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 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, 
 
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 THE REFORMATM SETTLEMENT 
 
 Examined in the Light of History and Law. 
 
 By the Rev. MALCOLM MACCOLL, D.D. 
 
 Canon Kesidentiary of Kipon. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, & CO. 
 London, New York, and Bombay. 
 
 OPINIONS OF THE PRESS. 
 
 * Canon MacColl attains a remarkable success in proving 
 that the principles which High Churchmen have inherited 
 from the Caroline divines fall in with the modern and, in 
 the best sense, liberal theology and with the science of 
 to-day.' — GuAEDiAN. 
 
 * We hasten to add our tribute of cordial respect to the 
 general conception of Canon MacColFs book, and to the 
 courage, vigour, and thoroughness with which he has 
 carried it out. . . . Having demonstrated the historic 
 width and the present-day reasonableness of Anglican 
 liberty in the realm of Sacramental teaching, Canon 
 MacColl is not less concerned to exhibit the injustice of 
 the attempt to suppress the Ritual by which "High," 
 views are symbolised and set forth. And, in particular, 
 he deals at length, and very effectively indeed, with the 
 judgments of the Judicial Committee on points connected 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PBESS 
 
 with the Ornaments Rubric. ... He places beyond 
 reasonable doubt the fact that the plain meaning of the 
 rubric by which the ornaments of the Church and of its 
 ministers were deliberately regulated at the last revision 
 of the Prayer-book, which, of course, has Parliamentary as 
 well as Synodical authority, was set aside by the Judicial 
 Committee, and a wholly non-natural meaning read into 
 it and made of penal obligation. . . . Another point of 
 great importance on which, • as it seems to us. Canon 
 MacColl achieves special success is his demonstration of 
 the unhistoric character of the claim, put forward by Sir 
 William Harcourt in his most aggressive manner, that 
 the Crown and Parliament have a right to determine the 
 doctrine, discipline and ceremonial of the Church of 
 England. . . . We may not agree with all Canon MacColl's 
 conclusions, but we must congratulate him on having 
 produced a book which is calculated to promote sound 
 thinking on the relations between Church and State, and 
 to dissuade the candid reader from participation in efforts 
 towards a reduction of the ancient and clearly established 
 liberties of the Anglican clergy.' — Spectatoe. 
 
 ' A contribution of solid value towards the enlighten- 
 ment of the public mind at a moment fraught with 
 grave issues to the welfare of religion in this country.' 
 
 Observer. 
 
 *A formidable armoury of weapons for use in the 
 present controversy.' — Echo. 
 
 ' A book written for the present crisis, but very 
 superior to the ordinary party manifesto.' 
 
 Manchester Guardian. 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PBE88 
 
 ' For dignity, vigour, and incisiveness it is worthy of 
 the author of the " Letters of Junius." ' 
 
 Chuech Times. 
 
 * His arguments and evidence are now generally re- 
 cognised to be so good in any case he takes in hand that 
 they cannot be disregarded. Royal Supremacy, Confes- 
 sion, Ecclesiastical Courts, and all the topics of this 
 controversy he handles with masterly skill.' 
 
 LivEBPooL Post. 
 
 'No one who has followed with any interest the 
 course of the recent ecclesiastical controversy can afford 
 to miss so lucid, moderate, and well presented a state- 
 ment of the case. ... In a succession of closely reasoned 
 chapters, which bristle with evidences of profound study 
 and research, Canon MacColl takes up, one by one, the 
 questions which have most stirred the parties to the 
 recent dispute, and examines them in the light of history 
 and law, making his constant appeal to the acts and 
 writings of the English reformers, and to the records of 
 the Reformation period. All parties to the controversy, 
 whatever their prepossessions, will agree in acknowledging 
 the literary strength displayed in a work which, for all 
 its erudition, is never dull or abstruse, and in appreciating 
 the unexceptional tone and temper brought by the author 
 to the consideration of theological moot points which, 
 unfortunately, are too often discussed in a very different 
 spirit.' — WoBLD. 
 
 * Dr. MacColl is an experienced and most dexterous 
 controversialist. ... It can hardly be questioned that 
 Dr. MacColl has made out his case.' — Ceitic. 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PEE88 
 
 ' Canon MacColl is a practised and energetic contro- 
 versialist, and it is impossible to read his new volume 
 without admiration for his skill of fence and his sturdy- 
 adroitness of attack. ... It is a clever and penetrating 
 criticism of many modern fallacies, political, historical, 
 religious, and it is a criticism which boldly carries the 
 war into the enemy's country. . . . Dr. MacColl's 
 criticism, too, of the "Ecclesiastical Courts and the 
 Ornaments Eubric " question will be found almost 
 conclusive.' — Liteeature. 
 
 * The author has studied his subject with great care, 
 and we believe with impartiality. . . . What we think is 
 clearly proved is that the High Church party has a far 
 stronger case from the historical point of view than the 
 extreme Protestant agitators would admit. ... In short, 
 from the political and historical point of view, we should 
 say that Canon MacColl comes off a comparatively easy 
 victor. . . . There is much else in this able and interesting 
 volume which is full of interest.' — Daily Chronicle. 
 
 * Canon MacColl's book is undoubtedly able, and, so far 
 as it helps to clear the issue, it is of service to all parties.' 
 
 Westminster Gazette. 
 
 ' Mr. MacColl's book covers all the questions at issue.' 
 
 Academy. 
 
 * The book bears marks of haste, but it is bright and 
 easy reading, in spite of all the technicalities.' 
 
 Morning Leader. 
 
 ' Canon MacColl deserves the best thanks of the 
 public for his interesting and instructive book.' 
 
 Sunday Times. 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PBESS 
 
 ' Canon MacCoU's book on this subject is full of 
 information, and is well worth reading.' 
 
 The Christian Million. 
 
 * As a first-class fighting defence of the High Anglican 
 position, we recommend the book, more especially as there 
 is not, from the first page to the last, one word of bitterness, 
 and nothing but appreciation of the labours and merits of 
 Nonconformists.' — Methodist Times. 
 
 * These quotations may suffice to set Churchmen and 
 others on reading this book, to the cogency of which a 
 
 quite unusual testimony is forthcoming Without 
 
 entering upon details, it is safe to say that Dr. MacCoU 
 has rendered it necessary for objectors to Catholic doctrine 
 and practice within the Established Church to look else- 
 where than to legal interpretations of the Book of 
 Common Prayer for relief. The ultra vagaries of extreme 
 High Churchmen will perhaps be put down, but the 
 system of which they are the excrescences will remain 
 until Protestant Englishmen repudiate it as a national 
 system by effecting Disestablishment.' — Liteeary World. 
 
 ' Protestants will find Canon MacCoU's book of value 
 because of the admissions he makes.' 
 
 The Christian World. 
 
 After some unfavourable criticism : — * At least two of 
 the twelve chapters were well worth writing, and we can 
 quite imagine that they produced an effect on the minds 
 of impressionable Members of Parliament ; we mean those 
 on " Auricular Confession" and the " Ornaments Rubric." 
 The latter is a well- sustained and fairly complete review of 
 a subject upon which the last word has certainly not been 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PRESS 
 
 said, and of which the more investigation the better. On 
 the crux of Confession the Canon's views are so far 
 temperate that he seems to us to answer himself. All 
 that loyal Churchmen are entitled to demand is that the 
 regulations of the Prayer Book shall not be so abused as 
 " to generate a morbid scrupulosity and blunt the sense of 
 personal responsibility." ' — Times. 
 
 ' The book is clever and interesting, but most unsatis- 
 factory. . . . Canon MacColl gives himself away on almost 
 every page. . . . But if Canon MacColl is occasionally 
 egotistic, there is a tone of true religious earnestness in 
 many parts of the volume, and his chapters on " The 
 Propinquity of the Spiritual World " and on " The Inter- 
 mediate State" are singularly suggestive, though their 
 high religious tone seems somewhat out of harmony with 
 the controversial purpose and the air of special pleading 
 that pervades all the rest of the book.' — Daily News. 
 
 * Canon MacColl is an acute and distinguished combatant 
 in many fields. He sustains his high reputation in the 
 substantial volume which he has contributed to the for- 
 midable mass of polemical literature which has grown 
 out of the " Crisis in the Church." We desire to say at 
 once and plainly the value we attach to this book. It is 
 timely, learned, extremely interesting, and — consider- 
 ing the circumstances of its composition — remarkably 
 moderate. It has, we are informed, already exercised a 
 salutary influence in political circles : we think it is 
 competent to do much good, to clear away many 
 delusions, and facilitate a juster and wiser discussion 
 of Church questions. We state this at the outset in 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PEESS 
 
 order to leave ourselves free, without risk of miscon- 
 ception, to call attention to points in which we find 
 ourselves compelled to join issue with the author. [The 
 Reviewer supports Professor Maitland's thesis as to ihe 
 Canon Law, and " Canon MacColl's lengthy discussion 
 of the Ornaments Eubric does not altogether satisfy" 
 him.] . . . The concluding chapters on " Anglican and 
 Roman Orders," and ''The Prisoner of the Vatican: 
 a Chapter of Secret History," have but an indirect 
 connection with the thesis of the book, but in them- 
 selves are both valuable and interesting. Canon MacColl 
 does well to recall the character of the antagonism 
 between the Churches of England and Rome ; for among 
 the consequences of domestic controversy not the least 
 probable or the least pernicious is the unreasoning disgust 
 with their own communion which it breeds in the minds 
 of devout Anglicans. Such disgust is the best condition 
 in the world for the projects of the Romanisers.' 
 
 Saturday Review. 
 
 ' In this ably written volume we have a vindication of 
 the position of the High Church party. ... In short. Dr. 
 MacColl's book, while no doubt controversial, is in effect a 
 plea for toleration on broad grounds in the present so-called 
 ''Crisis in the English Church," especially, perhaps, in 
 view of the claims of the Vatican ; and as such it deserves 
 study by the leaders on both sides.' — Liverpool Mercury. 
 
 ' To us the most interesting portion of the work is 
 that very large, and perhaps predominating element, which 
 has little or nothing to do with the subject of his work, 
 such as " The Propinquity of the Spiritual World.' 
 
 Weekly Register. 
 
OPINIONS OF THE PBESS 
 
 * Weighty and learned.' — Scotsman. 
 
 ' It is not too much to say that the anti-ritual judg- 
 ments of the Privy Council have never before been subjected 
 to so damaging a piece of criticism.' 
 
 Phcenix (by Professor Shuttle worth). 
 
 ' This is the most solid contribution which has been 
 made, or which is likely to be made, to the literature of 
 the present crisis in England. Its learned author is 
 abundantly qualified, probably beyond any man of our 
 times, for the treatment of his subject. His exposition of 
 it is so lucid and masterly that we do not see how the 
 force of his argument can be evaded by any fair-minded 
 man. Indeed, it may be asserted that it has made itself 
 felt more directly and practically than any book of this 
 decade. Although it has hardly been published six 
 months, four editions have been sold, and it is reported 
 that since reading it, some forty members of Parliament 
 have felt forced to change their votes. It is seldom that 
 such results are produced by a book. We are well within 
 the bounds of moderation when we say that no American 
 Churchman can form a sound and sensible opinion upon 
 the great questions which are convulsing our mother 
 Church until he has carefully studied this book.' 
 
 The Living Chubch (New York). 
 
 * With exceptional knowledge, secured by long and 
 accurate study of history, the writer has exhibited with 
 masterly force and lucidity the leading principles of the 
 Keformation Settlement in the light of history and law.' — 
 The Official Year-Book of the Chubch of England, 
 page 530. 
 
I 
 
BT THE SAME AUTHOR. 
 
 Sixth Edition. Crown 8vo. 6s. 
 
 CHRISTIANITY IN RELATION TO SCIENCE 
 AND MORALS. 
 
 Second Edition, Revised. Crown 8vo. 7s. 6d. 
 
 LIFE HERE AND HEREAFTER : Sermons preached 
 in Ripon Cathedral and elsewhere. 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, A CO. 
 
 LONDOH, NEW YORK, AND BOMBAY. 
 
THE 
 
 EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
THE 
 
 REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 EXAMINED IN THE LIGHT OF 
 HISTORY AND LAW 
 
 BY THE 
 
 REV. MALCOLM MacCOLL, D.D, 
 
 CANON RESIDENTIARY OP RIPON 
 
 EIGHTH EDITION REVISED AND ENLARGED 
 
 9^ OF THE ^ 
 
 UNIVERSITY 
 
 LONGMANS, GREEN, AND CO. 
 
 39 PATERNOSTER ROW, LONDON 
 NEW YORK AND BOMBAY 
 
 1900 
 
 All rights reserved 
 

 
\^A^ 
 
 PEEFACE 
 
 TO 
 
 THE EIGHTH EDITION 
 
 The interest taken by the public in the subjects 
 discussed in this volume is proved by the fact that 
 the book ran through seven editions within a year of 
 its publication. It has been out of print for some 
 time because I was anxious to review in a new 
 edition the decisions given by the two Archbishops 
 on the use of Incense in public worship and the Keser- 
 vation of the Blessed Sacrament for the communion 
 of the sick. I have in a new chapter subjected those 
 decisions to an exhaustive examination, and have 
 proved them, as I believe, to be untenable on 
 historical and legal grounds. On that point, how- 
 ever, the reader must' form his own conclusion. But 
 I wish here to offer some criticism on certain aspects 
 of the controversy which have not received the atten- 
 tion they deserve. 
 
 1. And first as to the complaint that the clergy 
 refuse to yield obedience to their bishops. We are 
 
 119852 
 
VI THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 told, with somewhat monotonous iteration, that the 
 disobedience of some of the clergy to their bishops 
 v/ould not be endured for a moment in the army. 
 Short shrift, we are warned, would be given to the 
 officer who refused to yield instant obedience to the 
 order of his superior. The answer is that there is 
 no analogy whatever betw^een the two cases. The 
 relation of subordinate officers to their superiors in 
 the army is a despotic relation. 'Theirs not to 
 reason why,' and if they do they are liable to 
 immediate arrest. The relation of presbyters to 
 their bishops is a constitutional relation. 'Tig 
 their duty * to reason why ' before they obey. -Nor 
 has the bishop any right to issue arbitrary orders. 
 Even in the middle ages bishops never claimed those 
 autocratic powers which are now claimed on behalf 
 of our bishops. It has been the policy of Ultranion- 
 tanism to lead to Papal absolutism by a. gradually 
 ascending scale of inferior despotisros : the laity 
 dependent on the priest, \ the priest on the bishop, the 
 bishop on the Pope. That is the conditionto which 
 the craft of the Jesuits has reduced the Church of 
 Eome ; audit answers their purpose admirably,; since 
 they have thus captured the Papacy, as I have shown 
 in chapter xii., and have consequently become lords 
 t)f the Church. An Ultramontane bishop in France 
 declared some years ago that his elergy, were a 
 Regiment submissive, without demur, to his word of 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION Vll 
 
 command. 'My clergy,' he said, 'are a regiment; 
 I say march, and it marches.' ^ Is that an ideal 
 that it is desirable to aim at? And at a time, too, 
 when not a few of the priests and laity of the Eoman 
 Church are proclaiming its evil results in their com- 
 munion ? 
 
 The bishops of the Church of England, like the 
 bishops of Catholic antiquity, are constitutional 
 rulers. The secret conclave of bishops at Lambeth 
 .every year before the meeting of Convocation is not 
 only modern, but unconstitutional and dangerous 
 in addition. The foolish and mischievous Public 
 Worship Eegulation Act was the offspring of one of 
 those secret meetings. The deliberations of Con- 
 vocation become a farce if all the members of the 
 Upper House meet in the Jerusalem Chamber merely 
 to give formal and public sanction to resolutions 
 already debated and passed in secret in Lambeth 
 Palace. According to the true principles of eccle- 
 siastical polity the bishop should govern his diocese 
 by the advice of a council of presbyters.. He did 
 so in the primitive Church, and he does now in 
 Scotland and America. It does not so much matter 
 what the exact composition of the bishop's council 
 may be. In Scotland it is a diocesan synod. We 
 
 ^ ' Mo7i clerge est comme im regiment : il doit marcher, et marcJie.^ 
 iSpeech by Cardinal Bonnechose in the French Senate in the Session 
 of 1865. 
 
viii THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 have in England, according to the high authority of 
 Thorndike, another kind of diocesan council : — 
 
 The chapters of cathedral churches are by their birth- 
 right counsellors to the bishops, and assistants in his 
 whole office ; the archdeacon his minister and principal 
 commissary ; those, by the rule set on foot by the apostles, 
 and observed always by the Church, of planting cathedral 
 churches in cities, and making the churches planted in 
 cities cathedral churches, for the government of all Chris- 
 tendom within the territories of those cities ; this, being 
 by his order ministerial to them, as well as to the bishop, 
 when both have part in the same office.^ 
 
 2. Let us apply this to the action of our episcopate 
 after the Lambeth decision on the use of incense. 
 Nearly all the bishops advised their clergy to yield 
 obedience to the decision ; and some of them com- 
 manded obedience to it in peremptory and minatory 
 terms. Now what are the facts? The decision 
 had no legal validity whatever ; and even if it had, 
 even if it had issued from a legal tribunal having 
 coercive jurisdiction, it concerned those priests alone 
 who pleaded before the Archbishops. Moreover, 
 not only did the decision lack all legal validity, but 
 it did not take the form of a godly admonition issued 
 to the few priests immediately concerned. It was 
 simply an historical conclusion arrived at by the two 
 Primates from a necessarily hasty and imperfect 
 examination of a certain department of ecclesiastical 
 
 • Works, x.-i5G-7. 
 
PEBFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION ix 
 
 history. They admitted that the use of incense was 
 not only innocent, but was beautiful and Scriptural 
 in addition ; and they encouraged the hope that it 
 might one day be restored in our Church. But at 
 present they pronounced incense illegal, and forbade 
 its use. That raised an entirely new issue, and made 
 obedience, in my humble judgment, impossible for 
 such of the clergy as had studied the subject and 
 had convinced themselves that the use of incense in 
 the Church of England was legal. If I were a 
 parish priest using incense, and my bishop said to 
 me : ' In view of the present distress I ask you to 
 give up the use of incense,' my disposition would be 
 to take his advice. But if he said : ' I have no 
 objection to incense ; I believe it to be Scriptural and 
 edifying; but I consider it illegal, and therefore I 
 order you to give it up,' I should respectfully refuse, 
 for I could not obey without acting what would be 
 to me a lie — namely, a public declaration that I 
 believe the use of incense illegal, whereas I believe 
 it to be perfectly legal. I should consider that my 
 bishop's order was of a non-Episcopal character. It 
 did not come from him as a bishop but as a student 
 of history, and the question in my mind would be 
 whether he knew more about the subject than I did. 
 If my hypothetical diocesan were the Bishop of 
 Oxford or the Bishop of London, I should feel at 
 once the need of reconsidering my own opinion. 
 For not only are those eminent prelates profomidly 
 
X THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 versed in ecclesiastical history, but they possess in 
 an eminent degree the historical instinct. They can 
 see the bearing of an argument almost before it is 
 uttered. But our Primates, able as they ar^, well read 
 as they are, and most upright and conscientious, are 
 not historians or historical critics. The questions 
 they asked during the ' Hearing ' at Lambeth proved 
 conclusively that they were on unfamiliar ground, 
 both historical and legal. Their decisions therefore, 
 both on Incense and Keservation, are entitled to the 
 deference, neither more nor less, which is due to 
 the accuracy or the reverse of their historical con- 
 clusions. The question of obedience, canonical or 
 otherwise, does not come in at all. It is purely a 
 matter of criticism, and you don't obey a critic. 
 You are either convinced by him, or you refute him. 
 That is a point which the public has entirely over- 
 looked in this matter. The Lambeth decisions are 
 the decisions of critics, not of judges, and still less 
 of fathers-in-God ; and are entitled to the respect 
 which their accuracy merits, and no more. People 
 would appreciate this distinction at once if the 
 Lambeth decisions were on questions of Greek 
 scholarship or of astronomy. The opinion of 
 Professor Jebb in the one case or Dr. Ball in 
 the other would outweigh any number of Lambeth 
 decisions to the contrary. The Archbishops do 
 not say : ' You must obey because we ask you 
 to do so as your spiritual superiors ' ; but, * You 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION Xl 
 
 must obey because we tell you that the facts 
 of history and law are against these usages.' 
 Those who cannot accept that conclusion are bound 
 in honesty to disobey, just as much as they 
 would be bound to disobey if the Archbishops had 
 asked them to disbelieve against their consciences 
 in the Mosaic authorship of the Pentateuch. It 
 is no part of a bishop's office to be an umpire in 
 such matters. People see this readily enough when 
 their prejudices are not engaged. Dr. Dollinger 
 was admired by all classes of English Churchmen 
 for disobeying a General Council of his Church, with 
 the Pope at its head. Why did he disobey it ? 
 Because he was asked to accept the Pope's infalli- 
 bility, not as a new doctrine, but as a doctrine always 
 held in the Church. He had surveyed the whole 
 field of history, and offered to prove against all 
 comers that the doctrine which he was asked to 
 accept as an historical truth was an historical false- 
 hood. ' I am an old man,' he said to me one day, 
 'and have not long to Hve ; but I am determined not 
 to go down into the grave with a lie in my right 
 hand.' The demand to accept such a dogma on 
 such ground he felt as an outrage on his intellectual 
 integrity. 
 
 Among the many lessons which I learnt from 
 him none made a deeper impression on me 
 than the duty of unswerving loyalty to historic 
 truth, be the consequences what they may. It was 
 
xii THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 my great privilege to study under his guidance for 
 some weeks every year during fifteen years. He 
 v^as so good as to give me a table in his own 
 working-room in his fine library at Munich, and was 
 not only ever ready to give me his advice, but always 
 encouraged me to draw upon his inexhaustible stores 
 of knowledge. But the alpha and omega of his 
 teaching invariably was : ' Make sure of your facts. 
 Be grateful to anyone who points out your errors, and 
 never sanction what you believe to be untrue. Truth 
 always pays best in the end.' He illustrated his 
 teaching one day by the following anecdote : He 
 visited England for the first and only time soon 
 after Cardinal Manning had seceded to the Church 
 of Rome, and chancing to meet him at an evening 
 party, the future Cardinal asked to be introduced to 
 the famous Munich Professor. ' Dr. Dollinger,' said 
 Manning, ' I have asked to be introduced to you that 
 I might thank you for having made me a Catholic' 
 * I bowed,' said Dollinger, * not understanding what 
 he meant. Manning explained. *' Yes," he went on, 
 " it was you who made me a Catholic. For I was 
 brought up in the belief that history could not be 
 trusted in the hands of Catholic writers, and my own 
 reading, I am bound to say, confirmed that impres- 
 sion. A book of yours fell into my hands. I read 
 it and found that you always gave the facts truly, 
 whether they made for or against the Church. The 
 
PREFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xiii 
 
 scales fell from my eyes. I saw that one might 
 be a Catholic and yet be true to the facts of his- 
 tory, and I became a Catholic." And this man,' 
 added Dollinger, with one of his humorous smiles, 
 * who thanked me for having made him a Catholic 
 through my loyalty to historic truth, now de- 
 nounces me as a heretic because I will not accept 
 as an article of faith what I know to be an historic 
 falsehood.' 
 
 3. Those of the clergy, therefore, who value 
 historical truth and have convinced themselves that 
 the Lambeth decisions are contrary to the facts of 
 history, are placed in the painful dilemma of being 
 obliged to disobey their bishops or do violence to 
 their consciences. And all because the Archbishops, 
 instead of issuing a godly admonition, have pro- 
 pounded some historical propositions which no one 
 can say are beyond dispute, and which I believe I 
 have proved to be contrary to the facts. Obedience 
 is a great virtue ; but it has its limits, and one of 
 those limits is loyalty to truth. ' To obey is better 
 than sacrifice ' we have often been told of late. Yes, 
 but to obey what and whom ? Saul was not asked 
 to give his assent to a disputable proposition. He 
 was sent on a definite errand, about which there 
 could be no two opinions. And he disobeyed. 
 Why? Not because he had any doubt as to the 
 meaning of his commission, but because he chose to 
 
xi V THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 obey another voice than Samuel's^ He was nervously 
 anxious to be on the popular side :-^: 
 
 And Saiil said unto Samuel, I have sinned; for Lbave 
 transgressed the commandment of the Lord and thyAvords : 
 because I feared the people and obeyed their voice. 
 
 Saul did obey, but he obeyed the wrong voice, 
 the voice of public opinion, because he was afraid. 
 Certainly, 'to obey is better than sacrifice,' but it 
 all depends upon the voice to which obedience is 
 rendered. The voice of the people is not always the 
 voice of God, the proverb notwithstanding. For 
 myself, when in any controversy I chance to find 
 myself on the popular side, I think it high time 
 to examine the purity of my motives and" the 
 righteousness of my cause. ;: . ; 
 
 I have never had a quarrel, or even.ardifferenjse, 
 with any bishop in my life. -My experience of tha 
 episcopate is of the niost pleasant character.: From 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury, when he was Bishop 
 of Jjondon, I received nothing but kin diiess. No 
 one admires more than I do his great ability, his: 
 manly nature, and his sterling integrity. And if hei 
 should do me the honour of reading the following 
 pages, and should feel annoyed by anything 1 hav^- 
 written, perhaps I.may remind him that one of my 
 earlieBt essays in controversy was in his own defence 
 when he was nominated to. the see of Exeter. He 
 was then on the unpopular side. Dr. Pusey and his 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION XV 
 
 followers joined hands with the ' Eecord ' and its 
 followers in a monster petition against the nomina- 
 tion of Dr. Temple. The petition was signed, I 
 think, by more than thirteen thousand clergy. I 
 was a young curate at the time, living in a clergy- 
 house, and was asked to sign the petition as all my 
 colleagues had done. I not only refused, but I 
 entered into a polemic in the ' Guardian ' on behalf 
 of Dr. Temple. Doubtless he has forgotten all 
 about it, but I received a letter of thanks from him 
 at the time. 
 
 From the Archbishop of York, too, I have 
 received undeserved kindnesses. And I have felt, as 
 others have, the charm of his personality and the 
 attraction of his high and holy character. It is just 
 because I feel that a mistake made by two men 
 of such lofty characters and of such well-earned 
 influence is sure to be more prolific of evil than 
 the mistakes of smaller men, that I have felt it 
 necessary to go so fully into the question. 
 
 4. With that explanation I will venture to make 
 some few more observations on the duty of obe- 
 dience to bishops. Twice within the last fifty 
 years the two Archbishops of the day have issued 
 Pastorals, signed by nearly all their suffragans, 
 against innovations in public worship ; and the 
 alleged root of the mischief, which they all deplored 
 was the disobedience of the clergy. What were the 
 innovations then ? and wherein consisted the dis- 
 
xvi THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 obedience. Let us take the first period. A states- 
 man in difficulties thought that he could ride back 
 into office on the crest of a great Protestant wave. 
 In the Durham Letter accordingly he appealed to 
 the mob, who responded with the St. Barnabas 
 riots. The bishops were frightened and issued their 
 Pastoral, laying the whole blame on the disobedient 
 clergy. The innovations then were surpliced choirs, 
 choral services, weekly Eucharists, preaching in 
 the surplice, credence tables, and floral decorations 
 of churches at festal seasons. These things the 
 bishops of the day wished to put down. One of the 
 twenty-four who signed the Pastoral of March 29, 
 1851, refused to license any curate in his diocese 
 unless the applicant made a ' statement in writing 
 that he would not preach in the surplice.' And 
 when an incumbent, assenting to this as a general 
 rule, pleaded that on Communion Sundays the 
 surplice might be permitted, * to avoid inconve- 
 nience,' the bishop refused peremptorily to grant 
 this indulgence, because * his doing so involved a 
 sanctioning the practice in general, which practice I 
 deem,' he said, ' not in accordance with the spirit 
 and intention of the law of the Church.' ^ 
 
 In the same year the Primate, before licensing 
 a young clergyman to a curacy, asked to see some 
 of his sermons as a specimen of the doctrine which 
 
 ' The correspondence is in the Gtcardian of 1851. I have lost 
 the number, but the page is 298. 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xvii 
 
 he was accustomed to preach. His Grace picked 
 out the following sentence as an * extreme and 
 unguarded opinion ' : — 
 
 At the font it was that * we put on Christ,' and were 
 regenerated, or made new creatures in Him : then the old 
 world of sin and wrath passed away : then ' all things 
 became new ' in our new birth to grace and reconciliation 
 to God.' ' 
 
 Another bishop, in a charge to his clergy, ' warned 
 them against the use of the word Catholic as a 
 party word, and expressed his regret that it should 
 have been retained in one place in the Liturgy (the 
 creed not being, in his opinion, part of the Liturgy).' ^ 
 
 Bishop Phillpotts tells another story of ' a meri- 
 torious and exemplary deacon ' who had been ' ex- 
 cluded by his bishop from the priesthood ' for refus- 
 ing to deny the doctrine of the Real Presence in 
 the Eucharist, * although still allowed to be worthy 
 of holding a license in his diocese.' ^ 
 
 Nearly a quarter of a century afterwards the two 
 Archbishops and all their suffragans except two 
 issued a Pastoral in which they lamented the aliena- 
 tion of the laity by the innovations introduced by 
 some of the clergy ; and the Public Worship Regula- 
 tion Act was passed in a panic, with the result which 
 
 ' See A Pastoral Letter to the Clergy of the Diocese of Exeter 
 on the Present State of tJie Church. By Henry, Lord Bishop of 
 Exeter, p. 44. 
 
 ' Ibid. p. 45. » Ibid. p. 48. 
 
 a2 
 
xviii THE BEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 we all know. And now, at the close of another quarter 
 of a century — these ecclesiastical crises recur, by 
 some mysterious law, in cycles of twenty-five years 
 — we are told that we are in another ecclesiastical 
 crisis, and again the cry is that all the mischief is 
 caused by the innovations and disobedience of the 
 clergy. I am far from saying that the clergy are 
 free from blame. I believe that some of them have 
 been greatly to blame for extravagance of language 
 and ceremonial. But the misfortune is that in every 
 so-called * crisis ' it is not at the extravagances that 
 the bishops have struck, but at what the Preface of 
 the Prayer Book calls ' some established doctrine or 
 laudable practice of the Church of England, or indeed 
 of the whole Catholic Church of Christ.' I quote 
 from the Episcopal Pastoral of 1875 : 
 
 The refusal to obey legitimate authority is another evil 
 in the Church at the present time. Not only has it 
 frequently occurred that clergymen fail to render to epi- 
 scopal authority that submission which is involved in the 
 idea of episcopacy, but obedience has been avowedly 
 refused to the judicial interpretations of the law of this 
 Church and Eealm. 
 
 Such has been the attitude of the Anglican 
 Episcopate towards every religious movement from 
 Wesley's time to our own. And can any one now 
 doubt that the attitude has been as detrimental 
 as it has been futile ? On all those occasions a 
 sympathetic yet discriminating interest would have 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xix 
 
 given the. bishops control of the movement, guiding 
 what was beneficial in it and checking what was 
 foolish or mischievous. Indiscriminate denunciation 
 failed to check the movement and left it without 
 authoritative guidance. The bishops forgot, as men 
 are prone to forget, that reforming movements are 
 always marked by zeal outrunning discretion, and 
 sometimes exhibiting itself in follies and eccentri- 
 cities, which will disappear with larger knowledge 
 and more mature experience, leaving what was solid 
 and good in the movement as a precious heritage, 
 which would have been lost by summary suppression 
 of the movement. The succeeding generation then 
 enjoys the fruit, and forgets the strife that brought 
 it forth. ' A prophet is not without honour save in 
 his own country,' and the children of one generation 
 deck the tombs of the prophets whom their fathers 
 slew. This is true especially of reforming movements, 
 be they social, political, or religious. Keformers are 
 apt to be regarded by the mass of their contem- 
 poraries as lawless persons, revolutionists, troublers 
 of Israel. And this is quite natural for two reasons. 
 In the first place, the prosperous and comfortable 
 classes of society are precisely those who least feel 
 the need of reform. In the second place, reformers 
 must necessarily aim at making an impression, and 
 this they can only do by dealing in general and 
 sweeping statements ; statements which are true 
 in the abstract, but which require qualification in 
 
XX THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 practice. If the reformer were to stop to explain 
 and qualify every general proposition with all the 
 necessary reservations which belong to it, the result 
 would be that he would make no progress at all. 
 His general principles would be lost in the multitude 
 of his explanations ; his hearers would be unable to 
 see the end for the process. From the nature of 
 the case, therefore, all great reforms are certain to 
 be more or less characterised by something of ex- 
 travagance. They are a recoil, and can hardly avoid 
 rebounding towards the opposite extreme before they 
 settle in the * golden mean.' Benovation implies a 
 wrong state of things out of which it grew — a decay, 
 or a weakness, or an obliquity, or an excrescence. 
 Whatever is amiss and requires mending necessarily 
 impairs the tone of the amendment itself : the 
 restoration still retains a connexion with the old 
 state, just because it is a restoration. As supplying 
 a defect or providing a counterpoise, it is still 
 correlative to the former state and must correspond 
 to it in some degree, even in its faultiness ; the 
 action and reaction, though contrary, requiring to 
 be equal ; too much answering to too little, the 
 over-prominent to the overlooked. The crooked 
 stick, to quote Aristotle's familiar illustration, can 
 only be straightened by bending it towards the 
 opposite extreme. 
 
 No reform that goes to the root of the evil 
 that it seeks to cure can escape this disadvantage. 
 
PREFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxi 
 
 Christianity did not iscape it. Its Founder was 
 delivered over to prison and to death as a 'male- 
 factor' and *perverter of the nation,' and His 
 Apostles shared the fate of their Master. ' These 
 men/ said the Jev^s of Thessalonica of Paul and Silas, 
 ' that have turned the world upside down are come 
 hither also.' What is the Sermon on the Mount, in 
 large part, but the assertion in an extreme and naked 
 form of the neglected side of great truths ? But 
 perhaps the aptest illustration of the point I am 
 insisting on is the treatment of the mutual relation 
 of faith and works by the Apostles Paul and James 
 respectively. ' Man is justified by faith and not by 
 works,' says the former. ' Man is justified by works 
 and not by faith,' says the latter. And both appeal 
 to the example of Abraham, by way of illustration. 
 Of course, we see that the opposition between the 
 two statements is only verbal, each being merely the 
 unqualified assertion oE a neglected truth. Ours is 
 not that epicurean deity that in delicious repose 
 
 occupies its 
 
 templa serena : 
 Despicere unde queas alios, passimque videre 
 Errare, atque viam palantes quaerere vitae.^ 
 
 In a world of error the progress of truth is commonly 
 not in a straight line, but zigzag ; by action and 
 reaction ; now inclining to this extreme, and then 
 to that ; sometimes giving one of its sides a promi- 
 
 ' Lucretius, De rerilm Nafnra, lib. ii. 7. 
 
Xxii THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 nence, and anon another, according as the exigencies 
 of the strife and the needs of men require. 
 
 And thus it happens that what one generation 
 regards as revolutionary innovations become the 
 truths of the next and the truisms of that which 
 follow^s. The Evangehcals of the present day are 
 more ' EituaHstic ' in their conduct of pubHc worship 
 than the Tractarians were fifty years ago. The 
 leaders of the Tractarians, so far from disregarding 
 episcopal authority, were almost obsequious in their 
 deference to the bishops. ' A bishop's slightest word, 
 ex cathedra, is heavy,' says one of the ' Tracts for 
 the Times.' ' His judgment on a book cannot be 
 light.' And the practice of the writers corresponded 
 with their professions. For the publication of the 
 ' Tracts ' was stopped at once on a hint from the 
 Bishop of Oxford to Newman. And how was this 
 docility rewarded by the bishops of that day ? 
 Newman, Keble, Pusey, Isaac Williams, Hugh James 
 Kose, and a galaxy of other great names were 
 abused in language which no bishop would now 
 think of flinging at the most obnoxious of extreme 
 Eitualists. I quote Newman : 
 
 They were called in turn 'superstitious,' 'zealots,' 
 'mystical,' ' malignants,' 'Oxford heretics,' 'Jesuits in 
 disguise,' ' tamperers with Popish idolatry,' ' agents of 
 Satan,' ' a synagogue of Satan,' ' snakes in the grass,' 
 ' walking about our beloved Church, polluting the sacred 
 edifice, and leaving their slime about her altars ; ' 
 
PKEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxiii 
 
 ' whose head,' exclaimed another bishop, ' may God 
 crush ! ' ^ 
 
 The bishops of our day would be among the first 
 to deplore such language as applied to such men. 
 But does it not teach a valuable lesson? The 
 leaders of the Oxford movement showed great 
 respect to episcopal authority in all matters of 
 external observances ; but they could not control 
 the mass of their followers. The whole style of 
 ecclesiastical architecture and public worship was 
 revolutionised in spite of the opposition of the 
 bishops. And how many bishops are there now on 
 the bench who would wish it otherwise — who would 
 wish, that is, that implicit obedience had been 
 rendered to the bishops of fifty years ago ? It is 
 hardly too much to say that disobedience to the 
 bishops then saved the Church as an Establishment. 
 To-day the Church is much more popular and 
 influential among both the classes and the masses 
 than she was then : a result largely due, not only to 
 the hard work of the clergy, but chiefly to that 
 brightening of Church Services which a short-sighted 
 prudence would have banned. Bishop Phillpotts, of 
 Exeter, alone among the bishops of his day, had the 
 sagacity to understand the situation, and the courage 
 to express and act on his convictions, as the following 
 extracts from his ' Pastoral Letter,' already quoted, 
 
 ' Difficulties Felt by Anglicans, p. 94. 
 
xxiv THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 show. Criticising the Pastoral of the Archbishops 
 and their suffragans, which he refused to sign, he 
 asks : - 
 
 Is it, then, accordant with the true dignity — or 
 even very manifestly consistent with the first duty — of 
 bishops, to close their eyes and seal their mouths against 
 the daring violation of an article of the creed, and to look 
 at nothing but little ritual irregularities? These are 
 matters which, so far as they may transgress the law of 
 the Church, ought, in my opinion, to be dealt with by 
 every bishop in his own diocese ; for they cannot be dealt 
 with justly or effectively without looking to the specialities 
 of every particular case. 
 
 How much wiser this discriminating policy than 
 the rigid enforcement of a Procrustean uniformity 
 even in cases where the law is unquestionable. But 
 to be lax about the creed while strict about cere- 
 monial observances — this the bishop could not 
 stand : — 
 
 I deemed it little short of mockery to put forth an 
 united address to our clergy, praying them to submit 
 to us, as doubts, these small matters, many of which do 
 not seem to them to be doubtful at all. 
 
 5. On January 18 last a lay deputation, headed 
 by the Duke of Newcastle, presented a numerously 
 signed remonstrance to the Archbishop of Canterbury 
 against his Grace's decision on incense and the 
 enforcement of that decision by many of the bishops 
 in their respective dioceses. Among the speeches 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION XXV 
 
 made on that occasion was one by Lord Edward 
 Churchill, who protested respectfully against the 
 partial administration of the law by the bishops. He 
 pleaded ' for even-handed justice,' and complained 
 that while the bishops condoned irregularities and 
 unquestioned breaches of the law in various direc- 
 tions, * those who indulge in an unpopular ritual — 
 although they are, almost without exception, hard- 
 working, successful, and excellent priests — are every- 
 where harassed and threatened.' In his very courteous 
 answer to the deputation the Primate took up this 
 point in a manner which, I own, surprised me. 
 There was, he said, an important difference of prin- 
 ciple between the two cases. The Kitualists claimed 
 to supplement the directions of the Prayer Book 
 by usages sanctioned by the early Church. And 
 that he considered ' a very serious thing.' 
 
 It cannot be said that omissions of such a kind as 
 have been described are of the same importance, because 
 they do not rest upon the same principle. A man refuses 
 to recite the Athanasian Creed. He breaks the law, but 
 he does not claim when he breaks the law that he is 
 doing what the Church Catholic commands him to do ; he 
 does not claim that he has some superior authority at his 
 back, and the thing therefore stands on a totally different 
 footing. 
 
 Surely that is a questionable doctrine. One man 
 breaks a law knowingly and deliberately. Another 
 man says : ' I am not breaking any law. The Church 
 
xxvi THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of England has herself referred me to the early- 
 Church as the model and standard of doctrine and 
 worship. The Prayer Book is not an exhaustive 
 directory of public worship, and I do not think 
 that I am violating its letter or spirit in adopting 
 a usage sanctioned by the early Church.' That 
 man may be in error as to the fact ; and I ad- 
 mit, for my part, that a parish priest has no right 
 to pick and choose among the usages of the early 
 Church and introduce whatever he pleases without 
 consulting his bishop. Still the man who con- 
 scientiously believes, however erroneously, that he 
 is obeying the law is surely less culpable than the 
 man who deliberately breaks what he acknowledges 
 to be law. The latter exhibits a distinctly lawless 
 temper : the other does not. 
 
 Archbishop Temple's great predecessor in the see 
 of Exeter took a very different view of this matter. 
 The Pastoral of the archbishops and bishops on 
 which he was commenting contained : — 
 
 A clear and unhesitating protest against the principle 
 that as the Church of England is the ancient Catholic 
 Church settled in this land before the Reformation, and 
 was then reformed only by the casting away of certain 
 strictly defined corruptions, therefore, whatever form or 
 usage existed in the Church before its reformation may 
 now be freely introduced and observed, unless there can 
 be alleged against it the distinct letter of some formal 
 prohibition. 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxvii 
 
 The Bishop of Exeter decHned to join in this 
 protest. On the contrary, 
 
 To this principle (making allowance for the terms in 
 which it is expressed, not by those who profess, but by^ 
 by those who condemn it) I am disposed to ascribe much 
 of weight and justice. Where any office in the prescribed 
 ritual, though not in express terms, yet in its plain spirit, 
 or according to the analogy of the service-book in general, 
 rejects an ancient usage or practice, which it may be 
 attempted to engraft upon it anew^ then I should think the 
 attempt unreasonable or culpable. But where no prohibi- 
 tion, expressed or implied, and no reason drawn from the 
 particular office, or from the general tone and nature of 
 our Liturgy, is opposed to the introduction of a Catholic 
 usage practised before Edward the Sixth's reign, I am not 
 prepared to say that such a thing is always improper — 
 much less merits the reprobation of the whole episcopal 
 body. 
 
 And he proceeds to argue that the Church of 
 England 'distinctly recognises the principle against 
 which my Eight Keverend Brethren out of Con- 
 vocation have felt it their duty to protest.' After 
 giving some reasons for his opinion, he adds: — 
 
 In truth, on what other principle can we justify our 
 own niost proper and edifying service at the consecration 
 of every new church ? Where is the modern canon 
 which enjoins or authorises it? 
 
 All this is in direct opposition not only to the 
 Primate's cZ^cMm in his answer to Lord Edward 
 Churchill, but to the whole doctrine of the inter- 
 
XXVlll THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 pretation of our formularies which the Archbishops 
 have expounded in their Opinions on incense and 
 reservation. Even so moderate a Churchman as 
 the late Charles Kingsley, in a letter written to me 
 and published in his Life, attributed much of the 
 unbelief of the day to ' the invincible ignorance of 
 modern Puritanism.' He ' believed that the English 
 mind (and probably the Scotch) was ripe ' for a larger 
 faith. He concluded : — 
 
 If we keep cautiously within the limits permitted by 
 truly Catholic antiquity, we shall set in motion a mighty 
 engine for the Church's help in her need. I, as a student 
 of public opinion, have no doubt whatsoever of this. 
 
 But I must return to Bishop Phillpotts and his 
 vindication of the right of the clergy to appeal to 
 Catholic antiquity as the model of their worship, 
 subject to two conditions : first, that they introduced 
 no usage which was clearly opposed to the Prayer 
 Book ; secondly, that they should carry their con- 
 gregations with them : — 
 
 But although I thus declined to subscribe the Episcopal 
 Address, and while I fully admit the right of the clergy 
 to practise all that is not forbidden by the law of the 
 Church, while, too, I would applaud the exercise of 
 that right to the utmost, whensoever their own people 
 agree with them in its exercise, I yet am bound to warn 
 them of the rashness of exercising it against the liking and 
 without the concurrence of their people. . . . Yet there is 
 one consideration which must not be omitted. It may 
 ])e truly urged that, the common prayer of the faithful 
 
PBEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxix 
 
 being not primarily nor chiefly designed to edify man, but 
 to worship God, and God having been pleased to reveal to 
 us something respecting the w^orship of Him in heaven — 
 that it is formal, ceremonial, aye and musical, choral, 
 antiphonal — divine worship upon earth ought to be a 
 representation, after our poor measure, of what we read of 
 the worship of the heavenly hosts. It is easy, therefore, 
 to conceive a state of feelings in a parish which ought not 
 to regulate the service of the Church ; which ought not to 
 be allowed to prescribe what is sometimes called the plain- 
 ness and simplicity of Protestant worship. . . . Neither 
 am I disposed to recommend any consideration of popular 
 feeling beyond the particular congregation intrusted to the 
 minister's charge. If that congregation prefers a more 
 ornate or elaborate service than many or all the parishes 
 around it, I should consider it an invasion of Christian and 
 even of civil liberty to control the services of any Church 
 at the bidding of those who do not belong to it. 
 
 And the poor especially ought to be considered : — 
 
 When the congregation consists mainly of the poorest 
 orders there we commonly observe a great love of a 
 majestic and even elaborate service. The ornaments of 
 their church ; the storied glass ; the painted and, it may 
 be, gilded walls ; the table of the Lord, elevated above the 
 rest, and decked with sober yet costly furniture ; the pealing 
 organ ; the chanted Psalms ; the surpliced choristers ; the 
 solemnity of the whole ritual— gladdens while it elevates 
 their minds ; they recognise in it their own high privilege as 
 Christians, and rejoice to find themselves equal participants 
 with their richest neighbours in the homage thus paid to 
 the common Lord and Father of all. In truth, when we 
 consider the little which the poor man has to delight his 
 heart and touch his imagination in his own squalid home, 
 
XXX THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 we ought to rejoice that he can find enjoyment in the 
 House of Prayer, his Father's House. For this reason, few 
 occurrences have affected me more than the lamentations of 
 the poor worshippers in one of the districts of the Metro- 
 poHs, when they saw, or thought they saw, at the dictation 
 of a riotous and lawless mob, the approaching surrender of 
 the ritual which they loved, and which was their weekly 
 — to many among them the daily — solace of that poverty 
 to which the providence of God had corjsigned them. 
 Incidents such as this cannot be separated from the general 
 character of the proceedings of the past winter. The 
 rioters at S. Barnabas's were stimulated to their violence 
 by the words and deeds of men of a far higher order than 
 their own.^ 
 
 6. No one is less of a Eomaniser than I am, as 
 anyone vs^ho reads this volume w^ill admit. Deplorable 
 as I regard the divisions of Christendom ; earnestly 
 as I desire the fulfilment of our Lord's dying prayer ; 
 sincerely as I appreciate the w^ork done by the 
 Roman Church and admire the saints which she has 
 reared ; I am sorrowfully forced to believe that the 
 reunion of Christendom will not come through her. 
 It is not reunion she seeks, but unconditional 
 submission. I must go even further, and avow my 
 honest conviction that as long as the Vatican decrees 
 remain unrepealed reunion with the Church of 
 Rome, if possible, would be sinful. Those decrees 
 have destroyed the original constitution of the Church 
 and erected an irresponsible despotism on its ruins. 
 
 ^ A Pastoral Letter. By Henry, Lord Bishop of Exeter, 
 pp. 84-88. 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxxi 
 
 And this revolution it has sought to justify by a 
 portentous falsification of history. Till all this has 
 been repealed — explained it cannot be — the reunion 
 of Christendom through Eome is out of the question. 
 It was not out of the question before the Vatican 
 Council, although the gradually increasing influence 
 of the Jesuits made it less and less probable. In 
 the end of last century and the beginning of this 
 ecclesiastics of eminence in both Communions 
 beheved in the possibility of such a union. In the 
 dawn of this century Barrington, the Prince Bishop 
 of Durham, used the following language in an 
 address to his clergy : — 
 
 There appear to me to be in the present circumstances 
 of Europe better grounds of hope for a successful issue to 
 a dispassionate investigation of the differences which 
 separate the two Churches of England and of Eome than 
 at any former period. With this view, and these 
 hopes, I continue to exert my humble efforts in this 
 great cause of charity and truth. ... If, I say, by per- 
 severing in a spirit of truth and charity, we could bring 
 the Eoman Catholics to see these most important subjects 
 in the same light that the Catholics of the Church of 
 England do, a very auspicious opening would be made 
 of Catholic Union, ^ which formerly engaged the talents 
 and anxious wishes of the best and ablest members of both 
 Communions. 
 
 And what public duty of greater magnitude can pre- 
 sent itself to us than the restoration of peace and union to 
 the Church by the reconciliation of two such large portions 
 
 ' The capitals are not mine. 
 
 ' b 
 
xxxii THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of it as the Churches of England and Eome? What 
 undertaking of more importance and higher interest can 
 employ the piety and learning of the ministers of Christ than 
 the endeavour to accomplish this truly Christian work? . . . 
 If I should live to see the foundation for such union well 
 laid and happily begun ; if Providence should but indulge 
 me with even a dying prospect of that enlargement of the 
 Messiah's kingdom which we have reason to hope is not 
 very remote, with what consolation and joy would it illu- 
 minate the last hours of a long life. With what heartfelt 
 pleasure should I use the rapturous language of good old 
 Simeon : * Lord, now lettest Thou Thy servant depart in 
 peace.' May that Saviour who has left us, in the record 
 of His Gospel, His own anxious prayer for the union of 
 His disciples, promote and prosper the blessed work of 
 Catholic Union. 
 
 I quote this from the Introduction to a somewhat 
 remarkable book published in the beginning of this 
 century by a pious Roman Catholic priest, the Rev. 
 Peter Gandolphy : ' An Exposition of Liturgy, or a 
 Book of Common Prayers and Administration of 
 Sacraments, with other Rites and Ceremonies of 
 the Church, for the Use of all Christians in the 
 United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland.' 
 It is modelled on our Prayer Book almost exactly 
 as far as the office of the Mass, which is all in 
 English, and much simplified and curtailed. There 
 are offices for Baptism, Matrimony, Churching 
 of Women, and Communion of the Sick. There 
 are also Articles of Religion, exceeding our Thirty- 
 nine by four. But what is most remarkable is that 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxxiii 
 
 the book, together with another by the same author, 
 received the formal approbation of the Holy See in 
 a document prefixed to the volume, and ending as 
 follows : — 
 
 Sed cum Adversarii ejusdem Auctoris ita machinatio- 
 nibus (opera eorumdem agentis in urbe) plures circum- 
 venerint, ac terrefecerint, ut aut sileant, aut veritatem 
 dicere vereantur, dum de hac re requiruntur ; has 
 Litteras jussu Erai. P. Magistri S. Palatii exaratas mea 
 manu subscripsi, solitoque mei muneris sigillo com- 
 munivi ; indubitatam fidem omnibus faciens, quod duplex 
 opus Eev. Dni. Petri Gandolphi amplam ab Apostolica 
 Sede Approbationem ^ jure, meritoque obtinuerit. 
 
 Datum Eomae ex Collegio Poenitentiariorum ad 
 S. Petrum Die 13 Novembris, anno 1816. 
 
 Then follow the seal and the formal signatures. 
 
 Another spirit has invaded and possessed the 
 Church of Eome since then, and those who pray for 
 the reunion of Christendom must look elsewhere for 
 encouragement and hope. And there is much to 
 encourage. Presbyterian Scotland seems to have 
 shaken off its prejudice against episcopacy, and 
 to be drawing nearer the Church of England in the 
 matter of public worship ; and both in Scotland 
 and in England the denominations which hold the 
 creed of Christendom have been moving towards 
 each other with a view to union. The Churches 
 of the East and of Eussia, on the other hand, have 
 been for some years past manifesting an increasing 
 
 ' The capitals are in the original. 
 
 b2 
 
xxxiv THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 friendliness towards the Church of England ; and 
 interchanges of courtesy and amity and good offices 
 have taken place between the see of Canterbury and 
 the primatial sees of Constantinople and Eussia. 
 The Bishop of London had his proper place assigned 
 to him at the coronation of the Tsar, and his mission 
 was reciprocated by that of the Archbishop of 
 Finland at the Diamond Jubilee of our Queen. The 
 subsequent visit of the Archbishop of York to Eussia 
 produced a most favourable impression in that 
 country — an impression greatly strengthened by the 
 masterly and dignified ' Answer ' of the two Arch- 
 bishops to the Pope's Bull against Anglican Orders. 
 The Lambeth Opinions on Incense and Eeserva- 
 tion have, I fear, gone far to destroy these happy 
 auguries. The condemned usages are not obnoxious 
 to the Protestant feeling of this country. The one 
 is too Scriptural to be condemned on the ground 
 of Popery, and the other commends itself, when 
 properly explained, to the practical common sense 
 of the average man. If the Archbishops had 
 claimed for the episcopate the right of regulating 
 both usages they would, I believe, have given 
 general satisfaction. As it is, they have done 
 nothing to conciliate the Intransigeants of the 
 Church Association, they have distressed and per- 
 turbed a large body of loyal Church people, and 
 they have played the game of Eome by declaring war 
 upon usages which have always prevailed throughout 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxxv 
 
 Eastern Christendom. The Eoman authorities in this 
 country, who were getting alarmed at the reci- 
 procal courtesies between the Anglican and Oriental 
 Churches, have not been slow to use against us the 
 effective w^eapon with which the Archbishops have 
 supplied them. Our argumentative position against 
 Kome rests on the same basis as that of the 
 Churches of the East. When Pio Nono invited 
 the Oriental bishops to the Vatican Council they 
 replied that Kome must first repudiate the additions 
 which she had made to the creed, and they appealed 
 to the verdict of history, preferring ' the historical 
 method ' to Papal decrees as the criterion of truth. 
 Such has been the position taken up by all our 
 great divines since the Reformation. The Lambeth 
 Opinions have abandoned that ground by assum- 
 ing that the I Church of England made a new start 
 at the Reformation, having bound herself by an 
 inflexible Act of Parliament to do nothing ' other or 
 otherwise,' no matter what the circumstances or 
 emergency, than is prescribed in black and white 
 in the Book of Common Prayer. 
 
 That assumption completely undermines our posi- 
 tion in the controversy with Eome, and that is one of 
 my main objections to the Lambeth Opinions. It is 
 to my mind a matter of the most vital importance 
 to the Church that those Opinions should not be 
 enforced. No more serious blow, if any so serious, 
 
 has been struck at the historical position of the 
 
 *b3 
 
xxxvi THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Church of England since the Beformation ; and on 
 her historical position everything depends. Fortu- 
 nately, however, they are opinions only, having 
 neither legal nor synodical authority. They bind 
 the Church in no v^ay, but they do much harm 
 meanwhile. Already they have done much to help 
 forward the cause of disestablishment. 
 
 7. In a conversation which I had with Mr. Glad- 
 stone some years ago on that subject he said : ' To 
 disestablish the Church of England would be a 
 gigantic operation, and I don't envy the man who 
 undertakes it. If it should ever come, it is more 
 likely to be by revolt from within than by assault 
 from without.' The revolt has begun, and I am 
 persuaded that if there is any attempt to suppress, 
 by legislation or otherwise, the party which has 
 been aggrieved by the Lambeth Opinions — a party 
 much larger than that of the extreme Ritualists — 
 the question of disestablishment will at once be 
 brought within the range of practical politics. This 
 is much more a lay than a clerical question, and a 
 large section of the most loyal and devoted lay 
 members of the Church of England, at the next 
 General Election, will support a Liberationist can- 
 didate, in preference to a candidate, be he who 
 he may, who pledges himself to any kind of legis- 
 lation which would have the effect of narrowing 
 the boundaries of the Church of England. Poli- 
 ticians are always making mistakes in this matter. 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxxvii 
 
 They mistake the loud noise of organised chques 
 for the voice of the nation. ' Because half-a-dozen 
 grasshoppers under a fern make the field ring 
 with their importunate chink, while thousands 
 of great cattle, reposed beneath the shadow of 
 the British oak, chew the cud and are silent, 
 pray do not imagine that those who make the 
 noise are the only inhabitants of the field, or that 
 of course they are many in number.' ^ Lord John 
 Eussell's Durham Letter was an electioneering fiasco. 
 Lord Beaconsfield's patronage of the Public Worship 
 Regulation Bill, which he described as a Bill to 
 * put down Ritualism,' contributed in no small 
 degree to the Conservative debacle of 1880. 
 
 The explanation is simple. The extreme Puritan 
 ' party, represented by the Church Association and the 
 Liverpool Laymen's League, are not a formidable 
 electioneering force. The candidate who accepts 
 their pledge will have arrayed against him the whole 
 of the Ritualists, and probably the majority of the 
 High Church party in addition. There is, moreover, 
 always a considerable body of the electorate who do 
 not ordinarily take an active part in politics. But 
 they hate persecution ; they hate bigotry ; they 
 consider self-denying lives and hard work among the 
 poor of more consequence than the occasional fumes 
 of incense or the Communion of the sick by a part of 
 the Sacrament reserved from the public administra- 
 
 > Burke, Works, iv. 220. 
 
xxxvni THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 tion. These will vote again, as they did in 1880, 
 against the candidate who gives a pledge in favour 
 of a persecuting policy. Lastly, there is the working 
 man. That distinguished publicist, the late Mr. 
 W. R. Greg, declared, a quarter of a century ago, 
 that the clergy who had most influence with the 
 working classes were the Eitualists. That is much 
 more the case now. The working man may be 
 indifferent to religion himself, but he is quick to 
 recognise and appreciate the self-denying labours of 
 clergy who live among the poor. Mr. Kensit and 
 his ' preachers ' have not ventured to invade any 
 church in a working-class parish. The working 
 man, moreover, is exceedingly jealous of the intrusion 
 of religion into secular politics. He has ideals and 
 aspirations of his own, and the last thing he wishes 
 is the waste (as he thinks it) of the time of Parlia- 
 ment on questions which do not touch his social life. 
 Mr. Gladstone was known to be a High Churchman. 
 He opposed the Public Worship Regulation Bill, 
 ruining thereby, as Lord Beaconsfield believed, his 
 political future. The truth is, I believe, that his 
 conduct on that and other occasions did not lose his 
 party a single seat. 
 
 8. We hear much of ' the crisis in the Church.' 
 There is no crisis if only those in authority will deal 
 patiently and tactfully with controversies which are 
 but ripples on the surface of the Church's life, and 
 are, after all, far preferable to the unwholesome 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xxxix 
 
 stagnation which has in the past done so much 
 harm. At the bottom of this controversy there are two 
 antagonistic theories of reHgious worship. Accord- 
 ing to one theory, God in the Psalmist's language 
 should be worshipped 'in the beauty of holiness.' 
 He demands the homage of the whole man, body, 
 soul, and spirit. He delights in splendour of service 
 when it is the offering of a pure love and a genuine 
 devotion. The other theory would banish art 
 altogether from the sanctuary. Its ideal of worship 
 is really a consecration of the principle of ugliness to 
 the service of Almighty God. Let anyone who doubts 
 this read the literature of Puritanism in this country 
 and in New England when it got the upper hand. 
 In the Journal of William Dowsing, Parliamentary 
 Visitor appointed under a warrant for * demolish- 
 ing the Superstitious Pictures and Ornaments of 
 churches ' within the county of Suffolk alone, we have 
 a description of the havoc made by those fanatical 
 iconoclasts. Painted windows, crosses, crucifixes, 
 holy water vessels, Ora pro nobis inscriptions, altars, 
 organs, brasses in floors and walls, frescoes, paintings, 
 candlesticks, crosses even on towers and pinnacles 
 of churches — all were ruthlessly destroyed, and all 
 chancels were lowered to the level of the nave. 
 Similar havoc went on in other counties. The fury 
 with which the Sign of Redemption was regarded 
 was ludicrous. All doors with bars that accidentally 
 formed the sign of the cross had to be taken down. 
 
xl THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and tailors were forbidden to sit cross-legged. 
 Mothers were sent to prison for kissing their babies 
 on Sunday. The theatres were all closed, and 
 Shakespeare and the Book of Common Praj^er were 
 both put on the Index of forbidden books which it 
 was a legal offence to possess. * Classes ' were 
 appointed with inquisitorial powers to pry into pri- 
 vate life and inflict arbitrary punishments. Milton 
 groaned under the tyranny, and gave vent to his 
 feelings in a line which has been constantly mis- 
 applied. He hoped, but in vain, that Parliament 
 would come to the rescue : — - 
 
 But we do hope to find out all your tricks, 
 
 Your plots and packing, worse than those of Trent, 
 
 That so the Parliament 
 May, with their wholesome and preventive shears, 
 Clip your phylacteries, though bank your ears. 
 
 And succour our just fears, 
 "When they shall read this clearly in your charge. 
 New j^'i'dshyter is but old priest writ large. ^ 
 
 It is hardly too much to say that the Puritan 
 regime went far to destroy the aesthetic sense of the 
 English nation. Not only was public worship made 
 dull and dreary, but ugliness reigned over our domestic 
 architecture and social life. Sir Walter Scott was 
 the first to break the spell of that worship of the 
 ugly, and the reaction which he started has embraced 
 
 ' Sonnet, On the Netv Forces of Conscience under the Long Parlia- 
 vie7it. The italics are in the original. 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xli 
 
 all denominations and all departments of life. The 
 Ritualistic movement is one of its offsprings, and it 
 will in due time, like all enthusiastic movements, 
 shed its follies and extravagances and be assimilated 
 with advantage into the organism of the Church. 
 Ten years hence incense and the primitive reserva- 
 tion of the Sacrament for the Communion of the sick 
 will be deemed as harmless as the use of the surplice 
 in preaching is now. All that is needed is patience 
 and common sense. The bishops have far more in- 
 fluence than they imagine. It is their business to 
 lead in matters of this sort, and the people always 
 appreciate leaders who will lead. I have had some 
 experience in addressing working men, and my ex- 
 perience tells me that the working man is a lover of 
 justice and fair play. Let him be told, as he 
 is told so seldom, that certain things, which are 
 denounced, are in the Prayer Book, and whatever he 
 may think of them — which commonly is very little 
 — his sense of fair play will revolt against the perse- 
 cution of those who practise them. Several of the 
 bishops, conspicuously the Bishop of London, who 
 have dealt with their clergy as fathers-in-God, and 
 have not been afraid to deal with each case on its 
 merits instead of trying to enforce a most question- 
 able exposition of the law, have had very little 
 difficulty. 
 
 In criticising Professor Collins's argument that 
 
xlii THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ' fuoco ' was commonly used for incense in Italian, I 
 forgot one thing of which the Professor's informant 
 may have been thinking. When the paschal candle 
 was lit on Holy Saturday five grains of blessed incense 
 were fixed in it in memory of the wounds of Christ 
 and the precious spices with which He was anointed 
 in the tomb. But there can be no doubt that 
 the Venetian Ambassador's * fuoco ' referred to the 
 ' Beam-light,' the new fire struck from the flint on 
 Easter Eve. 
 
 In my answer to Professor Maitland I have 
 dealt with the only adverse criticism which deserves 
 any notice. 
 
 A pamphlet has been sent to me by a gentleman 
 of the name of Tomlinson, accusing me of a variety 
 of offences. The tone of the pamphlet might well 
 excuse me for declining to notice the criticism of 
 such a writer. But, in truth, there is nothing 
 in the pamphlet to answer. A few unimportant 
 inaccuracies in . details had been noticed by myself 
 and by friends. But the fact is that Mr. Tomlin- 
 son is an impossible controversialist. He does not 
 understand either his own case or his opponent's. 
 He is a gentleman with a craze, to which he 
 has given the name of * the Fraud Kubric' He 
 thinks that the Ornaments Kubric is a ' fraud ' 
 foisted into the Prayer Book without any authority. 
 Even if that were true — and it happens to be the 
 reverse of the truth — of the Elizabethan Kubric, 
 
PEEFACE TO THE EIGHTH EDITION xliii 
 
 Mr. Tomlinson's theory would be a sheer irrelevancy, 
 for our present Ornaments Kubric is unquestionably 
 authorised by the Uniformity Act of 1662. But 
 Acts of Parliament are futile against a monomania, 
 and Mr. Tomlinson sticks to his 'Fraud Eubric' 
 His craze has not even the equivocal merit- of 
 originality. It was started in the year 1883 by an 
 excellent layman of some learning — Mr. Wheatley 
 Balme. I reviewed his book in a weekly journal, 
 and, I believe, convinced him of his error. Some 
 time afterwards Mr. Tomlinson took up the dis- 
 carded theory, trotted it out as a wonderful 
 discovery of his own, and has been riding his 
 hobby against all comers ever since. His first 
 tilt was against Archbishop Benson in the Lincoln 
 case, although I believe the Archbishop never 
 knew it. According to him the Act of Uniformity 
 of 1559, the Act of Uniformity of 1662, Archbishop 
 Benson's Lincoln Judgment, and all the decisions of 
 the Judicial Committee on questions of Ritual are 
 monuments of ignorance and abettors of a fraud 
 practised by Queen Elizabeth. I am thus a sinner 
 in good company. Putting aside a few superficial 
 inaccuracies almost inevitable in a book written in 
 much haste, I have not been convicted of any serious 
 error, and I have every reason to be satisfied with 
 the verdict of the critics, not only in this country, 
 but in the United States and in our Colonies as 
 well. 
 
xliv THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 I have omitted in this edition the long Introduc- 
 tory Letter to Sir William Harcourt, and I take this 
 opportunity of thanking him for the courtesy and 
 friendliness which he has shown to me in this contro- 
 versy. I have also, by the urgent desire of many, 
 reduced the price of the volume from 7s. 6d. to 35. 6d., 
 while adding some 250 pages of fresh matter. 
 
 MALCOLM MacCOLL. 
 Jtdy 1900. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PAGK 
 
 Preface . v-xliv 
 
 I. The Presence of Christ in the Eucharist . 1 
 
 II. The Eucharistic Sacrifice 39 
 
 III. The Eeformation : its Causes and Eesults . 80 
 
 IV. The Testimony of Anglican Divines . . . 114 
 V. Propinquity of the Spiritual World . . 177 
 
 VI. Sacerdotalism 193 
 
 VII. Auricular Confession 217 
 
 VIII. The Eeformation and Confession . . . 265 
 
 IX. The Intermediate State 296 
 
 X. Ecclesiastical Courts and the Ornaments 
 
 EuBRic 331 
 
 XI. Anglican and Eoman Orders .... 460 
 
 XII. The Prisoner of the Vatican : a Chapter of 
 
 Secret History 520 
 
 XIII. The Lambeth Decisions 553 
 
 XIV. An Answer to Professor Maitland . . . 709 
 Index 763 
 
THE 
 
 REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 THE PEESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST 
 
 The Primate has in his recent Charge given us, 
 with admirable clearness, an exposition of the 
 various aspects of the doctrine of the Eucharist 
 which, in his opinion, have been held at different 
 times in Eastern and Western Christendom. 
 
 I. There is, first, the Zwinglian view, according 
 to which ' the Sacrament, in fact, differs from prayer 
 in degree, but not in kind.' His Grace admits that 
 this view * softens, purifies, elevates, kindles ; ' but 
 it is only as a memory of a past sacred event, 
 kindling devotion as a Trafalgar or Waterloo 
 banquet may kindle patriotism. This view, excel- 
 lent as far as it goes, he rejects as inadequate. 
 
 II. There is, next, the doctrine of a * mysterious 
 gift, uniting us to Christ in a special manner and 
 degree, giving new power, new cleansing, new life, 
 
 B 
 
2 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and even new insight into spiritual things, leavening 
 the v^hole being with a heavenly infection. This 
 gift is something far beyond the natural working of 
 our own minds.' And ' this mysterious gift,' which 
 theologians call the res sacrame7iti, results from the 
 consecration of the bread and wine in the way 
 ordained by the Church. It is, therefore, indepen- 
 dent of the communicant. 
 
 Between the Zwinghan doctrine and this ' there 
 can be no question at all that the Church holds the 
 latter,' in common with * the early Christians ' uni- 
 versally, and with ' the Greek and other Churches 
 in the East ' to-day, as well as with * the Eomans 
 and the Lutherans.' 
 
 III. But now comes a subdivision of opinion. 
 The Boman Church defines the manner of the 
 Presence by the word Transubstantiation, which 
 the Church of England rejects as going beyond our 
 Lord's revelation, and ' overthiowing the nature of 
 a sacrament ' in addition. Others, like Hooker, 
 * maintain that the Eeal Presence should not be 
 looked for in the consecrated elements, but in the 
 receivers.' ' The Church certainly teaches Hooker's 
 doctrine,' which is indeed inseparable from belief in 
 a Beal Presence. Yet Hooker's doctrine does not 
 exhaust the Church's teaching, which implies ' the 
 further doctrine that there is a Beal Presence in 
 some way attached to the elements at the time of 
 consecration and before the reception.' 
 
 If there be no Eeal Presence until the reception, it 
 may be asked what is the effect of consecration, and may 
 
PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST 3 
 
 not the consecration be omitted ? The answer is obvious. 
 On the theory that the Real Presence is bestowed in the 
 reception and not before, then the effect of the prayer of 
 consecration is to attach to the elements, not a presence, 
 but a promise. The bread has been blessed according to 
 our Lord's command, and the Lord's promise is that when 
 the communicant partakes of the bread, so blessed, he 
 shall be a partaker of the Lord's Body. 
 
 But this does not, even on the admission of the 
 Judicial Committee in the Bennett case, ' exclude 
 the other opinion, namely, that in some mysterious 
 way there is a Presence attached to the elements 
 from the moment of their consecration.' ' It is 
 difficult,' the Primate thinks, * if not impossible, 
 really to distinguish between this doctrine and the 
 Lutheran doctrine commonly called Consubstantia- 
 tion, and it is important that it should be clearly 
 understood that it is not unlawful to hold it and to 
 teach it within the Church of England.' 
 
 That is, I believe, an accurate epitome of what 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury has laid down as the 
 doctrine of the Real Presence sanctioned by the 
 Church of England. It has evoked a good deal of 
 criticism, more particularly in regard to the doctrine 
 of Hooker and that of Consubstantiation. On these 
 two points T shall have something to say presently. 
 But there i*^ rj) much misconception on the general 
 subject that ^.L may be useful to explain, as far as 
 possible, what the doctrine of the Eeal Presence 
 connotes in the min:ls of those who hold it, without 
 any attempt or desire to define the mode of the 
 
 B 2 
 
4 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Presence. My own belief, based on considerable 
 experience, is that the controversy is largely a 
 verbal one, some denying what others do not affirm. 
 The truth is that human language is totally in- 
 adequate to express the verities of the spiritual 
 world. It is always more or less symbolical, and 
 never comes up to the reality. It is the clothing, 
 not the skin, of thought, and never, even at its best, 
 fits its contents accurately. This is true of ordinary 
 ideas. But all that relates to the being and mode 
 of working of the infinite Creator must necessarily 
 be beyond the compass of mundane speech. St. Paul 
 tells us that when he was * snatched up into Para- 
 dise ' in some mysterious way above his comprehen- 
 sion he 'heard unutterable utterances, which it is 
 impossible for man to put into speech ' {dpprjra 
 pTjfjbara, a ovk e^ov dvOpooira) XdXrjo-at). Who can 
 doubt that the Nicene Creed itself, with all the 
 skilled precision bestowed on its terminology by the 
 united experts of Christendom in the most supple 
 and plastic of languages, gives but a most imperfect 
 expression to the truths which it enshrines ? And 
 thus it sometimes happens that what seem to be 
 contradictory statements are in fact only different 
 aspects of the same truth. Hooker's language 
 about the Eucharist is, I believe, a case in point. 
 His meaning is by no means exhausted by the oft- 
 quoted sentence : — 
 
 The real presence of Christ's most blessed Body and 
 Blood is not therefore to be sought for in the Sacrament, 
 but in the worthy receiver of the Sacrament. 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHAEIST 5 
 
 An isolated quotation may bear a very different 
 meaning when restored to its context. Let me 
 therefore quote what precedes and follows this 
 famous passage in Hooker :— 
 
 The bread and cup are His Body and Blood because 
 they are causes instrumental upon the receipt whereof 
 the participation of His Body and Blood ensueth. For 
 that which produceth any certain effect is not vainly nor 
 improperly said to be that very effect whereunto it 
 tendeth. Every cause is in the effect which groweth 
 from it. Our souls and bodies, quickened to eternal life, 
 arc effects the cause whereof is the Person of Christ. 
 His Body and Blood are the true wellspring out of which 
 it floweth. So that His Body and Blood are in that very 
 subject whereunto they minister life, not only by effect or 
 operation, even as the influence of the heavens is in 
 plants, beasts, men, and in every thing which they 
 quicken, but also by a far more Divine and mystical kind 
 of union, which maketh us one with Him even as He and 
 the Father are one. 
 
 Then follows the passage in dispute, which 
 Hooker proceeds to explain and amplify. And what 
 he is plainly anxious to show is that the Sacraments 
 have in themselves no inherent virtue ; that they 
 were ordained for a purpose, and that they have no 
 efficacy beyond or apart from that purpose ; that the 
 Eucharist was ordained in , order to incorporate us 
 into Christ, and that we have no right to look for 
 Christ's presence in the Sacrament except in connec- 
 tion with that purpose. 
 
 The fruit of the Eucharist is the participation of the 
 Body and Blood of Christ. There is no sentence of Holy 
 
E THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Scripture which saith that we cannot by this Sacrament 
 be made partakers of His Body and Blood except they be 
 first contained in the Sacrament, or the Sacrament con- 
 verted into them. * This is My Body ' and * This is My 
 Blood,' being words of promise, sith we all agree that by the 
 Sacrament Christ doth really and truly in us perform His 
 promise, why do we vainly trouble ourselves with so 
 fierce contentions whether by Consubstantiation or else 
 by Transubstantiation the Sacrament itself be first 
 possessed with Christ, or no ? A thing which no way 
 can either further or hinder us howsoever it stand, 
 because our participation of Christ in this Sacrament 
 dependeth on the co-operation of His omnipotent power, 
 which maketh it His Body and Blood to us, whether 
 with change or without alteration of the element, such as 
 they imagine, we need not greatly to care nor inquire. 
 
 Take therefore that wherein all agree, and then 
 consider by itself what cause why the rest in question 
 should not rather be left as superfluous than urged 
 as necessary. It is on all sides plainly confessed, first, 
 that this Sacrament is a true and real participation of 
 Christ, who thereby imparteth Himself, even His whole 
 entire Person as a mystical Head, unto every soul that 
 receiveth Him ; and that every such receiver doth thereby 
 incorporate or unite himself unto Christ as a mystical 
 member of Him, yea, of them also whom He ac- 
 knowledgeth to be His own ; secondly, that to whom the 
 Person of Christ is thus communicated, to them He giveth 
 by the same Sacrament His Holy Spirit to sanctify them 
 as it sanctifieth IJim which is their Head ; thirdly, that 
 what merit, force, or virtue soever there is in His 
 sacrificed Body and Blood, we freely, fully, and wholly 
 have it by this Sacrament; fourthly, that the effect 
 thereof in us is a real transmutation of our souls and 
 bodies from sin to righteousness, from death and corrup- 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHAEIST 7 
 
 tion to immortality and life ; fifthly, that because the 
 Sacrament, being of itself but a corruptible and earthly 
 creation, must needs be thought an unlikely instrument 
 to work so admirable effects in man, we are therefore to 
 rest ourselves altogether upon the strength of His 
 glorious power, who is able and will bring to pass that 
 the bread and cup which He giveth us shall be truly the 
 thing He promiseth. 
 
 It seemeth, therefore, much amiss that against them 
 whom they term Sacramentarians so many invective 
 discourses are made, all running upon two points : that 
 the Eucharist is not a bare sign or figure only ; and that 
 the efficacy of His Body and Blood is npt all we receive 
 in this Sacrament. For no man, having read these books 
 and writings which are thus traduced, can be ignorant 
 that both these assertions they plainly confess to be 
 most true. They do not so interpret the words of Christ 
 as if the name of His Body did import but the figure of 
 His Body, and to be was only to signify His Blood. 
 They grant that these holy mysteries, received in due 
 manner, do instrumentally both make us partakers of the 
 grace of that Body and Blood which were given for the 
 life of the world, and, besides, also imports into us in true 
 and real though mystical manner, the very Person of our 
 Lord Himself, whole, perfect, and entire, as hath been 
 showed.^ 
 
 This quotation gives a complexion, different from 
 the common interpretation, to the passage so often 
 quoted from Hooker. He rejects peremptorily the 
 Zwinglian view of 'a bare sign or figure only,' and 
 the Calvinistic view of a presence merely of ' efficacy.* 
 He also rejects as presumptuous and untenable such 
 
 ' Bh. V. Ixvii. 5-8. 
 
8 THE EEFORMAl'ION SETTLEMENT? 
 
 definitions as Transubstantiation and Consubstantia- 
 tion, which, however, he is in his charity wiUing to 
 leave in the category of philosophical opinions, pro- 
 vided they are not made articles of faith or obtruded 
 into the sphere of dogmatic theology. But while 
 rejecting any definition of the manner of Christ's pre- 
 sence in the Eucharist, he insists emphatically on the 
 objective reality of the presence ; the presence, that 
 is, of ' the very Person of our Lord Himself, whole, 
 perfect, and entire,' and ' imparted unto every soul 
 that receiveth Him ' instrumentally through the 
 Sacrament. But he is jealous of any attempt to 
 localise the heavenly gift or subject it to temporal 
 conditions. Avoid, he says in effect, curious ques- 
 tions as to time and place. Let it suffice for you 
 to know that if you receive the Sacrament duly 
 prepared, you receive not a bare sign or figure, and 
 not an efficacious influence only, but Christ Him- 
 self in the fulness of His theanthropic Presence. 
 
 This doctrine Hooker unfolds elsewhere as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 It is too cold an interpretation whereby some men 
 expound our being in Christ to import nothing else but 
 only that the self-same nature, which maketh us to be 
 men, is in Him, and maketh Him man as we are. For 
 what man in the world is there which hath not so far 
 forth communion with Jesus Christ ? It is not this that 
 can sustain the weight of such sentences as speak of the 
 mystery of our coherence with Jesus Christ (John xiv. 
 19 ; Ephes. v. 23). The Church is in Christ as Eve was 
 in Adam. Yea, by grace we are every one of us in Christ 
 and in His Church, as by nature we are in those our 
 
I>BESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHABIST 9 
 
 first parents. God made Eve of the rib of Adam. And His 
 Church He frameth out of the very flesh, the very v^rounded 
 and bleeding side of the Son of Man. His Body crucified 
 and His blood shed for the life of the world are the true 
 elements of that heavenly being, which maketh us such 
 as Himself is of whom we come. For which cause the 
 words of Adam may be fitly words of Christ concerning 
 His Church : * flesh of my flesh, and bone of my bones,' a 
 true native extract of mine own body. So that in Him, even 
 according to His Manhood, we, according to our heavenly 
 being, are as branches in that root out of which they grow. 
 
 To all things He is life, and to men light, as the Son 
 of God : to the Church both life and light eternal by 
 being made the Son of Man for us, and by being in us a 
 Saviour, whether we respect Him as God or as Man. 
 Adam is in us as an original cause of our nature, and of 
 that corruption of nature which causeth death ; Christ as 
 the cause of original restoration to life. The person of 
 Adam is not in us, but his nature and the corruption of 
 his nature derived into all men by propagation. Christ, 
 having Adam's nature as we have, but incorrupt, deriveth 
 not nature but incorruption, and that immediately from 
 His Person, into all that belong unto Him. As therefore 
 we are really partakers of the body of sin and death 
 received from Adam, so except we be truly partakers of 
 Christ, and as really possessed of His Spirit, all we speak 
 of eternal life is but a dream. 
 
 These things St. Cyril duly considering, reproveth 
 their speeches which taught that only the Deity of Christ 
 is the vine whereupon we by faith do depend as branches, 
 and that neither His Flesh nor our bodies are comprised in 
 this resemblance. For doth any man doubt but that even 
 from the Flesh of Christ our very bodies do receive that 
 life which shall make them glorious at the latter day, and 
 for which they are already accounted parts of His blessed 
 
10 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Body ? Oui corruptible bodies could never live the life 
 they shall live, were it not that here they are joined with 
 His Body which is incorruptible, and that His is in ours as 
 a cause of immortality; a cause by removing through the 
 death and merit of His own Flesh that which hindered the 
 life of ours. Christ is therefore both as God and as Man 
 that true Vine whereof we both spiritually and corporeally 
 are branches. 
 
 Hooker does not hesitate to say that, in virtue ot 
 this sacramental union with Christ, * God hath deified 
 our nature.' ^ 
 
 These grand passages show what a lofty view 
 Hooker took of the sacramental system, a view as far 
 removed from that of those who would regard the 
 Sacraments as bare figures and symbols as of those 
 who would fall into the gross error of the people of 
 Capernaum and ask, 'How can this Man give us 
 His flesh to eat ? ' 
 
 We have in Keble's ' Christian Year ' an exact 
 parallel to the passage so often quoted to prove that 
 Hooker believed in a mere subjective presence of 
 Christ in the Eucharist. In his poem on * Gun- 
 powder Treason ' Keble writes : — 
 
 O come to our Communion Feast : 
 
 There present in the heart. 
 Not in the hands, th' eternal Priest 
 
 Will His true Self impart. 
 
 Take these words by themselves, and they are 
 a more explicit denial of an objective presence of 
 
 » Bk. V. liv. 5 ; Ivi. 7, 9. 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEISl IN THE EUCHAEIST 11 
 
 Christ in the Eucharist than Hooker's words ; yet we 
 know that no one taught mojre emphatically than 
 Kebledid the doctrine of an objective presence. His 
 treatise * On Eucharistical Adoration ' is based on 
 that belief. For instance, the dispute about Eucharis- 
 tical adoration, he says, ' raises evidently the whole 
 question of that which is denominated " the real 
 objective presence " of Jesus Christ in the holy 
 Eucharist.' And then he proceeds to argue in favour 
 of that doctrine. In the course of his argument he 
 naturally discusses the doctrine of Hooker, of whose 
 works his own edition is the standard one, and con- 
 eludes : * Therefore let no person apprehend that in 
 teaching and magnifying the Eucharistic sacrifice he 
 is really contradicting this great authority ; any more 
 than, to name a kindred point, he need think him- 
 self departing in principle from Hooker's mind by 
 maintaining the Eeal objective Presence after conse- 
 cration.' ' I shall presently endeavour to explain the 
 sense in .which the Church, as I understand the 
 matter, wishes her children to believe in the doctrines 
 of the Real Presence and Eucharistic Sacrifice — a 
 sense very different from the misconceptions of 
 popular Protestantism. The point which I am now 
 pressing is that the ordinary interpretation of the 
 classical passage on the Real Presence in Hooker is 
 not consistent with his teaching as a whole, which 
 plainly insists on a Presence independent of the faith 
 of the recipient. What he was solicitous about was 
 that people should not think that the Eucharistic 
 * On Eiicharistical Adoration^ pp. 57, 71. 
 
1^ THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Presence was inherent in the consecrated elements as 
 a quality proper to them. He insists therefore that, 
 although the Sacrament is by Divine appointment 
 the cause instrumental for putting us in communica- 
 tion with our Incarnate Lord, yet the Presence must 
 be sought in the recipient and not in the conduit 
 through which the gift passes. Reception of the gift 
 is conditional on reception of the Sacrament where 
 that is possible, just as the cure of Naaman's leprosy 
 was contingent on his dipping seven times in Jordan ; 
 but in each case the efhcient cause must be sought 
 in the will of God. He can attach what condition 
 He pleases to the bestowal of His gifts, and we have 
 no right to expect them if we wilfully neglect the 
 conditions; but the gifts themselves exist quite 
 independently of our views about them or our 
 attitude towards them. The Eucharistic Presence 
 is quite independent of the faith of the recipient. 
 Faith creates nothing. Its province is not to create 
 but to receive a gift external to it and offered to it. 
 Faith is sometimes compared to an eye. But the 
 eye does not create the light. It receives it and 
 transmits it to the brain and intellect. But a man 
 may injure his eyes, so that they cease to be accurate 
 conductors to the soul. The vision is thus blurred 
 and distorted. Or he may destroy his eyes altogether, 
 and then the whole realm of light, with all its en- 
 trancing visions, is shut out from the soul. But the 
 hght is there all the same. It embraces the blind 
 man in its radiance, but can find no avenue into his 
 soul, since he has destroyed his organs of vision. 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHAEIST 13 
 
 The light is there, but no longer for him. Yet it 
 impinges on his blind eyes. It touches the optic 
 nerves. But there is no response, for the organ of 
 apprehension is gone. And this is true of all our 
 senses ; the function of each is to receive an impres- 
 sion, an impact from an external object charged v^ith 
 its appropriate virtue. And philosophers may discuss, 
 and have discussed, whether the gift is in the external 
 object or in the recipient of the impact ; v^hether the 
 sweetness is in the sugar or in the palate ; whether 
 the beauty is in the sunset or in the percipient 
 mind. The sunset prints the same image on the eye 
 of the brute as on the human eye ; but there is no 
 corresponding res sacramentiy if I may so express 
 myself. For indeed Nature is a sacrament, as the 
 old Fathers loved to think ; * an outward and visible 
 sign of an inward and spiritual ' Presence energising 
 through all her operations and phenomena. 
 
 But however philosophers may dispute, we all 
 agree that our bodily senses are our organs of com- 
 munication with external facts, and that our sensa- 
 tions are no mere subjective impressions, but im- 
 pressions resulting from contact with objective 
 realities. The senses do not create the impres- 
 sions. They only receive and convey them. 
 
 So with faith. It no more causes the Presence 
 in the Eucharist than the eye causes the sunset. 
 The Presence is objective — that is, outside of it and 
 independent of it. If faith be lacking, the Presence 
 has no more access to the soul than the glory of the 
 setting sun has through sightless eyeballs. Want of 
 
14 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 faith in the people of Capernaum incapacitated them 
 for the reception of their Saviomr's gifts. ' He could 
 do no mighty work there because of their unbelief.' 
 Yet He was there, close to them, touching them. 
 
 Thus we see that, alike in the Kingdom of Nature 
 and of Grace, the Presence that nourishes the soul 
 must be objective before it can become subjective. 
 And there is also in each case a process of transmu- 
 tation on reception of the gift. As Hooker says of 
 the Sacrament of the altar, so we may say of the 
 Sacrament of nature, that the gift * is not to be sought 
 for in the Sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of 
 the Sacrament.' If he is not worthy, the gift can 
 find no entrance in either case ; but let it find an 
 entrance, and immediately it begins to energise and 
 to transform the recipient of it. Our Church repu- 
 diates the transubstantiation of the sacramental ele- 
 ments ; but she asserts the transubstantiation of the 
 recipient of the Sacrament. Thus, says Hooker, * God 
 hath deified our nature.' Just as we assimilate 
 material food and transubstantiate it into the sub- 
 stance of our bodies, so the Presence of Christ, sacra- 
 mentally received, is designed to transubstantiate us 
 spiritually into the redeemed and deified Humanity 
 of Christ , making us, as the Apostle says, ' partakers 
 of the Divine nature.' * 
 
 The doctrine of those who make the faith of the 
 communicants the cause of Christ's Presence is 
 exposed to a fatal objection. For it follows — as may 
 surely happen — that if all the communicants lack 
 
 ' 2Pet. i. 4. 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHAEIST 15 
 
 faith there is no sacrament at all : there is only an 
 empty ceremony without any result, ' an outward and 
 visible sign ' without any corresponding reality. 
 This, not less than Transubstantiation, ' overthroweth 
 the nature of a sacrament.' The former abrogates 
 the heavenly part ; the latter, the earthly. The 
 primitive and Catholic view maintains both. 
 
 And now let us see what the primitive and 
 Catholic doctrine is, disengaged from materialism, on 
 the one hand, and what, for lack of a better word, I 
 will venture to call psilochristism, on the other. 
 
 Our Lord, says the ' Te Deum,' * hath opened the 
 Kingdom of Heaven to all believers.' How? We 
 have the answer in the Epistle to tKe Hebrews : 
 * Having therefore, brethren, a sure confidence for 
 entrance into the Holies in the blood of Jesus, which 
 entrance He hath made for us anew — a living way 
 fresh opened sacrificially through the veil, that is His 
 flesh.' * What are we to understand by this preg- 
 nant passage ? It is impossible to give the compact 
 and suggestive meaning of the original except in peri- 
 phrasis. Our Lord's Incarnation is the medium of 
 communication between the natural life and the 
 spiritual. It is, in the first place, the copula that 
 unites the creation with the Creator. * He took not 
 on Him the nature of angels, but of the seed of 
 Abraham He layeth hold.' Had He assumed angelic 
 nature, the chasm that divides the Creator from His 
 creation would have remained unbridged. By taking 
 human nature, the Eternal Son bridged the gulf. 
 
 ' Heb. X. 20. 
 
16 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 For human nature consists of body (o-w/ia), soul 
 i'^vxv), and spirit (irvsv^a) ; and these embrace the 
 whole creation : inorganic matter, vegetable, animal 
 and spiritual life. Thus only can we fully under- 
 stand the profound language of St. Paul. The atone- 
 ment which he preached was a truth infinitely deeper 
 and higher and wider than a mere forensic satisfaction 
 for sin. It embraced the universe by uniting it with 
 the Almighty and all-loving Creator. * For it pleased 
 the Father that in Him should all the fulness {irav 
 TO TrXtjpco/jLa) dwell ; and through Him to reconcile 
 all things (to, iravra) to Himself through the blood 
 of His Cross ; through Him, whether things upon 
 the earth or things in the heavens.' ^ And the same 
 Apostle, in another place, represents * the whole 
 creation ' as ' groaning and travailing in pain with 
 us until now,' and awaiting with us * the redemption 
 of the body ' ^ which aUies us to the material 
 universe. 
 
 The Incarnation thus embraces the whole uni- 
 verse of being. Next, it is, in a more restricted 
 sense, a fresh source of purified life to the fallen 
 race of Adam. ' For as in Adam all die, even so in 
 Christ shall all be made alive.' ^ How do all men 
 die in Adam? By deriving from him a nature 
 biased towards evil by the now recognised law of 
 heredity ; a nature not so much evil in itself, as 
 disorganised, out of joint, going after wrong objects, 
 nourished on deleterious food, and thus become 
 
 ^ Col. i. 19, 20. 2 Rom. viii. 22, 23. 
 
 » 1 Cor. XV. 22. 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHAEIST 17 
 
 anaemic, needing a fresh supply of healthy blood 
 to forni gradually a new nature to take "the place of 
 the old. This is the * new and living way ' which 
 Christ opened for mankind through the veil of His 
 flesh — that is, of His deified humanity. Zcocra is 
 here the antithesis of that which is lifeless, and 
 therefore powerless. The way into the sanctuary 
 of the Old Dispensation was a lifeless pavement 
 trodden by the high priest alone with the blood of 
 slain beasts for which there was no resurrection — 
 sacrifices, therefore, ' which could never take away 
 sin,' and were efficacious only as shadows cast 
 before of the one prevailing ' Sacrifice for ever ' of 
 the ' Lamb slain from the foundation of the world.* 
 The way opened by Jesus Christ is new and unique ; 
 and it is living, for it is His own. Humanity, over 
 which death 'hath no more dominion.' The veil, 
 ' that is His flesh,' is rent asunder, opening the holy 
 of holies ' to all believers,' never again to be closed 
 till His mediatorial work, which embraces all 
 creation, is finished, and death is swallowed up in 
 victory, and all this visible scene of fleeting phe- 
 nomena gives place to the 'new heavens and the 
 earth wherein dwelleth righteousness.' 
 
 Let us try to enter into the full meaning of this 
 glorious revelation, this ' new and living way ' into 
 the spiritual realm. Sea rod KarairsTdo-^aTos tovt 
 scTTLv aapK09 avTov. While our Incarnate Lord 
 was on earth fulfilling the conditions of fallen 
 humanity during the period of His Kenosis — that 
 is, while He held His uncreated glory and Divine 
 
 c- 
 
18 THE BEFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 attributes in abeyance — His mortal flesh hung Hke 
 the Temple curtain between Himself and His people. 
 But death rent the veil, and at the same moment 
 * the veil of the Temple was rent in twain from the 
 top to the bottom.' He laid aside the Adamite 
 conditions of His manhood, and passed with it, 
 transfigured and glorified, under the reign of the 
 laws which are proper to spiritual being. And thus 
 He reconciled {airoKarriXka^sv) us in the body of 
 His flesh through death (Col. i. 22), so that the 
 flesh should no longer be a wall of partition either 
 between His Humanity and the spiritual world, or 
 between God and man ; but, on the contrary, a 
 bond of union bridging the ' great gulf fixed ' till 
 then between the human and the Divine, the finite 
 and the Infinite. Thus it is that He has made a 
 new way for us (avsKalvicrsv) through the veil of His 
 flesh, opened out a new mode ®f access to God, so 
 that the Divine Nature is now approachable by the 
 human. 
 
 What a flood of light this view of the Incarnation 
 casts upon sundry passages of Holy Writ ; such, for 
 instance, as our Lord's words to Mary Magdalene : 
 ' Touch Me not, for I am not yet ascended to My 
 Father/ It was no longer the * flesh ' which she 
 had known and handled under its temporal con- 
 ditions, but that flesh spirituaHsed and glorified, and 
 to be approached henceforth ' in a new and living 
 way,' and by other organs than the bodily senses. 
 
 And now let us see how this doctrine bears on 
 our sacramental union with Christ as expounded by 
 
PRESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHARIST 19 
 
 St. Paul, and also by our Lord Himself, especially 
 in the great sacramental discourse recorded in the 
 sixth chapter of St. John's Gospel. ' For as in 
 Adam all die,' says the Apostle, * even so {ovtw Kal) 
 shall all be made alive.' All men die in Adam 
 through the law of heredity ; by deriving from the 
 progenitor of the race — not indeed an utterly 
 depraved nature, as some have supposed, but — a 
 tainted nature ; a nature v^ith a germ of evil in it ; 
 a nature with the equilibrium of its parts destroyed, 
 so that the animal bias is apt to master the spiritual. 
 And this evil inheritance with which we are all: 
 born is due to our organic connection with the 
 head of our fallen race. Thus ' in Adam we all die.' 
 How are we * made alive in Christ ' ? The 
 Apostle tells us that it is by an identical process — 
 i.e. by organic connection. ' Even so ' — just in the 
 same way — ' in Christ shall all be made alive.' He 
 contemplates humanity as subsisting under two 
 heads, the ' First Adam ' and the ' Second Adam,' 
 ' the Old Man ' and ' the New Man.' From the one 
 we derive a vitiated life, an impoverished nature. 
 Into the other we are ' grafted ' by sacramental 
 union in order to have a new and untainted life 
 injected into our wounded nature. In baptism, our 
 Church Catechism tells us, we are ' made members 
 of Christ.' And the Catechism does but follow the 
 stronger language of St. Paul, who compares the 
 connection between Christ and Christians with that 
 between Adam and his wife, who was made * bone of 
 his bone and flesh of his flesbc' Christians, he says, 
 
 c 2 
 
20 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ' are limbs of His body, out of His flesh and His 
 bones.' And elsewhere : * The first man Adam was 
 made a living soul ; the Last Man was made a life- 
 giving (^cooTTOLovv) spirit. Howbeit that was not 
 first which is spiritual, but that which is natural ; 
 and. afterward that which is spiritual. The first 
 man is of the earth, earthy : the second man is the 
 Lord from heaven. As is the earthy, such are they 
 also that are earthy ; and as is the heavenly, such 
 are they also that are heavenly. And as we have 
 borne the image of the earthy, we shall also bear the 
 image of the heavenly.' 
 
 These words can bear but one meaning, namely, 
 that the connection with ' the Last Adam ' is just 
 as real as the connection with the first. Our Lord 
 Himself conveys the same idea under the image of 
 the life-giving Vine and its branches ; and still more 
 emphatically in that wonderful discourse in the sixth 
 chapter of St. John's Gospel. There He calls Him- 
 self 'the Bread of life,' 'the living Bread which 
 came down from heaven.' And then more plainly : 
 ' The Bread that I will give is My Flesh, which I will 
 give for the life of the world.' And when His 
 hearers questioned the possibility of such a gift. He 
 repeated the startling assertion with a solemn as- 
 severation : * Verily, verily, I say unto you. Except 
 ye eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink His 
 Blood, ye have no hfe in you. Whoso eateth My 
 Flesh and drinketh My Blood hath eternal Hfe; 
 and I will raise him up at the last day. For My 
 Flesh is meat indeed, and My Blood is drink indeed* 
 
PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST 21 
 
 . . . Many therefore of His disciples, when they 
 heard this, said, This is an hard saying ; who can 
 hear it ? . . . From that time many of His disciples 
 went back, and walked no more with Him.' And 
 He let them go rather than water down His ' hard 
 saying.' He was even willing that His ' little flock ' 
 of twelve should follow the rest rather than let them 
 believe that He meant less than He said. There is 
 pathos, but also unflinching determination in His 
 question : ' Will ye also go away ? ' It were well 
 if they who still stumble at the doctrine would 
 ponder Simon Peter's answer : ' Lord, to whom 
 shall we go ? Thou hast the words of eternal life.' 
 
 Our Lord's words are 'an hard saying' still. 
 Shall we call them figurative ? All language is in a 
 sense figurative. It is never the exact embodiment 
 of the idea which it seeks to express. But it is, let 
 us remember, always less than the truth. In that 
 sense our Lord's language here is figurative. He 
 does not mean flesh and blood in the sense in which 
 we ordinarily use these words ; but He means 
 something much deeper, grander, more real. He 
 means His essential Humanity. Throughout the 
 sacrificial system of Israel the blood represents the 
 life, the totality of individual being. Hence the 
 prohibition to eat it. ' For the life of the flesh is in 
 the blood : and I have given it to you upon the altar 
 to make an atonement for your souls ; for it is the 
 blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.' ^ 
 
 It was thus in the language of their own law that 
 
 ' Lev. xvii. 11. 
 
22 THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 our Lord expounded His Eucharistic doctrine to the 
 people of Capernaum ; and they ought to have 
 understood Him and followed His reasoning. But 
 their minds remained on the low level of gross 
 materialistic conceptions, and they asked incredu- 
 lously, ' How can this man give us His flesh to eat ? ' 
 He tried to explain : * The spirit is the life-producer ; 
 the flesh profiteth nothing. The subject of My dis- 
 course is spirit and life.' ^ That is to say, when He 
 spoke of giving His Flesh and Blood as the food of 
 His people, He did not mean by flesh and blood any- 
 thing that the bodily senses could apprehend or a 
 chemist could analyse into its elements. In that 
 sense our Lord's Flesh and Blood are certainly not 
 present in the Eucharist, or indeed anywhere. It is 
 true that He called on His disciples to testify to His 
 * flesh and bones ' after His Kesurrection. But it is 
 also true that the normal condition of His risen body 
 was that of spirit. What we call flesh and bones is 
 a consolidation of gases which are subject to disinte- 
 gration and dissolution, and this is warded off for a 
 time by the assimilation of congenial nutriment to 
 repair the unceasing waste of tissue. But our Lord's 
 risen body subsists without food and is independent 
 
 ' The form of the original is somewhat lost in the English 
 version, especially the second clause of the verse (63) : To ftiifxaTa & 
 f 70) AaAw viuv irvevfxd eVrt /cat (oo-f} eariv. This is inadequately rendered 
 by ' The words that I speak unto you they are spirit and they are 
 life.' The word ^rj/xa in Hebraistic Greek, both in the Septuagint and 
 in the New Testament, came to signify the subject of the words, and 
 not the mere words themselves. It was of the realities enshrined in 
 His words that our Lord declared that they are spirit and life ; not 
 dead matter like ' flesh and blood ' in ordinary speech. 
 
PRESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHARIST 23 
 
 of the laws of physics. He passed through the 
 rock-closed tomb, for the angels rolled back along its 
 groove the heavy stone door to let the pious vromen 
 in, not to let the risen Saviour out. Similarly He 
 passed afterguards through the closed door, and 
 appeared and disappeared at will, sometimes recog- 
 nisable, sometimes not, according to the spiritual 
 receptivity of those He visited. The truth is that 
 His humiliation. His self-emptying, was always on 
 His part a voluntary act. He chose to be subject to 
 the conditions of fallen human nature ; to learn to 
 walk and read, stumbHng as He learnt ; to ' grow 
 in wisdom and stature,' His mind developing ^»ri 
 passu with His body ; to need sleep and food like 
 weary and decaying mortals ; to sit fatigued by the 
 well of Jacob and crave for a refreshing draught of 
 cool water ; to feel keenly the desertion of friends 
 and the pain of wounds ; to have a tender human 
 pity for the widow who was following the bier of an 
 only son ; to shed tears at the grave of Lazarus as 
 He heard the sobs of the dead man's sisters ; to die 
 upon the cross by a royal act of will, not through the 
 violence of men ; for it was ' with a loud voice,' not 
 with the gasp of dying men, that ' He yielded up the 
 ghost.' 
 
 But all this was a voluntary subjection, not a 
 necessity laid upon Him by an unavoidable destiny. 
 And to show this He occasionally freed Himself even 
 before His death from the domination of physical 
 conditions and laws. He dispensed with food for 
 forty days aoxd forty nights, contrary to the ordinary 
 
24 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 experience of men. He walked upon the waves against 
 the law of gravity. He made Himself invisible to 
 the multitude at Capernaum contrary to the laws of 
 optics. He was transfigured on the Mount beyond 
 the skill of mortals. Before His Eesurrection there- 
 fore the normal condition of His body was what St. 
 Paul calls psychical and our English Version calls 
 * natural ; ' that is to say, He chose to submit to the 
 ordinary conditions of fallen humanity, but retained 
 the power of retiring on occasion within the domain 
 of spiritual laws, and was jpro tanto released from 
 the reign of natural laws. 
 
 Conversely, after the Eesurrection the normal 
 condition of His body was that of spirit. His 
 habitat, if I may use the expression, was the 
 spiritual world, from which He emerged at will, 
 moving freely and unimpeded among natural laws ; 
 availing Himself of them when He chose, and dis- 
 pensing with them at His pleasure. He appeared in 
 human form, though the form varied, and almost 
 invariably required the opening of a spiritual organ 
 in the percipient to recognise it. To convince the 
 incredulous Thomas, He materialised His spiritual 
 body and exhibited it with the stigmata of the 
 Passion. And He spoke with an audible voice and 
 ate with them on the shore of the lake. On the 
 other hand, He passed through solid substances as if 
 they did not exist. And although this fact has so 
 often furnished the sceptic and the scoffer with 
 objections and gibes against Christianity, physical 
 
PEESEKCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST 25 
 
 science itself has now come to the aid of an affronted 
 creed, and discomfited its assailants. We now know 
 that even a physical substance like electricity can 
 pass through solid substances as if they did not 
 exist ; through masses of tissue, and wood, and even 
 rock. What is possible to a material substance can, 
 a fortiori, present no difficulty to a spiritual sub- 
 stance, which is so much subtler than the most 
 ethereal of earthly entities. 
 
 Though I accept the intention conveyed by the 
 Black Kubric — to use the common solecism— at the 
 end of the Communion Office, I cannot accept its 
 philosophy when it affirms that ' the natural Body 
 and Blood of our Saviour Christ are in Heaven, and 
 not here ; it being against the truth of Christ's 
 natural Body to be at one time in more places than 
 one.' Christ, as we have seen, has no ' natural 
 body ' at all in the sense of the rubric. For * flesh 
 and blood,' as the Apostle assures us, ' cannot 
 inherit the kingdom of God ; neither doth corruption 
 inherit incorrupcion.' ^ Our Lord's risen body is 
 
 * spiritual,' not * natural,' as the same Apostle also 
 assures us, and has therefore no relation to place. 
 
 * Christ sits at the right hand of God,' says a most able 
 and learned Danish Protestant divine, ' but the right 
 hand of the Father is everywhere.' He is careful, 
 however, to guard himself against the Lutheran 
 perversion of the doctrine of the Communicatio 
 Idiomatum, which endows Christ's Humanity with 
 
 • 1 Cor. XV. 50. 
 
26 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the ubiquity of His Divine Person.' Hooker takes 
 much the same view : — 
 
 To conclude, we hold it in regard of the fore-alleged 
 proofs a most infallible truth that Christ as Man is not 
 everywhere present. There are which think it as infalli- 
 bly true that Christ is everywhere present as Man, which 
 peradventure in some sense may be well enough granted. 
 His human substance in itself is naturally absent from 
 the earth. His soul and body not on earth but in heaven 
 only. Yet because this substance is inseparably joined 
 to that personal Word which by His very essence is 
 present with all things, the nature which cannot have in 
 itself universal presence hath it after a sort '^ by being 
 nowhere severed from that which everywhere is present. 
 For inasmuch as that infinite Word is not divisible into 
 parts, it could not in part but must needs be wholly 
 incarnate, and consequently wheresoever the Word is it 
 hath with it manhood, else should the Word be in part 
 or somehow God only and not Man, which is impossible. 
 For the Person of Christ is whole, perfect God and per- 
 fect Man wheresoever, although the parts of His Man- 
 hood being finite, and His Deity infinite, we cannot say 
 that tJie lohole of Christ is simply everywhere, as we may 
 say that His Deity is, and that His Person is by force of 
 Deity. For Somewhat of the Person of Christ is not 
 everywhere in that sort, namely, His Manhood, the o)iIy 
 conjunction whereof with Deity is extended as far as 
 Deity, the actual position restrained and tied to a certain 
 place ; yet presence hy ivay of conjtmction is in some 
 sort presence. 
 
 Again, as the Manhood of Christ may after a sort be 
 everywhere said to be present, because that Person is 
 
 * Martensen's Christian Dogmatics, p. 325. 
 
 ' The italics are Hooker's in all this quotation^ 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHARIST 27 
 
 everywhere present from whose Divine substance man- 
 hood nowhere is severed ; so the same universaUty of 
 presence may likewise seem in another respect apphcable 
 thereunto, namely, co-ope7'ation with Deity, and that in 
 all things} 
 
 There is scarcely a greater name in the history 
 of philosophy than Leibnitz, a man of universal 
 genius, sound judgment, and master of all the learn- 
 ing of his time in addition. A sincere Protestant 
 himself, he was a sincere believer in the doctrine of 
 the Real Presence in the Sacrament, and he meets 
 as follows one of the current objections to it : — 
 
 As I have been the first to discover that the essence 
 of a body does not consist in extension but in motion, 
 and hence that the substance or nature of a body, even ac- 
 cording to Aristotle's definition, is the principle of motion 
 (eVreXexcta) and that this principle or substance of the 
 body has no extension, I have made it plain how God 
 can be clearly and distinctly understood to cause the sub- 
 stance of the same body to exist in many different places.'^ 
 
 Even of material substance we must admit that 
 we know nothing but as it is manifested in certain 
 qualities. We cannot think of any quality except as 
 inhering in some underlying substance as its basis. 
 But substance itself eludes our last analysis.^ Alike 
 in philosophy and in theology if we try to run beyond 
 
 ' Eccl. Pol. V. Iv. 7, 8. 
 
 "^ Briefivechsel zicischen Leibnitz, Amauld, u. Ernst v. Hesse- 
 Bheinfels, p. 145. 
 
 3 ' Quid sit rei alicujus substantia minime cognoscimus. Videmus 
 tantum corporum figuras et colores ; audimus tantum sonos ; tan- 
 gimus tantum superficies externas ; olfacimus odores solos ; et gus- 
 tamus sapores : intinms substantias nullo sensu, nulla action^ 
 
28 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 our tether we end in upsetting ourselves. Our 
 inquiry leads us at last to a mystery which sense 
 and intellect fail to penetrate. The doctrine of the 
 Eucharistic Presence is a matter of revelation and 
 of faith, and the mode of it is past our comprehen- 
 sion. So true is Sir William Hamilton's dictum 
 that ' no difficulty emerges in theology which had 
 not previously emerged in philosophy.' For the 
 philosopher equally with the theologian the safe 
 rule is, ' Crede ut intelligas,' not ' Intellige ut credas.' ^ 
 ' Mysteries are revealed unto the meek,' says the 
 wise son of Sirach. And a greater than he has 
 taught us that the key which opens the secret of His 
 mysteries is a teachable will. * If any one hath the 
 will to do His will, he shall know of the doctrine 
 whether it be of God.' ^ 
 
 Let us then, in this spirit, see whether we cannot 
 understand at least the drift of our Lord's discourse 
 at Capernaum. He declares Himself to be the food 
 of His people. He promises to give them His Flesh 
 and Blood for their sustenance, and solemnly affirms 
 that unless men eat His Flesh and drink His Blood 
 they have no life in them. But He adds that they are 
 not to understand His words in a gross natural sense 
 appreciable by the bodily senses. It is not man's 
 perishable body that He promises to feed, and by 
 feeding make partaker of His own Eternal Life, but 
 
 reflexa, cognoscimus.' (Principia, Schol. TJlt.) Cf. Sir William 
 Hamilton's Discussions on Philosophy, pp. 604-5, 
 
 ' See Is. vii. 9, in the LXX version : Kal iav fi^ Tnanixnire olZf fx^ 
 ffvyrjre. 
 
 * St. John vii. 17. 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHAEIST 29 
 
 man's true self, his spiritual substance, which re- 
 mains constant amidst the unceasing mutations of 
 its earthly integument. *It is the spirit that 
 quickeneth,' not flesh and blood that the senses can 
 scrutinise. Impoverished humanity must be placed 
 in communication with a fresh spring of life to arrest 
 the decay of the old perishing nature and transform 
 it into the nature of the Incarnate Son. 
 
 * It is the spirit that quickeneth, the flesh pro- 
 fiteth nothing.' In these words our Lord lays down 
 a truth applicable to all life. Even in material 
 things it is not the gross mass of palpable particles 
 that ' profiteth,' but the spirit, the hidden essence, 
 which is too subtle for the apprehension of the 
 senses, too ethereal for the skill of science. ' It is 
 the spirit that quickeneth ' throughout the realm of 
 nature. Matter in all its forms is an evolution from 
 a spiritual cause which has its source in the Divine 
 Will. * In Him we live, and move, and have our 
 being,' and apart from Him there is and can be no 
 life. In this sense the whole universe of created 
 being may be said with exact truth to feed upon its 
 God. Its life is derivative, not independent. ' The 
 eyes of all wait upon Thee, Lord, and Thou givest 
 them their meat in due season.' No life can exist for 
 a moment, from that of an archangel to that of a 
 blade of grass, apart from the Almighty Creator and 
 Universal Sustainer. In the spiritual world, as far 
 as we are given to know, all created life is sustained 
 immediately by the will of God. On earth it is sus- 
 tained sacramentally — that is by means of secondary 
 
30 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 causes. This rule prevails universally in our world. 
 It is the law of all life in the vegetable and animal 
 kingdoms, and it is the law of human life both on 
 its material and spiritual side. It was the law of 
 Paradise. However we interpret the narrative of 
 man's innocence and fall, it is plain that it describes 
 a sacramental system : ordinary food proper for 
 man's body, and spiritual food for his spiritual 
 nature, imparted through material channels, till 
 man's sin interposed a barrier. 
 
 All nature may thus be regarded as a sacramental 
 system, * an outward and visible sign of an inward 
 and spiritual grace ' energising within it ; and the 
 Sacraments of the Church are but an example in one 
 department of the Divine Providence, as manifested 
 on earth, of the rule which He has ordained through- 
 out the realm of nature. By the ' hard saying ' 
 which shocked the people of Capernaum, and many 
 others since their day, we are to understand Christ's 
 Incarnate life. He would have us believe that this 
 is the source and nutriment of our spiritual, that is 
 our true, our real life. 
 
 But how can our Lord's Humanity be thus dis- 
 seminated germinally among the milHons of His 
 members ? To which I answer : How can the flesh 
 and blood — that is, the essential humanity — of 
 Adam be disseminated among the millions of his 
 descendants ? We know that it is so : the fact is 
 undisputed. And shall we declare that to be im- 
 possible to the Second Adam, whose Person is 
 Divine, which is an admitted fact in the case of the 
 
PEESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHAEIST 31 
 
 first Adam ? Shall the first Adam be capable of 
 propagating his perverted nature among all the 
 human beings who have sprung from his loins? 
 And shall the Second Adam, 'the Lord from 
 heaven,' be unable to impart His life-giving 
 Humanity through the channels of His ov^n ap- 
 pointment ? There is a real presence of Adam, in 
 no figure of speech but in stern truth, in all his 
 children. We are indeed partakers of his flesh 
 and blood ; and yet, again, not in the gross sense 
 understood by the people of Capernaum, but in a 
 far more real sense. 
 
 But there is a fundamental difference between 
 Adam's presence through the long line of his 
 offspring, and Christ's Sacramental Presence. 
 Adam is present in his nature, through the mys- 
 terious process of natural generation, in all his 
 descendants. But he is not present personally, for 
 his person, being human, is limited and circum- 
 scribed. Christ's human nature is communicated 
 sacramentally, and He is thus, like Adam, present 
 humanly in the process of communicating it ; but 
 He is also present personally, for His Person, being 
 Divine, is inseparable from His Humanity, and is in 
 fact omnipresent. 
 
 The fact is, the impugners of the Sacramental 
 system of the Church take too contracted a view of 
 God's relation to the material universe. They find 
 it hard to believe that spiritual energy can be 
 imparted through material channels, such as water, 
 and bread and wine. But surely this is in strict 
 
32 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 analogy with His operations in nature and among 
 men. Does any of His gifts reach us except through 
 some material agency ? What were the prophets 
 of old? What is the Bible? What is prayer? 
 Are not all these and the like material organs of 
 communication between God and man? Let us 
 purge our minds of carnal notions and rise above 
 the grovelling literalism of the people of Capernaum, 
 who imagined that the Flesh and Blood with which 
 Jesus offered to feed them meant portions of pon- 
 derable matter. ' They are spirit and they are 
 life,' and all the more real on that account. 
 
 It may be well, before passing away from this 
 subject, to take note of the Primate's reference to 
 Consubstantiation in his recent Charge. ' It is diffi- 
 cult, if not impossible,' he says, 'really to distinguish 
 between this doctrine [of the Real Presence] and the 
 Lutheran doctrine commonly called Consubstantia- 
 tion, and it is important that it should be clearly 
 understood that it is not unlawful to hold and teach 
 it within the Church of England.' 
 
 I suppose that his Grace understands by Con- 
 substantiation the co-existence of the substance 
 of the bread and wine with the substance of the 
 Lord's Body. It is not quite clear what the 
 Lutheran doctrine really is. The explanations of it 
 are not always consistent. Luther himself explains 
 it as follows in his letter to Henry VIII. : — 
 
 The Body of Christ is (the bread still existing) in the 
 Sacrament, as fire is in iron, the substance of the iron 
 existing ; and God in man, the human nature existing ; 
 
PEESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST 33 
 
 the substances in each case being so united that each 
 retains its own operation and proper nature, and yet they 
 constitute one thing. 
 
 Yet on other occasions Luther, while strongly 
 insisting on the reality of the Sacramental Presence, 
 deprecates any attempt to define the mode. The 
 Lutheran Confessions, moreover, carefully avoid 
 definition while affirming the fact. The Augsburg 
 Confession says : ' De Coena Domini docent quod 
 cum pane et vino vere exhibeantur corpus et 
 sanguis Christi vescentibus in Coena Domini.' The 
 Saxon Confession says : ' Docentur etiam homines 
 sacramenta esse actiones divinitus institutas, et extra 
 usum institutum res ipsas non habere rationem 
 sacramenti, sed in usu instituto in hac communione 
 vere et substantialiter adesse Christum, et vere ex- 
 hibere sumentibus corpus et sanguinem Christi.' 
 The Wiirtemberg Confession says : ' Cum de pane 
 dicitur Hoc est corpus meumj non est necesse ut 
 substantia panis mutetur in substantiam corporis 
 Christi ; sed ad veritatem sacramenti sufficit quod 
 corpus Christi vere sit cum pane praesens, atque adeo 
 necessitas ipsa veritatis sacramenti exigere videtur, 
 ut cum vera praesentia corporis Christi verus panis 
 maneat ' 
 
 We may therefore say that Lutheranism is not 
 committed to the doctrine of. Consubstantiation, and 
 the English Church certainly is not. The great 
 divines of the seventeenth century reject equally ' a 
 trans and a con ' as definitions of the mode of the 
 Presence : and the divines of the Tractarian move- 
 
34 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 merit are equally emphatic on the point. And with 
 good reason. For the word ' Consubstantiation ' lends 
 itself to more than heterodox meaning. Luther 
 himself, misled by the word, sometimes used lan- 
 guage which implied impanation, and also Euty- 
 chianism. The word may mean not only the co- 
 existence of heterogeneous substances, but also their 
 possession of a common nature, as when the Nicene 
 Creed says tha-t Christ is consubstantial with the 
 Father. Our divines therefore have done wisely to 
 avoid a word which has never been naturalised even 
 in Lutheran theology, and which has never obtained 
 a footing in our Church. 
 
 In fine, try as we may, we are not likely to im- 
 prove on Queen Elizabeth's profession of faith in 
 the Eeal Presence : — 
 
 He was the Word that spake it ; 
 He took the bread and brake it ; 
 And what that Word did make it, 
 I do believe and take it.* 
 
 So much as to the doctrine of the Real Presence 
 in the Eucharist. Disengaged from popular mis- 
 conceptions and crude materialistic notions, surely 
 it must be admitted to be in complete harmony with 
 the teaching of our Lord and with St. Paul's 
 
 ' These lines have sometimes been attributed to Donne ; but the 
 balance of evidence is in favour of their Elizabethan authorship 
 when the queen was in confinement as Princess Elizabeth. They 
 are not in the first edition of Donne, and were published for the 
 first time as his in 1654, thirteen years after his death. Some other 
 poems, confessedly not his, were published in the edition of 1654. 
 
PRESENCE OF CHRIST IN THE EUCHARIST 35 
 
 doctrine of our relation to the two Adams, and of 
 the Eucharist being our bond of union with 
 Christ.' We shall presently see how the Church of 
 England regards it. But let me first endeavour to 
 explain the sense in which I understand the 
 Eucharist to be a sacrifice. For undoubtedly that 
 term has been applied to it in the earliest Liturgies, 
 and by those ' Catholic Fathers and ancient 
 Bishops' to whose doctrine the English nation, in 
 its ecclesiastical and lay capacity, appealed at the 
 time of the Keformation as a model for the teaching 
 and practice of its clergy. The primary appeal was 
 to Scripture, but to Scripture as interpreted by the 
 undivided Church of the first centuries of Chris- 
 tianity. The Canon of 1571 concerning Preachers 
 enjoins the clergy * never to preach anything to be 
 religiously held and believed by the people except 
 what is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old or 
 New Testament, or which the Catholic Fathers and 
 ancient Bishops have collected from that doctrine.' ^ 
 An Act of Parliament, passed thirteen years 
 previously,^ declares emphatically that * nothing is 
 to be adjudged heresy but that which heretofore has 
 been adjudged by the authority of the Canonical 
 Scriptures, or the first four General Councils, or 
 
 • 1 Cor. X. 16. 
 
 2 ' In primis videbunt Concionatores, nequid unquam doceaiit 
 pro concione quod a populo religiose teneri et credi velint, nisi 
 quod consentaneum sit doctrinse Veteris aut Novi Testamenti, 
 quodque ex ilia ips& doctrina Catholici Patres et veteres Episcopi 
 colligerint.' 
 
 ' 1 Eliz. cap. i. a.d. 1558, § xxxvi. 
 
 d2 
 
36 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 some other General Council, wherein the same hath 
 been declared heresy by the express word of Scrip- 
 ture ; or such as shall be termed heresy by the High 
 Court of Parliament with the assent of the clergy in 
 Convocation.' 
 
 Bishop Pearson is a standard Anglican authority, 
 whose classical work on the Creed is one of the 
 books which candidates for Holy Orders are re- 
 quired to master. He was, moreover, one of the 
 divines who presided over the last revision of the 
 Book of Common Prayer, and was also one of the 
 divines who took part in the Savoy Conference. 
 Baxter says ' he was their [Church of England's] 
 true logician and disputant. . . . He disputed 
 accurately, soberly, and calmly, being but once 
 in a passion, breeding in us [the Puritans] a 
 great respect for him.' He also calls him * the 
 strength and honour of that [Church of England] 
 cause.' In a sermon in praise of the Reformation 
 preached before the University of Cambridge in 
 1669 during his tenure of the Lady Margaret 
 Professorship of Divinity, Pearson says : — 
 
 Sacros igitur imprimis Scripturse codices [Eeformatio] 
 tanquam basin religionis instaurandae posuit, et omnibus 
 propalavit. Sed ne mala feriata hominum ingenia tarn 
 tremenda mysteria violarent, sapientissime praecepit ' ne 
 quis populo quicquam tanquam ad salutem necessarium 
 prsedicaret, quod antiquissimi Patres ex eisdem ante non 
 coUegerunt.' Tria praeterea Symbola, certissima antiquae 
 fidei criteria, admisit ; admonuit etiam, ' Vere generalia 
 Concilia esse sine controversia admittenda, et quicquid 
 
I 
 
 PRESENCE OF CHEIST IN THE EUCHAEIST 37 
 
 iis contrarium doceretur ac pervivaciter defenderetur, 
 pro haeresi puniendum esse.' Sacros ordines, ab ipsis 
 Apostolis institutes, promo^dt ; disciplinam vetustissimam, 
 aut adhuc obtinentem retinuit, aut ante collapsam 
 restitutum iri exoptavit.^ 
 
 Here then we have this eminently representative 
 divine of the Church of England taking his stand 
 on the authoritative declarations of the Church and 
 State of England at the period of the Eeformation, 
 and laying down the following cardinal principles 
 of the Eeformation : first, the appeal, on all disputed 
 points, to Scripture as interpreted by the Church of 
 the (Ecumenical Councils ; secondly, the conservation 
 of the organic constitution of the Church as it came 
 down from Apostolic times ; thirdly, the retention 
 of what still remained of the ancient order of Divine 
 worship, and the restoration of what had collapsed 
 in the turmoil of party passions and prejudices. 
 We have probably in this passage a side light on 
 the Ornaments Eubric by one of its framers. The 
 ornaments there prescribed w^e to be retained for 
 use where circumstances allowed their restoration. 
 
 Grotius also refers in terms of high praise to the 
 Canon of 1571.2 The thirtieth Canon of 1603 
 enters more fully into the rationale of the Canon of 
 1571. After defending against the Puritans the use 
 of the sign of the Cross in baptism, the Canon pro- 
 ceeds to lay down as follows the general principle 
 
 ' Minor Theological Works, i. 436. 
 
 * Non possum non laudere praeclarum AnglisB canonem» 
 * Imprimis,' &c. De Imperio Sum. Pot. circa Sacra, vi. 8. 
 
38 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 underlying the appeal of the English Church to 
 antiquity : — 
 
 Thirdly, it must be confessed that in process of time 
 the sign of the Cross was greatly abused in the Church 
 of Eome, especially after that corruption of Popery had 
 once possessed it. But the abuse of a thing doth not 
 take away the lawful use of it. Nay, so far was it from 
 the purpose of the Church of England to forsake and 
 reject the Churches of Italy, France, Spain, Germany, or 
 any such-like Churches, in all things which they held and 
 practised, that, as the Apology of the Church of England 
 confesseth, it doth with reverence retain those ceremo- 
 nies, which do neither endamage the Church of God, nor 
 offend the minds of sober men ; and only departed from 
 them in those particular points wherein they were fallen 
 both from themselves in their ancient integrity, and from 
 the Apostolical Churches which were their first founders. 
 
 Lastly, the use of the sign of the Cross in Baptism, 
 being thus purged of all Popish superstition and error, 
 and reduced in the Church of England to the primary 
 institution of it, upon those true rules of doctrine con- 
 cerning things indifferent, which are consonant to the 
 Word of God and the judgment of the ancient Fathers, 
 we hold it the part of every private man, both minister 
 and other, reverently to retain the use of it prescribed 
 by public authority. 
 
 With this rule of interpretation to guide us, let 
 us now consider what is meant by the Eucharistic 
 Sacrifice. 
 
3'J 
 
 CHAPTEK II 
 
 THE EUCHAEISTIC SACRIFICE 
 
 I SAY it With all respect, but those who condemn 
 the doctrine of the Eucharistic Sacrifice appear to 
 me not only to misunderstand what they censure, 
 but to take an inadequate and jejune view of the 
 Sacrifice of Christ. They seem to fasten down its 
 significance to what logicians call its inseparable 
 accident, and to regard it as beginning and ending 
 on Calvary. What a poor notion such a view gives 
 of the doctrine of the Atonement and of our Lord's 
 condescension and love ! To us, with our limited 
 vision and sense of guilt, death appears a great 
 calamity. It puts an end to all our plans, tears us 
 from a thousand endearing associations, and dis- 
 misses us to an unknown world and an uncertain 
 destiny. To Him death was but a temporal in- 
 cident in a lifelong sacrifice. He ' drank of the 
 brook in the way ' and passed to His mediatorial 
 throne to offer Himself as a perpetual sacrifice.^ 
 The essence of sacrifice is in the surrender of the 
 will. That done, the sacrifice is complete as far as 
 
 ' Heb. X. 12. Both the argument and the sense require that 
 us rh SirtveKh in this verse should be connected with 7tpoaw4yKas. 
 
40 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the sufferer is concerned, though circumstances re- 
 quire its consummation in the death of the victim. 
 Abraham's self-sacrifice was complete, and Isaac's 
 also, when the Father of the faithful raised his arm 
 to slay his child ; and the Church has always con- 
 ceded the crown of martyrdom to those whose 
 martyrdom was only in will. God has been sacri- 
 ficing Himself from eternity. He is self-sufficing 
 through the eternal harmony of a threefold Perso- 
 nality in an indivisible substance. He needs nothing 
 from without, and when He broke the silence of 
 eternity with the sights and sounds of created life it 
 was because His nature, like His name, is love, and 
 it is of the essence of love to share its happiness. 
 To Him this perpetual self-sacrifice involves no pain, 
 because His love is ' perfect,' having no disturbing 
 elements, and none of that ' fear ' which St. John tells 
 us 'hath torment.' But when the Eternal Son laid 
 aside His uncreated glory, ' emptied Himself ' for a 
 time of His regal dignity by voluntary abasement, 
 circumscribing for a purpose His infinitude by the 
 limitations of humanity, the pain that is latent in 
 the love of all finite natures became manifest in the 
 ' strong crying and tears ' of His human nature. 
 He found the outpourings of His self-sacrifice re- 
 pelled on all sides. * He could do no mighty work 
 there because of their unbelief,' and His human soul 
 felt the pangs of baffled love. 
 
 The best of men 
 
 That ere wore earth about Him was a sufferer ; 
 
 A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit ; 
 
 The first true gentleman that ever breathed. 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFICE 41 
 
 We may, therefore, say that in self-sacrifice Hes 
 the happiness of God : first, in the relations of the 
 Persons of the Blessed Trinity to each other ; then 
 in the sphere of created life. The doctrine of the 
 Trinity is a mystery which transcends, without con- 
 tradicting, human reason. But one precious truth 
 it does disclose ; namely, the existence of social 
 qualities in the Godhead. It was not at the birth 
 of a Virgin's child in Bethlehem that God became a 
 Father. Fatherhood is an eternal attribute of His 
 nature, as Sonship is an eternal attribute of the 
 Second Person of the Trinity. Hence the emphasis 
 with which our Lord always calls Himself ' the Son 
 of man,' implying thereby in Him the prerogative 
 of another Sonship which differentiated Him from 
 all other men. This unique expression arrested the 
 attention of Benan. * It is probable,' he says, ' that 
 from the first He regarded His relationship with 
 God as that of a son towards his father. This was 
 His great act of originality ; in this He had nothing 
 in common with His race.' This important truth 
 is expressed with much force and clearness by the 
 late Mr. R. H. Hutton in his profound essay on the 
 * Incarnation and Principles of Evidence.' His 
 treatment of the subject may be gathered from the 
 following quotation : — 
 
 If Christ is the Eternal Son of God, God is indeed 
 and in essence a Father ; the social nature, the spring of 
 love, is of the very essence of the Eternal being ; the 
 communication of His life, the reciprocation of His affec- 
 tion, dates from beyond time — belongs, in other words, 
 
42 THE EEFOEMATTON SETTLEMENT 
 
 to the very being of God. Now some persons think that 
 such a certainty, even when attained, has very httle to do 
 with human hfe. * What does it matter,' they say, ' what 
 the absolute nature of God is, if we know what He is to 
 us ; how can it concern us to know what He was before 
 our race existed, if we know what He is to all His 
 creatures now ? ' These questions seem plausible, but I 
 believe they point to a very deep error. I can answer 
 for myself that the Unitarian conviction that God is — as 
 God and in His eternal essence — a single and, so to say, 
 solitary personality, influenced my imagination and the 
 whole colour of my faith most profoundly. Such a con- 
 viction, thoroughly realised, renders it impossible to 
 identify any of the social attributes with His real essence 
 — renders it difficult not to regard power as the true root 
 of all other Divine life. If we are to believe that the 
 Father was from all time, we must believe that He was 
 as a Father — that is, that love was actual in Him as well 
 as potential ; that the communication of life and thought 
 and fulness of joy was of the inmost nature of God, and 
 never began to be if God never began to be. 
 
 For my own part, I am sure that our belief, whatever 
 it may be, about the * absolute ' nature of God, influences 
 far more than any one supposes our practical thoughts 
 about the actual relation of God to us. Unitarians 
 eagerly deny, I once eagerly denied, that God is to them 
 a solitary Omnipotence. Nor is He. But I am sure 
 that the conception of a single eternal will as originating, 
 and infinitely antecedent to, all acts of love or spiritual 
 communion with any other, affects vitally the temper of 
 faith. The throne of heaven is to them a lonely one. 
 The solitude of the eternities weighs upon their imagina- 
 tions. Social are necessarily postponed to individual 
 attributes ; for they date from a later origin — from 
 creation — w^hile power and thought are eternal. Neces- 
 
THE EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE 43 
 
 sarily, therefore, God, though spoken of and worshipped 
 as a Father to us, is conceived primarily as imagining 
 and creating ; secondarily only, as loving and inspiring. 
 But any being whose thoughts and resolves are con- 
 ceived as in any sense deeper and more personal than 
 his affections, is necessarily regarded rather as benignant 
 and compassionate than as affording the type of that 
 deepest kind of love which is co-ordinate with life ; in 
 short, rather as a beneficence whose love springs out of 
 power and reason, than as one whose power and reason 
 are grounded in love. I am sure that this notion of God 
 as the Absolute Cause does tincture deeply even the 
 highest form of Unitarian faith, and I cannot see how it 
 could be otherwise. If our prayers are addressed to One 
 whose eternity we habitually image as unshared, we 
 necessarily for the time image the Father the Omniscient 
 and Omnipotent Genius of the universe. If, on the other 
 hand, we pray to One who has revealed His own eternity 
 through the Eternal Son ; if in the spirit of the liturgies, 
 CathoHc and Protestant, we alternate our prayers to the 
 eternal originating love, and to that filial love in which 
 it has been eternally mirrored, turning from the * Father 
 of heaven ' to the ' Son, Redeemer of the world,' and 
 back again to Him in whom that Son for ever rests — 
 then we keep a God essentially Social before our hearts 
 and minds, and fill our imagination with no solitary 
 grandeur.^ 
 
 And as the happiness of God springs from His 
 self-sacrifice, from His outpouring of Himself, as far 
 as that is possible, in the sphere of created life, this 
 also is true of man. * Whosoever will save his life 
 will lose it ; and whosoever will lose his life for My 
 
 ' Essays, Theological and Literary, ii. 246-248. 
 
44 THE BEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 sake shall find it.* We must, therefore, be somehow 
 partakers of Christ's sufferings. "We must be brought 
 into some kind of connection with His all-sufficing and 
 enduring Sacrifice. This idea underlies St. Paul's 
 teaching on the Sacrifice of Christ, e.g. Col. i. 24 : 
 ' Now I rejoice in my sufferings for you, and fill up 
 {dvravaTrXrjpQ)) on my part what is lacking (ra 
 v(TTspi]fjLaTa) of the afflictions of Christ in my flesh 
 for His Body's sake, which is the Church.' 
 
 How are we to understand this language ? Cer- 
 tainly not in the sense that Christ's Sacrifice was 
 incomplete in itself. He died for all, and once for 
 all, and there can be no addition to that Sacrifice, 
 nor can there be anything lacking to its complete- 
 ness. And yet lack of some sort there must be, for 
 the Apostle says so very distinctly ; and lack, more- 
 over, which it is the duty and privilege of Christians 
 to 'fill up on their part.' It is a pregnant word, 
 occurring nowhere else in the New Testament, and 
 not at all in the Septuagint. The avrt has for its 
 primary meaning the idea of supply from an opposite 
 quarter to make up a deficiency. There is a clear 
 antithesis of two sufferers, the one filling from his side 
 something that had been left for him as his share of 
 the affliction. But that implies co-operation, and thus 
 identity in the work of redemption between Christ and 
 His followers, between the Head and His members. 
 We may therefore paraphrase the passage as follows. 
 
 When Adam fell, he involved his race in his 
 ruin. As yet he had no child, and mankind there- 
 fore, viewed as a race, fell with him. But the race 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIG SACEIFICE 45 
 
 became individually partakers of the catastrophe by 
 process of natural generation. Christ's Sacrifice on 
 Calvary reversed the calamity of Eden, and thus 
 saved the race qud race. But the race becomes 
 individually partaker of the Eedemption by process 
 of spiritual regeneration. The lacking part of the 
 remedy, which they are to ' fill up on their side,' is 
 individual participation in the new life and all- 
 sufficing Sacrifice which He has offered, and this 
 through the means which He has Himself appointed 
 for that purpose. The Fall has two aspects. It 
 was an injured and guilty * nature which Adam 
 passed on to his offspring and descendants. It is a 
 restored and sinless Nature that died on Calvary, 
 and by His death made satisfaction for an attainted 
 race. 
 
 Thus Christ came, not as * the Desire of all 
 nations ' merely, nor merely as the infallible Teacher 
 and perfect Example of men, but, above all, as the 
 Healer and Saviour of our race. He came, not to 
 develop our old nature, but to make it anew ; to 
 reconstruct it from the foundation ; to place a new 
 organic force at its centre, which should gradually 
 transform the members into the likeness of the 
 Head. Humanity had been perverted from its- true 
 end ; but it was still Divine, else the Son of God 
 could not have clothed Himself in it even by a 
 Virgin birth. The very misery of man, as Pascal 
 has observed, proves his grandeur, and denotes his 
 
 * Guilty in the sense in which the descendants of an attainted 
 man inherit the consequences of their ancestor's crime. 
 
46 THE RBFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 lineage as not of earth. There is an unearthly 
 melody in his song, and something more than 
 mortal mingles in his wail. Natures inferior to 
 his may be miserable ; but they are not conscious 
 of their misery. The knowledge of his misery adds 
 poignancy to man's sorrow, but also bears witness 
 to the high estate from which he fell. He is like a 
 royal exile, bearing about him in his retributive 
 wanderings the lineaments of his Divine origin. 
 
 The soul that rises with us, our life's star, 
 Hath had elsewhere its setting, 
 
 And Cometh from afar : 
 
 Not in entire forgetfulness, 
 
 And not in utter nakedness, 
 But trailing clouds of glory do we come 
 
 From God, Who is our home. 
 
 It was one of the fundamental errors of the 
 leaders of the Eeformation on the Continent that 
 they peremptorily denied that man ' trailed ' any 
 ' clouds of glory ' from his heavenly home. They 
 taught that the Fall vitiated human nature at the 
 very core, making it altogether corrupt, so that God 
 could find nothing in it but what was abominable 
 and hateful. In his * Institutes ' Calvin has a 
 chapter entitled Ex corruptd naturd }iomi7iis nihil 
 nisi damnahile prodire, and the following quotation 
 will give a fair idea of his doctrine : — 
 
 Let us grasp this unquestionable truth, which no 
 opposition can ever shake, that the mind of man is so 
 completely alienated from the righteousness of God that 
 it conceives, desires, and undertakes everything that is 
 
THE BUCHAEISTIG SACEIFICB 47 
 
 impious, perverse, base, flagitious ; that his heart is so 
 thoroughly infected by the poison of sin that it cannot 
 produce anything but what is corrupt ; and that if at any 
 time men do anything apparently good, yet the mind 
 always remains involved in hypocrisy and deceitful 
 obliquity, and the heart remains enslaved by its inward 
 perverseness. ... In vain do we look in our nature for 
 anything that is good.' 
 
 Again : — 
 
 Man cannot be excited or biased to anything but evil. 
 If this is so, there is no impiety in affirming that he is 
 under the necessity of sinning.^ 
 
 Further on he does not hesitate to assert that ' man, 
 by a just impulse, does what is wrong.' 
 
 Melanchthon and Zwingli teach the same doc- 
 trine. The former maintains that the virtues of 
 good heathens, the constancy of Socrates, the ch^,s- 
 tity of Xenocrates, the temperance of Zeno, were 
 not virtues at all, but must be considered as vices ; 
 and that in fact ' all their works and all their 
 endeavours are sinful.' ^ Like Calvin, he accepts 
 the full consequences of his premisses, and does not 
 scruple to make God the direct author of sin, giving 
 as an example the adultery of David and his assas- 
 sination of Uriah. For obvious reasons I must 
 leave the passage in its coarse Latin vesture : — 
 
 Quod Deus facit libere facit, alienus ab omni affectu 
 noxio, igitur et absque peccato, ut adulterium David, quod 
 
 ' Inst. lib. ii. c. 3, § 19, § 5. 
 
 ^ ' Non debent pro veris virtutibus sed pro vitiis haberi.' — Loci 
 Theologici, p. 22. 
 
48 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ad auctorem Deum pertinet, non magis Deo sit peccatum 
 quam cum taurus totum armentum inscendit et implet. 
 
 Zwingli teaches the same doctrine, and uses the 
 same illustration. God, he says, is * the author, 
 mover, and impeller ' of the sins of men.* 
 
 Luther went quite as far. He said that ' it is 
 the nature of man to sin ; sin constitutes the essence 
 of man ; the nature of man since the Fall is become 
 quite changed ; original sin is the very offspring of 
 father and mother.' 
 
 Man is thus reduced to what Hallam calls ' a 
 sordid, grovelling, degraded Caliban.' ^ But men 
 are often better than their creeds, and I imagine 
 that most of those who would now call themselves 
 Calvinists and Lutherans would recoil from the 
 crude and cruel doctrine of their spiritual ancestors. 
 Nevertheless it colours the theology of many who 
 would repudiate its naked statements. Even so 
 gentle and truly Christian a spirit as the late Pro- 
 fessor Henry Drummond accepted the fundamental 
 tenet of the Calvinistic creed, and his acceptance 
 of it vitiates the argument of his (in many ways) 
 charming and suggestive volume on * Natural Law 
 
 ' ' Unum igitur atque idem facinus, puta adulterium aut homici- 
 dium, quantum Dei auctoris, motoris, impulsoris, opus est, crimen 
 non est, quantum autem hominis est crimen ac scelus est.' — De 
 Provid. c. vi. 
 
 ' Sic autem agit [Deus] per ilia instrumenta, ut non tantum sinat 
 ilia agere, nee tantum moderetur eventum, sed etiam incitet, impellat, 
 moveat, regat, atque adeo quod omnium est maximum, et creat, ut 
 per ilia agat quod eonstituit.' — Aphor. xxii. 
 
 2 Hist, of Lit. iii. p. 284. 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFICE 49 
 
 in the Spiritual World.' In that book he repre- 
 sents man as dead by nature. Spiritually he 
 belongs, he says, to the inorganic kingdom, and 
 cannot pass over to the organic except through the 
 miraculous process of conversion. 
 
 The natural corollary of this doctrine of the Fall 
 was the figment of an 'imputed righteousness '—a 
 cloak, not a cure, for the sins of humanity. * God,' 
 says Luther, * sent His Son into the v^orld, and laid 
 upon Him all the sins of all men, saying, " Be Thou 
 Peter, that denier ; Paul, that persecutor, blasphemer, 
 and cruel oppressor ; David, that adulterer ; be Thou 
 that sinner that ate the apple in Paradise ; that 
 thief which hung upon the Cross ; in short, be Thou 
 the Person who has committed the sins of all men. 
 See therefore that Thou pay and satisfy them." . , . 
 Therefore when sins are seen and felt they are no 
 longer sins.' To say that faith without works was 
 dead and unprofitable he pronounced ' a devilish and 
 blasphemous doctrine,' and naturally therefore cha- 
 racterised the Epistle of St. James as ' an Epistle 
 of straw.' 
 
 This view of the Fall and the Atonement is 
 responsible for a great deal of the scepticism and 
 agnosticism of the day. Men who take the trouble to 
 reason seriously on these matters, identifying, as they 
 naturally do, Christianity with a representation of it 
 which outrages their moral sense, reject what they 
 believe to be Christianity, but is really a pernicious 
 perversion of it. I have dealt with this subject at 
 
 E 
 
50 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 length in a work from which I will venture to make 
 a long quotation here. 
 
 * Now what do we mean by the doctrine of the 
 Atonement ? Various views have been put forward 
 on this subject, but I do not think it necessary 
 to discuss more than two of them. One view 
 represents the doctrine of the Atonement somewhat 
 as follows : That when man fell he brought com- 
 plete ruin on his race ; that human nature was 
 entirely and absolutely vitiated by the Fall ; that it 
 was not merely disorganised — its bond of unity being 
 broken by the severance of the human will from the 
 Divine — but that it became wholly and absolutely 
 evil, not a single element of good being left in it. 
 And not only so, but, in addition, all men became 
 criminals through Adam's guilt, and the successive 
 generations who are thus born into the world are 
 justly liable to an immortality of torture ; all except 
 a comparatively small number who have been pre- 
 destinated to eternal happiness, and for whom alone 
 Jesus Christ made atonement. This doctrine, more- 
 over, represents God the Father as a Being whose 
 majesty was so offended by Adam's sin that nothing 
 would appease Him but the death of His own inno- 
 cent Son. A ransom had to be paid of a value 
 beyond anything that man could offer, and the 
 Eternal Son accordingly offered Himself to His 
 offended Father as a substitute for guilty man ; and 
 for His sake, thus dying in man's stead, God was 
 satisfied, and an atonement was made for the elect. 
 
 ' Surely this is a doctrine very derogatory to the 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFICB 51 
 
 nature of Almighty God. It represents human 
 nature as wholly and completely evil in consequence 
 of Adam's fall. But that is not the doctrine of the 
 Bible, which represents the Divine Image in fallen 
 man as marred, but not entirely effaced. St. Paul 
 says that " we have all sinned, and come short of the 
 glory of God ; " come short, you see, not entirely 
 lost. Had man's nature become wholly sinful, God 
 the Son could not have become incarnate ; He could 
 not have taken a nature wholly sinful into union with 
 His Divine Person. 
 
 * Next, the doctrine on w^hich I am commenting 
 implies a difference of moral character in the Trinity. 
 God the Father is represented as so offended with 
 the human race that He could only be reconciled by 
 the voluntary sacrifice of His Son : as if the Father 
 and Son had contrary feelings towards mankind ; the 
 Father, a severe Sovereign Who would not forgive 
 without a ransom ; the Son, a compassionate Saviour 
 "Who offered His life to redeem humanity. The 
 Father would thus be less loving than the Son, 
 which of course is heresy. God the Father is, 
 moreover, represented as indifferent to the guilt or 
 innocence of the victim, provided only that the pay- 
 ment be equivalent to the debt. The innocent 
 suffered for the guilty, and His righteousness is im- 
 puted to sinful man, who is thus accounted, not 
 made, righteous. The righteousness which man 
 obtains through Christ does not enter into the tissue 
 of his own being, does not become part of him, does 
 not circulate through his spiritual veins as the sap 
 
 K 2 
 
52 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of a healthy tree circulates through the fibres of the 
 sickly sprout which is grafted upon it. It is an 
 external garment which " skins and films the ulcer- 
 ous sore," leaving the putrid matter still festering 
 within. But what man needs is to have the sore 
 healed, to have the poison rooted out, to have his 
 nature renewed, to be placed in communication with 
 a fresh and pure fountain of life. He requires to be 
 made, not simply to be accounted, righteous. It is 
 with no mere imputed sin and guilt that he comes 
 into the world, but with a real heritage of woe — a 
 will biased to evil, and a conscience which bears 
 witness to ancestral guilt. It is, therefore, by no 
 mere imputed righteousness that he can be saved. 
 Christ's Atonement is not a substitution for man's 
 righteousness, but the source of it, bringing him into 
 organic relation with the redeemed humanity of God 
 the Son. So much then as to that view of the 
 Atonement which regards human nature as wholly 
 evil and the righteousness of Christians as imputed, 
 not organic ; an external endowment, not an internal 
 principle of sanctity. I believe the view which I 
 have been criticising to be as false as it is certainly 
 comparatively modern. 
 
 ' What, then, is the true view of the Atonement ? 
 It embraces, as I conceive, two ideas : first, the union 
 of the creation as a whole with the Creator — the 
 bridging of the chasm that had divided the finite 
 from the Infinite ; secondly, the reconciliation of 
 mankind, sinful and exiled, to their heavenly Father. 
 Let us glance — for there is no space for more — at 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIO SACRIFICE 53 
 
 these two ideas respectively. Atonement, as we 
 know, means at-one-ment, bringing into harmony 
 again, into unison and agreement, persons or parties 
 who were at variance and apart. How does this 
 apply to the reconciliation of the Creator with His 
 creation ? By what atonement can they be brought 
 together ? Let us think. One of the most striking 
 facts revealed to us by modern science is the wonder- 
 ful and mysterious unity which pervades the universe 
 and binds all its parts together. There is nothing 
 isolated. All the forces of nature are correlated. 
 The stellar systems that fill infinite space are bound 
 together in all their parts, and are ceaselessly acting 
 upon and influencing each other : planets revolving 
 round their suns, satellites revolving round their 
 planets, and vast solar systems, with their separate 
 hierarchies of planets, moving and controlling each 
 other. Nor is it only in the interdependence of the 
 huge masses of the universe that we find this law of 
 unity, this mutual action and counteraction, prevail- 
 ing ; it binds together the minutest atoms, regardless 
 of distance and intervening obstacles. Every atom 
 in the universe is so closely connected with every 
 other atom, and is so affected by it, that we may say 
 there is a kind of cognisance of each other, a sort of 
 mutual sympathy. Man longs to be independent, 
 but it is a vain dream. There is no independence in 
 the universe. All its parts are correlated, and the 
 whole is sustained by the reciprocal services of the 
 parts. " One deep calleth another," and one atom 
 attracts another on opposite sides of the globe. This 
 
64 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 is not a figure of speech, but a literal matter of fact. 
 Let me quote one of our leading men of science : 
 u rjiQ gravity/' he says, " all media are, as it were, 
 absolutely transparent, nay non-existent, and two 
 particles at opposite points of the earth affect each 
 other exactly as if the globe were not between. To 
 complete the apparent impossibility, the action is, 
 so far as we can observe, absolutely instantaneous, 
 so that every particle of the universe is at every 
 moment in separate cognisance, as it were, of the 
 relative position of every other particle throughout 
 the universe at the same moment of absolute time." ^ 
 * This great law of the mutual interdependence 
 and reciprocal action of the various parts of the 
 universe was present to the mind of the great 
 Apostle of the Gentiles, only he looked behind 
 material forces to the spiritual Power which wields 
 and controls them. In St. Paul's view matter was 
 no dead thing, having no kind of relation to man 
 or God ; on the contrary, he regarded the universe 
 as one vast whole, differentiated by hierarchies of 
 being, from inorganic matter up to angelic life, and 
 all embraced in the Atonement of the God-Man. In 
 the eighth chapter of the Epistle to the Eomans he 
 pictures " the whole creation " as '* groaning and 
 travailing in pain together until now," and waiting 
 to share in the redemption of the human race. You 
 will find a still more striking passage in the first 
 chapter of the Epistle to the Colossians, where the 
 Apostle represents the whole creation, angelic, human, 
 
 ' Jevons's Principles of Science, ii. 144. 
 
THE EUCHARISTIG SACRIFICE 55 
 
 animate and inanimate, as having a part in Christ's 
 atoning sacrifice. You must have the whole passage 
 before you in order to appreciate its meaning in all 
 its range and depth. He speaks of God the Father 
 as having " delivered us from the power of darkness, 
 and translated us into the Kingdom of His dear Son, 
 in whom we have redemption through His Blood, 
 even the forgiveness of sins : Who is the image of the 
 invisible God, the Firstborn of all creation : for by 
 Him were all things created, that are in heaven, and 
 that are in earth, visible and invisible, whether they be 
 thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers : 
 all things were created by Him and for Him. And 
 He is before all things, and by Him all things consist. 
 And He is the Head of the body, the Church : Who 
 is the beginning, the Firstborn from the dead ; that 
 in all things He might have the pre-eminence. For 
 it pleased the Father that in Him should all fulness 
 dwell ; and having made peace through the Blood of 
 His Cross, by Him to reconcile all things unto Him- 
 self ; by Him, I say, whether they be things inearth, 
 or things in heaven." 
 
 ' Try to follow out St. Paul's argument in that 
 passage. God the Father, you will observe, is not 
 represented as an angry Deity between whose wrath 
 and the guilty race of man the Divine Son interposes 
 as an adequate victim. On the contrary, Father and 
 Son are portrayed as co-operating in loving harmony 
 for the redemption of man and the atonement of all 
 creation. The initiative in this work is given to the 
 Father as the fount of Deity — the initiative not in 
 
66 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 time, but in the internal relations of the Trinity. It 
 is God the Father Who " hath made us meet to be 
 partakers of the inheritance of the saints in light," 
 and *' Who hath delivered us from the power of dark- 
 ness." And this He has done through the mediation 
 of the Son of His love. The Father is personally 
 invisible. He is to be seen only in the Son, " Who is 
 the image of the invisible God," and " the Firstborn 
 of all creation," as being the efficient and formal 
 cause whereby the creation was born into a Divine 
 adoption. The Apostle then goes on to show how 
 Christ, by means of His creative and mediatorial 
 office, has brought the whole creation, '* visible and 
 invisible," within the sphere of His atoning work ; 
 not "thrones" merely, or "dominions, or principali- 
 ties, or powers," or "the Church," but " all things," 
 " whether they be things in earth, or things in 
 heaven." " For it pleased the Father that in Him 
 should all fulness dwell " — that the Son, in other 
 words, should by His Incarnation comprehend in 
 Himself the whole universe of being. 
 
 * Let us see how this can be. And let us begin 
 by considering man's relation to the rest of created 
 life. Man came last in the order of creation ; in that 
 the conclusion of science agrees with the Mosaic 
 cosmogony. Man was thus intended to be the copula 
 that should unite the lower creation with the highest 
 form of created life, namely, the angeHc. He was in 
 touch with all^with inorganic matter, with vege- 
 table and animal life, and with the nature of angels. 
 Physiologists tell us that man in the early stages of 
 
THE EUCHAKISTIC SACEIEICE 57 
 
 his development passes through all the forms of life 
 inferior to his own. His body is allied to the dust of 
 the ground. He takes up vegetable and animal life 
 and transmutes them into his own higher life, and 
 the lower types of life are thus represented parabo- 
 lically, as it were, in the human embryo. Now look 
 for a moment at the typical characteristics of the 
 different strata of life. The lower the life is, the 
 more material are its gratifications. In vegetables 
 the material appetite is everything. The vegetable 
 fulfils the end of its being best when it most freely 
 takes and uses all the matter it can assimilate. 
 Animals possess a higher life than vegetables. They 
 have a kind of spontaneity, possess an inferior form 
 of soul endow^ed with emotion, and have a hmited 
 and circumscribed intelligence. Their life is chiefly 
 material, and they live mainly for the gratification 
 of their appetites ; but not altogether. They have an 
 inchoate soul which needs a higher kind of life to 
 change animal into person. Man, as I have said, is 
 related through his body to inorganic matter, and to 
 vegetable and animal life ; but he is still more closely 
 related to animal life through his soul. So far as 
 man consists of body and soul only his life is merely 
 that of the brute. But God " breathed into his 
 nostrils the breath of life, and man became a living 
 soul "—a being endowed with reason, conscience, capa- 
 city of self-sacrificing love — the " perfect love which 
 casteth out fear." Through His spirit man is related 
 to the angelic order, and is enabled to hold commu- 
 nion with God. Man was thus created to be the 
 
68 THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 nexus between the highest and lowest forms of 
 created Hfe. The animals were brought to him in 
 Paradise, and he classified them. Dominion was 
 given him over the lower creation, and if he had 
 kept his innocence and perfected his character by 
 self-conscious discipline, the Son of God would still 
 have become Incarnate, but without need of Cross or 
 Passion. When man fell, however, he broke the unity 
 and harmony of creation, and the lower elements of 
 his nature sobn began to triumph over the higher. 
 The animal soul, with its brutal appetites, " pressed 
 down the incorruptible spirit," as the son of Sirach 
 says. Intellectual development was of no avail when 
 spirit was dethroned, for the intellect became enlisted 
 in the service of the animal appetites.^ • 
 
 ' Now let us go back to the great passage on the 
 Atonement in St. Paul's Epistle to the Colossians, to 
 which I have already referred. Just as the innu- 
 merable worlds which are scattered through infinite 
 
 ' I quote an impartial witness in ratification of this statement : 
 " Intellect is not a power, but an instrument ', not a thing which 
 itself moves and works, but a thing which is moved and worked by 
 forces from behind it. To say that men are ruled by reason is as 
 irrational as to say that they are ruled by their eyes. Beason is 
 an eye — the eye through which the desires see their way to gratifica- 
 tion. And educating it only makes it a better eye ; gives it a vision 
 more accurate and more comprehensive ; does not at all alter the 
 desires subserved by it. However far-seeing you make it, the 
 passions will still determine the directions in which it shall be turned, 
 the objects on which it shall dwell. Just those ends which the 
 instincts or sentiments propose will the intellect be employed 
 to accomplish : culture of it having done nothing but increase 
 the ability to accomplish them." — Hekbert Spencer's Social Statics, 
 p. 382. 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIG SACEIFICE 69 
 
 space are not isolated and independent of each other, 
 but, on the contrary, correlated, so that they are 
 ceaselessly acting and reacting on each other, not 
 only in the mass, but in all their particles ; so neither 
 are the realities of the spiritual world,* its thrones, 
 dominions, principalities, and powers, isolated facts ; 
 they are intimately related, and are being brought 
 back to the primal unity through the Incarnation of 
 the Eternal Word energising through the Church, 
 which is His Body. So transcendent a fact as the 
 Incarnation of Grod could not be limited and ex- 
 hausted by man's needs ; it affected the universe and 
 was independent of man's Fall, although that event 
 had been foreseen and provided for. The angelic 
 world was interested in the Incarnation, and so was 
 inanimate nature, all-unconscious as it was of its 
 discords and its share in the universal adoption. Let 
 us look at the matter a little more closely. Our Lord 
 took a human body the same as ours in all its 
 constituent elements ; a body, therefore, related to 
 inorganic matter and to vegetable and animal life. 
 He possessed, like other men, an animal soul which, 
 apart from spirit, leaves man a brute. He took a 
 human spirit, including all that we mean by intel- 
 lectual and moral qualities. And all this was in Him 
 united to a Divine personality. In this way He made 
 atonement for the whole of creation, which He united 
 with Himself, and through Himself with the Triune 
 Godhead. *' He took not on Him the nature of angels, 
 but of the seed of Abraham He layeth hold." Had 
 He taken angelic nature into union with Himself, the 
 
60 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 rest of creation would not have been affected thereby. 
 But by taking human nature He embraced the whole 
 universe of life in the fulness of His Atonement. 
 And we find creation in its typical representatives 
 celebrating ' His birth ; the manger receiving His 
 infant form ; the cold air of a winter's night warmed 
 by the breath of cattle, kinder to Him, though they 
 knew it not themselves, than the highly favoured 
 race for whom He came to suffer and to die ; and the 
 choir of angels proclaiming His birth, not to the kings 
 and nobles of the earth, but to the gentle shepherds 
 of Bethlehem. We have some foregleams of this 
 comprehensive character of the Atonement in the Old 
 Testament ; for example, in the twenty-third verse 
 of the fifth chapter of Job. Keferring to man's 
 redemption, Eliphaz the Temanite says, " For thou 
 shalt be in league with the stones of the field, and 
 the beasts of the field shall be in league with thee." 
 Similarly in Hosea ii. 18 : "And in that day will I 
 make a covenant for them with the beasts of the 
 field, and with the fowls of heaven, and with the 
 creeping things of the ground ; and I will break the 
 bow and the sword and the battle out of the earth, 
 and will make them to lie down safely." 
 
 ' But does this view of the Atonement exhaust 
 the meaning of the doctrine ? Evidently not. It would 
 have done so had there been no sin. But sin is 
 a fact and involves guilt — the feeling of outraged 
 justice and impending retribution. The sense of un- 
 worthiness to hold direct communication with God 
 is one of the deepest feehngs in our nature. We have 
 
THE EUCHARISTIC SACEIFICE 61 
 
 examples of it in the histories of the saints of the Old 
 and New Testaments, and all along the course of 
 history. The traditions of heathendom testify to the 
 same truth, and also the universal prevalence of the 
 doctrine of sacrifice. What, then, do we mean by the 
 doctrine of the Atonement in this more specific sense ? 
 It is easy enough to understand that we come into the 
 world with a disorganised nature, a nature that has 
 lost its principle of harmony, and in which the animal 
 predominates over the spiritual. Hereditary evil, both 
 moral and physical, is a fact too plain to be disputed. 
 But hereditary guilt ? Can guilt really be hereditary ? 
 Let us think. Have we anything of the same kind 
 in secular life ? A nobleman rebels against his 
 sovereign. What is the consequence ? He forfeits his 
 life. Is that all ? No ; he forfeits also his nobility, 
 his possessions, and his privileges, and not for him- 
 self only but for his posterity. Guilt therefore 
 may in a sense be hereditary in civil life, but only 
 in a negative sense. To put a child, still more a 
 remote descendant, to death for an ancestral crime 
 would be held a monstrous perversion of justice, re- 
 volting to the moral sense. Surely then we cannot 
 ascribe to Almighty God conduct which we should 
 regard as immoral on the part of man. Our conscience 
 rebels against the notion that God would consign to 
 endless torment any human being for a sin committed 
 by a remote ancestor. In matter of fact God condemns 
 no one to endless torment. He inflicts no arbitrary 
 punishment on any one. " The soul that sinneth, it 
 shall die." " God will have all men to be saved and 
 
62 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 come unto the knowledge of the truth." But what do 
 we mean by being saved ? Not simply the remission 
 of punishment. So far from it, the man who has a 
 real sense of his own guilt has no wish to escape 
 due punishment. He seeks, on the contrary, to make 
 reparation for the wrong. God cannot make us happy 
 by simply forgiving us and imputing to us a righteous- 
 ness which belongs to another. Our conscience is 
 burdened rather than relieved by learning that an 
 innocent person has borne the punishment which 
 we deserved. Do you suppose you could make all the 
 criminals in this kingdom happy by a general gaol 
 delivery ? Far from it, unless you had previously 
 reformed their characters and rooted their evil habits 
 out of their nature. You must not believe that God 
 is keeping any one in a place of torment against that 
 person's will. " The kingdom of heaven," said our 
 Lord on one occasion, ** is within you." The kingdom 
 of hell is also within the sinner's own breast, in the 
 anarchy and tormenting appetites of a ruined consti- 
 tution. Men are not punished arbitrarily in the 
 spiritual world for what they have done here, but 
 for what they continue to do there as the inevitable 
 consequence of the habits formed in this world. 
 Pain does not assail the drunkard to-day as an 
 arbitrary infliction apart from the excess of yester- 
 day ; it is the excess of yesterday continued in its 
 results and impelling him to a repetition of the 
 cause of his misery. Death makes no breach in the 
 continuity of human character. Man carries with 
 him into the spiritual world precisely that character 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFICE 63 
 
 which he bore in this Hfe. " He that is unjust, let 
 him be unjust still : and he which is filthy, let him be 
 filthy still : and he that is righteous, let him be righteous 
 still : and he that is holy, let him be holy still." The 
 punishment of the lost is no arbitrary infliction from 
 without, but a torment springing from within ; from 
 raging animal appetites or fiendish passions which de- 
 vour the wretched creatures who have become their im- 
 potent slaves. So long as sin remains in man's nature 
 he must of necessity be miserable, for he cherishes in 
 his bosom the scorpion from which comes his pain. 
 God strives to root out sin from our nature because 
 He knows that pardon is otherwise useless. God loves 
 us, and there is nothing so inexorable as love when it 
 is genuine. There is no weakness in it. It will inflict 
 present anguish to save from future misery. And 
 thus God never passes over the sins of those He loves. 
 He will not leave them alone, will not abandon them 
 to themselves. He takes away the desire of their 
 eyes, sends them cruel disappointments, forces them 
 into the narrow thorny way, desolates their homes and 
 leaves their idols all shivered around them, that they 
 may learn where their true happiness lies. As gold is 
 put into the furnace to separate the dross from the 
 pure ore, so God flings men into the furnace of afflic- 
 tion, that He may separate the sin which He hates 
 from the soul which He loves. That is why He is 
 called in the Old and New Testament " a consuming 
 fire." Fire does not destroy, does not annihilate : it 
 disintegrates, separates substances which are foreign 
 to each other. God pursues us with the fire of His 
 
64 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 love, seeking to melt and mould us into conformity 
 with His will, because that is the only way in 
 which He can make us happy. But He is never 
 vindictive, never unwilling to forgive, never requires a 
 victim, like a pagan deity, to appease offended majesty. 
 * What then do we mean by the Atonement when 
 we use it in the sense of propitiation? Now re- 
 member, to start with, that the barrier to reconcilia- 
 tion lies always in the will of man, never in the will 
 of God. Atonement means making at one again 
 persons who have been sundered. How are they to 
 be brought together? Analyse your own feelings. 
 When you have wronged, deeply hurt, one who has 
 been kind to you, what is your first feeling ? A 
 longing to make reparation. Forgiveness would be 
 painful to you without reparation on your part. 
 Your conscience tells you of a law of compensation 
 which forbids complete reconciliation, entire atone- 
 ment, till the law of compensation has been satisfied. 
 Even a child will yearn to offer some gift, purchased 
 perhaps with the parent's own money, to expiate its 
 faults. There is an innate sense of justice in the 
 breast of man which is a reflex of the Divine justice. 
 But what do we mean by the Divine justice ? We 
 mean simply Divine love at war with sin, which is 
 the contradiction of all that is truly lovable.^ The 
 
 * ' Giustizia mosse '1 mio alto fattore : 
 Fecemi la divina potestate, 
 La somma sapienza e '1 primo amore,' 
 
 Inferno, canto iii. 
 
 We may acknowledge the profound truth which underlies this 
 
THE EI3CHAEISTIC SACEIFICE 65 
 
 law of compensation or retribution pervades the 
 universe. In the beginning God made everything 
 *' very good," and He so ordered the work of His 
 hands that it should inevitably avenge on the trans- 
 gressor, sooner or later, every violation of the Divine 
 order. Man's happiness is therefore contingent on 
 his conformity to the will of God, and every viola- 
 tion of that will must entail suffering, which is thus 
 a finger-post set up by the Eternal Love to warn 
 the unwary from dangerous paths. God wills the 
 happiness of every form of created life, and it is 
 probable that in the worjd of life below man happi- 
 ness predominates so largely as to reduce conscious 
 suffering almost to zero. To the animal mere exis- 
 tence is a joy. Its life is ever in the present. No 
 regrets haunt it from the past, and coming events 
 do not cast their shadows before. And when death 
 overtakes it, either by natural process or violence, 
 there is probably little or no suffering, as we under- 
 stand the word. It is when man appears upon the 
 scene that suffering really begins, ^nd justice is the 
 form which the Divine love takes to drive man into 
 the ways of happiness. It is therefore a paralogism 
 to contrast Divine love and Divine justice as if they 
 were opposite, or even different, attributes. Love 
 always gives happiness to those who conform to its 
 laws ; in the form of justice it inflicts pain on the 
 sinner, and must continue to do so while he sins. 
 * But it may be objected that it is not the sinner 
 
 explanation of the origin of the cittd dolente without necessarily 
 adopting all Dante's views on Eschatology. 
 
6G THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 who always suffers, but very often the innocent. In 
 matter of fact the sinner always does suffer, though the 
 suffering may be long delayed and he may fail to recog- 
 nise its cause when it comes. But it is undoubtedly 
 true that the innocent do suffer for the sins and 
 errors of others. How is this to be reconciled with 
 the Divine justice which I have called the offspring 
 of Divine love ? The answer is that mankind is an 
 organic unity, a moral organism, so that injury done 
 to a part is in fact done to the whole. ^ This view 
 is enforced all through the Bible, and by none more 
 emphatically than by St. Paul, as in the following 
 passages : " For as we have many members in one 
 body, and all members have not the same office ; so 
 we, being many, are one body in Christ, and seve- 
 rally members one of another." And these several 
 members have need of each other, so " that there 
 should be no schism in the body; but that the 
 members should have the same care one for another. 
 And whether one member suffer, all the members 
 suffer with it ; or one member be honoured, all the 
 members rejoice with it." Human language bears 
 witness to this doctrine — in such words, for example, 
 as " fellow-feeling" and "sympathy ; " and the history 
 of the race furnishes abundant illustration of it. 
 Even physically one member may affect injuriously a 
 
 ' ' See Dr. Kedney's Christian Doctrine Harmonised and its 
 Rationality Vindicated, i. 265. A striking and profound book, 
 which has come under my notice as these sheets have been passing 
 through the press, and which I have not been able as yet to read 
 through — indeed, to read at all with the care which it evidently 
 deserves.' This note was written nine years ago. 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFICE 67 
 
 whole community — may propagate a germ of disease 
 which vitiates the Hves of all. Spiritual influences, 
 being much more subtle, are consequently much 
 more contagious. We are constantly throwing out 
 moral influences on each other by word, look, 
 gesture ; and the law of vicarious suffering is thus 
 seen to pervade the human race. But there is no 
 injustice, inasmuch as the race is one, a real organism, 
 moral, intellectual, and bodily; no injustice more 
 than there is, according to St. Paul's analogy, in the 
 members of the human body being severally affected 
 by each other's pains. 
 
 * The Eternal Son of God, then, having become 
 Incarnate, having taken human nature in its 
 integrity, with the hereditary proclivities of the Fall 
 cut off by His miraculous Conception, and having, in 
 St. Paul's language, thus "recapitulated" humanity 
 in His reconstruction of it, it follows that He also 
 bore and suffered for its sins. " He was made sin 
 for us Who knew no sin," and thereby made an 
 atonement for the whole race. 
 
 * Now we all awake, when we begin to reason 
 about these things, to the consciousness of our un- 
 worthiness to appear before God. We have a feeling 
 of guilt on our conscience, which bears witness to our 
 organic membership of an attainted race. But, in 
 truth, there is no need to puzzle ourselves about in- 
 herited guilt. We have sins enough of our own to 
 humble us and to make us exclaim with Peter: 
 " Depart from me, for I am a sinful man, Lord." 
 The natural impulse of fallen man is to hide himself 
 
 F 2 
 
68 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 like Adam, from the presence of his Maker. Human 
 nature therefore needs an atonement, and has always 
 cried aloud for it ; needs some way of access back to 
 God, some means whereby the alienation that has 
 subsisted between man's nature and God's shall be 
 removed. And this was done by the Incarnation of 
 the Divine nature in Jesus of Nazareth. By that 
 transcendent condescension the Son of Man " opened 
 the Kingdom of Heaven to all believers " — to all, that 
 is, who choose to avail themselves of the restored 
 heritage of humanity. God the Son took human 
 nature in its integrity, and thus learnt experimen- 
 tally what sin entailed. Through His humiliation, 
 suffering, and death He fulfilled the law of retribu- 
 tion which ordains that morally every wrong must 
 be righted ; that sin is sure to find the sinner out 
 sooner or later; that humanity, collectively and 
 regarded as a moral entity, must pay the debt of its 
 transgression ; that an offence against Eternal Love 
 must be undone. So, you see, the atonement made 
 by Christ is in a manner the payment of a ransom 
 or debt ; but a ransom, not to appease a vengeful 
 Divine Father, but to liberate mankind from the 
 thraldom of a disorganised nature. For in sad 
 truth man unredeemed is in real bondage : bondage 
 to Nature, which has become his master and tyrant 
 instead of being his servant ; bondage to ancestral 
 tendencies towards physical and moral degenera- 
 tion ; bondage to an obliquity of vision and infirmity 
 of purpose which make him an easy prey to tempta- 
 tion. To break the spell of these malign influences ; 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIO SACKIFICE 69 
 
 to place at the centre of human nature a new 
 principle of life from which men may make a fresh 
 start : — this surely is in a very real sense to pay a 
 ransom for fallen man ; to break his bonds ; to open 
 the door of his prison and enable him to regain his 
 liberty. And this is what Christ did by His atoning 
 sacrifice — a sacrifice begun when He " emptied 
 Himself " of His Divine glory, and consummated 
 when He died on the Cross. Had our Lord been a 
 mere man He could not have made an atonement. 
 His acts could have affected none but Himself ; they 
 could have had no influence on the destiny of the 
 race. But the Humanity of Christ is not that of 
 any particular man; it is universal humanity, 
 humanity in the abstract, humanity viewed germi- 
 nally. His Manhood therefore reaches to every 
 member of the race. He is the pure Vine of which 
 all human beings may become branches ; the Well 
 of Living Water out of which all may drink and 
 imbibe eternal life. Man may now approach His Maker 
 without shame or fear, for he may approach Him in 
 the nature of the Second Adam, in the very manhood 
 which God Himself now wears. Humanity is thus 
 made, as St. Peter does not hesitate to express it, 
 "partaker of the Divine nature."^ An atonement 
 has been made which is adequate to all the require- 
 ments of the case. Look again at the first chapter 
 
 * <l>v<ris, not oijcria, i.e. the attributes of God, which are in part 
 communicable, not His incommunicable essence. It was of the (jyvcris, 
 not the oiiaia, that the Word emptied Himself, " economically," when 
 He became man. 
 
70 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of the Epistle to the Colossians in the Hght of the 
 explanations which I have given, and you will see 
 what a depth of meaning and moral grandeur is 
 concentrated in the Apostle's terse statement of the 
 doctrine of the Atonement as an all-embracing 
 dispensation existing eternally in the Divine inten- 
 tion, and not as an isolated fact in time to meet an 
 unforeseen emergency. It is in the light of that 
 great truth that St. Paul's references to predestination 
 must be understood. And it is in that sense that one 
 of our own Articles of Beligion explains the matter 
 when it tells us that " we must receive God's promises 
 [of salvation] in such wise as they be generally set 
 forth to us in Holy Scripture." '* Generally set 
 forth ; " that does not mean set forth for the most 
 part or in a general way, but set forth generically — 
 that is, as applicable to the entire race. The word 
 in the Latin version of the seventeenth Article indi- 
 cates this interpretation. This universality of the 
 Atonement as covering the whole of creation had 
 strong hold of St. Paul's mind. He states it as 
 follows in Eph. i. 9-12 : " Having made known 
 anto us the mystery of His will, according to His 
 good pleasure which He hath purposed in Himself : 
 that in the dispensation of the fulness of times He 
 might gather together in one [the essential idea of 
 atonement] all things in Christ, both which are in 
 heaven, and which are on earth ; even in Him : in 
 Whom also we have obtained an inheritance, beingpre- 
 destinated according to the purpose of Him Who 
 worketh all things after the counsel of His own will : 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFICB 71 
 
 that we should be to the praise of His glory, who first 
 trusted in Christ." The word translated " gather 
 together in one," means " recapitulated," summed up 
 and reduced to harmonious unity under one Head 
 through the Incarnation. That is the leading idea 
 of the Atonement in St. Paul's teaching ; and the 
 predestination he speaks of is simply that of pre-emi- 
 nence in a world-wide process. 
 
 * And it is this view of it which has made the 
 doctrine of the Atonement so attractive and subduing, 
 revolutionising man's ideas not only towards God, or 
 even towards man, but towards all creation, investing 
 it with a mystery and sanctity it never had inspired 
 before. God, as depicted in the Old Testament, says 
 Arthur Hallam — and we may add still more so as He 
 is exhibited in the Incarnation — ** was a manifold 
 everlasting manifestation of one deep feeling — a 
 desire for human affection. Love is not asked in 
 vain from generous dispositions;" and Infinite Love 
 condescending to sue for the love of man becomes 
 irresistible to all minds who believe in the Incarna- 
 tion and have not polluted their affections. A 
 striking illustration of this is given in a letter from 
 a Christian native in one of the South Sea Islands, 
 who had been a cannibal. He went up to the altar 
 one day to receive the Holy Communion, and I will 
 relate in his own words what followed : " When I 
 approached the table I did not know beside whom I 
 should have to kneel. Then suddenly I saw beside 
 me a man who some years ago slew my father, and 
 drank bis blood ,i whopa I then swore I would kill th^ 
 
72 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 lirst time I should see him. Now think what I felt 
 when I suddenly knelt beside him. It came upon 
 me with terrible power, and I could not prevent it, 
 and so I went back to my seat. Arriving there I 
 saw in the spirit the upper sanctuary, and seemed 
 to hear a voice saying, ' Hereby shall all men know 
 that ye are My disciples, if ye have love one to 
 another.' That made a deep impression on me, and 
 it seemed to me in thought that I saw another sight, 
 a cross, and a man nailed thereon, and I heard him 
 say : ' Father, forgive them, for they know not what 
 they do.' Then I went back to the altar." 
 
 'Another illustration still more remarkable is 
 supplied by the famous passage reported from 
 Napoleon's conversations at St. Helena — a passage 
 that cannot be quoted too often. "I have been 
 accustomed to put before me the examples of 
 Alexander and Caesar, with the hope of rivalling 
 their exploits, and living in the minds of men for 
 ever. Yet, after all, in what sense does Alexander, 
 in what sense does Caesar, live? Who knows or 
 cares anything about them? . . . But, on the con- 
 trary, there is just one Name in the world that 
 lives. It is the Name of One Who passed His years 
 in obscurity, and Who died a malefactor's death. 
 Eighteen hundred years have gone since that time, 
 but still it has its hold upon the human mind. It 
 has possessed the world, and it maintains possession. 
 Amid the most varied nations, under the most diver- 
 sified circumstances, in the most cultivated, in the 
 rudest races and intellects, in all classes of society, 
 
THE EUCHARISTIO SACRIFICE 73 
 
 the Owner of that great Name reigns. High and 
 low, rich and poor, acknowledge Him. Millions of 
 souls are conversing with Him, are venturing on 
 His Word, are looking for His presence. Palaces, 
 sumptuous, innumerable, are raised to His honour ; 
 His image, as in the hour of His deepest humilia- 
 tion, is triumphantly displayed in the proud city, in 
 the open country, in the corners of streets, on the 
 tops of mountains. ... It is worn next the heart 
 in life ; it is held before the failing eyes in death. 
 Here, then, is One Who is not a mere name. Who 
 is not a mere fiction. He is dead and gone, but 
 still He lives — lives as the living energetic thought 
 of successive generations, as the awful motive power 
 of a thousand great events. He has done without 
 effort what others with lifelong struggles have not 
 done. Can He be less than Divine ? Who is He 
 but the Creator Himself, Who is Sovereign over His 
 own works, towards Whom our eyes turn instinc- 
 tively because He is our Father and our God ? " ' i 
 
 Nothing is clearer from the teaching both of the 
 Old Testament and the New than the necessity of 
 two factors in the process of man's salvation — God's 
 grace and man's co-operation. Neither is operative 
 without the other. The obedience of nature is 
 mechanical. ' He hath given them a law which 
 shall not be broken. They continue this day 
 according to Thine ordinance, for all things serve 
 Thee.' This is true of all organic life below man. 
 
 * Christianity in Relation to Science and Morals, sixth edition, 
 pp. 153-180. 
 
74 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 It is true even of the animal world. They follow 
 their nature, a law of mechanical necessity. ' I will 
 inform thee and teach thee in the way wherein thou 
 shalt go, and I will guide thee with mine eye.' That 
 is the rule laid down for man. It is one test of a 
 good portrait that its eye should follow you, should 
 be fixed upon you, from whatever part of the room 
 you examine the picture. God's eye follows us 
 wheresoever we may wander. '• Thou art about my 
 path, and about my bed, and spiest out all my ways.' 
 He appeals to our reason, to our emotions, to our 
 innate love— if our nature had fair play— of what is 
 true and beautiful and noble, and to our instinctive 
 loathing of what is mean, impure, and false. But 
 His method is that of persuasion, never of irresistible 
 force. For He made man in His own image, and 
 endowed him with personahty, which implies the 
 awful gift of a free will, and therefore the power to 
 obey or disobey his Creator. 
 
 The law imposed on the lower creation is 
 different. They cannot choose but to obey. And 
 therefore the Psalmist goes on, after the verse 
 quoted above : ' Be ye not like to horse and mule, 
 which have no understanding ; whose mouths must 
 be held with bit and bridle lest they come near unto 
 thee.' * * Bit and bridle ' for the brute creation ; for 
 man the eye of the ' understanding ' and the purity 
 of heart, to which is promised the vision of God : 
 this is his only guide, inasmuch as he is — to 
 quote Bacon's phrase — ' a kind of god ' on earth, a 
 
 » Ps. xxxii. 9, 10. 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFIOE 75 
 
 vicegerent of the Most High among inferior creatures. 
 He alone is endowed with power of origination, and 
 even with some delegated power of creation. A 
 great poem, or statue, or picture, or masterpiece of 
 music, is not each of these a creation, a bringing 
 into being something which existed before only in 
 the rude material, if indeed even in that ? A great 
 poem is a real creation out of nothing. And the 
 statue came out of the mind of the sculptor as truly 
 as Adam, according to Genesis, came out of the 
 mind of His Maker. And a composition by Handel, 
 or Beethoven, or Mozart, what is it but a creation, the 
 circumambient air being but the medium for giving 
 expression to the musician's ideas in the sphere of 
 sound ? 
 
 And there is another sense, too, in which man is 
 truly ' a kind of god.' It is his province and his 
 privilege to enable natures inferior to his own to 
 reach their ideal perfection. ' The eyes of all wait 
 upon Thee, God,' exclaims the Psalmist. The 
 eyes of many lower organisms wait upon man. 
 Birds, quadrupeds, fishes, flowers, wait upon man 
 to lift them out of their natural state and endow 
 them with attributes which by their own striving 
 they could never acquire. And when he withdraws 
 his hand they all relapse to their original state. 
 
 In this way men are, as the Apostle tells us, 
 * fellow-workers with God,' ^ alike in the natural 
 and spiritual Hfe. It is a mystery, yet a fact, 
 that God's works are often left imperfect and in- 
 
 » 2 Cor, vi. 1, 
 
76 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 complete because man will not do his part ; and 
 God's intentions are thus frustrated because man 
 rejects the glorious privilege of being a fellow- 
 worker with his Maker. And in man's own 
 salvation this human factor is as necessary as the 
 Divine. Luther relied on St. Paul especially as his 
 great authority for his doctrine of salvation by faith 
 only. But St. Paul is equally emphatic as to the 
 necessity of works as the fruit of a true faith. 
 Indeed, faith itself belongs to the category of works, 
 for it is a human energy. Never was there a more 
 profitless and needless controversy than that 
 between faith and works. St. Paul condenses the 
 whole matter into a single sentence : ' Work out 
 your own salvation with fear and trembling, for it 
 is God that worketh in you, both to will and to 
 work for His good pleasure.' * The cure of 
 Naaman's leprosy is a parable of God's method as 
 revealed to us alike in the kingdom of nature and 
 of grace. * Go and wash in Jordan seven times, 
 and thy flesh shall come again to thee, and thou 
 shalt be clean. But Naaman was wroth, and went 
 away, and said. Behold, I thought. He will surely 
 come out to me and stand, and call on the name of the 
 Lord his God, and move his hand over the place, 
 and recover the leper. Are not Abana and Pharpar, 
 rivers of Damascus, better than all the waters of 
 Israel? May I not wash in them, and be clean? 
 So he turned and went away in a rage.' 
 
 Naaman had reason on his side, the reason of 
 
 ' Phil. ii. 12, 13. 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFICE 77 
 
 the natural man. The Jordan contained no curative 
 virtue to cleanse the leper. No test that the skill of 
 man could apply would have been able to find any 
 property in the Jordan to heal the smitten Syrian ; 
 and Abana and Pharpar, coming down from snowy 
 Lebanon, looked fairer to the eye. But God 
 had appointed the thirty miles' journey to the Jordan 
 and the sevenfold bath in its turbid stream to cure 
 Naaman, and that made all the difference. And 
 Naaman's noble nature, after his outburst of anger 
 at what he deemed an exhibition of superstitious 
 ceremonialism, listened to the saner reason of his 
 slaves, and received his reward. Men often reason 
 like Naaman now, and the vice of all that kind of 
 reasoning is the unconscious presumption of dictating 
 to Almighty God the terms on which they will 
 condescend to receive His gifts. Our part is simply 
 to find out what conditions He has in matter of fact 
 ordained in each case, and act accordingly. 
 
 Now let us apply this to the doctrine of the 
 Eucharistic Sacrifice. Of course there is no question 
 as to the completeness of Christ's Sacrifice on the 
 Cross, no question of any repetition of that sacrifice, 
 no impious question of any further mactation. But, 
 on the other hand, our part remains to be done, 
 namely, to ' fill up on our side the lacking afflictions 
 of Christ.' Now, in the view of all Christian 
 antiquity, the Eucharist is in a special manner the 
 Divinely appointed means for placing Christians en 
 rapport with the Sacrifice of Christ at once in its 
 vivifying and mediatorial aspects. That Sacrifice is 
 
78 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 going on now. He is Priest at once and Victim in 
 heaven. It is in His sacrificial aspect that He appears 
 to the disciple whom He loved all through the 
 Apocalypse. He appears as ' a Lamb standing as 
 though slain ' (wy hacjiayfjLsvov) ; standing because He 
 ' is alive for evermore,' and it is the office of a priest 
 to stand while offering ; but also ' as a Lamb 
 sacrificially slain,' to indicate the perpetuity of His 
 Sacrifice as well as of His priesthood ; bearing on 
 His glorified Humanity the marks of His victorious 
 passion. Twenty-nine times is He thus described in 
 His sacrificial character in the Apocalypse. He is the 
 Lamb ' in the midst of the throne, standing as though 
 slain.' The four and twenty elders ' fall down before 
 the Lamb.' The saints sing, * Worthy is the Lamb that 
 was slain to receive power, and riches, and wisdom, and 
 strength, and honour, and glory, and blessing.' We 
 read also of * the wrath of the Lamb ; ' the diminutive 
 apviov indicating His gentleness ; yet a gentleness 
 that can never make a compromise with sin, and 
 hence 'the wrath of the Lamb.' The robes of the 
 saints are * made white in the blood of the Lamb.' And 
 we read of ' the song of Moses and the Lamb,' and ' the 
 marriage of the Lamb,' and the * marriage supper of 
 the Lamb,' and * the bride, the Lamb's wife,' and ' the 
 Lamb' as 'the light' of the heavenly city, and 'the 
 throne of God and of the Lamb.' 
 
 In this Book, and all through the New Testa- 
 ment, the Church on earth and the Church in Para- 
 dise are regarded as one : the one militant, the other 
 triumphant ; the one enjoying the repose and the 
 guerdon of victory, the other still on foreign service and 
 
THE EUCHAEISTIC SACEIFICE 79 
 
 engaged in unceasing warfare. Yet it is but one 
 army, one society, * the whole family in heaven and 
 earth,' as St. Paul calls it. And the Eucharist is 
 the great bond of union, the nexus between the 
 Church visible and invisible, uniting both *in one 
 communion and fellowship in the mystical death ' of 
 the Lamb. And so we do our feeble best here to join 
 our Eucharistic adoration with the song of the Lamb : 
 ' Therefore with angels and archangels, and with all 
 the company of heaven, we laud and magnify Thy 
 glorious Name ; evermore praising Thee, and saying, 
 Holy, holy, holy. Lord God of hosts, heaven and 
 earth are full of Thy glory : Glory be to Thee, 
 Lord most High.' 
 
 It was this view of it that made the ancient un- 
 divided Church speak of the Eucharist in accents of 
 awe, calling it by such names as ' the holy sacrifice,' 
 ' the unbloody sacrifice,' ' the tremendous sacrifice.' 
 Their thought was not on Calvary. That was but a 
 past incident in the sacrificial life of the Lamb. 
 Their gaze was not backward, but forward and 
 upward. Through Christ's own appointed ' Mystery,' 
 as they also called the Eucharist, they felt that they 
 came within the penumbra of the worship in heaven ; 
 ' forgetting,' like St. Paul, ' those things which are 
 behind, and reaching forth to those things which are 
 before.' 
 
 So much, then, as to the rationale of the 
 Eucharistic Sacrifice. And now let us see what 
 our own representative divines say upon the doctrine 
 of the Heal Presence, and the Eucharistic Sacrifice, 
 its correlative. 
 
80 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 CHAPTEK III 
 
 THE EEFOEMATION : ITS CAUSES AND EESULTS 
 
 In considering the testimony of the AngHcan divines, 
 especially those of the sixteenth century, on the 
 subject of the Eucharist, the first thing that is likely 
 to strike one is the fact that both sides in the con- 
 troversy are wont to appeal to them with equal 
 confidence. But there is, after all, nothing surpris- 
 ing in this when we regard the circumstances. At 
 the time of the Eeformation our Church and nation 
 were engaged in a death-struggle with a politico- 
 religious polity, the most marvellous creation of 
 human craft and literary forgeries that the world has 
 ever seen.^ Historians the least friendly to sacerdotal 
 claims, like Guizot and Hallam, have freely admitted 
 the immense debt rendered to the cause of political 
 
 ' After the Vatican Council Dr. Dollinger began the study of the 
 history of the Papacy afresh, and he told me some years afterwards that 
 much as he knew about the system of forgeries on which the Papacy 
 had been gradually reared, he was not in the least prepared for the 
 mass of cumulative evidence which his special study of the subject 
 had revealed to him. He was engaged in arranging his materials 
 for a great work on the subject when death overtook him. Of 
 course, a whole series of writers, Aquinas included, accepted these 
 forgeries in good faith as authentic history. 
 
REFOEMATION CAUSES AND RESULTS 81 
 
 progress and of civilisation in general by the Latin 
 Church of the Middle Ages. But it is a fallacy to credit 
 the Papacy with all this service. Some of the Popes, 
 no doubt, deserve all the praise that their most zealous 
 admirers can bestow upon them ; but it is certainly 
 open to question whether the Papacy, as a system 
 and in the long run, has not done more to retard 
 than to advance the civilisation of Christendom. In 
 defending the liberties of the Church against the 
 encroachments of a licentious and tyrannical feudal- 
 ism, some great prelates were undoubtedly champions 
 of the cause of freedom in the State as well as in the 
 Church. But if the Papacy gave a languid support 
 to Anselm in his contest with William Rufus, it 
 instigated and supported King John in his con- 
 spiracy against the rights and liberties of the 
 Church and State of England in the interest of the 
 Papacy, and suspended the patriotic Langton from the 
 primacy for his share in securing the Great Charter. 
 It has been the rule of Papal policy always to support 
 either the cause of freedom or of despotism according 
 as either seemed likely to further the aggrandise- 
 ment of the Papacy. So that even its contributions 
 to the cause of freedom have generally proceeded 
 rather from the calculations of an astute selfishness 
 than from any spontaneous love of freedom for its 
 own sake. 
 
 At the period of the Reformation the Papal 
 power, though shaken, was still, both in religion and 
 politics, the most formidable in Europe ; and it was 
 apparently prepared to stick at nothing in compass- 
 
82 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ing its ends. This is a strong statement, which 
 ought not to be made without convincing proof. 
 Unfortunately the evidence is abundant and incontro- 
 vertible. It will suffice here to quote the following 
 from an authentic and unsuspected source.^ On 
 May 3, 1583, the Papal Nuncio wrote from Paris to 
 the Cardinal of Como, Secretary of State under 
 Gregory XIII. :— 
 
 The Duke of Guise and the Duke of Mayenne have 
 told me that they have a plan for killing the Queen of 
 England by the hand of a Catholic, though not one out- 
 wardly, who is near her person and is ill affected towards 
 her for having put to death some of his Catholic relations. 
 This man, it seems, sent word of this to the Queen of 
 Scotland,^ but she refused to attend to it. He was, 
 however, sent hither, and they have agreed to give him, 
 if he escape, otherwise his sons, 100,000 francs, as ,to 
 which he is satisfied to have the security of the Duke of 
 Guise for 50,000 and to see the rest deposited with the 
 Archbishop of Glasgow in a box, of which he will keep a 
 key, so that he or his sons may receive the money, should 
 the plan succeed ; and the Duke thinks it may. The Duke 
 asks for no assistance from our Lord [the Pope] in this 
 affair ; but when the time comes he will go to a place of 
 his near the sea to await the event, and then cross over 
 on a sudden to England. As to putting to death that 
 wicked woman, I said to him that I will not write about 
 it to our Lord [the Pope], nor should I, nor tell your most 
 illustrious Lordship to inform him of it ; because, though 
 I believe our Lord [the Pope] would be glad that God 
 
 • Namely, Letters and Memorials of Cardinal Allen, edited by 
 the Fathers of the Congregation of the London Oratory, with an 
 Historical Introduction by Thomas Francis Knox, D.D. 
 
 * Then a prisoner in England. 
 
EEFOEMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 83 
 
 should punish in any way whatever that enemy of his, 
 still it would be unfitting that His Vicar should procure it 
 by these means. The Duke was satisfied ; but later on 
 he added that for the enterprise of England, which in 
 this case would be much more easy, it will be necessary 
 to have here in readiness money to enlist some troops to 
 follow him, as he intends to enter England immediately 
 in order that the Catholics may have a head. He asks 
 for no assistance for his own passage. But as the Duke 
 of Mayenne must remain on the Continent to collect some 
 soldiers to follow him [the Duke of Guise] (it being 
 probable that the heretics, who hold the treasure, the 
 fleet, and the ports, will not be wanting to themselves, so 
 that it will be necessary to make a fight for it), he wishes 
 that for this purpose 100,000 or at least 80,000 scudi 
 should be ready here. I let him know the agreement 
 there is between our Lord the Pope and the Catholic 
 King with regard to the contribution, and I told him that 
 on our Lord the Pope's part he may count on every 
 possible assistance when the Catholic King does his part. 
 The Agent of Spain beheves that his King will gladly 
 give this aid, and therefore it will be well, in conformity 
 with the provisions so often made, to consider how to 
 provide the sum, which will amount to 20,000 scudi 
 from our Lord the Pope, when the Catholic King gives 
 his 60,000 scudi. God grant that with this small sum 
 that great kingdom may be gained. The Queen of Scot- 
 land wrote the other day that she had won over the Earl ^ 
 
 ' Earl of Shrewsbury. Few who came in contact with her could 
 resist the charm of the unfortunate Mary Stuart. One is glad to 
 learn that she scorned to listen to any proposal to murder Elizabeth, 
 cruelly as she was treated by that sovereign. Whatever her faults — 
 and considering her upbringing and her social and political environ- 
 ment the wonder is they were so few — few princesses, with so many 
 temptations to the contrary, have exhibited so much generosity and 
 magnanimity. 
 
 Q 2 
 
84 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 who has her in custody, and that she is sure of being 
 able to free herself when she pleases, but that she 
 wishes to wait for a good opportunity. Independently of 
 this plan, the Duke of Guise expects in a few days informa- 
 tion from four gentlemen of rank [principali signori} in 
 England, and he will let me know the result. Meanwhile 
 he has nothing of moment from Scotland or England to 
 tell me. 
 
 The Cardinal Secretary of State answered this 
 despatch on May 23 as follows : — 
 
 I have reported to our Lord the Pope that your Lord- 
 ship has written to me in cipher about the affairs of Eng- 
 land, and since his Holiness cannot but think it good that 
 that kingdom should in some way or other be relieved 
 from oppression and restored to God and our holy religion, 
 his Holiness says that, in the event of the matter being 
 effected, the 80,000 will be, as your Lordship says, very 
 well employed. His Holiness will therefore make no 
 difficulty about paying his fourth when the time comes, 
 if the Agents of the Catholic King do the same with their 
 three-fourths : and as to this point, the Princes of Guise 
 should make a good and firm agreement with the Catholic 
 Agent on the spot. With regard to our 20,000, since 
 your Lordship has already in hand 4,000, and to send the 
 rest without knowing for certain that there will be any 
 result would be to take trouble for nothing, while not to 
 send them might injure the affair, if by chance it should 
 become necessary to pay them, his Holiness thinks it 
 best that in case of need your Lordship should take up 
 the whole or part where you are by a bill of exchange on 
 the credit of some Italian merchant, or other person, 
 which his Holiness will not fail to meet immediately it 
 is due : I say the whole or a part because it is not likely 
 that it will all be needed at once, since it is more probable 
 
EEFOEMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 85 
 
 that it will have to be spent in two or three months 
 rather than in one, in which case your Lordship will 
 easily supply the first advance with the 4,000 you have 
 already in your hand, and will have time to write here for 
 the rest. Nevertheless, if necessity requires it, your 
 Lordship can adopt the expedient which I have mentioned 
 of raising the money there ; and do not stop on this account 
 from doing good. But God grant that this may not prove 
 like so many other promises which have never had any 
 result.' * 
 
 There is a long and interesting memorandum in 
 Spanish from Father Persons (sometimes spelt 
 Parsons), written from Kome, June 30, 1597, to 
 Don Juan de Ydraquez, which confirms this and 
 other attempts on the life of Elizabeth, all inspired 
 from Eome or by the Jesuits. ^ The policy of the 
 Jesuits, which they moved heaven and earth to carry 
 out, was to procure an invasion of England by 
 
 ' Letters and Memorials of Cardinal Allen, pp. xlvi-xlviii. A most 
 valuable collection of documents, which no student of the Keformation 
 can afford to neglect. 
 
 '^ E.g : ' Hecieron otra traycion que fue que mientras que estavan 
 tratando con el Duque de Guysa y con Alano y Personio de procurar 
 y aguardar algunas fuerpas de Espana, de las quales ya avia mucha 
 probabilidad que vendrian presto, los dos embiaron secretamente a 
 Ynglaterra un cierto espia que avia sido muchos anos de la Keyna 
 Ynglaterra en Italia y otras partes, llamado Guilielmo Parry ; el qual 
 descubrio luego a la Reyna todo lo que passava, come se save por 
 sus confessiones que estan impresas, y mas, la dixo como tenia 
 commission para matar tam bien a ella a su tiempo para llevantar a 
 la Reyna de Escocia y para prevenir la invasion Espanola, la que los 
 Jesuitas pretendian : y aunque por entonces la Eeyna le agradecio y 
 regalo, toda via despues le hizo ahurcar ; y este fue el fin del 
 doctor Parry.' — Letters and Memorials of Cardinal Allen, pp. 
 387-8. 
 
86 THE REFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Philip II., who was to rule England either directly 
 or through a member of his family ; and eventually 
 Scotland, Elizabeth having been either assassinated, 
 executed, or deposed. Mary Stuart was to be 
 restored to liberty, and to the throne of Scotland, on 
 condition of agreeing to the supersession of her son 
 on account of his heresy — a device by which Philip 
 and the Jesuits hoped to unite England and Scotland 
 in one kingdom under the Spanish crown. The 
 King of France, on the other hand, and the French 
 and Scotch Catholics, were opposed to the Hispano- 
 Jesuit enterprise, preferring the restoration of the 
 Pope's supremacy by an expedition from France, 
 aided by a Scotch invasion and an English Roman 
 Catholic insurrection, which should place both Scot- 
 land and England under the sovereignty of Mary. 
 They strove, therefore, to anticipate the Jesuits' plan 
 by the assassination of Elizabeth. Hence the plot 
 described above, in which the principals were the 
 Pope (Gregory XIIL), the Papal Nuncio in Paris, 
 the Duke of Guise, and the Roman Catholic Arch- 
 bishop of Glasgow. 
 
 I should have thought that the Fathers of the 
 London Oratory, while pleading perhaps the moral 
 perturbations caused by the political ethics and 
 stress of circumstances of that time, would never- 
 theless have reprobated those repeated attempts on 
 the life of Queen Elizabeth. On the contrary, I 
 found, to my great surprise, an elaborate defence of 
 them. The gist of the argument may be found in 
 the following extract from Father Knox's interesting 
 
EEFORMATION CAUSES AND RESULTS 87 
 
 and remarkably frank ' Historical Introduction.' ^ 
 The foundation of his argument is the following 
 quotation from the Corpus Juris of the Roman 
 Church : — 
 
 If a temporal lord, after having been required and 
 admonished by the Church, shall neglect to cleanse his 
 land from heretical defilement, let him be excommunicated 
 by the metropolitan and the other bishops of the province. 
 x\nd if he shall through contempt fail to give satisfaction 
 within a year, let this be signified to the Sovereign Pontiff, 
 that he may thereupon declare his vassals absolved from 
 allegiance to him, and offer his land for seizure by Catho- 
 lics, that they may, after expelling the heretics, possess it 
 by an incontestable title, and keep it in the integrity of the 
 faith : saving the right of the principal lord, provided he 
 puts no obstacle in the way of this and oppose no hin- 
 drance ; the same law being nevertheless observed with 
 regard to those who have no principal lords. 
 
 On this Father Knox observes : — - 
 
 This decree, by its insertion in the Corpus Juris, 
 became part of the ordinary statute law of the Church. 
 It had not been abrogated by desuetude in the sixteenth 
 century ; for Allen and Persons appeal to it as in full 
 force in a memorandum drawn up for Philip II. ; and 
 St. Pius V. acted in accordance with it when he issued 
 his bull deposing Queen Elizabeth. . . . ^ 
 
 * Father Knox died while the proof sheets of his Introduction 
 were passing through the press, and the book was published by the 
 Fathers of the Oratory. 
 
 2 The arrogance and insolence of that bull may be judged from 
 its opening paragraph : ' Kegnans in excelsis cui data est omnis in 
 csbIo et in terra potestas, unam sanctam, catholicam, et apostolicam 
 ecclesiam, extra quam nulla est salus, uni soli in terris, videlicet 
 
B8 THE EEFOEMAl:10N SETTLEMEN^T 
 
 This Pontifical act was not a mere empty protest. 
 Its effect was that EHzabeth ceased to be Queen de jure, 
 while she remained Queen de facto as before. 
 
 But she was a usurper, and must be got rid of as 
 soon as an opportunity presented itself. No such 
 opportunity occurred during the Pontificate of 
 Paul V. 
 
 It was far, however, from the desire of Gregory XIII. 
 [who succeeded Sixtus V.] that the bull should remain 
 without execution. He saw too clearly the ruin to 
 innumerable souls which resulted from Elizabeth's 
 continuance on the throne. As spiritual pastor of these 
 souls, he was bound to use all lawful means to save them 
 from perishing. Hence, not content with aiding by his 
 munificent gifts the purely spiritual work of conversion 
 which was carried on by the colleges of Douay and Eome, 
 the latter being his own foundation, he left nothing 
 undone to impel Philip 11. of Spain to overthrow Elizabeth 
 by force of arms. Thus in 1577, when it had been 
 arranged that Don John of Austria, after pacifying 
 Flanders, should undertake the conquest of England and 
 place Mary Queen of Scots on the English throne, 
 Gregory XIII. sent Mgr. Sega as his Nuncio to Don John 
 
 apostolorum principi Petro, Petrique successor! Eomano pontifici, in 
 potestatis plenitudine tradidit gubernandam. Hunc unum super 
 omnes getites et omnia regna principem constituit, qui evellat, de- 
 Btruat, dissipet, disperdat, plantet, et sedificet, ut fidelem populum, 
 mutuas charitatis nexu constrictum, in unitate spiritus contineat, 
 salvumque et incolumem suo exhibeat salvatori.' This bull comes 
 within the definition of Papal infallibility laid down by the Vatican 
 Council, and is therefore ' irreformable ' — an immutable article of 
 the creed of the Eoman Church, binding the members of that Church 
 to belieye that the Pope alone is by Divine appointment prince over 
 all nations and kingdoms,' and in that capacity rightfully deposed 
 Queen Elizabeth, and handed her over to any one who chose to slay her. 
 
REE'OEMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 89 
 
 with 50,000 ducats in aid of the proposed expedition. The 
 ill-fated expedition under Sir Thomas Stukely, which was 
 equipped by Gregory XIII. and sent by him to Ireland, 
 but which, by the treachery of its commander, was diverted 
 from its destination, and perished with Sebastian, King of 
 Portugal, at x\lcazar in Morocco, August 4, 1578, is a 
 further proof of the Pope's zeal in the same cause. ^ 
 
 And as to the various attempts to assassinate 
 Elizabeth, Father Knox suggests the following 
 apology :— 
 
 Let me begin by putting a possible case. In a 
 country where the executive is pow^erless and might 
 prevails over right, the chief of a band of robbers has 
 seized an unoffending traveller and keeps him a close 
 prisoner until he pays for his ransom a sum which is 
 quite beyond his power to obtain. Now who can deny 
 that under these circumstances the prisoner might law- 
 fully kill the robber, if by so doing he could secure his 
 escape ? And if he might do it himself, any one, much 
 more a friend and kinsman, might do it for him, or he 
 might hire another to do it in his stead. The violent 
 death of the robber could not in this case be justly 
 regarded as a murder : it would simply be the result of 
 an act of self-defence on the part of the innocent man 
 whom he was holding captive. . . . Thus the parallel is 
 complete between the bandit chief and Queen Elizabeth. 
 Both detain with equal injustice the prisoner who has 
 fallen into their hands. Both have the power and the 
 will to murder their prisoner if circumstances make it 
 advisable. Both prisoners are unable to persuade their 
 captors to release them. If, then, it be no sin in the 
 captive, either by his own hand or the hand of others, 
 to kill the bandit chief and so escape, why was it a sin to 
 ' Pp. xxvii-xxix. 
 
90 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 kill Elizabeth, and by so doing to save from a lifelong 
 prison and impending death her helpless victim, the 
 Queen of Scots ? If the one act is a laudable measure of 
 self-defence, why is the other branded vp^ith the names of 
 murder and assassination ? In a word, if there is no 
 real disparity between the cases, why should we not use 
 the same weights and measures in judging of them 
 both ? ' 1 
 
 Certainly this is a startling doctrine, propounded 
 in the year of grace 1882 by ' the Fathers of the 
 Congregation of the London Oratory.' In virtue of 
 the Pope's bull of excommunication Queen Elizabeth 
 is to be regarded as ' the chief of a band of robbers,* 
 a * bandit chief,' who may justly be privately 
 poniarded, or shot, or poisoned. The Fathers 
 declare that ' there is tio proof ' that Mary was 
 privy to these projects of assassination ; but any 
 friend or kinsman might think himself justified in 
 secretly taking the life of Elizabeth, and the Pope 
 did well to aid and bless the deed. 
 
 But, in matter of fact, the attempts on Elizabeth's 
 life were not made for the purpose of liberating 
 Queen Mary, but for the purpose of restoring the 
 authority of the Pope over the realm of England. 
 Father Knox had first admitted that the Pope had 
 
 * left nothing undone to overthrow Elizabeth by 
 force of arms ' through a foreign invasion ; and his 
 Holiness had himself equipped an expedition to 
 
 * undertake the conquest of England and place 
 Mary Queen of Scots on the Enghsh throne.' 
 
 » P. u. 
 
KEFOEMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 91 
 
 But even if the chief object of these persistent 
 conspiracies and projects of assassination had been 
 —as it certainly was not — to Hberate Queen Mary, 
 are they to be excused on that plea ? Here is the 
 case, as stated by the Papal Nuncio at Paris for the 
 information of the Pope. ' A Catholic, though not 
 outwardly ' — that is, who pretends to be a Protestant 
 — and * who is near the person ' of the Queen, desires 
 to murder her out of revenge for the judicial execu- 
 tions of some relations. But he wishes to turn his 
 revenge to profitable account. He offers the 
 Queen of Scotland to take the life of Queen Eliza- 
 beth for the sum of 100,000 francs. On Mary's 
 refusal, he betakes himself to the Duke of Guise and 
 Duke of Mayenne. The Duke of Guise is willing to 
 find the money, which the Roman Catholic Arch- 
 bishop of Glasgow agrees to hold ' in a box, of which 
 he will keep the key,' till the deed is done, when the 
 money is to be paid over to the assassin if he escapes, 
 and to his sons in the event of his capture. In the 
 confusion which was to follow the assassination of 
 the Queen, the Duke of Guise is to land in England 
 with an army in order to put a Roman Catholic 
 sovereign on the English throne, and thereby restore 
 the Pope's supremacy. Of all this the Pope is 
 confidentially informed, and is asked if he will con- 
 tribute ' 100,000 or at least 80,000 crowns ' to the 
 cost of the expedition in case the assassin succeeds 
 in accomplishing his purpose. The Cardinal Secre- 
 tary of State, after consultation with the Pope, 
 replies that * since his Holiness cannot but think it 
 
92 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 good that this kingdom [of England] should be in some 
 way or other relieved from oppression and restored to 
 God and our holy religion, his Holiness says that, in 
 the event of the matter being effected, there is no 
 doubt that the 80,000 crowns will be, as your 
 Lordship [the papal Nuncio] says, very well em- 
 ployed.' It was, therefore, no question of the release 
 of a captive from * the bandit chief ' [Elizabeth] — the 
 fate of the captive was a very secondary consideration 
 — but the restoration over the realm of England of 
 the intolerable yoke of an Italian prelate claiming 
 more than regal power. To achieve this, the Pope 
 is willing to hire the stiletto or the poison of an 
 assassin who desires to avenge a private quarrel by 
 murder. Comment is useless. 
 
 But even if the case were as Father Knox puts 
 it, I cannot accept his ethics. I will not admit that 
 any Christian, still less one who claims to be the 
 Vicar of Him who bade Peter sheath his sword 
 because He would not save His own precious life by 
 violence, would be justified in hiring an assassin to 
 murder even a * bandit chief ' in order to deliver a 
 captive. 
 
 Now when we remember that there were bands 
 of Seminarists from Eome and Douay and Spain 
 scattered all over England in various disguises, 
 preaching sedition, and teaching that Elizabeth was 
 a usurper and * bandit chief,' outlawed by the Pope, 
 and therefore obnoxious to death by the hand of any 
 one who would thereby do God service, we cannot 
 feel surprise at the natural revolt against all con- 
 
EEFORMATION CAUSES AND RESULTS 93 
 
 nection with the Papacy.^ It was not a theological 
 so much as a political revolt, the uprising of a free 
 nation against the domineering insolence and inter- 
 meddling of a foreign priest in our domestic affairs. 
 Transubstantiation was eventually made a test, but 
 of civil loyalty rather than theological orthodoxy. 
 It was the climax of a struggle that had been going 
 on for centuries, a struggle between the Crown of 
 England and the Tiara of Eome. It is a popular 
 error to suppose that the struggle began with Henry 
 VIII. He inherited it from a long line of pre- 
 decessors. It will suffice to give the following 
 summary of 16 Eichard II. cap. 5 ; and Richard was 
 by no means the first English king who resisted 
 the Pope's encroachments. This early Statute of 
 Praeumunire declares that the Crown of England has 
 been free at all times ; that it has been under no 
 earthly subjection, but immediately subject to God 
 in all things touching the regality of the same Crown, 
 and of none other. That no submission should be 
 made to the Pope, who aimed at the perpetual de- 
 struction of the King, his crown, his regality, and all 
 his realm, which God defend. The Commons, and 
 the Lords spiritual and temporal, pledged themselves 
 to the defence of the liberties of the Church of 
 England and of the Crown as against the pretensions, 
 
 ' The Roman Catholic laity of England in the mass had no 
 sympathy with these Roman intrigues against the liberties of 
 England and the life of the Queen, as their loyal conduct in the 
 crisis of the Spanish Armada proved. As for the clergy, they con- 
 formed to the Elizabethan regime, except about two hundred, till the 
 bull of excommunication forbade them. 
 
94 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 claims, and usurpations of the Pope, with respect 
 to sentences of excommunication, and the Pope's 
 appointment to bishoprics and benefices, or any other 
 interference with the rights and Hberties of the 
 Church of England. And all persons getting any 
 bull from Eome containing any matter whatsoever, 
 or publishing or putting the same in use, were to 
 be judged traitors to the King and Kealm ; and being 
 thereof lawfully indicted and attainted, according to 
 the course of the laws of the Eealm, would suffer 
 pains of death, and to lose and forfeit all their lands, 
 hereditaments, tenements, goods, and chattels, as in 
 cases of high treason, by the laws of this Eealm. 
 
 This internecine struggle between the Papal 
 Power and the Eealm of England — in its ecclesias- 
 tical as well as civil character, be it remembered — 
 reached its crisis in the reign of Elizabeth. We 
 ought, therefore, to expect in that reign, as in all 
 crises, the development of the two antagonistic 
 principles in their most extreme forms. And this is 
 what, in matter of fact, we do find. The Puritan 
 exiles returned soured, embittered, hating all forms 
 and ceremonies, and scorning all authority in 
 Church and State; republicans in poHtics ^ and 
 
 ' Elizabeth's leading courtiers countenanced the Puritans up to 
 the point where they expected to profit, as we shall see further on, 
 from the qualified triumph of Puritanism. On Burleigh's osten- 
 tatiously claiming credit one day for the care with which the 
 courtiers looked after ' the State, ecclesiastical,' Archbishop Parker 
 wrote to tell him privately, ' that he doubted when his Lordship 
 used those words, whether he might have smiled or lamented to 
 think that he would oifer it to their contemplation (who knew so 
 
EEFOEMATION CAUSES AND KESULTS 95 
 
 anarchists in religion. If they had had their way 
 then, they would have anticipated the Common- 
 wealth and abolished both Church and Monarchy. 
 But Elizabeth and her able ministers were too strong 
 for them, and the result was a compromise by which 
 the orthodox rule of doctrine and ritual was laid 
 down, with a minimum of observances to which the, 
 recalcitrants were required to conform, leaving the 
 rest to carry out the maximum. The Puritan 
 clergy roundly accused the Elizabethan bishops of 
 accepting what their consciences condemned for the 
 sake of promotion, and then forcing a detested 
 ritual on their clergy to save their own dignity. 
 One of the ablest spokesmen of the Puritans writes 
 thus some years after Elizabeth's accession : — 
 
 These [the returned exiles] at first began to oppose 
 the ceremonies ; but afterwards, when there was no hope 
 otherwise of obtaining a bishopric, they yielded, and, as 
 one of them openly acknowledged, undertook the office 
 against their consciences. In the meanwhile they 
 comforted their brethren, whom they perceived to be still 
 struggling against these things, by promising them free, 
 liberty in the government of their churches ; and for 
 some years they kept this promise. On the obtaining of 
 which liberty they diligently purified their churches 
 
 well that it was quite otherwise) that were driven quite out of regard.* 
 ' To which I may join,' adds Strype, ' what the same Archbishop said 
 another time to the same Lord : " That how secure soever the 
 nobility were of these Puritans, and countenanced them against the 
 bishops, they themselves might rue it at last. And that all that 
 these men tended towards was to tho overthrow of all honourable 
 quality, and the setting afoot a commonwealth, or, as he called it, a 
 'popularityy ' — Life of Parker, ii. 323. 
 
96 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 from all the blemishes and defilements of Popery. 
 Others who had yielded, incited by their example, began 
 to reform their churches in like manner.* 
 
 Here we see in epitome the process by which 
 the ritual and ceremonial sanctioned by the Orna- 
 ments Knbric were so ruthlessly abolished in the 
 dioceses of the Puritan bishops. It was by no pro- 
 cess of law, but by a gross violation of the law. 
 The leaders of the returned Puritans conformed, for 
 the sake of episcopal preferment, to the minimum 
 of ritual enforced upon them, but silenced the 
 reproaches of their clergy by promising them a free 
 hand in the matter of ritual and ' the government of 
 their churches,' which they immediately proceeded 
 to strip of all legal ornaments— crosses, crucifixes, 
 candlesticks, roodscreens, vestments, and painted 
 windows. The Queen at last interfered to stop the 
 vandalism, giving the Puritan bishops their choice 
 of obedience to the law and enforcing it on the 
 clergy, or the resignation of their sees. They 
 obeyed sullenly ; but much of the mischief was 
 irreparable. The self-regard of the bishops smoothed 
 the path of obedience for them, as one of their 
 Puritan censors takes care to record. * But when 
 the bishops perceived that the number and influence 
 of these parties was increasing among the people, 
 they thought their dignity would come to nought 
 unless they compelled the inferior clergy to adopt 
 the same usages as they did themselves. They took 
 up the matter therefore at the Queen's command. 
 
 • Zurich Letters, ii. 161. 
 
EBFOEMATION CAUSES AND RESULTS 97 
 
 They deprived Samson, a most learned man,' and 
 
 * more than thirty ' other defiant clergy in London.^ 
 
 The spirit of toleration was not known in those 
 days. The party that was up invariably persecuted 
 the party that was down, and there was not much 
 to choose between them. And the clergy, it is 
 lamentable to say, were generally more intolerant 
 than the laity. Cooper, successively Bishop of 
 Lincoln and Winchester, urged on Walsingham the 
 policy of forcing all Eoman Catholics to receive 
 the Sacrament in the Established Church or go to 
 prison. But the statesman rejected the advice of 
 the bishop. On another occasion he proposed to 
 the Privy Council that some two hundred Eoman 
 Catholics, ' lustie men, strong and well able to 
 labour,' should be transported into penal servitude, 
 while the feebler, who remained behind, should be 
 
 * put in some fears, probably by means of the rack.' 
 But the Privy Council was more merciful than 
 their spiritual adviser, who spared neither sex.^ 
 Nor was it Eoman Catholics alone whom the Puritan 
 bishops persecuted. One of them condemned to 
 the stake a Fellow of Corpus Christi, Cambridge, 
 for heterodox opinions on the Trinity and Atone- 
 ment, while another burnt ' a poor half-crazy Arian.' 
 
 And to their intolerance most of them added 
 rapacity in its most odious forms, combined in some 
 cases with simony, alienating for their own use the 
 properties of their sees. One of them, says Mr. 
 
 * Zurich Letters, ii. 161-2. 
 
 » White's Elizabethan Bishops, pp. 60, 190-1, 196. 
 
 H 
 
98 THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 White in his dispassionate and instructive volume, 
 * fleeced rather than fed his flock, and was probably 
 the greatest pluralist that the Protestant Church 
 has ever known. x\t the time of his consecration 
 he held one Archdeaconry and ten other benefices, 
 all of which he held " in commendam." He after- 
 wards added six more, thus making a total of sixteen, 
 nine of which were sinecures. . . . His incomings 
 were unrighteously great, and his outgoings were 
 scandalously small. He entirely neglected hospi- 
 tality and charity ; for the better sort were not 
 entertained at his table, and the wants of the poor 
 went unrelieved. Indeed, he was oblivious of 
 common honesty, for though it was his bounden 
 duty to keep the chancel of his cathedral in repair, 
 his successor, Morgan, found it roofless. He left 
 behind him a large fortune, which he bequeathed to 
 his only daughter.' 
 
 I own that I feel but small respect for zeal 
 against chasubles, or even crucifixes, on the part of 
 prelates of whom such things can be justly written. 
 In truth, none of the Elizabethan bishops inspires 
 admiration, and very few of them respect. Parker 
 was the best of them ; yet even him his successor 
 accuses of gross simony.^ 
 
 The judicial and dispassionate Hallam confirms 
 this view of the character of the Puritan bishops of 
 this reign : — 
 
 The bishops of this reign do not appear, with some 
 distinguished exceptions, to have reflected so much 
 • White's Elizabethan Bishops, pp. 71, 93-4, 160, 190, 196, 209. 
 
EEFOEMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 99 
 
 honour on the Established Church as those who attach 
 a superstitious reverence to the age of the Eeformation 
 are apt to conceive. In the plunder that went forward 
 they took good care of themselves. Charges against 
 them of simony, corruption, covetousness, and especially 
 destruction of their Church estates for the benefit of their 
 families, are very common — sometimes no doubt unjust, 
 but too frequent to be absolutely without foundation. 
 The Council often wrote to them, as well as concerning 
 them, with a sort of asperity which would astonish one 
 of their successors. And the Queen never restrained 
 herself in treating them on any provocation with a good 
 deal of rudeness, of which I have just mentioned an 
 egregious example.* 
 
 And we have similar complaints of leading 
 JReformers in the reign of Edw^ard VI. It is the 
 latitudinarian Burnet w^ho writes as follows : — 
 
 The irregular and immoral lives of many of the 
 professors of the Gospel gave their enemies great advan- 
 tages to say, they ran away from confession, penance, 
 fasting, and prayers, only that they might be under no 
 restraint, but indulge themselves in a licentious and 
 dissolute course of life. By these things, that were but 
 too visible in some of the more eminent among them, the 
 people were much alienated from them : and as much 
 as they were formerly prejudiced against Popery, they 
 grew to have kinder thoughts of it, and to look on all the 
 changes that had been made as designs to enrich some 
 vicious courtiers, and to let in an inundation of vice and 
 wickedness upon the nation. Some of the clergy that 
 promoted the Eeformation were not without very visible 
 blemishes : some indiscretions, both in their marriages 
 and in their behaviour, contributed not a little to raise a 
 ' Hallam's Constitutional History, i. 304. 
 
 H 2 
 
100 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 general aversion. It is true that there were great and 
 shining hghts among them . . . ; but they were few in 
 comparison with the many had} ■ 
 
 Nor were the laity who took a leading part in 
 the Keformation one whit behind the leading divines 
 in the very mundane motives which quickened their 
 zeal for reformation. I appeal again to the judicial 
 Hallam :— 
 
 Nor could the people repose much confidence in the 
 judgment and sincerity of their governors, whom they 
 had seen submitting without outward repugnance to 
 Henry's schemes of religion, and whom they saw every 
 day enriching themselves with the plunder of the Church 
 they affected to reform. There was a sort of endowed 
 colleges or fraternities, called chantries, consisting of 
 secular priests, whose duty was to say daily masses for the 
 founders. They were abolished and given to the King 
 by Acts of Parliament in the last year of Henry and the 
 first of Edward. It was intimated in the preamble of 
 the latter statute that their revenues should be converted 
 to the erection of schools, the augmentation of the 
 universities, and the sustenance of the indigent. But this 
 was entirely neglected, and the estates fell into the 
 hands of the courtiers. Nor did they content themselves 
 with this escheated wealth of the Church. Almost every 
 bishopric was spoiled by their ravenous power in this 
 reign, either through mere alienations, or long leases, or 
 unequal exchanges. Exeter and Llandaff, from being 
 among the richest sees, fell into the class of the poorest. 
 Lichfield lost the chief part of its lands to raise an estate 
 
 * Hist, of the Eef. iii. 378-9. The italics are in the original. 
 The editor dots some of Burnet's i's : e.g. a scandal ' between the 
 Archbishop of York and one Norman, who claimeth the same 
 bishop's wife to be his.' 
 
EEFOEMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 101 
 
 for Lord Paget. London, Winchester, and even Canter- 
 bury, suffered considerably. The Duke of Somerset was 
 much beloved; yet he had given no unjust offence by 
 pulling down some churches in order to erect Somerset 
 House with the materials. He had even projected the 
 demolition of Westminster Abbey ; but the chapter 
 averted this outrageous piece of rapacity, sufficient of 
 itself to characterise that age, by the usual method, a 
 grant of some of their estates. 
 
 Again : — 
 
 I have mentioned in another place how the bishopries 
 were impoverished in the first Eeformation under 
 Edward VI. The Catholic bishops who followed made 
 haste to plunder from a consciousness that the goods 
 of their Church were speedily to pass into the hands of 
 heretics. Hence the alienation of their estates had gone 
 so far that in the beginning of Elizabeth's reign statutes 
 were made, disabling ecclesiastical proprietors from 
 granting away their lands except on leases for three lives, 
 or twenty-one years. But an unfortunate reservation 
 was introduced in favour of the Crown. The Queen, 
 therefore, and her courtiers, continued to prey upon their 
 succulent victim. . . . The documents of that age contain 
 ample proofs of their rapacity. Thus Cecil surrounded 
 his mansion-house at Burleigh with estates once belong- 
 ing to the See of Peterborough. Thus Hatton built his 
 house in Holborn on the Bishop of Ely's garden. 
 
 After giving other examples, including Elizabeth's 
 own custom of keeping bishoprics vacant for years — 
 in one case eighteen years — in order to appropriate 
 the revenues, and in some cases alienate Church 
 property, the impartial historian adds : * These 
 transactions denote the mercenary and rapacious 
 
102 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 spirit which leavened almost all Elizabeth's 
 courtiers.' ^ 
 
 I have already referred to the spirit of bigotry 
 and intolerance v^hich characterised the leading 
 Reformers in Elizabeth's reign, and have given two 
 examples, out of several, of persons burnt at the 
 stake for heterodoxy. The two Primates ^ — the 
 mild Parker, and the somewhat truculent Sandys — 
 clamoured for the death of the Scottish Queen on 
 the sole ground of her being a Eoman Catholic. 
 Sandys, in a letter to Burleigh, urged the Lord 
 Treasurer * furthwith to cutte of the Scottish 
 Queene's head.' Persecution,' says Ilallam, 'is 
 the deadly original sin of the Eeformed Churches ; 
 that which cools every honest man's zeal for their 
 cause in proportion as his reading becomes extensive.' 
 Lutherans, Calvinists, and Anglican Reformers in 
 the reign of Edward YI., he goes on to show, are 
 just as amenable to the accusation as the Roman 
 Catholics whom they denounced. And with less 
 excuse. * In men hardly escaped from a similar 
 peril [like Cranmer], in men who had nothing to 
 plead but the right of private judgment, in men 
 who had defied the prescriptive authority of past ages 
 and of established power, the crime of persecution 
 assumes a far deeper hue, and is capable of far less 
 extenuation, than in a Roman inquisitor.' * Several 
 men indicted for heresy in the reign of Edward VI. 
 
 » Const. Hist. i. 129, 303. « Parker Corresp. p. 398. 
 
 ' Const. Hist. i. 130-2. 
 
EEFORMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 103 
 
 were bidden peremptorily to choose between recanta- 
 tion and death, and a Baptist of the name of Joan 
 Boucher was tried by a commission, of w^hich 
 Cranmer and Eidley were members, and condemned 
 to the stake. The young King, not usually disposed 
 to mercy, was inclined to let her off; but Cranmer 
 insisted on her being burnt, and burnt she was 
 accordingly, Bishop Scory preaching her cremation 
 sermon, while Latimer improved the occasion the 
 following Sunday at St. Paul's by preaching an 
 approving sermon. Some Baptist preachers were 
 also put to death in Elizabeth's reign, and Jewel 
 declares in his ' Apology ' — a book chained, with the 
 Bible, in churches — that ' we not only condemn the 
 old heretics, and pronounce them impious and lost, 
 and detest them to the gates of hell, but even if they 
 anywhere break forth and show themselves, we 
 restrain them severely and seriously with lawful 
 and civil punishments,' the stake included. 
 
 One of the strongest arguments, to my mind, for 
 the Church of England as a Divine institution, is the 
 fact of its surviving the rank and luxuriant crop of 
 tares which mingled with the wheat of the Eefor- 
 mation. The leading men on all sides — Eoman 
 Catholics, Puritans, Anglicans — were for the most 
 part men whose characters inspire no admiration 
 and very little respect. We behold among them all 
 a sad lack of spirituality or nobility of character. 
 Strype gives the following description of the state of 
 England in the year 1572, which is based on a paper 
 of suggestions for reform by Burleigh, whose 
 
104 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 language Strype quotes verbally in the Minister's 
 denunciatory sentences : — 
 
 The state of the Church and religion at this time was 
 but low, and sadly neglected, occasioned in a great measure 
 by these unhappy controversies about the Church's 
 government, and other external matters in religion : which 
 so employed the thoughts and zeal of both clergy and 
 laity, that the better and more substantial parts of it were 
 very little regarded. The Churchmen heaped up many 
 benefices upon themselves, and resided upon none, 
 neglecting their cures ; many of them alienated their 
 lands, made unreasonable leases and wastes of their 
 woods, granted reversions and advowsons to their wives 
 and children, or to others for their use. Churches ran 
 greatly into dilapidations and decays ; and were kept nasty, 
 and filthy, and undecent for God's worship. Among the 
 laity there was little devotion. The Lord's Day greatly 
 profaned and little observed. The common prayers not 
 frequented. Some lived without any service of God at all. 
 Many more were heathens and atheists. The Queen's 
 own court an harbour for epicures and atheists,^ and a kind 
 of lawless place, because it stood in no parish. Which 
 things made good men fear some sad judgments impending 
 over the nation.'-^ 
 
 A sombre picture truly ! and well calculated to 
 warn ourselves against the danger of allowing the 
 essence of religion to escape amid the barren logo- 
 machies which characterise our present controversies, 
 and which are, for the most part, more about words 
 than things. A heavy responsibility surely belongs 
 
 * The italics are in Burleigh's paper, from which Strype quotes 
 the expressions. 
 
 2 Life of Parker, ii. 204. 
 
REFORMATION CAUSES AND RESULTS 105 
 
 to the leaders of the Evangehcal party for decHning 
 to meet representatives of other theological schools 
 in friendly conference, with a view to mutual ex- 
 planations, leading perhaps to a possible concordat. 
 One inference from Burleigh's paper is inevitable, 
 namely, the absolute necessity of a court for eccle- 
 siastical causes, of which the members must have 
 a competent knowledge of the ecclesiastical history 
 of England. If the members of the Judicial Com- 
 mittee in the Purchas and Ridsdale cases had been 
 thus equipped, they would have avoided the absurd 
 paralogisms and historical blunders on which those 
 judgments, as I hope to prove further on, are based. 
 Fancy arguing the illegality of the full ritual sanc- 
 tioned by the Ornaments Rubric from its absence 
 in the deplorable state of desolation described by 
 Burleigh ! When the ecclesiastical fabrics ' ran 
 greatly into dilapidations and decays, and were kept 
 filthy and undecent for God's worship ; ' when ' the 
 Lord's Day was greatly profaned and little observed ; ' 
 when ' the common prayers were not frequented,' 
 and ' some lived without any service of God at all ; ' 
 when the Holy Communion in many places was 
 celebrated only once a quarter, and in not a few 
 places never at all ; is it so wonderful that vestments, 
 some of them valuable spoil, which were used only 
 in the Communion Service, should have generally 
 disappeared in the general ruin? Yet this is the 
 strongest proof of their illegality, if we are to accept 
 the law of the Judicial Committee. Is there a better 
 way of making men lawless than to impose upon 
 
106 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 them as law what they know to be nonsense ? If 
 a law is bad or inexpedient, let it be repealed ; but 
 let it not be perverted in the interest of a party or a 
 policy. Men will more readily obey a law which 
 they detest than a plain perversion of a law to which 
 they vowed allegiance, and which has been twisted 
 against them by being made to mean precisely the 
 reverse of what it says. The former case they may 
 endure as one of oppression. The latter they will 
 regard as an outrage on their intellectual integrity in 
 addition ; and men will endure oppression with more 
 patience than self-stultification. Many a man 
 would rather go to prison than admit that black is 
 white, even at the bidding of the Judicial Committee. 
 But I must reserve for another chapter a full dis- 
 cussion of the miscarriage of justice which lies at 
 the root of all our present troubles. 
 
 The frightful state of irreligion and depravity 
 described by Burleigh, and painted in still blacker 
 colours in some, of the documents published under 
 the auspices of the Kolls Court, ^ caused a reaction 
 against Puritanism in the reign of Elizabeth, which, 
 however, was only partially successful. The leading 
 statesmen of the day saw the danger of the principles 
 and doctrines propagated by the returned exiles from 
 Frankfort and Switzerland. Puritanism was now 
 declared, in solemn State papers, to be as great a 
 
 ' It is stated in one of these documents that not only had many 
 churches ceased to be places of Divine worship, even on Sunday, but 
 that many of them were turned to vile uses on that holy day, the 
 parishioners assembling in them to witness cock-fights. This was 
 the case especially in Lancashire. 
 
EEFOEMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 107 
 
 danger on the one hand as Popery had been on the 
 other. I quote as an example from a letter addressed 
 by Sir Francis Walsingham to 'Monsieur Critoy, 
 Secretary of France.' It is an important document, 
 as the long extract which I subjoin will show, and 
 its importance is increased by the fact, which Mr. 
 Spedding, the accomplished editor of Bacon's works, 
 has proved, namely, that the letter was drawn up by 
 Bacon, who adopted a few suggestions made by 
 Archbishop Whitgift, an active member of the Privy 
 Council. It was sent by Walsingham on behalf of the 
 English Government to the Government of France : — 
 
 I find therefore (writes the English Secretary of State) 
 that her Majesty's proceedings have been grounded upon 
 two principles : — 
 
 1. The one, that consciences are not to be forced, 
 but to be won and reduced by* the force of truth, with the 
 aid of time and the use of all good means of instruction 
 and persuasion. 
 
 2. The other, that the causes of conscience, when 
 they exceed their bounds and grow to be matter of faction, 
 lose their nature ; and that sovereign princes ought 
 distinctly to punish the practice or contempt, though 
 coloured with the pretence of conscience and religion. 
 
 According to these principles, her Majesty at her 
 coming to the crown, utterly disliking the tyranny of 
 Eome, which had used by terror and rigour to seek 
 commandment of men's faiths and consciences, though as 
 a Prince of great wisdom and magnanimity she suffered 
 but the exercise of one religion, yet her proceeding towards 
 the Papists was with great lenity, expecting the good 
 effects which time might work in them. And therefore 
 her Majesty revived not the laws made in the twenty- 
 
108 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 eighth and thirty-fifth year of her father's reign, whereby 
 the oath of allegiance might have been offered at the 
 King's pleasure to any subject, though he kept his con- 
 science never so modestly to himself ; and the refusal to 
 take the same oath without further circumstance was 
 made treason. But contrariwise her Majesty, not liking 
 to make windows into men's hearts and secret thoughts 
 except the abundance of them did overflow into overt 
 and express acts or affirmations, tempered her law 
 so as it restraineth only manifest disobedience, in in- 
 fringing and impeaching advisedly and maliciously her 
 Majesty's Supreme Power, and maintaining and extol- 
 ling a foreign jurisdiction. And as for the oath, it was 
 altered by her Majesty into a more grateful form ; the 
 harshness of the name and appellation of Supreme 
 Head was removed ; ^ and the penalty of the refusal 
 thereof [i.e. of the oath in its modified form] turne(i 
 only into disablement to take any promotion or 
 to exercise any charge ; and yet with liberty of being 
 reinvested therein if any man should accept thereof during 
 his life. But after, when Pius Quintus had excommuni- 
 cated her Majesty, and the Bulls of Excommunication 
 were published in London, whereby her Majesty was in a 
 sort proscribed ; and that therefore as upon a principal 
 motive or preparative followed the rebellion in the North ; 
 yet because the ill , humours of the realm were by that 
 rebellion partly gauged, and that she feared at that time 
 no foreign invasion, and much less the attempt of any 
 within the realm not backed by some potent succour from 
 without, she contented herself to make a law against that 
 special case of bringing in or publishing of any Bulls or 
 
 ' Yet many persons still speak and write of the Sovereign as 
 ♦ Supreme Head of the Church.' The title of ' Head of the Church * 
 has never been borne by any English sovereign since the accession of 
 Elizabeth. 
 
EEFOEMATION CAUSES AND RESULTS 109 
 
 the like instruments ; whereunto was added a prohibition, 
 upon pain not of treason but of an inferior degree of 
 punishment, against the bringing in of Agnus Dei, hallowed 
 beads, and such other merchandise of Rome, as are well 
 known not to be any essential part of the Romish religion, 
 but only to be used in practice as love-tokens to enchant 
 the people's affections from their allegiance to their natural 
 Sovereign.^ In all other points her Majesty continued 
 her former lenity. But when about the twentieth year of 
 her reign she had discovered in the King of Spain an 
 intention to invade her dominions ; and that a principal 
 point of the plot was to prepare a party within the realm 
 that might adhere to this foreigner, and that the Seminaries 
 began to blossom and to send forth daily priests and pro- 
 fessed men [i.e. men belonging to religious orders ; mostly 
 Jesuits], who should by vow taken at shrift reconcile her 
 subjects from their obedience, yea, and bind many of them 
 to attempt against her Majesty's Sacred Person ; and that 
 by the poison which they spread the humours of most 
 Papists were altered, and that they were no more Papists 
 in conscience and of softness, but Papists in faction ; then 
 were there new laws made for the punishment of such as 
 should submit themselves to such reconcilements or re- 
 nunciations of obedience. And because it wa^ a treason 
 carried in the clouds and in wonderful secrecy, and came 
 seldom to light, and there was no presumption thereof so 
 great as the recusance to come to Divine service ; because 
 
 ' This shows the political aspect of many customs and practices 
 of that time, and the prohibition of them proves, as already 
 observed, that the motive causes of the Reformation were political 
 rather than theological. To the unscrupulous machinations of 
 foreign Papists — the name is appropriate here, for the Pope was the 
 fons et origo malorum — and the revolutionary violence and excesses 
 of foreign Protestants, was due the deplorable state to which the 
 Church of England was reduced in the latter half of Elizabeth's 
 reign. 
 
110 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 it was set down by their decrees that to come to church 
 before reconcilement was to live in schism, but to come to 
 church after reconcilement was absolutely heretical and 
 damnable ; therefore there were added new laws contain- 
 ing a punishment pecuniary against such recusants, not to 
 enforce conscience, but to enfeeble and impoverish the 
 means of those to whom it rested indifferent and ambiguous 
 whether they were reconciled or no. And when, notwith- 
 standing all this provision, the poison was dispersed so 
 secretly as that there was no means to stay it but by 
 restraining the merchants that brought it in ; then lastly 
 there was added another law whereby such seditious 
 priests of the new erection were exiled, and those that 
 were at that time within the land shipped over, and so 
 commanded to keep hence upon pain of treason. 
 
 This hath been the proceeding with that sort, though 
 intermingled not only with sundry examples of her 
 Majesty's grace towards such as in her wisdom she knew to 
 be Papists in conscience and not in faction, but also with 
 an ordinary mitigation towards the offenders in the highest 
 degree convicted by law, if they would but protest that in 
 case the realm should be invaded with a foreign army 
 by the Pope's authority for the Catholic cause, as they 
 term it, they would take part with her Majesty and not 
 adhere to her enemies. 
 
 For the other part, which have been offensive to this 
 State, though in another degree ; which named themselves 
 Eeformers, and we commonly call Puritans; this hath 
 been the proceeding towards them. A great while, when 
 they inveighed against such abuses in the Church as 
 pluralities, non-residence, and the like, their zeal was not 
 condemned, only their violence was sometimes censured ; 
 when they refused the use of some ceremonies and rites 
 as superstitions, they were tolerated with much connivency 
 and gentleness; yea, when they called in question the 
 
EEFOEMATION CAUSES AND EESULTS 111 
 
 superiority of bishops, and pretended to bring a democracy ^ 
 into the Church, yet their propositions were heard, con- 
 sidered, and by contrary writings debated and discussed. 
 Yet all this while it was perceived that their course was 
 dangerous and very popular. As because Papistry was 
 odious, therefore it was ever in their mouths that they 
 sought to purge the Church from the relics of Popery ; a 
 thing acceptable to the people, who love ever to run from 
 one extreme to another. Because multitudes of rogues 
 and poverty were an eyesore and dislike to every man, 
 therefore they put it into the people's head that if disci- 
 pline were planted there should be no beggars nor 
 vagabonds ; a thing very plausible. And in like manner 
 they promised the people may [? many] other impossible 
 wonders of their discipline. Besides, they opened the 
 people a way to government by their consistory and pres- 
 bytery: a thing though in consequence no less prejudicial 
 to the liberties of private men than to the sovereignty of 
 princes, yet in the first show very popular. Netherthe- 
 less this (except it were in some few that entered 
 into extreme contempt) was borne with, because they 
 pretended but in dutiful manner to make propositions, 
 and to leave it to the providence of God and the authority 
 of the magistrate. But now of late years, when there 
 issued from them a colony of those that afl&rmed the 
 assent of the magistrate was not to be attended ; when, 
 under pretence of a concession to avoid slanders and 
 imputations, they combined themselves by classes and 
 subscriptions ; when they descended into that vile and 
 base means of defacing the government of the Church by 
 ridiculous pasquils ; when they began to make many 
 subjects in doubt to take an oath, which is one of the 
 fundamental parts of justice in this land and in all 
 places ; when they began both to vaunt of the strength 
 and number of their partisans and followers, and to use 
 
112 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 comminations that their cause would prevail though 
 with uproar and violence ; then it appeared to be no more 
 zeal, no more conscience, but mere faction and division ; 
 and therefore, though the State was compelled to hold 
 somewhat a harder hand to restrain them than before, 
 yet it was with as great moderation as the peace of the 
 Church and State could permit. And therefore, Sir, to 
 conclude, consider uprightly of these matters, and you 
 shall see her Majesty is no temporiser in religion. It is 
 not the success abroad, nor the change of servants here 
 at home, can alter her ; only as the things themselves 
 alter, so she applieth her religious wisdom to methods 
 correspondent unto them; still retaining the two rules 
 before mentioned, in dealing tenderly with consciences 
 and yet in discovering faction from conscience, and 
 softness from singularity.^ 
 
 The date of this luminous survey of the eccle- 
 siastical position in England is not given, but it was 
 certainly after 1588, for the Spanish Armada is 
 mentioned in the historical tone of an event that / 
 had been some time past. The complete discom-/ 
 fiture of that iniquitous invasion destroyed once for 
 all the dreams of the Papal Court that England could 
 be coerced into an acceptance of Papal supremacy, 
 with all its extortions and abuses. The Seminarists, 
 who had been for years engaged in secretly foment- 
 ing sedition among the Eoman Catholics of England, 
 had translated their own hopes into assurances to 
 the Roman Curia that the apparition of the Armada 
 in British waters would be the signal for an insurrec- 
 tion on the part of avowed Eoman Catholics, who 
 
 ' Baonn'8 Works, viii. 98-101. 
 
EEFORMATION CAUSES AND RESULTS 113 
 
 would be joined by a host of crypto-Papists, who 
 were fain to bow in the house of Eimmon till the 
 banner of deliverance appeared in sight. The event 
 falsified these anticipations. There were no crypto- 
 Papists, and Eoman Catholics distinguished them- 
 selves in defence of their country's freedom and 
 rights. 
 
114 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 CHAPTEE IV 
 
 THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 
 
 PoPEEY having thus ceased to be a political danger, 
 the reaction against the violence and excesses of the 
 Puritans naturally increased, and the accession of 
 James gave it a fresh impulse. That astute sovereign, 
 with all his pedantry, was a man of great ability, 
 solid learning — befitting the pupil of George Bu- 
 chanan — and much political sagacity. Equally 
 opposed to the excesses and anarchical doctrines of 
 the Puritans and to the usurpations of the Papacy, 
 he sought out for the highest offices in the Church 
 men remarkable for learning, ability, integrity, and 
 sobriety of character : a policy which was continued 
 by his son and successor,^ and which gave us the 
 
 ' Charles I. had great faults ; but he had great virtues also. He 
 was a munificent patron of art and literature, and did much to 
 elevate the national character in both departments. The purity of 
 his life and the sincerity of his religious profession are beyond 
 dispute. And his love for the Church of England v;as that of a 
 devout Christian, not of a politician who desired to use the Church 
 as an instrument of statecraft. The following letter to Alexander 
 Henderson, written on May 29, 1646, explains his reasons for 
 rejecting a proposal to abolish Episcopacyin England, and bears the 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 115 
 
 great divines of the seventeenth century, who are 
 par excellence the representative theologians of the 
 
 stamp of genuine sincerity. ComiDliance would probably have saved 
 his life and crown : — 
 
 ' No one thing made me more reverence the Eeformation of my 
 Mother, the Church of England, than that it was done — according to 
 the Apostle's defence, Acts xxiv. 18 — neither with multitude nor with 
 tumult, legally and orderly ; and by those whom I conceive to have 
 only the reforming power, which, with many other inducements, 
 made me always confident that the work was very perfect as to 
 essentials ; of which Church government being undoubtedly one, I 
 put no question but that would have been likewise altered if there 
 had been cause ; which opinion of mine was soon turned into more 
 than a confidence, when I perceived that in this particular, as I must 
 say of all the rest, we retained nothing but according as it was 
 deduced from the Apostles to be the constant universal custom of 
 the primitive Church ; and that it was of such consequence as by the 
 alteration of it we should deprive ourselves of a lawful priesthood ; 
 and then how the Sacraments can be duly administered is easy to 
 judge. These are the principal reasons, which make me believe that 
 Bishops are necessary for a Church ; and I think sufficient for me, if 
 I had no more, not to give my consent for their expulsion out of 
 England ; but I have another obligation that to my particular is a 
 no less tie of conscience, which is my Coronation Oath. Now if, as 
 St. Paul saith — Eom. xiv. 23 — he that doubteth is damned if he eat, 
 what can I expect, if I should not only give way knowingly to my 
 people's sinning, but likewise be perjured myself? 
 
 * Now consider, ought I not to keep myself from presumptuous 
 sins? and you know who says, " What doth it profit a man though 
 he should gain the whole world and lose his own soul? " Wherefore 
 my constant maintenance of Episcopacy in England, where there 
 was never any other government [of the Church] since Christianity 
 was in this kingdom, methinks should be rather commended than 
 wondered at.' 
 
 Hallam, the historian, writes : ' No candid reader, I think, can 
 doubt that a serious sense of obligation was predominant in Charles's 
 persevering fidelity to the English Church.' In the same chapter he 
 gives his judgment concerning those who took away his life : — ■ 
 
 ' It was, as we all know, the act of a bold but very small minority, 
 who, having forcibly expelled their colleagues from Parliament, had . 
 
 i 2 
 
116 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Church of England. No church in Christendom, 
 during any period of its history, can exhibit a finer 
 array of great names illustrious for intellectual 
 power, massive learning, and saintliness of character, 
 than the Jacobean and Caroline divines : Andrewes, 
 Barrow, Bull, Bramhall, Beveridge, Hall, Jeremy 
 Taylor, Cosin, Overall, Ken, Ussher, Waterland, 
 Montague, Wilson, Pearson, and the like. And the 
 rank and file of the clergy contained a host of names 
 not inferior to these. Nor will I omit from the list 
 the great name of Laud. No name in history has 
 had less justice done to it. The present and past 
 generation take their opinion of him from Macaulay's 
 brilliant parody, and his opponents in his own 
 generation made him the scapegoat of a bad system 
 of government which was not his own creation. It 
 was a period of transition from absolutism to con- 
 stitutional government, and Laud was unfortunately 
 a great statesman as well as a great ecclesiastic ; 
 Prime Minister as well as Primate. The mingling 
 of the two is not good for either, and Laud the 
 statesman incurred such odium in administering a 
 moribund system of secular government as reacted 
 on the Church of which he became the chief. But 
 
 usurped, under the protection of a military force, that power which 
 all England reckoned illegal. I cannot perceive what there was in 
 the imagined solemnity of this proceeding, in that insolent mockery 
 of the forms of justice, accompanied by all unfairness and inhumanity 
 in its circumstances, which can alleviate the guilt of the transaction ; 
 and if it be alleged that many of the regicides were firmly persuaded 
 in their consciences of the right and duty of condemning the king, 
 we may surely remember that private murderers have often had 
 the same apology.'— History of England, ii. 186, 227, 228. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 117 
 
 he was a great man, and a patron of much that 
 conduced to greatness. He was devoted to his own 
 university, Oxford, and spent much of his time and 
 money to adorn it architecturally and to raise its 
 standard of learning. He not only built the inner 
 quadrangle of his own college, and improved its 
 intellectual equipment by various donations, but he 
 built the convocation-house and Selden's library 
 above, and enriched the public collection of books 
 by the munificent present of 1,300 valuable MSS. 
 in Hebrew, Syriac, Chaldee, Egyptian, and other 
 languages, ancient and modern, procured at great 
 expense. As Bishop of London he found St. Paul's 
 Cathedral in a state of deplorable dila])idation, and 
 he had it restored to great magnificence. 
 
 And when we read of Laud's rigour against some 
 of the Puritan clergy under his jurisdiction, it 
 is fair to recall the description previously quoted 
 from Burleigh of the lawlessness of the Puritans, 
 which continued in some dioceses, notably in that of 
 London, when Laud was promoted to it. Numbers 
 of the clergy defiantly refused to conform to the 
 plainest directions of the Prayer Book. Some of 
 them not only flatly refused to wear the surplice in 
 any part of the service, but showed their contempt 
 for Laud's orders in ways like the following, de- 
 scribed by a contemporary writer : — 
 
 * There was one who wore his surplice upon his 
 heel. He was a kind of half-quarter conformist, and 
 when he came into the reading-pew, where he must 
 put on his whites, he used to hold up one of his legs 
 
118 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 behind him (hke a goose), and, resting it upon his 
 matt, he would hang the surpHce upon his foot, that 
 he might be able to swear he both wore the surplice 
 and bow'd the knee at the name of Jesus.' ^ Another 
 Bishop of this period (Montague) complains of some 
 of his clergy celebrating the Holy Communion ' in a 
 cloak or sleeveless jacquet, or horseman's coat.' If 
 Sir William Harcourt had been Bishop of London 
 instead of Laud, I have a shrewd suspicion that he 
 would have dealt with that ' mutiny of the priests ' 
 in a manner considerably more drastic than Laud's. 
 There was one admirable . feature in Laud's 
 character which has never received recognition, and 
 to which Mr. Gladstone was the first to call my 
 attention. Laud was the first Bishop since the 
 Reformation who exercised liberality and toleration 
 in the distribution of patronage. He promoted, or 
 obtained promotion for, good men who differed from 
 himself on important theological questions — men 
 who would now be called good Evangelicals. So 
 long as they rendered a decent obedience to the 
 Prayer Book and abstained from railing, and showed 
 themselves diligent and devout pastors, he promoted 
 them as readily, as those who were doctrinally in 
 closer agreement with himself. Bishop Hall is one 
 out of many examples. Clarendon sums up the 
 case with terse equity when he says of Laud that 
 * his learning, piety, and virtue have been attained 
 by very few ; and the greatest of his infirmities are 
 common to all, even the best of men.' Clarendon's 
 
 ' I quote the italics and spelling from the original. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 119 
 
 sketch of Laud is fair and discriminatiDg. He was 
 * made Archbishop of Canterbury,' Clarendon says, 
 'without the least condescension to the arts and strata- 
 gems of the Court, and without any other friendship 
 or support than what the splendour of a pious life and 
 his unpolished integrity would reconcile to him ; 
 which was an unskilful measure in a licentious age, 
 and may deceive a good man in the best times that 
 shall succeed.' ' He was always maligned and perse- 
 cuted by those w^ho were of the Calvinian faction, 
 which was then very powerful, and who, according 
 to their usual maxim and practice, call every man 
 they do not love Papist ; and under this senseless 
 appellation they created him many troubles and 
 vexations.' * He intended the discipline of the 
 Church should be felt as well as spoken of, and that 
 it should be applied to the greatest and most splendid 
 transgressors as well as to the punishment of smaller 
 offences and meaner offenders. . . . Persons of 
 honour and great quality, of the Court and of the 
 country, were every day cited into the High Com- 
 mission Court upon the fame of their incontinence, 
 or other scandal in their lives, and were there pro- 
 secuted to their shame and punishment ; and the 
 shame (which they called an insolent triumph upon 
 their degree and quality, and levelling them with 
 the common people) was never forgotten, but watched 
 for revenge.' He also made powerful enemies 
 by resisting, as Commissioner of the Treasury, the 
 enclosure of commons, and every kind of jobbery 
 and corruption over which he could exercise any 
 
120 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 control. He thus united in a common league 
 against himself crowds of enemies who had nothing 
 else in common : Puritans, powerful courtiers, 
 jobbers, peculators, trespassers on the rights of the 
 people. His scorn of respect for persons, when vice 
 was to be exposed or punished, was as rare as it was 
 splendid.^ 
 
 His death was certainly noble. His enemies 
 stooped not only to calumny, but even to deliberate 
 forgery against him. During his three years' im- 
 prisonment he was subject to every kind of indignity 
 and insult. His property was confiscated, and he 
 was fined 20,000^ Every article of comfort was 
 removed from his cell, and even the papers which 
 he had prepared for his defence were rudely torn 
 from him, so that he had to rely on his memory and 
 ready speech when he was put on trial for his life. 
 He bore it all with the uncomplaining heroism of a 
 martyr, and made a speech in self-defence dis- 
 tinguished by courage, manliness, and pathetic 
 eloquence. But no defence could have availed, and 
 he sank in the breakers caused by the collision of the 
 old order and the new. But to Laud more than to 
 any other single man is due, under Providence, 
 the Eeformation settlement of the Church of 
 England on the foundation on which it has rested 
 since 1662. 
 
 It is to the divines of the seventeenth century, 
 therefore, rather than to those of the sixteenth, that 
 we must look as the representative exponents of the 
 
 » See Clarendon's Hist, of the Rcbr.Uwn, i. pp. 116, 159, 166. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 121 
 
 doctrinal position of the Church of England. The 
 returned exiles in Elizabeth's reign have, in fact, 
 left us no theology. They were in constant warfare 
 with the doctrine and ritual prescribed in the Prayer 
 Book, and cannot be regarded at all as representa- 
 tives of the Keformation Settlement. Cranmer and 
 his colleagues were the chief actors in a period of 
 transition, and they shared the unstable equilibrium 
 of their position. To them we owe the Prayer Book 
 substantially as we now possess it. They are the 
 divines to whom the Catholic and the Protestant 
 party have been wont respectively to appeal, and 
 naturally, as I have observed in the beginning of 
 this chapter. Their controversy, as I have just 
 shown, was with the most formidable Power then 
 in Europe — a Power that had France and Spain at 
 its back, and stuck at nothing. They were in 
 rebellion against the supremacy of the Pope, with 
 its long tale of accumulated extortions and abuses : 
 a righteous rebellion, but still a rebellion, and there- 
 fore in need of justification to the multitude. The 
 Eeformers had to make out a case against a system 
 which, with varying fortunes, had the prescription 
 of centuries on its side, and they acted as men in 
 such circumstances are apt to act. Intent on 
 damaging their adversary, they were not always 
 careful to discriminate between the true and the false. 
 * There is,' as Bacon says, ' a superstition in avoid- 
 ing superstition, when men think to do best if they 
 go furthest from the superstition formerly received ; * 
 and Cranmer and his colleagues were not proof 
 
122 THE BEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 against this superstition. In protesting against 
 Koman errors they sometimes trespassed against 
 primitive truth. In doing battle against Kome they 
 courted the dangerous alliance of Geneva ; so that, 
 as Thorndike says, ' the tares of Puritanism were 
 sov^n together with the Keformation.' Cranmer and 
 Ridley use language which makes it possible to quote 
 them on either side ; but what we have to consider 
 is the broad fact that their occasional Zwinglian lan- 
 guage left so little mark on the Prayer Book. Nor 
 IS it safe to conclude that their Zwinglian language 
 connoted to their own minds a Zwinglian sense. 
 It is the custom of all reformers to insist strongly 
 on that side of the truth which has been denied or 
 obscured, and to take the other side for granted. I 
 have in a previous chapter referred to the verbally 
 contradictory statements, coincident with identity 
 of belief, by St. Paul and St. James on the question 
 of justification by faith and works, each appealing 
 to Abraham as an example of justification by faith 
 and works respectively. In like manner when 
 Cranmer or Eidley, for example, denies that the 
 substance of Christ's Humanity is present in the 
 Eucharist, they mean substance in the vulgar, not 
 philosophical sense — substance material, extended, 
 localised. This is evident, for they also affirm a 
 substantial presence. We have a similar ambiguous 
 use of language in the writings of the early Christian 
 Apologists, like Minutius Felix and Arnobius, when 
 engaged in controversy with the heathen ; and they 
 have accordingly been misunderstood, as some 
 
THE TESTIMONY OP ANGLICAN DIVINES 123 
 
 Anglican divines have been, by superficial readers. 
 They affirm, for instance, that the Christians had 
 no altars. Yet we know from Tertullian and others 
 that altars, both name and thing, were undoubtedly 
 used in the worship of Christians at that time. In 
 the same way Minutius Felix says that the Chris- 
 tians had no temples. Yet Christian temples are 
 recognised in the Diocletian edicts, and Eusebius 
 vouches for their existence. The explanation is 
 that, in repudiating temples and altars on behalf of 
 Christianity, Minutius and Arnobius meant such 
 temples and altars as were used in Pagan worship. 
 In fact, all men who are whoUy bent upon a single 
 object must, for the time being, be more or less one- 
 sided. And controversialists are, of all men, likely 
 to be so. For it is the tendency of every dominant 
 system to force those who are in arms against it into 
 the most opposite and jealous attitude, from the appre- 
 hension which they naturally feel lest they should be 
 misrepresented and overborne by its authority on 
 those points in which they approximate towards it. 
 Thus the idolatries of Paganism tended to repress 
 the ritual of the early Church ; and a similar reserve 
 on the subject of the Eucharistic Sacrifice was 
 necessary while the temple was still standing with 
 its bloody sacrifices and carnal associations. 
 
 This natural tendency of controversy should be 
 borne in mind in reading passages from the AngHcan 
 divines. Anything can be proved by skilful quotation, 
 and an author may thus be made to teach the very 
 •opposite of what he has written. The Beformers 
 
124 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 were confronted by a practical system of teaching on 
 the subject of the Eucharist which was in some 
 respects revolting. Take the following from Bishop 
 Jeremy Taylor's treatise on the Eeal Presence : ^ — 
 
 They that deny the spiritual sense, and afi&rm the 
 natural, are to remember that Christ reproved all senses 
 of these words which were not spiritual. And, by the 
 way, let me observe that the expressions of some chief 
 men among the Eomanists are so rude and crass that it 
 will be impossible to excuse them from understanding the 
 words in the sense of the men of Capernaum ; for, as they 
 understood Christ to mean His ' true flesh natural and 
 proper,' so do they ; as they thought Christ intended they 
 should tear Him with their teeth and suck His blood, for 
 which they were offended ; so do these men not only think 
 so, but say so and are not offended.^ 
 
 And then he proceeds to give instances of this 
 gross belief among Eomanists. So Ussher, in his 
 'Ajiswer to a Jesuit,' argues against this gross 
 view of the Eeal Presence, which was then not un- 
 common. He mentions a horrible legend ' of a Eoman 
 matron, who found a piece of the sacramental bread 
 turned into the fashion of a finger, all bloody ; which 
 afterwards, upon the prayers of St. Gregory, was 
 converted into its former shape.' ^ 
 
 Cosin also, in his learned treatise against Tran- 
 substantiation,'^ relates at length some views held 
 and discussed by Eoman divines about the Presence 
 of Christ in the Sacrament which are too repulsively 
 irreverent for quotation. 
 
 » Works, vi. 28. « Pp. 62-4. » Works, iv. 225. * Works-, iv. 225. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OP ANGLICAN DIVINES 125 
 
 It was against these gross conceptions of the 
 Sacrament, and against the imposition of fresh tests 
 of orthodoxy, that the great Ajiglican divines pro- 
 tested. This is the key to many words that look 
 superficially like a denial of the doctrine of the Keal 
 Presence in the utterances of some of the Keformers. 
 Cranmer, for example, at his trial in 1553, ' offered 
 to join issue upon this point, that the order of the 
 Church of England, set out by the authority of the 
 innocent and godly- Prince Edward YI. in his High 
 Court of Parliament, is the same that was used in 
 the Church fifteen hundred years past.' ^ It is im- 
 possible to reconcile this declaration with the opinion 
 that Cranmer was conscious of having introduced 
 any new doctrine of the Eucharist in either of King 
 Edward's Prayer Books, except in the repudiation of 
 Transubstantiation, which was in reality a new 
 doctrine, not a trace of it existing in any early 
 Liturgy, including the Koman. 
 
 The question, however, as far as my argument is 
 concerned, is not what the leaders of the Bef ormation 
 in the sixteenth century believed on the subject of 
 the Eucharist, but what they intended to impose as 
 a test of communion on others ; and my study of the 
 literature of that period has left no doubt on my 
 mind that at no period in the reigns of Edward VI. 
 and Elizabeth would belief even in Transubstantia- 
 tion have disqualified a clergyman for office in the 
 Church of England, provided he accepted the Eoyal 
 Supremacy and was careful not to impose his belief 
 
 See Jeremy Taylor's Works, v. 238, Eden's edition. 
 
126 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 on others. The line those divines took was that, in- 
 asmuch as the Sacramental Presence was involved 
 in mystery, a man should be at liberty to explain it 
 to his own mind in any way, apart from gross 
 materialism, which he found most helpful, but he 
 was not to impose his terminology on others. The 
 rulers of the nation in Church and State, 'not liking,' 
 as Secretary Walsingham's State paper already 
 quoted puts it, ' to make windows into men's hearts 
 and secret thoughts,' would have gladly allowed a 
 large and generous toleration if the Papal policy had 
 not forced them to impose tests, but for political 
 rather than theological reasons. On the accession of 
 Elizabeth the vast majority of the parish priests 
 throughout England submitted to the new regime 
 and retained their cures. ' Of nine thousand benefices 
 thus named in England,' says Echard,^ ' fourteen 
 bishops, six abbots, twelve deans, twelve archdeacons, 
 fifteen heads of colleges, fifty prebendaries, and eighty 
 rectors, was the whole number of those that were 
 deprived.' Camden increases that total a little, and 
 the latest student of the question says that, on the 
 most liberal reckoning, 'the number of clergymen 
 deprived for Papal sympathies between 1558 and 
 1564 ' ' cannot have greatly exceeded two hundred.' ^ 
 That is to say, of all the clergy in England on the 
 accession of Elizabeth, probably at least ten thousand, 
 all conformed with the exception of about two 
 
 * Hist of Engl. vol. i. bk. iii. p. 330. 
 
 ^ The Elizabethan Clergy and Settlement of Religion, by Henry 
 Gee, B.D., F.S.A. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OP ANGLICAN DIVINES 127 
 
 hundred. This is a remarkable and significant fact 
 on the one side. On the other is the well-known 
 anxiety of the Queen to make as few changes as 
 possible, either in the substance or garb of religion. 
 There can be no doubt that a large majority of the 
 clergy who conformed did believe in Transubstantia- 
 tion, and observed unmolested the accustomed ritual. 
 And this went on till the issue of the Bull of ex- 
 communication, and the consequent plots against 
 the Queen's realm and life. But we are left in no 
 doubt as to the general attitude of the men who had 
 to do with the piloting of the ship of the Reformation 
 through the breakers. Edward VI. was more in- 
 clined than Elizabeth to move in the direction of the 
 foreign Reformers. Yet in the year 1550 the Council 
 of Edward VI., with the sanction of the Primate and 
 Episcopate, recognised and continued to the Roman 
 Catholic Bishop of Coutances his jurisdiction as Ordi- 
 nary over the islands of Jersey and Guernsey, though 
 Papal Supremacy had been abolished there and the 
 reformed Liturgy was in use.* The Bishop of Cou- 
 tances accepted the reformed Liturgy for that part 
 of his ancient diocese, and continued to govern it 
 formally till the eighth year of Elizabeth, when the 
 intrigues of the Papal faction, followed by the Bull 
 of excommunication, severed the Channel Islands 
 from the See of Coutances. To that arrogant exhi- 
 
 * Imagine the indignation of the Protestants who lately demon- 
 strated at the Albert Hall if such a thing were to happen now ! It is 
 a great pity that the history of the English Reformation is so little 
 known bv those who arc most loud in protesting their loyalty to it. 
 
128 THE EBFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 bition of intolerable insolence is due no small share 
 of our troubles in Church and State ever since. The 
 Bishop of Coutances remonstrated against what he 
 regarded as arbitrary injustice, and offered, on con- 
 dition of his jurisdiction being allowed, to give in- 
 stitution to such priests as the Queen might nominate 
 from Oxford and Cambridge, waiving the right of pre- 
 sentation enjoyed by certain abbots in Normandy.^ 
 
 This interesting incident proves two things : first, 
 that there was no question then on the part of Eome 
 as to the validity of Anglican orders ; secondly, that 
 belief in Transubstantiation, so long as it was not 
 enforced on others, was no disqualification for office 
 in the Church of England until the violent action of 
 the Pope compelled the English Government to 
 treat Roman Catholicism as treason. It is true that 
 the doctrine of Transubstantiation is condemned in 
 one of the Thirty-nine Articles as ' repugnant to the 
 plain words of Scripture, overthrowing the nature of 
 a sacrament,' and a doctrine that ' hath given occasion 
 to many superstitions.' That is undoubtedly true. 
 In their attempts to explain the term * Transub- 
 stantiation ' Eoman writers have involved themselves 
 in a maze of contradictions which no ingenuity can 
 reconcile. The doctrine was established in the fourth 
 Council of the Lateran by Innocent III., and its final 
 authoritative explanation is given in the Catechism 
 of the Council of Trent. There it is explicitly laid 
 down that ' in this Sacrament there is no substance 
 in which the accidents of bread and wine can inhere.' 
 
 » Falle's Hist, of Jersey, p. 337. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 129 
 
 ' The species of bread and wine in this sacrament 
 exists without any underlying substance.' After 
 consecration ' there is no longer the substance of 
 bread or wine, since these accidents cannot inhere 
 in the body and blood of Christ.' * It follows that, 
 in a manner altogether above the order of creation, 
 they subsist of themselves sustained by no substance.' 
 And then follows the bold declaration that ' this has 
 been the perpetual and constant doctrine of the 
 Catholic Church.' ' 
 
 One hardly knows how to deal with an assertion 
 which it is as impossible to reconcile with philo- 
 sophy as with reason and history. Accidents from 
 which the substance has departed ; which ' cannot 
 inhere in the Body and Blood of Christ ; ' and which 
 * subsist of themselves unsustained by any substance,' 
 are simply unthinkable. It is a doctrine which does 
 not transcend reason like the mysteries of faith, but 
 flatly contradicts it. 
 
 But now let us turn to the Pope (Innocent III.) 
 who made Transubstantiation an article of faith. 
 He teaches that after consecration not the accidents 
 only remain, but also the natural properties of 
 bread, sufficing to appease hunger and nourish him 
 who eats the Sacrament ; so also the consecrated 
 wine quenches the thirst of him who takes the 
 chalice. And to these qualities of the bread and 
 wine which remain after consecration he gives the 
 
 ' ' Tertium restat, quod in hoc sacramento maximum atque 
 admirabile videatur quod quidem, jam duobus aliis explicatis, facilius 
 
 K 
 
J 30 THE iREFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 scholastic names of ' paneity ' and * vineity.' ^ But a 
 quality which can be seen, felt, tasted, and is capable 
 of quenching hunger and thirst, and of being assimi- 
 lated into the human body, supplies all the tests 
 by which we verify substance. It will be observed, 
 moreover, that the doctrine of Innocent III. is here 
 in direct contradiction to the doctrine of the Cate- 
 chism of Trent. An awkward fact for believers in 
 Papal Infallibility. 
 
 Those who have read the history of the Council 
 of Trent will remember the hot contests that went 
 on between the Franciscans and the Dominicans as 
 to the mode in which Transubstantiation took place, 
 and how it taxed all the subtlety of Cardinal 
 Palavicino to reconcile the two views in his explana- 
 tion of the Tridentine definition. Christ, he says, is 
 not present in the Sacrament as water in a vessel, 
 but as a part is present in the whole ; ^ not a very 
 illuminating explanation. 
 
 a pastoribus tractari posse existimandum est ; panis videlicet et vini 
 species in hoc sacramento sine aliqua re subjecta constare. Nam 
 quum antea demonstratum sit, corpus Domini et sanguinem vere in 
 sacramento esse, ita ut amplius nulla subsit panis et vini substantia, 
 quoniam ea accidentia Christi corpori et sanguini inhgerere non possunt : 
 relinquitur, ut super omnem naturfe ordinem ipsa se, nulla alia re 
 nisa, sustentent. Haec perpetua et constans fuit Catholicss ecclesiee 
 doctrina, quaj etiam facile eorum testimoniorum auctoritate confir- 
 mari poterit, quibus antea planum factum est, nullam residere in 
 Eucharistia panis aut vini substantiam.' — Catech. ex decreto Concilii 
 Trid. adParochos,De Sacramento Eucharistice, Quaest. xliii. pt. ii. c. vi. 
 
 ^ Innoc. III. De Myst. Miss. 1. 4, c. 7. Cf. Basnage's Histoirede 
 VEglise, torn. ii. p. 1623. 
 
 2 Istoria del Co7icil. di Trento, 1. 12, c. 7, p. 988. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 131 
 
 I have already referred to the gross superstitions 
 which grew out of the doctrine of Transubstantia- 
 tion, and if the reader wishes to see additional illus- 
 trations of these ghastly profanities, he will find 
 several in the work of a sober and learned Roman 
 Catholic divine, Dr. Rock's * Church of Our Fathers.' ^ 
 
 Assuredly our Church is more than justified in 
 saying that the Tridentine doctrine of Transub- 
 stantiation *is repugnant to the plain words of 
 Scripture, overthroweth the nature of a sacrament, 
 and hath given occasion to many superstitions.' 
 The voluminous and fierce discussions which it has 
 caused cannot be read without pain and shrinking 
 by any reverent mind. As if a Divine gift offered to 
 our faith and love by the Saviour of mankind were 
 intended as an exercise in intellectual gymnastics ! 
 
 But the real leaders and guides of the Reforma- 
 tion settlement under Elizabeth, with true charity, 
 avoided on their side the fatal error made by the 
 Church of Rome. So long as Transubstantiation 
 was held as a mere opinion of the schools, and the 
 term was not obtruded on others, they * did not like ' 
 — to quote again the striking phrase in the Bacon- 
 Walsingham State paper — *to make windows into 
 men's hearts and secret thoughts, except the 
 abundance of them did overflow into overt and 
 express acts or affirmations.' In harmony with this 
 policy the Convocation which revised the Thirty- 
 nine Articles in 1562 allowed some members, who 
 hesitated about some of them, to subscribe them in 
 * Vol. i. c. i. § viii. 
 
132 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 their own sense.^ They acted on the view after- 
 wards formulated by the Carohne divines, that the 
 Articles were not so much articles of faith as 
 * articles of religion,' or of * peace ; ' ^ not a creed, 
 but a concordat, affording a basis of intercom- 
 munion for persons to whose minds divine truth 
 presented itself under different forms and aspects. 
 For, indeed, different minds are not capable of 
 receiving the very same image of the truth, and our 
 varying representations of what we behold are thus 
 often due to differences in the mental construction of 
 individuals, or to separate environment or habitude. 
 The image of the truth is inevitably coloured by 
 that of the mind which receives it. We should 
 therefore have patience with each other, and not 
 too hastily conclude that those who may differ from 
 us in their language must necessarily differ from us 
 also in ideas which language can never adequately 
 clothe. That the Thirty-nine Articles are not 
 dogmas of faith is evident from the fact that they 
 are not binding on the laity, or, indeed, on the 
 clergy either, except as conditions of office. 
 
 I will now give a few extracts from some of the 
 Caroline divines to show the position which they 
 held in the Eoman controversy of their day, especially 
 as regards the Eucharist. And I will begin with 
 Archbishop Bramhall, whose office as an Irish 
 prelate would naturally dispose him to take up an 
 antagonistic attitude towards Eome. Yet, as a 
 
 » Heylin's Hist. p. 159 
 
 2 Biamhall's Works, ii 476, 693. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 133 
 
 matter of fact, we find this eminent Anglican divine, 
 a man of great moderation, and by no means 
 extreme in his theology, writing in a strain which 
 would have exposed him to the fierce and scornful 
 invective of Sir William Harcourt, if that distin- 
 guished controversialist had lived in those days. 
 The reaction against the violence and bigotry of 
 Puritanism on the one hand, and the insufferable 
 pretensions and intrigues of Rome on the other, had 
 the effect of causing a rapprochement between 
 moderate Anglicans and moderate Roman Catholics, 
 and disposed them to look for points of agreement 
 rather than of difference. In an interesting des- 
 patch to his Government on that subject the 
 Venetian Ambassador in London writes : — 
 
 In sum, they [Anglicans] believe all that is taught by 
 the Church, but not by the Court, of Eome. . . . Both 
 the Archbishop and the Bishop of Chichester had often 
 said that there were but two sorts of persons likely to im- 
 peach and hinder reconciliation, to wit, the Puritans 
 among the Protestants, and Jesuits among Catholics.^ 
 
 Heylin bears similar testimony.^ *It was the 
 petulancy of the Puritans on the one side,' he says, 
 *and the pragmaticalness of the Jesuits on the 
 other, which made the breach ' so difficult to heal. 
 * And had those hot spirits on both sides been 
 calmed aw^hile, moderate men might possibly have 
 
 * Somers's Tracts^ third collection, vol. i. pp. 388-9. 
 - L'lfe of Laud, p. 413. 
 
134 TEE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 agreed upon such equal terms as would have laid a 
 sure foundation for the peace of Christendom.* 
 
 Thorndike was one of the most learned men of 
 the seventeenth century, not only as a divine, but as 
 a man of letters and Oriental scholarship. His 
 writings were so moderate that the Puritans re- 
 joiced in his nomination as a member of the Savoy 
 Conference. His influence and great learning made 
 themselves felt later in the last revision of the 
 Prayer Book. Everybody who knows anything 
 about the subject would now recognise him as one 
 of the most eminent of that ' historic High Church 
 School,' to which even Sir William Harcourt con- 
 cedes a legitimate place in the Church of England. 
 Thorndike's general position may be gathered from 
 the following quotations : — 
 
 Though I sincerely blame the imposing of new articles 
 upon the faith of Christians, and that of positions which 
 I maintain not to be true ; yet I must and do freely 
 profess that I find no position necessary to salvation 
 prohibited, none destructive to salvation enjoined to be 
 believed by it [i.e. Eoman Church]. And therefore 
 must I necessarily accept it for a true Church ; as in the 
 Church of England I have always known it accepted : 
 seeing there can no question be made, that it continueth 
 the same visible body by the succession of pastors and 
 laws (the present customs in force being visibly the cor- 
 ruption of those which the Church had from the begin- 
 ning), that first was founded upon the Apostles. For the 
 idolatries — which I grant to be possible, though not 
 necessary to be found in it, by the ignorance and carnal 
 affections of particulars, not by command of the Church 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 135 
 
 or the laws of it, — I do not admit to destroy the salvation 
 of those who, living in the communion thereof, are not 
 guilty of the like. 
 
 But while allowing all this, Thorndike goes on to 
 say that although the Church of Kome holds ' all 
 that truth which it is necessary to the salvation of 
 all Christians to believe either in point of faith 
 or manners/ yet it is ' very much darkened, indeed, 
 by enhancing of positions, either of doubtful sense, 
 or absolutely false, to the rank and degree of matters 
 of faith ; but much more overwhelmed and choked 
 with a deal of rubbish, opinions, traditions, customs, 
 and ceremonies.' He also condemns * the half -sacra- 
 ment,' Papal supremacy, the abuses arising out of 
 the invocation of Saints, private masses and indul- 
 gences, and ' the Romish doctrine of Purgatory.' ^ 
 Union of Rome on those conditions he regards as 
 hopeless. 
 
 Bramhall takes the same line. Baxter having 
 accused him of leaning towards Rome, Bramhall 
 published a reply from which I quote the following : — 
 
 I will confess that freely which Mr. Baxter neither 
 doth know nor could know but by me, that when my 
 body was stronger and my wits fresher, when I had some 
 books and notes of my own, and could have had what 
 supply I had desired, and opportunity to confer with 
 whomsoever I pleased. I had then a design indeed to do 
 my weak endeavour to disabuse the Christian world by the 
 right stating and distinguishing of controversies between 
 the Church of Eome and us, and to show, 
 
 * Epilogue, Works, vol. iv. pt. ii. pp. 916-7., 
 
136 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 First, how many of them are mere logomachies, or 
 contentions about words without any just grounds. 
 
 Secondly, how many of them are scholastic subtleties, 
 whereof ordinary Christians are not capable, and conse- 
 quently no points of faith. 
 
 Thirdly, how many of them are not the controversies 
 of the Churches, but of particular persons or parties in 
 those Churches. 
 
 Fourthly, how many of our controversies are about 
 rites and' ceremonies, and things indifferent in their own 
 nature. 
 
 When all these empty names and titles of contro- 
 versies are wiped out of the roll, the true controversies 
 between us may be quickly mustered, and will not be 
 found, upon a serious inquiry, to be so irreconcilable as 
 some persons have imagined. The two dangerous ex- 
 tremes are, to clip away something from saving truth, 
 whereof I do not find the Church of Eome to have been 
 guilty; and to obtrude erroneous or probable opinions 
 for articles of faith, whereof I find mmvij in the Church of 
 Eome to have been most guilty. 
 
 These were my thoughts in my younger days, which 
 age and experience hath rather confirmed and radicated 
 in me than altered.* 
 
 Elsewhere he emphasises the distinction drawn 
 by the Venetian Ambassador between ' the Court of 
 Rome ' and ' the Church of Rome.' His Roman 
 Catholic opponent had urged that *it was not the 
 Roman religion, nor any public tenet in their Church, 
 that binds any to those rigorous assertions which 
 the Protestants condemn.' 'I know it is not their 
 " religion," ' Bramhall replies : ' our religion and 
 
 ' Works, iii. 539. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 137 
 
 theirs is the same. I know it is not the general 
 tenet of their Church. But it is the tenet of the 
 Court of Eome and the governing party amongst 
 them.' ^ And thus he too, Hke Thorndike, was forced 
 to own that the governing and dominant party in 
 the Church of Eome, while it held power, made 
 union impossible. The prospect is much more 
 remote now, for ' the governing party amongst them ' 
 — the ' insolent and aggressive faction,' as Newman 
 called it in 1870 — has captured the whole Koman 
 Church and revolutionised its constitution and its 
 creed. 
 
 The longing for the reunion of Christendom, 
 arising from a general sense of the manifold evils of 
 separation, influenced the best minds even among 
 the Puritans. Baxter himself lived to modify the 
 opinions which Bramhall felt obliged to combat. 
 The following passage, ' faithfully published from 
 his own MSS. by Matthew Silvester, 1696,' ^ illus- 
 trates this change : — 
 
 My censures of the Papists do much differ from what 
 they were at first. I then thought that their errors in the 
 doctrines of faith were their most dangerous mistakes. 
 But now I am assured that those misexpressions and mis- 
 understandings of us, with our mistakings of them, and 
 inconvenient expressing of their own opinions, have made 
 the difference in most points appear much greater than it 
 is. But the great and unreconcilable differences lie in 
 their Church tyranny; in the usurpations of their hierarchy 
 and priesthood, under the name of spiritual authority 
 exercising a temporal lordship ; in their corruptions and 
 ' Vol. ii. p. 317. - Baxter's Life, pt. i. p. 131. 
 
138 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 abasement of God's worship ; but, above all, in their 
 systematic befriending of ignorance and vice. . . . And I 
 can never believe that a man may not be saved by that 
 religion which doth but bring him to the true love of God 
 and to a heavenly mind and life ; nor that God will ever 
 cast a soul into hell that truly loveth Him. Also at first 
 it would disgrace any doctrine with me if I did but hear 
 it called Popery and anti- Christian ; but I have long 
 learned to be more impartial, and to know that Satan can 
 use even the names of Popery and anti-Christ to bring a 
 truth into suspicion and discredit. 
 
 This is in substance the line which the Caroline 
 divines take. What they called ' the usurpations of 
 the Court,' as distinguished from * the Church, of 
 Borne,' Baxter calls ' the usurpations of their hierarchy 
 and priesthood, under the name of spiritual authority 
 exercising temporal power.' And we have much 
 need just now to take to heart Baxter's warning, 
 that ' Satan can use even the names of Popery and 
 Antichrist to bring a truth into suspicion sifid dis- 
 credit.' 
 
 A few more quotations from Bramhall, who is 
 generally recognised as a divine of moderate views and 
 great learning, will help to show the tone towards the 
 Church of Eome as distinguished from the Curia, 
 which was then prevalent in England. 
 
 The Eoman Catholic Bishop of Chalcedon, 
 writing against Bramhall, says : ' The Church of 
 Eome is not homogeneal with the Protestant Church.' 
 Bramhall replies : — 
 
 This is true qua tales,, as they are Eoman and Protea- 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 139 
 
 taut. The Eoman Church is not a Protestant Church, 
 nor the Protestant Church a Eoman Church. Yet hoth 
 the one and the other may be homogeneous members of 
 the CathoUc Church. Their difference in essentials is 
 but imaginary.^ 
 
 Again : — 
 
 A great many of those controversies which raised the 
 highest animosities among Christians at the first Eeforma- 
 tion are laid aside already by moderate and judicious 
 persons of both parties, without any miracle, and are only 
 kept on foot by some blunderers, who follow the old 
 mode when the fashion is grown out of date, either out of 
 prejudice, or pride, or want of judgment, or all together. 
 And as many controversies of the greatest magnitude 
 are already as good as reconciled, so more may be. 
 
 It was not the erroneous opinions of the Church of 
 Eome,butthe obtruding them by laws upon other Churches, 
 which warranted separation. ^ 
 
 Speaking elsewhere of these erroneous opinions, he 
 
 says : — 
 
 I do profess to all the world, that the transformation 
 of indifferent opinions into necessary articles of faith 
 hath been that * insana laurus,' or cursed bay- tree, the 
 cause of all our brawling and contention. 
 
 So much as to the opinion of the Caroline divines 
 with regard to our differences with Eome in general. 
 And when they came to discuss in particular the 
 subject of the Eucharist they declared, one and all, 
 that their differences with Eome were entirely re- 
 
 ' Works, ii. 86. « See vol. iii. pp. 552, 571-2. 
 
140 THE KEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 specting the mode, not the fact, of the Eeal Presence. 
 They allow the substantia, but object to a con or a 
 trans. ' The disagreement is only de modoprcBsenticB,' 
 say Bishops Montague and Bilson. * All the con- 
 troversy is about the mode,' says Bishop Andrewes. 
 ' The question is not concerning a Keal Presence,' 
 says Bishop Morton, ' which Protestants do also 
 profess.' ' I cannot see,' says Cosin, ^ ' where there is 
 any real difference betwixt us [and the Church of 
 Eome] about this Real Presence if we would give 
 over the study of contradiction and understand one 
 another aright. Maldonatus, *' De Sacr.," p. 143, after 
 a long examination of the matter, concludes thus at 
 last with us all.' And he adds: * And so have I heard 
 my Lord Overall [the author of the sacramental part 
 of the Church Catechism] preach it a hundred times.' 
 And with regard to the opinion that the Body of 
 Christ is present * only in the use of the Sacrament 
 and in the act of eating, and not otherwise,' he says : 
 * They that hold the affirmative, as the Lutherans 
 and all Calvinists do, seem to me to depart from all 
 antiquity, which place the Presence of Christ in the 
 virtue of the words of consecration and benediction 
 by the priest, and not in the use of eating the Sacra- 
 ment ; for they tell us that the virtue of that 
 consecration is not lost though the Sacrament be 
 either reserved for sick persons or other.' And, 
 although he condemns the abuse of solitary masses, 
 yet he gives it as his opinion that * better were it to 
 endure the absence of the people than for the 
 
 ' Notes on the Book of Common Prayer, first series, pp. 131, 155. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 141 
 
 minister to neglect the usual and daily Sacrifice of 
 the Church, by which all people, whether they be 
 there or no, reap so much benefit. And this was the 
 opinion of my lord and master Dr. Overall.' ^ 
 
 Bramhall says : * Abate us Transubstantiation and 
 those things which are consequent on this determina- 
 tion of the manner of the Presence, and we have no 
 difference with them on this particular.' He thinks 
 there is * no difference between the Churches if 
 rightly understood,' ^ and he adds that his own view 
 
 » Notes, p. 127. 
 
 * Vol. ii. p. 211, iii. p. 165. It is interesting to note what a very 
 able and candid outsider thinks on this subject. Dr. Martineau 
 writes as follows in his Slicdies of Christianity (pp. 61-2) : — 
 
 • The office of Communion contains even stronger marks of the 
 same sacerdotal superstitions ; and, notwithstanding the Protestant 
 horror entertained of the Mass, approaches it so nearly that no 
 ingenuity can exhibit them in contrast. Near doctrines, however, 
 like near neighbours, are knowxi to quarrel most. 
 
 ' The idea of a physical sanctity, residing in solid and liquid 
 substances, is encouraged by this service. The priest consecrates the 
 elements by laying his hand upon all the bread, and upon every 
 fiagon containing the wine about to be dispensed. If an additional 
 quantity is required, this, too, must be consecrated before its distri- 
 bution. And the sacredness thus imparted is represented as surviv- 
 ing the Celebration of the Supper, and residing in the substances as 
 a permanent quality ; for in the disposal of the bread and wine 
 that may remain at the close of the sacramental feast, a distinction 
 IS made between the consecrated and the unconsecrated portion of 
 the elements ; the former is not permitted to quit the altar, but is to 
 be reverently consumed by the priest and the communicants ; the 
 latter is given to the curate. What the particular change may be, 
 which the prayer and manipulation of the minister are thought 
 to induce, it is by no means easy to determine ; nor would the dis- 
 covery, perhaps, reward our pains. It is certainly conceived that 
 they cease to be any longer mere bread and wine, and that with 
 them thenceforth co-exist, really and substantially, the body and 
 
M2 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of the Eucharistic Sacrifice is in substantial agree- 
 ment with Bellarmine's. His words are : — 
 
 The Holy Eucharist is a commemoration, an applica- 
 tion of the all-sufficient propitiatory Sacrifice of the Cross. 
 If his [Bishop of Chalcedon's] Sacrifice of the Mass have 
 any other propitiatory power or virtue in it than to com- 
 memorate, represent, and apply the merit of the Sacrifice 
 of the Cross, let him speak plainly what it is. Bellarmine 
 knew no more of the Sacrifice than we.^ 
 
 And he goes on to quote Bellarmine in proof of 
 his assertion. He calls the Eucharistic Sacrifice 
 
 * commemorative,' 'representative,' * impetrative,' 
 
 * applicative ; ' but denies and challenges any Eoman 
 Catholic to show * that it is a Suppletory Sacrifice, to 
 supply the defects of the Sacrifice of the Cross.' 
 
 While he strongly insists, in another place, and 
 in common with the whole Church during the first 
 six centuries of Christianity, on the reality of a 
 
 blood of Christ. Eespecting this "Keal Presence" with the elements, 
 there is no dispute between the Eomish and the English Church ; 
 both unequivocally maintain it, and the only question is, respecting 
 the " Eeal Absence " of the original and culinary bread and wine. . . . 
 The catechism of our Church affirms that " the body and blood of 
 Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in 
 the Lord's Supper." And this was not intended to be figuratively 
 understood, of the spiritual use and appropriation to which the fai^h 
 and piety of the receiver would mentally convert the elements ; for 
 although here the body of Christ is only said to be "taken" (making 
 it the act of the communicant), yet one of the Articles speaks of 
 it as " given " (making it the act of the officiating priest), and 
 implying the real presence before participation. However anxious, 
 indeed, the clergy of the " Evangelical " school may be to disguise 
 the fact, it cannot be doubted that their Church has always main- 
 tained a supernatural change in the elements themselves, as well as 
 in the mind of the receiver.' ' Vol. ii. p. 88. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES U3 
 
 representative and applicative Sacrifice in the 
 Eucharist, he is careful to add : ' But for any 
 Sacrifice that is meritorious or propitiatory, by its 
 own pov^er or virtue, distinct from the Sacrifice of 
 Christ, I hope the author v^ill not say it. If he does 
 he v^ill have few partners,' even in the Eoman 
 Church. And he calls the difference between the 
 Churches of Eome and England on this question 
 * a show of empty names to no purpose.' ^ 
 
 And in reply to the Romanist objection to 
 Anglican orders — revived recently — that the Anglican 
 clergy do not receive the power of offering Sacrifice 
 at their ordination, Bramhall says : — 
 
 First they [i.e. Anglicans] acknowledge spiritual and 
 eucharistical sacrifices, as prayers, praises, a contrite heart, 
 alms, and the like. Secondly, they acknowledge a com- 
 memoration, or a representative Sacrifice, in the Holy 
 Eucharist. Thirdly, they teach that this is not a * nuda 
 commemoratio ' — ' a bare commemoration' without efficacy, 
 but that the blessed Sacrament is a means ordained by 
 Christ to render us capable, and to apply unto us the 
 virtue, of that all-sufficient Sacrifice of infinite value, 
 which Christ made upon the Cross ; which is as far as 
 the moderate Eomanists dare go in distinct and particular 
 expressions. But the Protestants dare not say that the Holy 
 Eucharist is a Sacrifice propitiatory in itself, by its own 
 proper virtue and expiatory efficacy. Whatsoever power 
 it hath is in relation to the Sacrifice of Christ, as a means 
 ordained to apply that to true believers. In sum, the 
 essence of the Eoman Sacrifice doth consist, according to 
 the doctrine of their own schools, either in the consecra- 
 
 ' Vol. V. p. 188. 
 
144 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 tion alone, or in the manducation alone, or both in the 
 consecration and participation; but not at all either in 
 the oblation or in the fraction or mixtion. Seeing there- 
 fore the Protestants do retain both the consecration 
 and consumption or communication, without all contra- 
 diction, under the name of a Sacrament, they have the 
 very thing which the Eomanists call a Sacrifice. How is 
 the world amused with a show of empty names to no 
 purpose ! * 
 
 On the question of Eucharistical adoration 
 Bramhall is equally clear and explicit. Keplying to 
 the titular Roman Catholic Bishop of Chalcedon, he 
 says : — 
 
 In the places alleged by him I do not charge the 
 Church of Eome with idolatry. In the one place I speak 
 of the adoration of the Sacrament as an abuse, but not 
 one word of idolatry. In the other place I speak of 
 the peril of idolatry, but not one word of the adoration 
 of the Sacrament. ... * The Sacrament is to be adored,', 
 said the Council of Trent : that is, ' formally the Body 
 and Blood of Christ,' say some of your authors ; we say 
 the same. * The Sacrament is to be adored,' that isi 
 ' the species of bread and wine,' say others ; that we 
 deny, and esteem it to be idolatry. Should we charge the 
 whole Church with idolatry for the error of a party ? ^ 
 
 Again : — 
 
 We deny not a venerable respect unto the consecrated 
 Elements, not only as love-tokens sent us by our best 
 Friend, but as the instruments ordained by our Saviour 
 to convey to us the Merits of His Passion. But for the 
 Person of Christ, God forbid that we should deny Him 
 Divine honour at any time, and especially in the use of 
 ' Ibid. p. 221. - Vol. ii. pp. 86-7. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 145 
 
 this Holy Sacrament. We believe with St. Austin, that 
 ' no man eats of that Flesh, but first he adores ; ' but that 
 which offends us is this, that you [i.e. Eoman Church] 
 teach and require all men to adore the very Sacrament 
 with Divine honour. To this end you hold it out to the 
 people. To this end Corpus Ghristi Day was instituted 
 about three hundred years since. . . . But that which 
 weighs most with us is this, that we dare not give Divine 
 worship unto any creature, no, not to the very Humanity 
 of Christ in the abstract (much less to the Host), but to 
 the Whole Person of Christ, God and Man, by reason of 
 the hypostatical union between the child of the Blessed 
 Virgin Mary and the Eternal Son, * Who is God over all 
 Blessed for ever.' Shew us such an union betwixt the 
 Deity and the Elements, or accidents, and you say some- 
 thing. But you pretend no such thing. ^ 
 
 Again : — 
 
 Lastly, the Grecians know no Feast of Corpus Christi, 
 nor carry the Sacrament up and down, nor elevate it to be 
 adored. They adore Christ in the use of the Sacrament ; 
 so do we. They do not adore the Sacrament ; no more 
 do we.^ 
 
 These last two extracts from Bramhall suggest 
 two observations. The first is the light which 
 Bramh all's employment of the term * Christ in 
 the use of the Sacrament ' throws on Hooker's 
 employment of that phrase. Bramhall indisputably 
 believed that the Presence of Christ in the Eucharist 
 was objective to the recipient and independent of 
 his faith, and he identifies the doctrine of the 
 Church of England on this subject with that of the 
 
 » Vol. i. p. 20. 2 Vol. ii. p. 634. 
 
146 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Greek Church, of which there is no question. 
 Nevertheless he declares of both Churches that they 
 * adore Christ in the use of the Sacrament.' 
 
 On the other hand, he is careful to guard against 
 such a materialisation of the doctrine of the Real 
 Presence as would constitute a kind of hypostatic 
 union between the consecrated elements and the 
 Humanity of Christ. And I am not at all sure that 
 the warning is not needed now among some of our 
 clergy and laity. To minds not accustomed to 
 philosophical speculation there is always some 
 danger of confusing the Divine Presence with the 
 material instruments through which God vouchsafes 
 to manifest Himself or bestow His gifts. These we 
 are to reverence for His sake, whose Presence sanc- 
 tifies them for some use beyond their natural 
 capacity. Moses was urgently forbidden to approach 
 the Burning Bush on Horeb till he had paid 
 reverent homage to the Divine Presence manifested 
 there. The Presence was objective to Moses and 
 independent of him, and worship was due to it, not 
 to the material instrument of its manifestation, 
 Nor would worship have been due to the Bush if 
 removed elsewhere and reserved as an object of 
 adoration apart from the particular use for which it 
 was there and then selected. In like manner the 
 reservation of the Blessed Sacrament, as far as I 
 know the mind of the primitive Church, was for the 
 sake of Eucharistic communion only, and not for 
 the sake of adoration apart from communion. It is 
 in that sense, and in that sense only, that I advocate 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 147 
 
 reservation, which I hope will be conceded on 
 condition that developments which are Eoman 
 rather than Catholic shall be abandoned, including 
 the unauthorised Feast of Corpus Christi. 
 
 The specimens which I have now given will, I 
 think, suffice to exhibit the teaching of that distin- 
 guished body of learned theologians known as the 
 Caroline divines, and it will be seen that it is the 
 very doctrine which Sir William Harcourt conscien- 
 tiously thinks so directly inconsistent with the doc- 
 trine of the Church of England as to entitle him to 
 denounce all clergy who teach it as ' perjured 
 priests.' I am sure that the late distinguished 
 leader of the Liberal party in the Hous€ of Commons 
 did not know this when he fired off his invectives 
 in Parliament and in the press. But does it not 
 follow that he has still a good deal to learn before 
 he is competent to sit in Moses' seat and fulminate 
 his decrees as to the limits of toleration in the 
 Church of England ? Admirable Crichtons are rare. 
 It is given to few men to excel alike in politics and 
 theology, and it is no disparagement to Sir Wilham 
 Harcourt's great gifts to say that he is not one of the 
 elect in that particular, like Bacon, and Leibnitz, 
 and Gladstone. Knowledge of theology, which 
 embraces knowledge of ecclesiastical history, does 
 not come by the light of nature even to the most 
 intellectual. It requires the reading and mastery of 
 a good many books, and cannot be got up for a 
 parliamentary speech or newspaper controversy by 
 a cursory inspection of indexes or encyclopaedias. 
 
 l2 
 
148 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Theology is, moreover, a science, and has, Hke all 
 sciences, its technical terminology, which may easily 
 mislead the unlearned. It is easy to imagine the 
 withering scorn with which Sir William Harcourt 
 would lash any rash layman who dared to lay such 
 rude hands on the sacred ark of constitutional law 
 as he has himself laid on an ark not less sacred. 
 How easy it would be to make fun of such doctrines 
 of constitutional law as that ' The King can do no 
 wrong,' and that ' The King is immortal.' Adopting 
 Sir William Harcourt's critical method, one might 
 exclaim : ' What pernicious heresy ! What political 
 cretinism ! What grovelHng superstition ! What 
 imbeciles those lawyers must be to offer such stuff 
 to laymen whose minds have not been obfuscated 
 by long burrowing among dusty text-books and 
 musty statutes ! ' I must venture to say, with all 
 respect, that this is not the spirit and temper in 
 which questions that touch the tenderest and 
 holiest feelings of human beings ought to be dis- 
 cussed. 
 
 I have so far presented, as I think, a fair review 
 of the doctrine of the Eucharist as held by the 
 Church of England down to the flight of James II. 
 I will now bring my review down to our own time 
 by putting into the witness-box a few men who will 
 be universally recognised as moderate in a sense 
 which would be considered inapplicable to the 
 Tractarian School. My first witness shall be the 
 moderate and very learned Archbishop Wake, 
 whose life covers the latter half of the seventeenth 
 
THE TESTIMOl^Y OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 149 
 
 century and the first part of the eighteenth. Before 
 he became a bishop he had a controversy with the 
 celebrated Bossuet, who in the course of it had ex- 
 plained that Komanists 'understand the word 
 " offer," when they apply it to the Mass, in a 
 larger signification than what the Apostle (in the 
 Epistle to the Hebrews) gives it ; as when we are 
 said to offer God whatever we present before Him ; 
 and that it is thus they pretend to offer up the 
 Blessed Jesus to His Father in the Mass, in w^hich 
 He vouchsafes to render Himself present before 
 Him.' 
 
 That this [Wake retorted] is to prevaricate the mean- 
 ing of that phrase, the doctrine of the foregoing article 
 [of the Council of Trent] shows. If Christ be in the 
 Mass a true and proper Sacrifice,^ as was there said, it 
 will necessarily follow that there He must be truly and 
 properly sacrificed : and one essential »property [of sacri- 
 fice] being the true and real destruction of what is 
 offered, insomuch that when there is not a tru^ and 
 proper destruction, neither can there be, as they them- 
 selves acknowledge, a true and proper sacrifice, it must 
 be evidently false in these men to pretend that, by offering 
 in this matter is meant only a presenting of Christ before 
 God, and not a real change and destruction of His Body 
 offered by them. . . . Though Christ be acknowledged 
 to be really present after a Divine and heavenly manner 
 in this Holy Eucharist, yet will not this warrant the 
 adoration of the Host, which is still only bread and 
 wine ; . . . nor will such a real presenting of our 
 Blessed Lord to His Father, to render Him propitious to 
 
 ' The italics here and throughout are Wake's. 
 
150 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 us, make the Eucharist any more than a metaphoricaly 
 not a true cmd proper propitiatory Sacrifice} 
 
 I venture to think that Wake goes too far in 
 insisting that a true sacrifice must of necessity 
 imply the 'real destruction of what is offered.' I 
 have in a previous chapter argued that the essence 
 of self-sacrifice is in the surrender of the will, and 
 that the death of the human victim is abstractedly a 
 separable accident. But I have quoted the passage 
 because it is an excellent illustration of language 
 which may be appealed to by both parties in this 
 controversy. In using the term ' metaphorical ' as 
 describing the Eucharistic Sacrifice, Wake might be 
 quoted by a careless controversialist as teaching 
 pure Zwinglianism. But the context gives the 
 adjective * metaphorical ' a different meaning. The 
 following are the points of the passage : — 
 
 1. Wake objected to a true and proper Sacrifice 
 in the Eucharist. 
 
 2. By a true and proper Sacrifice he meant the 
 true and real destruction of the Victim. 
 
 3. He believed in a ' metaphorical ' offering in 
 the Eucharist. 
 
 4. By a ' metaphorical ' offering he meant ' a 
 real presenting of our Blessed Lord to His Father, 
 to render Him propitious to us.' 
 
 This is simply the doctrine of Bramhall and 
 
 Andrewes, and the, whole school of Caroline divines. 
 
 After Wake became Archbishop of Canterbury 
 
 ' Wake's Exposition, pp. 69, 70. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 151 
 
 he entered into a friendly correspondence with the 
 eminent French historian and theologian," Dupin, 
 with a view to union between the Anglican and 
 Gallican Churches. The Church of France was 
 strongly opposed to Ultramontanism, as indeed it 
 continued to be till it was forcibly revolutionised by 
 an unholy alliance between the secular arm of 
 Napoleon and the spiritual arm of the. Pope. 
 Experience as well as reflection taught Napoleon 
 the impossibility of expelling religion from among 
 the dominant factors of civil government ; so he 
 determined to enlist it in his service. To that end 
 he captured the Pope ; and the Pope secure in his 
 grasp, the next thing was to destroy the indepen- 
 dence of the bishops and clergy, The bishops were 
 forced to surrender their sees, and France was, in 
 violation of Catholic principles, carved into new 
 sees by Napoleon, which were filled with Napoleon's 
 nominees, deprived of their ancient rights and made 
 dependent on the Pope. The inferior clergy were 
 also deprived of their canonical rights and made 
 subservient to the bishops. Thus Napoleon believed 
 that he held the entire control of the conscience of 
 France by making the clergy subservient to the 
 bishops, the bishops to the Pope, and the Pope to 
 himself. Our Roman brethren sometimes twit us 
 with the subservience of our bishops at the period 
 of the Reformation to the Sovereign. But, at the 
 worst, our bishops never descended to the degrada- 
 tion inflicted on the Church of France by Napoleon, 
 using the Pope as his tool. 
 
152 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Nothing came of the correspondence between 
 Wake and Dupin. But it is noteworthy that so 
 moderate a Churchman as Wake should have enter- 
 tained the idea of a union between the Churches of 
 France and England on the basis of mutual explana- 
 tions. Wake desired to get both Churches ' to agree 
 to communicate in everything we can with each 
 other, . . . and join in the public service, and yet leave 
 one another in the free liberty of believing Transub- 
 stantiation or not, so long as we do not require any- 
 thing to be done by either in consequence of that 
 opinion.' ^ 
 
 To this I may add, since it is short, the following 
 passage from a ' Discourse on the Sacrament of the 
 Lord's Supper,' by Dr. Edward Felling, a canon of 
 Westminster Abbey, and a contemporary of Wake : — 
 
 Though there be no grounds in the world for the 
 opinion of Transubstantiation, yet we must not conceive 
 that Christ is not verily, really, and of a truth, in the 
 Sacrament. He may be really present, though there 
 may be no reason to believe that He is present after a 
 corporal manner. For two different substances and 
 natures may be joined and go together, though they 
 remain distinct in themselves and in their properties ; as 
 the soul and flesh of a man are united in the same person, 
 and as the Humanity and Divinity of Christ were joined 
 together in the same Lord. 
 
 This way of stating the doctrine of the Real 
 Presence is sometimes called Consubstantiation ; 
 but erroneously, for Consubstantiation, as I have 
 
 » Mosheim, Hist. iv. 286. Maclaine's edition. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 153 
 
 already explained, does not mean in theological 
 language the co-existence of two diverse substances, 
 but an identity of substance in two subsistences. 
 
 I will conclude this part of my argument with 
 the testimony of two eminent men of our own time, 
 the late Eev. Sir William Palmer and the late 
 Bishop Thirlwall. The former worked for a time 
 with the leaders of the Oxford Movement. 'He 
 was,' says Newman,' * the only really learned man 
 among us. He understood theology as a science ; 
 he was practised in the scholastic mode of contro- 
 versial writing, and I believe was as well acquainted 
 as he was dissatisfied with the Catholic schools. 
 He was as decided in his religious views as he was 
 cautious and even subtle in their expression, and 
 gentle in their enforcement.' 
 
 Again : — 
 
 Mr. Palmer about the same time [1836-7] was pro- 
 jecting a work of a similar nature [to Newman's * Pro- 
 phetical Office of the Church '] in his own way. It was 
 published, I think, under the title, * A Treatise on the 
 Christian Church.' As was to be expected from the 
 author, it was a most learned, most careful composition ; 
 and in its form, I should say, polemical. So happily 
 at least did he follow the logical method of the Eoman 
 Schools, that Father Perrone, in his treatise on Dogmatic 
 Theology, recognised in him a combatant of the true cast, 
 and saluted him as a foe worthy to be vanquished. Other 
 soldiers in that field he seems to have thought little better 
 than the lanzknechts of the Middle Ages, and, I dare say, 
 with very good reason. ... As to Mr. Palmer's book, it 
 
 • Apologia, p. 108. 
 
154 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 was one which no AngUcan could write but himself — in 
 no sense, if I recollect aright, a tentative work. The 
 ground of controversy was cut into squares, and thus 
 every objection had its answer.^ 
 
 The exact title of Palmer's book is ' A Treatise 
 on the Church of Christ.' I made Newman's ac- 
 quaintance some years after his ' Apologia ' was 
 published, and I remember his telling me that he 
 still regarded Palmer's book as the ablest exposition 
 ever written of the position of the Church of Eng- 
 land since the Keformation, especially as against 
 Eome. Dollinger had an equally high opinion of 
 Palmer's ' Treatise,' and told me that he would con- 
 sider a new edition of the book, brought up to date, 
 * an event for Christendom.' He repeated the 
 phrase in a letter to Mr. Gladstone, who quite 
 agreed with him. At the earnest solicitation of Mr. 
 Gladstone I undertook a new edition of the book, 
 and spent a good deal of time working on it in Dr. 
 Bollinger's library at Munich, under the direction 
 of that illustrious scholar and divine. But the 
 publication was interrupted for private reasons, into 
 which it is not necessary to enter here. I hope, 
 with the aid of a friend, to bring out before very 
 long a work which covers Palmer's ground, and 
 will attempt to meet some problems which did not 
 exist when he published his masterly * Treatise ' 
 sixty years ago. Perrone made an elaborate reply 
 to Palmer; but no dispassionate reader of both 
 
 • Apologia, p. 142. 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 155 
 
 * Treatise ' and reply will think that Perrone ' van- 
 quished ' his opponent. 
 
 Warmly, however, as Palmer sympathised with 
 the Oxford Movement in its earlier stages, his 
 cautious temperament was repelled by some of its 
 later developments, and he eventually broke with it 
 altogether. So that, on the whole, he may be 
 regarded as one of the most moderate as well as one 
 of the most learned of Anglican divines, and at the 
 same time one of the most formidable opponents of 
 the Boman claims. Let us see, then, what Palmer 
 says as to the Reformation settlement under 
 Cranmer at the period when the foreign Reformers 
 wielded their greatest influence in England — in 
 other words, when Protestantism reached its high- 
 water mark in the Church of England. The italics 
 in the following quotation are Palmer's : — 
 
 It is asserted that our Church, having stedfastly 
 adhered to the whole Eomish doctrine in the reign of 
 Henry VIIL, relinquished it immediately after the acces- 
 sion of Edward VI. and became Zwinglian, rejecting 
 especially the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist. This 
 assertion arises from an erroneous view of facts, and from 
 not distinguishing the opinions of individual theologians 
 from the public and authorised doctrine of the Church of 
 England. 
 
 It is a fact, that no new formulary was published by 
 authority of the Church during the whole reign of Edward 
 VI. The forty- two Articles of Religion compiled (it is 
 supposed) by Cranmer, Ridley, and others, in 1552, were 
 never authorised by Convocation, though the Royal 
 Council most unjustifiably published them as so ap- 
 
156 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 proved, for which Archbishop Cranmer remonstrated with 
 them in vain : nor were they ever at any time received as 
 a formulary of the Church of England, having been put 
 forth by the King but a few days before his death in 1553, 
 and only subscribed by a few clergy in Canterbury, Norwich, 
 and London, and in the University of Cambridge, who were 
 solicited, but not compelled, to subscribe by the bishops 
 Cranmer and Ridley. From this time we hear no more 
 of them as of any authority. That no new doctrine was 
 established in the Church of England during this reign 
 appears from Burnet, who observes with reference to the 
 above Articles : * It seemed to be a great want that this 
 was so long delayed, since the old doctrine had still the 
 legal authority on its side.' Yet these Articles, as we have 
 seen, were never in force. 
 
 It seems plain, indeed, that during the whole reign of 
 Edward VI. the doctrine of the Church of England was 
 most authentically represented by the Formulary of 
 Instruction formally approved by the Convocation of 
 Henry VIII. a.d. 1543, entitled ' The Necessary Doctrine 
 and Erudition,' a book which was most assuredly quite 
 opposed to the Zwinglian doctrines. This book was 
 of authority in the Church of England during the re- 
 mainder of King Henry's reign. In 1546 Archbishop 
 Cranmer, in writing to the King concerning the abolition 
 of certain ceremonies, recognises it as of authority in the 
 Church. The First Book of our Homihes, published in 
 1547 (the first year of Edward VI.), chiefly relates to 
 Christian morals, but it terms matrimony a Sacrament 
 [indeed, the Second Book of Homilies speaks of Ordina- 
 tion and * other Sacraments ' besides Baptism and the 
 Eucharist] ; and at the end of this Book of Homihes we 
 read of ' the due receiving of Christ's Body and Blood 
 under the form of bread and wine.' This is all very con- 
 sistent with 'The Necessary Doctrine,' but it is not 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 157 
 
 Zwinglian. Immediately after the publication of the 
 HomiUes, Gardiner objected to the doctrine of Justifi- 
 cation there laid down, as inconsistent with that of * The 
 Necessary Doctrine,' assuming the latter to be of au- 
 thority still. Again, in 1551, in arguing against the 
 opinions of Cranmer on the Eucharist, he appealed to the 
 doctrine confessed by the whole clergy of England in 
 an open Council, ' and never hitherto by any public Council 
 or anything set forth by authority impaired.' Nor could 
 any effectual answer be made to this ; and, accordingly, not 
 only does Cranmer disclaim the notion that Gardiner had 
 been brought to trial for his doctrine on the Eucharist, 
 but none of the bishops of the Popish party, who were 
 expelled from their sees in Edward's reign, were deprived 
 on pretence of their holding doctrines contrary to those 
 of the Church, but for disobedience to the Eoyal Council, 
 or for treason. 
 
 Thus it appears that the authorised doctrine of the 
 Church of England, during the whole of Edward the 
 Sixth's reign, was that of the Eeal Presence, in the 
 strongest and most decided sense. ^ 
 
 There is, of course, no pretence for saying that 
 the Church of England has changed or modified her 
 doctrine on this subject since Edward VI. ; on the 
 contrary, all the alterations in her formularies since 
 then have been in the direction of giving greater 
 emphasis to the doctrine of the Eeal Presence, 
 which Palmer states as follows : — 
 
 She believes that the Eucharist is not the sign of an 
 absent Christ, and that those who partake of it receive 
 not merely the figure, or shadow, or sign of Christ's Body, 
 
 ' A Treatise on the Church of Christ, i. 508-511. 
 
158 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 but the reality itself. And as Christ's Divine and 
 Human Natures are inseparably united, so she believes 
 that we receive in the Eucharist not only the Flesh and 
 Blood of Christ, but Christ Himself , both God and Man.' 
 
 The late Bishop Thirlv^all, one of the most 
 learned and one of the ablest of Broad Churchmen, 
 sums up the case as follows, with bis usual judicial 
 impartiality and accuracy:— 
 
 The Church of England has dealt with the subject in 
 a spirit of true reverence as well as of prudence and 
 charity. She asserts the mystery inherent in the institu- 
 tion of the Sacrament, but abstains from all attempts to 
 investigate or define it, and leaves the widest range open 
 to the devotional feelings and the private meditations of 
 her children with regard to it. And this liberty is so 
 large, and has been so freely used, that, apart from the 
 express admission of Transubstantiation or of the grossly 
 carnal notions to which it gave rise, and which, in the 
 minds of the common people, are commonly inseparable 
 from it, I think there can hardly be any description of 
 the Eeal Presence which, in some form or other, is 
 universally allowed, that would not be found to be 
 authorised by the language of eminent divines of our 
 Church ; and I am not aware, and do not believe, that 
 our most advanced Kitualists have in fact outstepped those 
 very ample bounds.^ 
 
 Lastly, the doctrines of the Eeal Presence, 
 Eucbaristic Sacrifice, and Eucbaristical Adoration 
 came up for judicial determination before the Court 
 
 » A Treatise on the Church of Christ, i. 527. 
 ^ Charge delivered hy the Bisliov of St. Davids in the year 186G, 
 pp. 97-8, 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 159 
 
 of Arches and the Judicial Committee, and were de- 
 cided to be in accordance with the teaching of the 
 Church of England. The final Court was unanimous 
 in affirming the legality of the two former, and 
 affirmed the legality of the latter, 'not without 
 doubts and divisions of opinion ; ' and this in an 
 undefended case, and in spite of the crude a.nd provo- 
 cative language of Mr. Bennett. 
 
 Let the reader now compare the doctrine of the 
 Church of England, as I have exhibited it in the 
 preceding pages, with the representation of it given 
 in the following quotation from a letter v/ritten by Dr. 
 Taylor, Archdeacon of Liverpool, on October 14, 1898, 
 and published in the ' Times ' of the following day : — 
 
 The Eeformers denied and denounced both Transub- 
 stantiation and Consubstantiation, and embraced the 
 purer views of Zwinglius, which denied any presence in 
 the elements, but maintained a presence in the due 
 ministration of the ordinance, to the soul of the faithful 
 recipient. 
 
 Yet Archdeacon Taylor has been active not only 
 in denouncing all who hold the doctrine which I 
 have now shown to be that of the Eeformers ; he 
 has, in addition, given his support to a Bill which 
 has for its object the expulsion of all who will not 
 hold his own ' purer views of Zwinglius,' which are 
 not only out of harmony with the formularies of the 
 Church of England and with the teaching of the 
 Anglican divines, but are repudiated even by the 
 Presbyterianism of Scotland and the Wesleyanism 
 of England. The Duke of Argyll emphatically re- 
 
160 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 pudiated in the ' Times ' the attribution of Zwing- 
 Hanism to Scottish Presbyterianism, and claimed 
 for it the doctrine of a Keal Presence barely distin- 
 guishable from Transubstantiation. 
 
 At the time that Archdeacon Taylor was pro- 
 claiming his rejection of Anglican doctrine and his 
 adhesion to 'the purer views of Zwinglius,' Mr. 
 Price Hughes was denouncing in the ' Methodist 
 Times ' * the deadly consequences of Zwinglianism,' 
 of ' the fatal Zwinglian view.' * To regard the 
 Lord's Supper,' says the President of the Wesleyan 
 Conference, ' as nothing more than a mere com- 
 memorative rite is to play directly, on the one hand, 
 into the hands of the Unitarians, and on the other, 
 and much more, into the hands of the Komanists. 
 . . . Our sacramental service is as definite and pro- 
 nounced as the Anglican service on which it is 
 based, and with which it entirely agrees.' 
 
 Thus we see that the Archdeacon of Liverpool 
 would degrade our doctrines far below the standard 
 of orthodox Nonconformists, and would expel even 
 men like Mr. Price Hughes from his communion. 
 Yet Protestants of his type protest that they have 
 no desire at all to abridge the comprehensiveness of 
 the Church of England! How subtle is the power 
 of self-deception ! 
 
 This seems to be the most convenient place for 
 offering some criticism on the objections made in 
 this controversy to the reservation of the Blessed 
 Sacrament for the Communion of the Sick. It is 
 assumed, and by men of far greater learning, ability, 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 161 
 
 and authority than myself, that reservation is 
 plainly and indisputably forbidden by the 28th Article 
 and the post-communion rubric. Let us see. 
 
 The article says : ' The Sacrament of the Lord's 
 Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, 
 carried about, lifted up, or worshipped.' The mean- 
 ing of the article is perhaps more fully and clearly 
 brought out in the Latin version, which is of equal 
 authority with the English : ' Sacramentum Eu- 
 charistise ex institutione Christi non servabatur, 
 circumferebatur, elevabatur, nee adorabatur.' The 
 substitution of ' Eucharistia ' here, and in the pre- 
 ceding clause of the article, for ' Coena Domina ' is 
 significant. In its theological connotation the 
 word implies more than *the Lord's Suppet' — an 
 expression which, though susceptible of the highest 
 doctrine, and used even in the Church of Kome, 
 lends itself more easily than * Eucharist ' to a 
 Zwinglian meaning. Ducange's definition of 
 
 * Eucharistia ' is ' Sacrum Corpus Qhristi in Missae 
 sacrificio confectum.' The authors of the article, 
 while excluding Transubstantiation, were careful 
 to use language which implied the reality of the 
 Presence, not only by substituting * Eucharistia ' for 
 
 * Coena Domini,' but by declaring that * the Body of 
 Christ is given' as well as 'taken' ('accipitur '), 
 though of course ' only after an heavenly and 
 spiritual manner.' 
 
 I suppose we may also infer that the imperfect 
 tense of ' reserved ' (' servabatur ') was used advisedly, 
 implying, that is, that no custom of reserving the 
 
 M 
 
162 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Sacrament followed from the ' institution ' of it by 
 Christ. That is an historical truism, and certainly no 
 prohibition of reservation for the sick can be inferred 
 from it. 
 
 But we are not left to inference in the matter. 
 The 28th Article was drawn up in 1562. Two 
 years previously a Latin edition of the Prayer 
 Book was published by authority, and in this the 
 rubric in Edward's First Prayer Book ordering 
 reservation for the Communion of the Sick was 
 restored in a slightly abbreviated form. The Latin 
 Prayer Book was prescribed for public use * in the 
 Churches and Chapels ' of the universities and 
 public schools. It was added, however, that in the 
 case of domestics who did not understand Latin, 
 and of parishes attached to any college, the service 
 should be used and the Sacraments administered in 
 English. But it may fairly be assumed that in 
 those cases the rubric on reservation would apply. 
 
 Now surely it is altogether unreasonable to sup- 
 pose that the very same authority which ordered 
 reservation in the Latin Prayer Book should at the 
 same time condemn and forbid it in one of the 
 Articles of Eeligion. We may, indeed, assume that 
 the article was intended to express disapproval — 
 condemnation seems to me too strong a word for its 
 cautious language— of carrying about the Sacrament 
 in solemn procession. It is a ceremony confined 
 exclusively to the Latin Church, and is com- 
 paratively modern even in it, not being traceable 
 farther back than the fourteenth century. It has 
 
THE TESTIMONY OP ANGLICAN DIVINES 163 
 
 never existed in the Russian Church, or in any of 
 the Oriental Churches. But reservation for the 
 Communion of the Sick, carried without any parade 
 or ceremony, has always been common to all the 
 Churches of the East. I may add that the elevation 
 of the chalice is likewise unknown to the Eastern 
 Churches, and is not a universal rule even in Latin 
 Christendom. 
 
 So much as to the 28th Article. Let us now 
 look at the rubrics which are relevant to the question 
 of reservation. A rubric in the Office for the Com- 
 munion of the Sick in the First Prayer Book of 
 Edward VI. sanctioned it explicitly. In the Second 
 Prayer Book this rubric was omitted. Does the 
 omission necessarily mean prohibition ? That does 
 not seem to me to follow, and I offer the following 
 reasons : The rubric of 1549 positively ordered 
 reservation : * Then shall the priest reserve,' &c. 
 This is omitted in 1552. The order is withdrawn, 
 but the practice is not forbidden. That I am not 
 splitting hairs here seems to me evident from another 
 rubric. In the Book of 1549 there is a rubric, not 
 merely sanctioning, but, like the rubric on reserva- 
 tion, enjoining by name what are called the Eucha- 
 ristic vestments. In the Book of 1552 this rubric is 
 not simply omitted ; there is another rubric substi- 
 tuted for it which prescribes the use of the surplice 
 only and forbids the use of the other vestments by 
 name. We see, therefore, that when the revisers in 
 1552 intended omission to mean prohibition they 
 said so in so many words. Is it an unfair construo- 
 
 M 2 
 
164 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 tion that the simple omission of the positive in- 
 junction left the practice optional in the matter of 
 reservation ? 
 
 In 1559 the Prayer Book was again revised and 
 a few alterations were made. But the question of 
 reservation was not touched. The only reference to 
 the question was a rubric which permitted the 
 celebrant to *have to his own use' whatever re- 
 mained of the bread and wine, making no distinction 
 between consecrated and unconsecrated. 
 
 Taking these facts in conjunction with the Latin 
 Prayer Book, the inference seems to me inevitable 
 that Elizabeth and her advisers intended reservation 
 to be the rule in seats of learning where there was 
 no danger of its being abused, and left optional else- 
 where. Let us remember that of upwards of ten 
 thousand priests in England at that time only two 
 hundred at the most refused to accept the Prayer 
 Book. Let us remember also that the sagacious 
 policy of Elizabeth and her wise ministers was to 
 give as little umbrage as possible to the settled 
 convictions and traditional religious habits of her 
 subjects, lay and clerical, as long as they recognised 
 her supremacy ; a proof of which policy I have 
 already given in the fact that some objectors to the 
 Thirty-nine Articles were persuaded to sign them in 
 their own sense. There can be no reasonable doubt 
 that the great majority of the ten thousand clergy 
 celebrated the Sacrament in the old vestments and 
 with the usual ceremonial, and in all probability 
 continued to reserve the Sacrament and carry it in 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 165 
 
 procession to the sick. This seems to me to explain 
 the very mild language of the 28th Article; not 
 condemning, yet discouraging, the carrying about of 
 the Sacrament, but making no reference at all to 
 reservation for the sick, and certainly not forbidding 
 it in face of the sanction of the Latin Prayer 
 Book. To this must be added the fact that the 
 Puritans appear to have made no sort of objection 
 to the reservation of the Sacrament for the Sick. 
 The changes in a Protestant direction made in the 
 Prayer Book of 1549 were chiefly at the instigation 
 of Bucer, who does not appear to have made any 
 objection at all to the rubric sanctioning reservation. 
 What the Puritans objected to, and very strongly, 
 was the Office for the Private Communion of the 
 Sick ; and it would seem that they would prefer 
 reservation to what they regarded — and truly — as an 
 innovation on the custom of Christendom. Our great 
 Anglican divines —Bingham, for instance — take the 
 line of apologising for private communion, and are 
 glad to fall back in justification of the innovation on 
 two or three instances in the primitive Church. 
 
 Now we come to the last revision of 1662. We 
 know that the revisers of that book were men who 
 wished to go back as far as circumstances would 
 permit to the Prayer Book of 1549. It is therefore 
 improbable in the highest degree that they would 
 gratuitously prohibit what the revisers of 1552 and 
 1559 had left open. The rubric of 1559 said : ' And 
 if any of the Bread and Wine remain the curate 
 shall have it to his own use.' The revisers of 1662 
 
166 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 changed the full stop into a semicolon and added 
 the words, * but if any remain of that which was 
 consecrated, it shall not be carried out of the church, 
 but the priest and such other of the communicants 
 as he shall then call unto him shall, immediately 
 after the Blessing, reverently eat and drink the 
 same.' Surely the logical and grammatical con- 
 struction of this added clause is governed and 
 limited by the clause to which it is appended. 
 It is not a new and independent rubric. It 
 is an explanatory addition to a previous rubric, 
 which allowed the priest to carry home for domestic 
 use what remained of the elements. The new clause 
 explains that this permission does not apply to the 
 consecrated elements. They are not to be used for 
 common purposes, but are to be reverently consumed 
 in church before the congregation departs. 
 
 This I hold to be the reasonable and natural 
 construction of the rubric. It is a recognised rule of 
 syntax that the apodosis is governed and explained 
 by the protasis, and does not travel beyond it if there 
 be nothing else to make that necessary. Is there 
 anything else here ? Yes, but in an opposite sense. 
 The addition was made to the rubric on the sugges- 
 tion of Cosin, and Cosin himself has left us the 
 explanation. The rubric of 1559, he says, was 
 * abused ' by some clergy carrying home for domestic 
 use what remained of the consecrated as well as the 
 unconsecrated elements. This became a great scan- 
 dal, he says, and was used by Eoman Catholics as a 
 handle against the Church. Therefore the clause 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 167 
 
 was added which forbade the clergy to carry home 
 what remained of the consecrated as well as of the 
 unconsecrated bread and wine. The question of 
 reservation for the sick does not come in at all. It 
 does not seem to have been within the purview of 
 the revisers, having never been forbidden, and being 
 still enjoined in seats of learning. 
 
 But it is objected that the practice of reservation 
 has been disused for three hundred years. How do 
 we know that ? There was not a universal press 
 during those three hundred years ; and even if there 
 were, communion of the sick by reservation would 
 be no more recorded than communion by private 
 celebration. What record is there at this moment 
 of the parishes where reservation is practised ? To 
 argue the non-existence of a private usage of that 
 kind from the absence of formal evidence is a most 
 fallacious mode of reasoning. If, however, diligent 
 search were made I have no doubt that evidence 
 would be forthcoming. After reading a letter of 
 mine on this subject in the ' Times,' the Eev. T. 
 Keble sent me from Bisley Vicarage, Stroud, on 
 December 8 last, the following note :— 
 
 I was told yesterday by a lady, nearly ninety-one 
 years old, that she remembered that her father, a very 
 conscientious country clergyman, was in the habit of 
 taking the Blessed Sacrament from the altar to a sick 
 person who lived near the church, while the communi- 
 cants waited in their places until his return. 
 
 This takes us back before the Oxford Movement, 
 and evidently denotes a tradition in the family, or 
 
168 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 circle, or parish of this clergyman. The reign of the 
 Commonwealth doubtless destroyed a great many 
 customs and usages that had been prevalent till then ; 
 but many survived that cataclysm of which no record 
 would, in the ordinary course of things, have come 
 down to us. Yet the custom of this old lady's father, 
 with the sympathetic acquiescence of his parishioners, 
 shows how unsafe it is to rely on sweeping generalis- 
 ations. 
 
 But we are told that litera scripta manet. 
 Whatever may have been the intention of the revisers 
 of 1662, the letter of their rubric is plain beyond a 
 doubt ; and, rubrics being statute law, they must be 
 construed literally. I wish that some of those who 
 use that argument would apply it to the interpreta- 
 tion of the Ornaments Bubric. But it is a sound 
 argument, and I am willing to test my interpretation 
 of this rubric by it. Here is the rubric : — 
 
 And if any of the Bread and Wine remain uncon- 
 secrated the curate shall have it to his own use ; but if 
 any remain of that which was consecrated, it shall not 
 be carried out of the church, but the priest, and such 
 other of the communicants as he shall then call unto 
 him, shall, immediately after the Blessing, reverently eat 
 and drink the same. 
 
 Now I venture to say that these words, so far 
 from forbidding reservation, exclude that interpreta- 
 tion. The celebrant does not reserve for the com- 
 munion of the sick what may chance to remain after 
 administering the Sacrament to those present. 
 After consecration he sets aside what he intends to 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 169 
 
 carry to the sick, and then begins to distribute to 
 those who intend to communicate. If any part of 
 that remain it is not to be carried out of church in 
 the manner condemned by Cosin, but is to be con- 
 sumed in the manner prescribed. But there is no 
 ' if,' no doubt, no sort of contingency, in regard to 
 the consecrated portion of the Sacrament reserved 
 for the sick ; so Httle, indeed, that if either element 
 should fail in administering the Communion in 
 church, the priest does not replenish paten or chalice 
 from the reserved portion : he consecrates afresh. 
 
 I say confidently, therefore, that the little word 
 * if ' entirely excludes the ordinary interpretation of 
 the so-called rubric on reservation. It does not touch 
 reservation. It has altogether a different aim and 
 purpose ; and whatever the position of the question 
 of reservation was in point of law before the revision 
 of 1662, that it still remains. To my mind that 
 position is quite plain : it is distinctly legal. Eeser- 
 vation is not forbidden in any of the formularies of 
 the Church of England, and it is enjoined in one — 
 the Latin Prayer Book — which is still legal in our 
 universities and public schools. An aged peer told 
 me the other day that it was used in Christ Church 
 when he w^as an undergraduate there. Keservation, 
 moreover, has always been practised in the Scottish 
 Episcopal Church. 
 
 I respectfully submit therefore that a bishop 
 would be acting ultra vires who should forbid 
 reservation for the sick when circumstances made it 
 expedient. I am not arguing for superseding private 
 
170 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 celebrations by the substitution of reservation. I 
 think private celebrations are edifying when the 
 requirements of the rubric can be satisfied. They 
 are these. The sick man ' must give timely notice 
 to the curate, signifying also how many there are to 
 communicate with him (which shall be three, or two 
 at the least), and having a convenient place in the 
 sick man's house, with all things necessary so pre- 
 pared, that the curate may reverently minister, he 
 shall then celebrate the Holy Communion.' 
 
 All this supposes leisure, and a private house, and 
 decent surroundings. It certainly does not contem- 
 plate a sudden emergency or the crowded lodgings 
 and squahd surroundings of our great towns. It is 
 a simple fact within my own experience and the ex- 
 perience of all clergy who have served among the 
 poor in London, that the requirements of the rubric 
 cannot always be satisfied as to the number of assist- 
 ing communicants or the accessories of reverence or 
 even decency. The following letter, which I ex- 
 tract from a newspaper, relates an experience by no 
 means exceptional : — 
 
 Sir, — The experience of Dean Hole, among villagers 
 in cottages, is very different from that of the London East 
 End clergy among lodgers. 
 
 A curate, forbidden by his vicar (in obedience to the 
 bishop) to reserve under any circumstances, went to 
 communicate a dying parishioner. He found a fellow- 
 lodger in the same room lying on his bed, mad drunk, 
 cursing and swearing and threatening his wife, who was 
 in vain trying to pacify two frightened children. There 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 171 
 
 Was another poor woman also on a sick bed in the same 
 room. 
 
 The curate went to the neighbouring mission church, 
 celebrated with no communicants, and administered to 
 the poor woman the reserved Sacrament. ' You did 
 wrong ; but I should have done the same,' was the vicar's 
 remark when the curate told him this. A Layman. 
 
 The fact is, the rubrics of the Prayer Book are a 
 body of general directions which were not, I believe, 
 intended to be enforced in every case au pied de la 
 lettre. They must be construed by the rule of rela- 
 tive importance, reason, and that very uncommon 
 faculty, common-sense. Let us test some of them by 
 the rigorous method of literal interpretation now 
 come suddenly into vogue. There is a rubric after 
 the Nicene Greedy which forbids all notices ' during 
 the time of Divine Service ' except those * prescribed 
 by the rules of this book ' (previously named) * or 
 enjoined by the Queen or by the ordinary of the 
 place.' There is hardly a parish in London in 
 which that rubric is not violated every Sunday. The 
 same rubric orders the sermon to begin immediately 
 after the publication of notices. If omission is 
 prohibition, that rubric is violated in every church 
 in which the sermon is preceded by a hymn or 
 collect. There are parishes, again, in which the 
 Athanasian Creed is systematically omitted ; in 
 which the rule of daily service is systematically 
 broken ; in which the services for Saints' days are 
 never kept ; in which the Holy Communion is cele- 
 brated only once a month or seldomer ; in which 
 
172 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 such high festivals as the Epiphany and Ascension 
 Day are never observed ; and where the Holy Com- 
 munion is never celebrated even on Whitsunday, 
 unless it happens to fall on the first Sunday in the 
 month. 
 
 Per contra^ take the case of a clergyman who 
 observes all these rubrics. He is, let us suppose, 
 administering the Holy Communion in the parish 
 church, and while he is thus engaged, word is 
 brought to him that a man, who has just met wi^h 
 an accident outside the church, is dying and earnestly 
 desires to receive the Sacrament According to the 
 ordinary interpretation of the rubric, the officiating 
 priest is to finish the service in church ; consume 
 what remains of the consecrated elements ; then go 
 home and return with a table and a fair linen cloth, 
 and fresh bread and wine ; and meanwhile scour 
 the parish for two or three who will communicate 
 with the dying man ; and then, when everything is 
 ready, after perhaps an hour's delay, he is to begin 
 a service which certainly occupies twenty minutes. 
 Must we seriously believe that the man who goes 
 through all that Pharisaic formalism is a more loyal 
 servant of the Church than he who carries the 
 Sacrament there and then out of the church to the 
 dying man ? And are we to conclude that the man 
 who disregarded this literalism and put a generous 
 and Christian interpretation on the rubric would be 
 convicted as an offender by any Court in the land ? 
 One whom we all revere, and who declared that He 
 * came not to destroy the law, but to fulfil it,' 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 173 
 
 answered the cavils of the Procrustean rubricians of 
 His day by the memorable pronouncement that * the 
 Sabbath was made for man, not man for the Sabbath.' 
 I venture to think that I am acting in the spirit of 
 that charter of evangelical exegesis when I say that 
 the Prayer Book was made for man, not man for the 
 Prayer Book. Those who now raise the cry of 
 ' lawlessness,' while disregarding its spirit, would, if 
 they had their way, soon reduce the Church of 
 England to a condition of hopeless catalepsy. They 
 would kill all enthusiasm, all spontaneity, all zeal, 
 all, in fact, that has made the Church of England 
 what she is — one of the noblest factors, with all her 
 faults and blunders not a few, in the orderly develop- 
 ment of our nation. 
 
 The fact is, we live in an age in which, for 
 various reasons, the minds of men are so fixed on 
 the visible and tangible that they find it hard to 
 realise any existences which elude the scrutiny of 
 the senses. The world we see seems so all-em- 
 bracing as to leave no room for any other. And 
 the wonderful progress of physical science during the 
 last half-century has tended to deepen this feeling. 
 Men's minds have been so set on the mechanism of 
 nature that they have, to a large extent, lost sight 
 of the end in the process, of the hidden cause in the 
 visible effect. Some readers will remember a 
 striking illustration in * The Life and Letters of 
 Charles Darwin,' ^ of this deadening effect of physical 
 
 » Vol. i. p. 100. 
 
174 ■ THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 studies on the higher faculties. The passage is 
 worth quoting : — 
 
 Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many 
 kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Words- 
 worth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure ; 
 and even as a schoolboy I took intense delight in 
 Shakespeare, especially in the historical plays. I have 
 also said that formerly pictures gave me considerable, 
 and music very great, delight. But now for many years 
 I cannot endure to read a line of poetry. I have tried 
 lately to read Shakespeare, and found it so intolerably 
 dull that it nauseated me. I have also lost my taste for 
 pictures or music. Music generally sets me thinking too 
 energetically on what I have been at work on instead of 
 giving me pleasure. I retain some taste for fine scenery, 
 but it does not cause me the exquisite delight which it 
 formerly did. . . . This curious and lamentable loss of 
 the higher aesthetic tastes is all the odder, as books on 
 history, biographies, and travels (independently of any 
 scientific facts which they may contain), and essays on 
 all sorts of subjects, interest me as much as ever they 
 did. My mind seems to have become a kind of machine 
 for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts ; 
 but why this should have caused the atrophy of that part 
 of the brain alone, on which the higher tastes depend, 
 I cannot conceive. A man with a mind more highly 
 organised or better constituted than mine would not, I 
 suppose, have thus suffered : and if I had to live my life 
 again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and 
 listen to some music at least once every week ; for perhaps 
 the parts of my brain now atrophied would thus have been 
 kept active through use. The loss of these tastes is a loss 
 of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, 
 
THE TESTIMONY OF ANGLICAN DIVINES 175 
 
 and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling 
 the emotional part of our nature. 
 
 It is odd that a man so familiar with the law of 
 degeneration tending to atrophy, which results from 
 the disuse of any limb or faculty, * could not con- 
 ceive ' why his ' higher tastes ' should, from disuse, 
 have been smitten with decay. The same process 
 of degeneration is apparent in his spiritual faculties. 
 He says truly in his ' Origin of Species ' that his 
 argument does not touch the question of creation, 
 but only of processes. The doctrine of evolution 
 leaves the origin of life in the impenetrable mystery 
 in which it found it. Ajid Darwin, accordingly, 
 seems to have been then a believer in an originating 
 Creator. But we can trace through his letters the 
 gradual evaporation of this belief, not so much from 
 any process of reasoning as from the ossification, 
 through disuse, of that part of his mental structure. 
 Darwin himself perceived, when too late, the proper 
 corrective — namely, the regular exercise of the 
 faculties which had been allowed to become atro- 
 phied. 
 
 Researches into the physical constitution of 
 nature have undoubtedly in this way had con- 
 siderable influence in turning men's minds away 
 from the spiritual side of nature, and made them 
 rest in the things which are seen as if they were 
 the only things. And yet the very discoveries of 
 modern science, which are supposed by some to 
 militate against belief in a spiritual world under- 
 
176 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 lying and interpenetrating this, will surely seem to 
 a reflecting mind, whose spiritual faculties are on 
 the alert, to confirm that belief in a wonderful 
 manner. And indeed it is this dull apprehension 
 as to the existence of a spiritual world close to us, 
 not far away, which is at the root of the ordinary 
 objections to the sacramental system. Minds which 
 regard the spiritual world as a fixed place in space 
 beyond the sidereal system find it hard to believe 
 in real, veritable, spiritual substances behind 
 material veils. And yet the whole of this world 
 which we inhabit is in truth a sacramental system, 
 an economy of outward and visible signs veiling 
 realities hidden behind them. 
 
 But this will more fitly form the subject of a 
 separate chapter, 
 
177 
 
 CHAPTEK V 
 
 PEOPINQUITY OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD 
 
 Nothing has struck me more, in contemplating the 
 modern discoveries of physical science, than the 
 light which they appear to me to throw on the 
 glimpses into the spiritual world which Holy Writ 
 incidentally, and as it were casually, vouchsafes to 
 us. If we are to believe the Bible, the spiritual 
 world is not a region far away in space, but close to 
 us ; and we do not see its sights or hear its sounds 
 simply because our present organs are too dull to 
 apprehend them. We are thus in the condition of 
 a man born deaf and blind into this world of sense. 
 He is in the midst of two worlds, of which, however, 
 he knows next to nothing. For him the abounding 
 beauties of nature in the sphere of sight and sound 
 are as if they were not. Let his eyes be opened, 
 and he finds himself at once in the midst of a world 
 of which before he had no conception — nothing but 
 the vaguest notion from the report of those who had 
 eyes to see. Open his ears, and another world is 
 disclosed to him which his want of hearing had till 
 then concealed from him. 
 
 N 
 
178 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 This is the sort of relation in which Holy Scrip- 
 ture represents us as standing towards the spiritual 
 world. Let us take a few instances. 
 
 When Elijah was about to leave the earth, and 
 Elisha prayed for ' a double portion of the spirit ' of 
 his departing master, the latter answered, * Thou 
 hast asked a hard thing. Nevertheless, if thou see 
 me when I am taken from thee, it shall be so unto 
 thee ; but if not, it shall not be so.' What did the 
 prophet mean by * if thou see me when I am taken 
 from thee ' ? Surely this : that if Elisha was able 
 to see the spiritual transformation which his master 
 was about to undergo, that would in itself be a suffi- 
 cient proof to him that spiritual organs were opened 
 within him which placed him in communication 
 with the spiritual world. Elisha did see the trans- 
 lation of his master, and found himself at once en- 
 dowed with the gift of seership, which enabled him 
 to reveal the secret counsels of the Syrian King, 
 who consequently sent an army to arrest him. 
 ' And when the servant of the man of God was risen 
 early, and gone forth, behold, an host encompassed 
 the city, both with horses and chariots. And his 
 servant said unto him, Alas, my master ! how shall 
 we do ? And he answered. Fear not : for they that 
 be with us are more than they that be with them. 
 And Elisha prayed and said. Lord, I pray thee open 
 his eyes that he may see. And the Lord opened 
 the eyes of the young man, and he saw ; and, behold, 
 the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire 
 round about Elisha.* 
 
PKOPINQUITY OF THE SPIEITUAL WOELD 179 
 
 It is evident that the * eyes ' which the prophet 
 prayed might be opened were not the bodily eyes of 
 the young man. These were open before, and saw 
 nothing but the Syrian host. A new sense was 
 opened which revealed to the youth the agencies of 
 Divine Providence invisible to mortal sight, which 
 protect the servants of God. 
 
 In S. Luke's Gospel (iii. 21, 22) we read : ' Now 
 when all the people were baptized, it came to pass 
 that, Jesus also being baptized and praying, the 
 heaven was opened, and the Holy Ghost descended in 
 a bodily shape like a dove upon Him, and a voice came 
 from heaven which said, Thou art my beloved Son ; in 
 Thee I am well pleased.' In S. Matthew's account the 
 expression is, ' The heavens were opened unto^Him.' 
 
 The meaning evidently is that prayer on the part 
 of Jesus was in fact the opening of His sinless soul 
 to that spiritual world which the gross environment 
 of the mortal body hides from the multitude. 
 
 Another incident of similar import in our Lord's 
 life is related in S. John's Gospel (xii. 27-29) : — 
 
 * Now is My soul troubled ; and what shall I 
 say ? Father, save Me from this hour ; but for this 
 cause came I unto this hour. Father, glorify Thy 
 name. Then came there a voice from heaven, say- 
 ing, I have both glorified it and will glorify it again. 
 The people, therefore, that stood by and heard it 
 said that it thundered : others said. An angel spake 
 to Him.' 
 
 That is to say, the heavenly voice which fell in 
 articulate accents on the sensitive ear of our Saviour 
 
 V 2 
 
180 THE EBFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 sounded like the rumbling of distant thunder on the 
 duller organs of those who were about Him. 
 
 I believe that several of the discrepancies in the 
 Gospel record of our Lord's Resurrection may be 
 explained in the same way. Woman's more refined 
 and delicate organisation is naturally more sensitive 
 to spiritual influences than man's, and this is pro- 
 bably the reason why the devout women who visited 
 the tomb of the risen Saviour saw more of the 
 spiritual world than Peter and John, Mary, whose 
 absorbing love and intense grief had, no doubt, 
 quickened her spiritual perceptions, saw two angels ; 
 the other women saw only one ; Peter and John saw 
 none. In fact, each saw more or less according as 
 the spiritual organs were in each case rendered more 
 or less sensitive to spiritual influences. 
 
 My next illustration shall be from an incident in 
 the account of the martyrdom of S. Stephen, re- 
 corded in Acts vii. 55-57 : — 
 
 VBeing full of the Holy Ghost, he looked up 
 stedfastly into heaven, and saw the glory of God, 
 and Jesus standing on the right hand of God, and 
 said. Behold, I see the heavens opened, and the Son 
 of Man standing on the right hand of God.' 
 
 Now where was the heaven into which the dying 
 martyr gazed ? Millions of miles away, beyond the 
 starry firmament ? Was his mortal sight miracu- 
 lously endowed with a telescopic power of traversing 
 in a moment the planetary spaces and- looking into 
 a world of supersensuous glories behind them ? Is 
 it not plain, on the contrary, that a new sense was 
 
I 
 
 PROPINQUITY OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD 181 
 
 opened in himself, which enabled him to see through 
 the integuments of the natural life into the world of 
 unseen realities which lie above it, not in space, but 
 in altitude of being ? The ' everlasting doors ' were 
 
 * lifted up,' and the protomartyr was vouchsafed a 
 glimpse into a world of unearthly splendours close 
 to him, where his Divine Master- was standing ready 
 to receive His faithful servant. But the persecutors 
 of S. Stephen saw nothing but the rapt gaze of their 
 victim ; for the world which was revealed to him is 
 
 * spiritually discerned,' and they lacked that spiritual 
 insight. 
 
 Another illustration in point is the narrative of 
 the conversion of S. Paul. The account given in 
 Acts ix. says that * the men which journeyed with 
 him stood speechless, hearing a voice but seeing no 
 man.' S. Paul himself, on the other hand, says, 
 ' And they that were with me saw indeed the light, 
 and were afraid ; but they heard not the voice of 
 Him that spake to me ' (Acts xxii. 9). And cavils 
 against the inspiration of the Acts are sometimes 
 founded upon this seeming discrepancy. What is the 
 explanation ? Evidently, that S. Paul's companions 
 heard the sound, while his ear alone caught its 
 articulate language : ra (jxcvrjivra awsrovai. 
 
 These examples will suffice to show the general 
 teaching of the Bible touching the relation between 
 the world of sense and that of spirit. And now let 
 us see what physical science has to say upon the 
 subject. 
 
 We talk of five bodily senses ; but in strictness of 
 
182 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 speech we have only one sense — that of touch. Our 
 vision of external objects is nothing else but sensa- 
 tions made on the retina of the eye by contact with 
 the vibrations of an external substance. To produce 
 the sensation of scarlet, 477 billions of vibrations 
 break upon the retina every second, while a ray of 
 violet is caused by no fewer than 700 billions of 
 vibrations. Waves of light above or below these 
 limits in number are invisible to the human eye ; 
 that is, they move too rapidly or too slowly to make 
 any impression on the optic nerve. This is but 
 another way of saying that objects innumerable may 
 exist in the midst of us which are of so subtile a 
 nature as to elude our visual organs. * Myriads of 
 organised beings may exist imperceptible to our 
 vision, even if we were among them. ' ^ 
 
 And the same observation is applicable to the 
 phenomena of sound. Notes above or below a 
 certain pitch, though the air be resonant with them 
 to more delicate organisations, are inaudible to the 
 human ear. In his interesting book on the Glaciers 
 of the Alps Dr. Tyndall tells the following anec- 
 dote : — 
 
 I once crossed a Swiss mountain in company with a 
 friend; a donkey was in advance of us, and the dull 
 tramp of the animal was heard by my companion ; but 
 to me this sound was almost masked by the shrill 
 chirruping of innumerable insects, which thronged the 
 adjacent grass. My friend heard nothing of this ; it lay 
 quite beyond his range of hearing. 
 
 * Grove's Correlation of Physical Forces^ p. 161. Fourth edition. 
 
PEOPINQUITY OF THE SPIEITUAL WOELD 183 
 
 Another illustration of this fact is given in Mr. 
 Skertchly's ' Dahomey as it is.' ^ Speaking of the 
 large bats of that region he says : — 
 
 They utter a sharp chirrup, something like the squeak 
 of a rat, but very much higher in pitch, so high, indeed, 
 that I have frequently come across individuals whose 
 acoustic powers had not sufficient range to permit of 
 their hearing the note ; and on more than one occasion 
 I have said to Buchan [his half-caste servant], ' What a 
 noise these bats are making ! ' Upon which he has 
 observed to me, * Bats have no mouths for talking,' he 
 being perfectly unconscious of their vocal powers. 
 
 Some remarkable instances of the superior power 
 of hearing possessed by insects are given in an in- 
 teresting correspondence in the ' Times ' of 
 November 1874. I quote the following : — 
 
 Adapting the concluding sentences of the letter of the 
 Eev. F. O. Morris in the * Times ' of Saturday, it may be 
 observed that there are doubtless more sounds uttered 
 on the earth and in the air than can reach our ears. It 
 is well known that to many persons both the grasshopper 
 and the bat are dumb, and it is probable that moths and 
 other insects attract each other by calls inaudible to us, 
 rather than by scent. 
 
 One night, a few years ago, I had a female tiger-moth 
 in a gauze cage, in a room opening into a garden. I had 
 reared the moth from a caterpillar myself. The room 
 was full of tobacco smoke, and the garden was in the 
 middle of a town ; yet in less than two hours no less than 
 five male tiger-moths flew to the cage. Though I have sat 
 in the same room hundreds of nights with the window open 
 
 » Pp. 50, 51. 
 
184 THE EEFOEMATIOK SETTLEMENT 
 
 and a light burning, I never before or since knew a tiger- 
 moth to be attracted thither. It seems almost impossible 
 that these moths could have been led to the spot from 
 other walled-in, and in some cases distant, gardens, in 
 any other way but by a call in the stillness of the night. 
 But the captive moth made no perceptible noise, even 
 with its wings. 
 
 There is nothing unreasonable, therefore, in 
 believing that persons in a state of spiritual tension 
 may be cognisant of sights and sounds which make 
 no impression, or only a vague and meaningless im- 
 pression, on the multitude. When we reflect, to 
 quote the words of an eloquent writer, * that there 
 are waves of light and sound of which our dull senses 
 take no cognisance, that there is a great difference 
 even in human perceptivity, and that some men, 
 more gifted than others, can see colours or hear 
 sounds which are invisible or inaudible to the great 
 bulk of mankind, you will appreciate how possible it 
 is that there may be a world of spiritual existence 
 around us — inhabiting this same globe, enjoying the 
 same nature — of which we have no perception ; that, 
 in fact, the wonders of the New Jerusalem may be in 
 our midst, and the songs of the angelic hosts filling 
 the air with their celestial harmony, although un- 
 heard and unseen by us.' ^ Truly 'there are more 
 things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our 
 philosophy.' 
 
 All this will sound supremely foolish to some of 
 
 ' Religion and Chemistry, p. 107. By Professor J. P. 
 Cooko. 
 
PROPINQUITY OF THE SPIRITUAL WOELD 185 
 
 the robust critics of the day. A well-known writer, 
 for example, contributed to a leading journal ^ some 
 
 ' Letter signed * S.' in Pall Mall Gazette of Jan. 26, 1875. The 
 writer was the late Sir J. Fitzjames Stephen, a man of powerful 
 intellect, but without any aptitude for metaphysics. This is shown 
 in a curious volume of anonymous Essays by a Barrister (p. 151), in 
 which he gravely argues, in opposition to the doctrine of the necessary 
 laws of thought, that there may be a world where omnipotence may 
 cause two and two to make five instead of four. After giving some 
 reasons for this paradox he proceeds : — 
 
 ' It would also be possible to put a case in which two straight 
 lines should be universally supposed to include a space. Imagine a 
 man, who had never had any experience of straight lines through the 
 medium of any sense whatever, suddenly placed upon a railway 
 stretching out in a perfectly straight line to an indefinite distance in 
 each direction. He would see the rails, which would be the first lines 
 he had ever seen, apparently meeting, or at least tending to meet at 
 each horizon ; and he would thus infer, in the absence of all other 
 experience, that they actually did enclose a space, when produced 
 far enough. ... In such a world, therefore, the impossibility of 
 conceiving that two straight lines can enclose a space would not 
 exist.' 
 
 All this is a pure ignoratio elenclii. The question is not whether 
 there may not be a world inhabited by beings so constituted as to 
 believe that two and two make five, and that two straight lines 
 running parallel can enclose a space, but whether the human mind 
 can accept such paradoxes for truths— whether, on the contrary, the 
 axioms of mathematics do not present themselves to the mind, the 
 moment it embraces them, as irreversible and eternal. The inference 
 of the man on the railway would be that the lines were not really 
 straight, or that his eyes deceived him. Strange to say, Mr. John 
 Stuart Mill quotes these paradoxes with approbation in his Examina- 
 tion of Sir W. Hamilton's Philosophy (ch. vi.) — a weak piece of 
 reasoning, in my opinion. Both he and Fitzjames Stephen fail to see 
 the fundamental difference between necessary laws of thought and 
 empirical knowledge. Once the human mind gets hold of a mathe- 
 matical axiom it cannot conceive its contradictory. But all our ex- 
 perience of sunrise does not forbid the thought of its one day rising 
 no more — a catastrophe, indeed, towards which astronomers tell us 
 the sun is travelling. 
 
186 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 years ago a long and most scornful attack on the 
 doctrine of Sacrament alism. His argument brought 
 him naturally into collision with the scholastic dis- 
 tinctions between matter and form, substance and 
 accident ; and here is the sort of criticism to which 
 his superficial study of the question tempted him : — 
 
 I suppose it requires no argument to show that far 
 the greater part of this is nonsense. * Virtual contact ' 
 and forms without matter, for instance, are unmeaning 
 expressions and make nonsense of the propositions in 
 which they occur. The whole speculation is spun out 
 of the very distinction about matter and form, substance 
 and accident, which is essential to the controversy about 
 the Sacraments. So much of the theory as is not non- 
 sense is simply a play of fancy, resting on no foundation 
 at all, and which an ingenious person might twist into 
 any shape he pleased. I quote this partly in order to 
 show the character of what is called scientific theology 
 and the silliness of the results which its method of pro- 
 cedure produces, and partly because it shows how of two 
 doctrines, the intrinsic value of which is identical, one 
 falls into neglect and contempt because it does not 
 interest mankind, while the other lives and flourishes 
 because it relates to specific tangible objects upon which 
 people can gratify the longing for idolatry, which lies so 
 deep in the human heart, and which serves as a founda- 
 tion for the most exalted ideas of priestly power. ... I 
 think it may furnish matter of reflection to some of the 
 clergy to hear the undisguised expression of a layman's 
 opinion on this matter. Others probably think as I do. 
 Well, then, I for one look upon these doctrines not 
 merely as being intellectually absurd, but as being 
 morally injurious in the highest degree. I would as 
 soon see my son or daughter lie or steal as I would see 
 
PKOPINQUITY OF THE SPIETTUAL WOELD 187 
 
 them bow to the Host or believe that the Communion is 
 anything but a bare figure or symbol. 
 
 In contrast with this supercilious sciolism, I have 
 much pleasure in quoting the following passage from 
 one of the ablest philosophical treatises of the day : — 
 
 Provided that there be no clear and absolute conflict 
 with known laws of nature, there is nothing so impro- 
 bable or apparently inconceivable that it may not be ren- 
 dered highly probable, or even approximately certain, by 
 a sufficient number of concordances. In fact, the two 
 best founded and most conspicuously successful theories 
 in the whole range of physical science involve the most 
 absurd suppositions. Gravity is a force which appears 
 to act between bodies through vacuous space ; it is in 
 positive contradiction to the old dictum that nothing 
 could act but through some intervening medium or sub- 
 stance. It is even more puzzling that the force acts in 
 perfect indifference to all intervening obstacles. Light, 
 in spite of its extreme velocity, shows much respect to 
 matter, for it is almost instantaneously stopped by opaque 
 substances, and to a considerable extent absorbed and de- 
 flected by transparent ones. But to gravity all media are, 
 as it were, absolutely transparent, nay non-existent ; and 
 two particles at opposite points of the earth affect each 
 other exactly as if the globe were not between. To com- 
 plete the apparent impossibility, the action is, so far as 
 we can observe, absolutely instantaneous, so that every 
 particle of the universe is at every moment in separate 
 cognisance, as it were, of the relative position of every 
 other particle throughout the universe at that same mo- 
 ment of absolute time. Compared with such incompre- 
 hensible conditions, the theory of vortices deals with 
 common-place realities. Newton's celebrated saying, 
 hypotheses nonfingOf bears the appearance of pure irony; 
 
188 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and it was not without apparent grounds that Leibnitz 
 and the greatest continental philosophers charged New- 
 ton with re-introducing occult powers and qualities. 
 
 The undulatory theory of light presents almost equal 
 difficulties of conception. We are asked by physical 
 philosophers to give up all our ordinary prepossessions, 
 and believe that the interstellar space which seemed so 
 empty is not empty at all, but filled with something im- 
 mensely more solid and elastic than steel. As Dr. Young 
 himself remarked, * the luminiferous ether, pervading all 
 space, and penetrating almost all substances, is not only 
 highly elastic, but absolutely solid ! ! ! ' Sir John 
 Herschel has calculated the amount of force which 
 may be supposed, according to the undulatory theory of 
 light, to be exerted at each point in space, and finds it 
 to be 1,148,000,000,000 times the elastic force of ordinary 
 air at the earth's surface, so that the pressure of the 
 ether upon a square inch of surface must be about 
 17,000,000,000,000, or seventeen billions of pounds. 
 Yet we live and move without appreciable resistance 
 in this medium, indefinitely harder and more elastic 
 than adamant. All our ordinary notions must be laid 
 aside in contemplating such an hypothesis ; yet they are 
 no more than the observed phenomena of light and heat 
 force us to accept. We cannot deny even the strange 
 suggestion of Dr. Young, that there may be independent 
 worlds, some possibly existing in different parts of space, 
 but others perhaps pervading each other unseen and un- 
 known in the same space. For if we are bound to admit 
 the conception of this adamantine firmament, it is equally 
 easy to admit a plurality of such. We see, then, that 
 mere difficulties of conception must not in the least 
 discredit a theory which otherwise agrees with facts, and 
 we must only reject hypotheses ivhich are inconceivable in 
 
PROPINQUITY OF THE SPIRITUAL WORLD 18^ 
 
 the sense of breorking distinctly the priniary lawsoftliought 
 and nature. 
 
 Again: — ^ 
 
 Scientific method leads us to the inevitable conception 
 of an infinite series of successive orders of infinitely small 
 quantities. If so, there is nothing impossible in the 
 existence of a myriad universes within the compass of a 
 needle's point, each with its stellar systems, and its suns 
 and planets, in number and variety unlimited. Scietwe 
 does nothing to redtice the number of strange things that we 
 may believe. When fairly 'pursued, it makes large drafts 
 upon our powers of comprehension and belief} 
 
 For the sake of convenience I will here re-quote 
 the passage from Leibnitz on the doctrine of the 
 Eeal Presence : — 
 
 As I have been the first to discover that the essence 
 of a body does not consist in extension, but in motion, 
 and hence, that the substance or nature of a body, even 
 according to Aristotle's definition, is the principle of 
 motion (evrcXc^f la) and that this principle or substance of 
 the body has no extension, — I have made it plain how 
 God can be clearly and distinctly understood to cause the 
 substance of the same body to exist m many different 
 places? 
 
 And w^hat could have seemed more incredible 
 before experience than wireless telegraphy? The 
 young Italian electrician Marconi has invented a 
 system of telegraphy without wires, which does not 
 
 » The Principles of Science, vol. ii. pp. 144, 145, 467. By W. S. 
 Jevons. 
 
 ■^ Compare his System of Theology, pp. 99, 100 ; also Sir W. 
 Hamilton's Discussions in Philosophy, pp. 604-7. 
 
190 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 depend on electro-magnetic, but on electrostatic 
 effects — that is to say, on electric waves set up at 
 the rate of 250,000,000 vibrations a second. Facts 
 like these bring almost within the range of credibility 
 such stories as that of Kinglake hearing, in the 
 stillness of the Sinaitic Desert, the sound of the 
 church bells in his Somersetshire home.^ 
 
 Some other interesting illustrations of this sub- 
 ject are supplied by the phenomena consequent on 
 the grand eruption of Krakatoa in 1883, as described 
 in a fascinating volume published by a committee of 
 experts under the auspices of the Koyal Society. 
 The air-waves varied in rapidity from 13 h. 48 m. 
 to 124 h. 30 m. in passing between Krakatoa 
 and Kew, differing, I suppose, with the violence of 
 the explosions. The sound of the explosions was 
 heard ' very nearly three thousand English miles 
 from Krakatoa.' * Several times during the night ' 
 (of the eruption) * reports were heard coming from 
 the eastward like the distant roar of heavy guns.' 
 
 At Diego Garcia, upwards of two thousand five 
 hundred miles from Krakatoa, the sounds were very 
 distinctly heard, and were supposed to be those of guns 
 fired by a vessel in distress. In Ceylon, and also in 
 Australia, the sounds were heard at many different places 
 far removed from each other ; while at Dorey, in New 
 Guinea, they were clearly heard, and their occurrence was 
 recorded at the time, long before it was known to what 
 cause they were due.^ 
 
 » Eothen, pp. 274-5. Third edition. 
 
 "^ The Eruption of Krakatoa and Subsequent Phenomena^ 
 pp. 79, 80. 
 
PEOPINQUITY OF THE SPIEITUAL WORLD 191 
 
 See, again, how Our Lord's passage through 
 closed doors in His Spiritual Body is brought within 
 the realm of reason through the revelations of the 
 Rontgen rays. For if the luminiferous ether, which 
 is a material substance, can penetrate, as if they did 
 not exist, opaque and solid substances like flesh and 
 muscle and wood and aluminium, d fortiori may 
 the much subtler substance of a spiritual body do 
 so. 
 
 Perhaps I may here quote from a previous 
 volume of my own : — 
 
 But, in addition to all this, photography and spectrum 
 analysis have proved that there are worlds within worlds 
 close to us now and here of which our gross senses can 
 take no cognisance. Photography has shown that there 
 are multitudes of stars beyond the reach of the most 
 powerful telescopes, and that the light of these stars is 
 ever playing on our earth. So distant are they, and so 
 attenuated are their rays, that it takes countless billions of 
 these luminous vibrations to make an impression on the 
 photographer's plate. ' The waves beating from the 
 Atlantic in long course of time,* says one of our leading 
 astronomers,^ * have gradually altered the face of the 
 shore. But in one second of time there are as many 
 minute waves of light beating in on one plate as the 
 Atlantic has sent in during a million years — a whole 
 geological period. The human eye is colour-blind to a 
 vast proportion of the rays which come in from the stars. 
 But the photo-plate sees all these invisible rays a great 
 deal better than our eyes see the visible rays.'^ 
 
 ' Sir K. Ball, in a lecture at the Koyal Institution ; cf. The Story 
 of the Heavens, p. 463, by the same author. 
 
 ' Life Here and Hereafter, p. 134. Second edition. 
 
192 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 It bewilders the intellect and makes the imagi- 
 nation giddy to learn that within the petals of a 
 flower, even within a speck of blood dissolved in a 
 drop of water, the seven colours of the rainbow are 
 seen as distinctly as in the bow which sjans our 
 sky. Yet that is one of the marvels which chemical 
 analysis has revealed to us. 
 
 Thus we see that human science and Holy 
 Scripture unite their voices in teaching us that 
 beneath the world of sense, penetrating and vivifying 
 it, there is a world of spirit ; that what we see and 
 touch is but the crust and shell, the outward and 
 visible sign of unseen realities, truly present, though 
 sense cannot apprehend it. 
 
 Two worlds are ours, 'tis only sin 
 
 Forbids us to descry 
 The mystic heaven and earth within, 
 
 Clear as the sea and sky. 
 
 So sings the poet of the 'Christian Year.' And 
 Milton expressed the same thought before him : — 
 
 What if earth 
 Be but the shadow of heaven, and things therein- 
 Each to other like, more than on earth is thought ? 
 
193 
 
 CHAPTEE VI 
 
 SACEEDOTALISM 
 
 It is a pity that those who denounce the doctrine 
 of Sacerdotalism do not ,take the trouble to explain 
 what it is precisely that they wish to condemn 
 under cover of that unpopular word. I take it, 
 however, that what the opponents of Sacerdotalism 
 wish to repudiate is that somewhat distorted aspect 
 of the Christian religion which has been condemned 
 in the following language by an able and revered 
 writer of our day, to whom, though himself dis- 
 owning the creed of Christendom, many Christians, 
 myself included, owe much : — 
 
 So long as its Sacramental principle remains, the 
 Established Church rests upon a theory of religion utterly 
 at variance with all the residuary varieties of Puritan 
 faith, and amounting, as many of us conceive, to a reversal 
 of the very essence of Christianity, for it reverses that 
 ivimediateness of relation between the human Spirit and 
 the Divine which is the distinctive boon of Jesus to the 
 world, and it reinstates that resort to mediation and 
 « channels of grace,' and magically endowed men, which 
 it w^as His special aim to sweep away and render im- 
 possible.^ 
 
 ' Why Dissent ? by James Martineau, p. 14. 
 
 O 
 
i94 THE EEFOBMA'tiON SETTLJEMENT 
 
 It is therefore the Sacramental principle and the 
 doctrine of mediation which are in question. I do 
 not mean that all who declaim against Sacerdotalism 
 would go quite so far as Dr. Martineau ; but that is 
 only because they are not so clear-headed as he, and 
 do not perceive the conclusion necessarily involved 
 in their premisses. Dr. Martineau admits, as indeed 
 every candid and unprejudiced person must, that 
 * the Estabhshed Church rests upon ' the doctrine of 
 Sacerdotalism, which, however, he thinks it was the 
 ' special aim ' of our Lord ' to sweep away and 
 render impossible.' Of that more anon. Meanwhile 
 let us see what the Old Testament has to say upon 
 the subject. 
 
 It seems to me quite impossible for any one, who 
 is not committed to the defence of a foregone con- 
 clusion, to read the Old Testament without acknow- 
 ledging that the principle of Sacerdotalism runs all 
 through it from Genesis to Malachi. A few instances 
 may suffice by way of illustration. 
 
 When Abimelech took Abraham's wife, thinking 
 her to be his sister, and pleaded afterwards that he 
 had done it * in the integrity of his heart and inno- 
 cency of his hands,' God is represented as saying, 
 ' Yea, I know that thou didst this in the integrity of 
 thy heart. . . . Now therefore restore the man his 
 wife ; for he is a prophet, and he shall pray for 
 thee, and thou shalt live; and if thou restore her 
 not, know thou that thou shalt surely die, and all 
 that are thine.' ^ Abraham's intercession for the 
 ' Gen. XX. 5-7. 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 195 
 
 doomed' Cities of the Plain is another instance in 
 point. 
 
 In the Twelfth Chapter of the Book of Numbers 
 we have an account of an outburst of rebellion 
 against the authority of Moses on the part of 
 Miriam ; her consequent punishment by the inflic- 
 tion of leprosy ; and her subsequent cure at the 
 prayer of Moses. 
 
 In the last chapter of the Book of Job I read as 
 follows : — 
 
 And it was so, that after the Lord had spoken these 
 words unto Job, the Lord said to Eliphaz the Temanite, 
 My wrath is kindled against thee and against thy two 
 friends ; for ye have not spoken of Me the thing that is 
 right, as My servant Job hath. Therefore take unto you 
 now seven bullocks and seven rams, and go to my servant 
 Job, and offer up for yourselves a burnt offering ; and My 
 servant Job shall pray for you ; for him will I accept, lest 
 I deal with you after your folly, in that ye have not 
 spoken of Me the thing which is right, like My servant 
 Job. 
 
 Here, then, are a few typical illustrations, which 
 might be multiplied indefinitely, of the doctrine that 
 God usually bestows His benefits on man, not 
 immediately, but through the intervention of human 
 agents ordained for that end. And what is the 
 Mosaic dispensation but a development, through 
 rite and sacrifice, of the same idea ? One family is 
 set apart and endowed with the exclusive right to 
 act mediatorially between God and His people ; and 
 when Korah and his company, relying on the fact 
 that the whole congregation of Israel was holy, as 
 
 o 2 
 
196 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 being, in some sort, ' a royal priesthood,' attempted 
 to usurp the office of the priesthood. Almighty God 
 is represented as vindicating by a terrible punishment 
 the exclusive priesthood of the family of Aaron. 
 
 To parry the force of this argument the opponents 
 of Sacerdotalism are wont to decry the Mosaic dis- 
 pensation not merely as a system of ordinances which 
 has been superseded by the Christian dispensation, 
 but as involving doctrines which are essentially 
 antagonistic to Christianity. Dr. Martineau says 
 distinctly that the sacramental principle and the 
 doctrine of mediation ' amount to a reversal of the 
 very essence of Christianity.' Dr. Martineau is a 
 Unitarian ; but on this question he is in full agree- 
 ment with the great mass of anti-Sacerdotalists. 
 What authority he would be willing to concede to 
 the Mosaic legislation, and whether he now con- 
 siders the Old Testament inspired in any special 
 sense, I know not. But the Evangelical party,^ 
 who in this matter are in the same boat with Dr. 
 Martineau, hold very stringent views indeed as to 
 the unqualified Divine inspiration of all the Books 
 of the Old Testament. They ought, therefore, to 
 
 ' Dr. Guinness Eogers, in an article in the Contemporary Review 
 of February 1899, asserts that ' there is a strong sacerdotal element 
 in the Prayer Book,' and declares that * while the formula [of the 
 ordination of priests] remains unchanged it will be impossible to 
 exclude priests and priestism from the Anglican Church. The 
 marvel is not that they are there, but that there has been found a 
 place for those who repudiate the idea of a "ministerial priesthood," 
 to use Dr. Moberly's expressive phrase.' That is surely the language 
 of reason and common sense. 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 197 
 
 consider seriously whither their attack on the 
 principle of Sacerdotalism leads them. They con- 
 demn it as something essentially wrong in itself. It 
 is certain, however, if the Old Testament is Divinely 
 inspired, that Sacerdotalism is a doctrine not only 
 sanctioned but peremptorily enjoined by Almighty 
 God Himself. But can God enjoin what is essen- 
 tially wrong ? And let it be considered, moreover 
 that our Lord has expressly declared that He came 
 * not to destroy the Law, but to fulfil it.' The Law 
 was developed into the Gospel. But development 
 implies the conservation of the norm or radical 
 idea. Now the radical idea underlying the Sacri- 
 ficial system of the Old Testament was man's need 
 of expiation, combined with his personal unworthi- 
 ness to make an atonement for himself. 
 
 It is remarkable that the immediate occasion of 
 the appointment of the Aaronic priesthood seems 
 to have been the public acknowledgment of un- 
 worthiness made by the general congregation. 
 During the patriarchal period the head of the family 
 was also its priest ; and even when the law was 
 delivered to the Israelites from Mount Sinai there 
 was no regular priesthood to stand between God 
 and His people. They were all regarded as a nation 
 of priests until their own sense of unworthiness 
 caused them to shrink back aghast from the awful 
 privilege. 
 
 The circumstance is related by Moses as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 And it came to pass when ye heard the voice out of 
 the midst of the darkness (for the mountain did burn 
 
198 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 witli fire), that ye came near unto me, even all the heads 
 of your tribes, and your elders ; and ye said, Behold, the 
 Lord our God hath shown us His glory and His greatness, 
 and we have heard His voice out of the midst of the fire : 
 we have seen this day that God doth talk with man, and 
 he liveth. Now therefore why should we die ? for this 
 great fire will consume us ; if we hear the voice of the 
 Lord our God any more, then we shall die. For who is 
 there of all flesh that hath heard the voice of the living 
 God speaking out of the midst of the fire, as we have, and 
 lived ? Go thou near, and hear all that the Lord our God 
 shall say : and speak thou unto us all that the Lord our 
 God shall speak unto thee ; and we will hear it and do 
 it. And the Lord heard the voice of your words, when 
 ye spake unto me ; and the Lord said unto me, I have 
 heard the voice of the words of this people, which they 
 have spoken unto thee : they have well said all that they 
 have spoken. 
 
 Accordingly Aaron and his sons were consecrated 
 to the office of the priesthood soon after this incident, 
 and they became the appointed mediators between 
 Jehovah and the general congregation. Still the 
 people were not suffered to rest in this as a final 
 and unchangeable arrangement. Their true ideal 
 was always kept before them. They were reminded 
 that, in spite of the Aaronic priesthood, they still 
 continued ideally ' a kingdom of priests, a holy 
 nation.' They were unworthy now to realise that 
 high ideal ; but they were not to lose sight of it, and 
 to keep them in perpetual remembrance of it there 
 were several rites of a sacerdotal character, such as 
 the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb, in which the 
 people at large were allowed to participate. 
 
SACERDOTALISM 199 
 
 So much as to the teaching of the Old Testament 
 on the subject of Sacerdotalism. Where is the evi- 
 dence that it was our Lord's ' special aim to sweep 
 away and render impossible ' such teaching ? On 
 the contrary, if we are to believe the Gospel narra- 
 tive, He ordained a certain order of men to occupy 
 in the Christian Church a position and to fulfil func- 
 tions analogous to those of the Aaronic priesthood. 
 Once before His death, and once after. He charged 
 them with the following commission : ' As My 
 Father hath sent Me, even so send I you. And when 
 He had said this He breathed on them and saith 
 unto them, Keceive ye the Holy Ghost : whosesoever 
 sins ye remit they are remitted unto them ; and 
 whosesoever sins ye retain they are retained.' 
 
 I cannot imagine a stronger sanction of the sacer- 
 dotal principle than these words' imply; and it is 
 clear that our Lord's xApostles understood them in a 
 sacerdotal sense. Why was Philip bidden to 'go 
 near ' the chariot of the Ethiopian eunuch and 
 instruct and baptise him ? Why was Ajianias sent 
 to Saul the persecutor, that he might ' put his hands 
 on him,' in order that he ' might receive his sight, 
 and be filled with the Holy Ghost ' ? Why was Cor- 
 nelius directed to * send men to Joppa ' to fetch 
 Peter that he might receive the pious centurion into 
 the Christian Church ? — Why all this, if it was one 
 of the special designs of Christianity to abolish the 
 sacerdotal principle and to forbid all 'resort to 
 mediation, and '' channels of grace," and " magically 
 endowed men " ' ? It is undeniabJe that the Acts of 
 
200 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the Apostles and the Epistles supply abundant evi- 
 dence of a public ministry during the period which 
 they embrace. And that ministry is represented, not 
 as a human institution, but as of Divine appointment. 
 Candidates are set apart with solemn rites, by means 
 of which spiritual powers are supposed to be con- 
 ferred upon them for the discharge of their new 
 duties. And with this agrees the language by which 
 the ministerial office is designated. St. Paul speaks 
 of himself and his colleagues as ' ministers and 
 stewards of Divine mysteries,' and as * ambassadors ' 
 accredited from God to men. Surely the sacerdotal 
 principle could not be asserted in stronger language 
 than this ; and, therefore, for the Church of England 
 to repudiate the sacerdotal principle would be to 
 repudiate all connection with the Christian ministry 
 of the Apostolic age. 
 
 And yet it must be admitted, on the other hand, 
 that there is a sense in which it is as true now as it 
 was under the Mosaic dispensation, that all Chris- 
 tians are in some way priests, and are charged with 
 sacerdotal functions. St. Peter addresses the whole 
 congregation of Christians in his day in the language 
 in which Moses described the priestly character of 
 ancient Israel. He calls them ' a royal priesthood ; ' 
 an ideal of Christian perfection which St. John saw 
 realised when he heard the saints in bliss giving 
 thanks for having been made * kings and priests unto 
 God.' A layman can validly baptise, and he has his 
 share in the offering up of the Eucharistic Sacrifice — 
 a fact which was symbolised in ancient times, and 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 201 
 
 now through Oriental Christendom, by the custom 
 of the faithful laity formally offering their oblation 
 of the Sacramental elements to their representative, 
 the officiating priest, who then consecrated them to 
 God, in order that Christ, the true Priest, might 
 make them, according to His own promise, the 
 Sacrament of His Body and Blood. 
 
 We are all intended, laity as well as clergy, to be 
 * kings and priests unto God.* If man had never 
 fallen there would have been no need of a special 
 priesthood. All would have been alike worthy to 
 offer God an acceptable service, as all will be here- 
 after in heaven. This is the ideal towards which we 
 are to strive ; and in order to keep our unworthiness 
 always before us, and thus help us to fulfil our 
 Christian calling, it has pleased God to ordain an 
 order of men, personally as unworthy as the rest, to 
 be His * ambassadors ' on earth, and the ' ministers 
 and stewards of His mysteries.' To characterise 
 such a doctrine as implying a caste of ' magically 
 endowed men' is to substitute offensive caricature for 
 serious argument. Dr. Martineau may, indeed, be 
 excused for not understanding a doctrine which it 
 has probably never fallen to his lot to study 
 seriously. 
 
 Those who repudiate the sacerdotal idea as 
 characteristic of the Christian ministry regard 
 personal fitness as the essential qualification of a 
 valid ministry.^ But that is a view which the 
 
 ' In the Catechism lately published by ' the National Council of 
 Evangelical Free Churches in England and Wales ' I find the follow- 
 
202 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Church of England rejects explicitly in the twenty- 
 sixth Article, where the line is drawn distinctly 
 between moral fitness and official commission : 
 validity of Sacraments depending on the former, not 
 on the latter. And most reasonably and justly. It 
 would indeed be a cruel injustice to the people if 
 their loyal obedience to God's commands were 
 rendered nugatory by the personal un worthiness of 
 His ministers. Most justly therefore does the Article 
 declare : ' Neither is the effect of Christ's ordinance 
 taken away by their [ministers'] wickedness, nor the 
 grace of God's gifts diminished from such as by 
 faith and rightly do receive the Sacraments minis- 
 tered unto them ; which be effectual because of 
 
 ing questions and answers : * What is a Christian minister ? A 
 Christian minister is one who is called of God and the Church to be 
 a teacher of the Word and a pastor of the flock of Christ. How may 
 the validity of such a ministry be proved ? The decisive proof of 
 a valid ministry is the sanction of the Divine Head of the Church, 
 manifested in the conversion of sinners and the edification of the 
 Body of Christ.' 
 
 The second answer reads to me like a contradiction of the first. 
 We are told, first, that * a Christian minister is one who is called of 
 God and the Church ; ' and next, that ' the decisive proof of a valid 
 ministry ' is the visible success of the minister. Visible it must be, 
 else it can be no proof to others. Yet Elijah's ministry seemed to 
 himself and to others a failure. Moreover, this ' decisive proof ' 
 would seem to make the call of the Church a superfluity. Why call, 
 why ordain, if * the decisive proof ' is in the fruits of the ministry ? 
 And is every man — nay, every woman also— who exhibits this deci- 
 sive proof a valid minister ? A minister of God undoubtedly every 
 man and woman is who brings forth the fruits of faith and love. But 
 what is the value of so comprehensive a definition ? If there is a 
 special ministry, it does not define it. If there is not, it were better 
 to say so.. 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 203 
 
 God's institution and promise, although they be 
 ministered by evil men.' 
 
 In truth, the objection which I am considering 
 implies a confusion between two things which are 
 totally distinct : individual merit and of&cial com- 
 mission. To affirm that every man who shows 
 eminent capacity for the ministerial office is in fact 
 a minister is as reasonable as it would be to argue 
 that every good strategist is ipso facto a general, 
 or every good financier ipso facto Chancellor of the 
 Exchequer. Of course it would be much better if 
 the men best fitted for the office were appointed 
 ministers, just as it would be much better if the 
 best men were appointed Commanders-in-Chief, 
 Ambassadors, and Prime Ministers. To be qualified 
 for an office, however, is one thing : to be appointed 
 to it is quite another. Men see this well enough 
 in secular matters. How is it that so obvious a 
 truth offends them when the sphere of its operation 
 is spiritual ? I believe the reason is to be. found in 
 man's natural reluctance to believe in the reality of 
 powers whose source and mode of action are in- 
 visible. Unless he sees signs and wonders he finds 
 it hard to believe that God has founded in the midst 
 of men a spiritual polity, the administration of 
 whose laws and powers He has committed to a 
 hierarchy of mortal men, the validity of whose 
 credentials can be tested by the methods of ordinary 
 evidence. Assuming that the Christian Church is a 
 Divine and not a human creation — I am not arguing 
 here against those who deny that assumption — I do 
 
204 THE EBFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 not see anything more unreasonable in supposing 
 that He should transmit spiritual life through the 
 instrumentality of a sacramental agency than in 
 believing that He propagates natural life through the 
 process of natural generation. No antecedent objec- 
 tion can be urged against the one which is not 
 equally valid against the other. 
 
 But let us consider this question of Sacerdotalism 
 a little more in detail. The ordinary objection to 
 the doctrine of absolution — v^hich is taught, be it 
 remembered, in all the Eeformation formularies, and 
 not merely in those of the Church of England — v^^as 
 anticipated long ago by the Pharisees v^hen they 
 murmured against our Lord : ' Who is this v^^hich 
 speaketh blasphemies ? Who can forgive sins but 
 God alone ? ' The objection is valid in one sense ; 
 invalid in another. It is true of course that God 
 alone can forgive sin as an originating cause. But 
 it is equally true that in this sense God alone can 
 give health, knowledge, fruitful harvests. Yet we 
 consult a physician when the body is out of order ; 
 we send our children to school to imbibe knowledge 
 from the lips of human teachers ; we sow, plant, and 
 reap, though we also pray God to ' give us day by 
 day our daily bread.' And the physician, or teacher, 
 or husbandman, who should arrogate as his own 
 the skill and energy which thus enable him to 
 benefit others, would ' speak blasphemies ' as truly 
 as the priest who should impiously claim in his own 
 right and person the power to forgive sins. The 
 physician of the soul acts ministerially ; and so does 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 205 
 
 the physician of the body, whether he acknowledges 
 it or not. The latter examines his patient, sketches 
 the diagnosis of his complaint, prescribes a regimen, 
 and bestows his medicine. But if the patient has 
 not told the truth, or disregards the treatment, the 
 medicine may become a poison to him. Ajid so in 
 spiritual matters the absolution becomes a curse, and 
 not a blessing, to him who has not received it in the 
 spirit of true penitence. 
 
 The truth is, the usual cavils against the doctrine 
 of Sacerdotalism are founded on a very shallow con- 
 ception of God's ordinary government of mankind. 
 As a matter of fact, He has committed the ever- 
 lasting destiny of men to the custody of one another. 
 Any one of us may ruin for ever souls for whom 
 Christ died. We have all received some talent of 
 one kind or another from God ; external talents of 
 wealth, of social rank, of official position, and the 
 like ; or personal gifts, like beauty of person or 
 charm of manner, an eloquent tongue or musical 
 voice. No one is so humble as not to have some 
 means or other of influencing those who come within 
 his reach. And, indeed, it is very terrible to think 
 how unceasing is this reciprocal influence of human 
 beings upon each other, and how unconsciously it is 
 generally exercised. 
 
 Now these various gifts of personal influence, 
 which God has given to all, in great measure or in 
 small, every one of us may use to the ruin of his 
 neighbour. The Almighty Father wills us to be 
 each his brother's keeper ; but we may act the part 
 
206 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of the first murderer, and kill the life committed to 
 our trust. I cannot imagine any torment of hell 
 more awful than the horror of those who shall meet, 
 face to face, before the judgment-seat of Christ, the 
 souls whom they have ruined. It seems incredible 
 that there ever can be a heaven for a soul through 
 whose evil influence another soul has perished. 
 Surely the very splendours of the Beatific Vision 
 would but increase his remorse on remembrance of 
 the never-ending mischief he had wrought on earth. 
 The reader will remember that of all the horrors 
 which the poet, with true instinct, makes Uhe 
 Ancient Mariner' endure in his awful solitude on 
 the lonely sea the climax was the dying curse in the 
 eyes of the two hundred corpses which lay, with 
 upturned faces on the deck, slain by his thoughtless 
 act. 
 
 An orphan's curse would drag to hell 
 A spirit from on high : 
 
 But O ! more horrible than that 
 Is the curse in a dead man's eye ! 
 
 Seven days, seven nights, I saw that curse ; 
 And yet I could not die. 
 
 But what a faint image that is of the horror 
 caused by a moral ruin which can never be undone ! 
 What is there in the doctrine of Sacerdotalism that 
 approaches in point of mystery to this fearful power 
 which God has given to every one of us? When a 
 priest absolves a penitent he knows full well that the 
 efficacy of his absolution depends, after all, on the 
 state of the heart which receives it ; and he knows 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 207 
 
 also that he cannot use the gift against the will and 
 intention of the Almighty Giver. He who reads the 
 heart will ratify or annul, in virtue of His perfect 
 knowledge, the words of pardon uttered by His 
 minister on earth. But personal influence, in what- 
 ever form, may be used against the will of the Divine 
 Giver. So that, in matter of fact, God has given 
 to each of us, laic and cleric, a power of the keys, a 
 power of opening or closing heaven, of a far more 
 awful kind than that which He has bestowed upon 
 the 'ministers and stewards of His mysteries.' I 
 wish that those who cry out against Sacerdotalism, 
 as an encroachment on the liberties of the laity, 
 would consider the very awful sacerdotal power which 
 the laity themselves are discharging day by day, 
 whether they think of it or not. It is not in the 
 Christian ministry that we have ' magically endowed 
 men,' but in ordinary society : men, and women too, 
 endowed with personal, not official, gifts of magnetic 
 influence on those who come in contact with them. 
 Personal influence is indeed the most awful of all 
 gifts. And we all possess it in measure and degree, 
 and are using it continually, and probably oftenest 
 when we think least about it. Virtue or vice is un- 
 ceasingly going out of us, and we are thus scattering 
 in the air around us germs of moral good or evil to 
 breed spiritual health or malady in those who inhale 
 them. 
 
 In truth, the argument against Sacerdotalism 
 cuts deeper and wider than those who use it appear 
 to perceive. If Christ is the only Mediator, to the 
 
208 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 absolute exclusion of all other mediators, this is 
 fatal not only to every kind of public ministry, but 
 to all acts of intercession whatsoever, and indeed to 
 any kind of personal influence. If *the fervent 
 prayer of a righteous man availeth much,' what is 
 that but an instance of successful mediation ? The 
 mother who pleads for a sick or erring child is surely 
 a mediator ; and so is the eloquent preacher or writer 
 who turns men from sin to righteousness. In one 
 sense of course it is true that there is but * One 
 Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ 
 Jesus ; ' since it is from His Atonement alone that all 
 human mediation derives its worth. But in another 
 sense all Christians are bound to be mediators, for it 
 is their duty to intercede for each other. In short, 
 what is the Gospel dispensation but a paramount 
 example of Sacerdotalism ? Christianity has now 
 been in the world for upwards of eighteen centuries, 
 and yet the vast majority of mankind are still outside 
 its pale. In the first ages of its career the Faith of 
 Christ carried all before it. The philosophy of 
 Greece and the statecraft and legions of Imperial 
 Eome were alike powerless to arrest its progress. 
 It penetrated into the hut of the savage and into the 
 palace of the Caesars, and led captive Jew and 
 Gentile, Greek and Barbarian, bond and free. 
 What has the Christian Church done in comparison 
 with this during the last few centuries? On balan- 
 cing its gains and its losses, must it not be sorrow- 
 fully admitted that it has done little more than hold 
 its own? And what explanation can be given, 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 209 
 
 except the humiliating fact that Christians have 
 turned against each other the arms which they ought 
 to have employed in extending the frontiers of their 
 Master's kingdom ? In other words, the purposes 
 of God are so far bafHed, because He has entrusted 
 the execution of them to the ministry of a fallible 
 and selfish race. 
 
 And yet, mysterious as all this seems, I think we 
 may see a reason for it. There is an inborn tendency 
 in human nature towards selfishness ; and to counter- 
 act this tendency, to which even the best of men are 
 more or less liable, God has made us necessary to 
 each other. On the right hand and on the left, from 
 the cradle to the grave, we need the help of others. 
 Neither in sickness nor in health, in joy nor in 
 sorrow, in temporal nor in spiritual matters, can we 
 afford to stand alone. 
 
 Ajid thus our very selfishness is turned into an 
 antidote against itself. If we could go through this 
 mortal life to our eternal home as isolated units, 
 there would be nothing to check our innate selfish- 
 ness. But human beings are no mere aggregate of 
 independent units, each complete in itself and striv- 
 ing after its own perfection alone. They are members 
 of one family — * the whole family in heaven and in 
 earth ' — and their mutual interdependence radiates 
 from the centre of the family to the circumference 
 of the race. Even the geographical arrangements 
 of the globe, its varieties of climates and productions, 
 are made to minister to the same end ; and the dic- 
 tates of enlightened selfishness are slowly teaching 
 
 P 
 
210 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the nations of the earth that they have need of one 
 another ; that if one member suffers, the rest will in 
 the long run suffer with it ; that exclusiveness is, 
 therefore, a suicidal policy, the true secret of a 
 nation's prosperity lying, not in jealous hugging 
 of its peculiar treasures, but in freely exchanging 
 them for those of its neighbours. 
 
 Thus does God contrive, in the domain of things 
 temporal, to make our very selfishness the instru- 
 ment of its own destruction. And His mode of treat- 
 ment is the same in things spiritual. Through all 
 the ordinances of the Christian Church He alone is 
 the Giver and the Source of all spiritual blessings. 
 ' Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, 
 and cometh down from the Father of lights ; ' but 
 these gifts reach us, as a rule, through the ministry 
 of human mediators. 
 
 The power is from God ; but He imparts it 
 through human agents and material channels. This 
 is the essence of Sacerdotalism ; and it is the advo- 
 cates of the doctrine and not its impugners w^ho 
 magnify the power of God and emphasise the feeble- 
 ness of man. For the objection to Sacerdotalism is 
 in reality, though not consciously, rooted in the 
 belief that man has any power apart from God. 
 The truth, however, is that I should be guilty of just 
 as much blasphemy in claiming to hold with any 
 strength of my own the pen which writes these 
 words as I should be if I claimed in my own right 
 to forgive a fellow creature his sins. Sacerdotalism 
 is, in fact nothing else than an example in one 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 211 
 
 department of God's providential government of a 
 principle which runs through the whole of it ; namely, 
 that it is His rule to work by the use of means. 
 
 It is remarkable how emphatically not only the 
 Church of the first centuries, but the mediaeval 
 Church also, claimed for the laity a quasi-sacerdotal 
 power even in respect to sacramental confession. I 
 need not remind the reader that private confession 
 came into vogue by way of relaxation on the 
 original discipline, which enjoined on penitents a 
 public confession in the sight of the congregation. 
 And the absolution pronounced was the absolution 
 of the Church through her authorised minister. 
 This share of the faithful laity even in the power 
 of the keys is fully recognised by the leading 
 men among the schoolmen. St. Thomas Aquinas, 
 for exardple, discusses the question, ' Utrum in aliquo 
 casu liceat aliis quam Sacerdotibus confiteri,' and 
 decides that a layman may hear a penitent's con- 
 fession, just as he may administer baptism, in case 
 of necessity, and that a penitent is in such a case 
 bound to confess. The layman cannot, indeed, com- 
 plete on his part the sacrament of penance, since he 
 does not possess the power of granting absolution. 
 But this defect 'the High Priest supplies.' And 
 therefore ' confession made to a layman in the ab- 
 sence of the priest is in a manner Sacramental.' ^ 
 
 ' ' Sed quando necessitas imminet, debet facere poenitens quod ex 
 parte sua est, scilicet conteri et confiteri cui potest ; qui quamvis 
 Sacramentum perficere non possit, ut faciat id quod ex parte sacer- 
 dotis est, absolutionem scilicet, defectum tamen sacerdotis Summus 
 
 V 2 
 
212 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Peter Lombard decides in the same manner the 
 question, * An sufficiat confiteri laico ? ' * If a priest 
 cannot be had,' he says, ' confession must be made 
 to one's neighbour or companion.' A priest must, 
 in the first place, be diligently sought after ; but ' so 
 great is the virtue of confession that, if a priest can- 
 not be found, confession should be made to one's 
 neighbour (tanta itaque vis confessionis est, ut si 
 deest sacerdos, confiteatur proximo). . . . For al- 
 though he to whom the confession is made has not 
 the power of giving absolution, nevertheless he who 
 confesses to his neighbour is worthy of pardon from 
 his desire for a priest. For the lepers were cleansed 
 on their way to show themselves to the priests, before 
 they reached them.' ^ 
 
 Albertus Magnus, another great name, goes 
 beyond this ; for he affirms that a layman possesses, 
 in case of necessity, the power of absolving.^ 
 
 Indeed, we find the duty of confessing to a layman 
 in case of necessity not only defended by theologians 
 in their studies, but commanded by synodical canons 
 and provincial constitutions. The synod of Treves, 
 
 Sacerdos supplet. Nihilominus confessio laico ex defectu sacerdotis 
 facta sacramentalis est quodammodo, quamvis non sit sacramentum 
 perfectum, quia deest ei quod est ex parte sacerdotis.' — Summ. Theol. 
 Supplem. pt. iii. Quosst. viii. Art. 2. Migne's edition, p. 944. 
 
 ' De Sacram. Lib. iv. Distinct. 17. 
 
 2 He distinguishes five kinds of potestas absolvendi. The fourth 
 is ' ex officio ministrorum concessa sacerdotibus. Et ultima ex 
 unitate fidei et caritatis, et hasc pro necessitatis articulo descendit 
 in omnem homine7n ad proximo subveniendum : et hanc potestatem 
 habet laicus in articulo necessitatis.'' — Albertus Magnus in Sent, 
 Lib. iv, Dist 17, Art. 58, 59. 
 
SACEEDOTALISM 213 
 
 A.D. 1310 (Can. 116), directed that confession should 
 be made to a Catholic layman when there was danger 
 of death, and no priest was at hand. The twelfth of 
 Archbishop Edmund's Constitutions allows a deacon 
 to hear confessions and give penances in cases of 
 necessity; as 'when no priest could be had, or he 
 was away from home, or stupidly or indiscreetly un- 
 willing ; and death was imminent.' And Lyndwood 
 says that not only may a deacon do this, but also a 
 layman, or even a woman. ^ 
 
 Two remarkable instances of confessions to lay- 
 men have come down to us from the middle ages. 
 It is related in ' Le Loyal Serviteur ' that when 
 Bayard, the Chevalier sans peur et sans reproche, 
 received his death-wound on the field of Eomagnano, 
 and was carried to his tent, he clasped his sword in 
 his hand, and, fixing his eye on the hilt for a cross, 
 bade his faithful esquire hear his confession. 
 
 The other example is related in Joinville's 
 ' Histoire de St. Louis.' When Joinville and his 
 companions were taken prisoners by the Saracens, 
 and were waiting in hourly expectation of death, the 
 Constable of Cyprus knelt down and made his con- 
 fession to Joinville ; ' and I gave him,' says Joinville, 
 * such absolution as God enabled me to give.' ^ 
 
 Even the standard modern theologian of the 
 Eoman Church, the Jesuit Father Perrone, of the 
 
 ' See Johnson's Canons, vol. ii. year 1236 ; and Maskell's Mon. 
 Bit. iii. p. cix. 
 
 * 'Encouste moy se agenoilla Guy d'Ebelin, connestable de 
 Chippre, et se confessa a moy : et je lui donnay telle absoliicion 
 comme Dieu in'en donnoit le povoir,' — Hist, de St. Louis, p. 298. 
 
214 THE EEFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Collegio Romano, admits that sometimes deacons, 
 men in minor orders, and even laymen, have been 
 allowed to hear confessions and grant ' ceremonial 
 absolution,' representing the ancient absolution 
 given by the congregation through the minister, but 
 not quite equivalent to * Sacramental absolution.' ^ 
 
 To sum up. The truth is that the impugners of 
 Sacerdotalism, little as they know it, are really un- 
 dermining the very foundations of revealed religion, 
 including the doctrine of prayer and of the whole 
 Sacramental system. That system is based on this 
 fundamental principle of religion : that all good 
 things come from God, but indirectly and condi- 
 tionally. I look abroad and find two revelations of 
 God's will : one in the material creation, the other in 
 the inspired record of His dealings with mankind. 
 And I see both characterised by one common feature, 
 teaching this one lesson ; that it is God's pleasure to 
 bestow His blessings, not directly from on high, but 
 indirectly and mediately — through material, through 
 animal, through human and spiritual agencies. He 
 arrays the lilies of the field with glory more than 
 Solomon's : yet not immediately, but through the 
 kindly influence of dews, and showers, and sunshine. 
 
 ' ' Interdum vero in sacerdotis absentia diaconi, clerici inferiores, 
 aut laici etiam excipiebant confessiones illas spontaneas et caere- 
 moniales, quas passim subsequentibus seculis faciebant animam 
 agentes coram ipsis ad majorem peccatorum dolorem concipiendum, 
 et ut adjuti EcclesiaB precibus veniam a Deo facilius impetrarent. 
 Hanc confessionem S. Thomas vocat quodammodo Sacramentalem, 
 quae juxta scholasticos una cum contritione virtutem sacramenti 
 habebat.' — Prcelec. Theol. Tract, de Pamit. cap. v. Prop. II. vol. ii. 
 p. 378. 
 
SACEEDOTALISM ' 215 
 
 It is He who gives the increase in the harvest season, 
 yet not without the co-operation of the husbandman. 
 The health of the body is from Him ; nevertheless the 
 sick man consults the physician and submits to his 
 treatment. He is the Source and Giver of all wisdom, 
 but He imparts it through the lips and pens of 
 human teachers. And when I raise my eyes from 
 the physical to the spiritual creation, I behold the 
 same law in operation. Under the Jewish economy 
 I observe an elaborate ritual prescribed — if we are 
 to believe the Bible — by God Himself as the condi- 
 tion on which man was to approach his Maker and 
 appropriate His gifts. I see Naaman cleansed by 
 the intervention of a prophet of Israel and the water 
 of the Jordan ; Job's friends pardoned by means 
 of Job's intercession ; Jeroboam's withered hand 
 restored by the prayer of the man of God from 
 Judah ; Elijah fed by the wild birds of the desert. 
 
 Then in the fulness of time, when Christ 
 appeared as the Head of the New Creation, I hear 
 Him declare that He ' came not to destroy the Law, 
 but to fulfil it' — not to abolish the old order of 
 things, but to give it a deeper meaning, and breathe 
 into it a higher hfe. Thus He fulfilled in His own 
 person the requirements of the Law. And when He 
 began to lay the foundation of that new dispensation, 
 into which the life of the old w^as to pass by an 
 orderly evolution, the rule of dispensing His gifts 
 through the ministry of secondary agencies is still 
 observed. He instituted a Sacramental system as 
 
216 THE REFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the channel through which men were to be brought 
 into spiritual relations with Himself, and founded a 
 society for the purpose of preaching His Gospel and 
 administering His Sacraments to the human race 
 till the end of the Christian dispensation. 
 
217 
 
 CHAPTEE VII 
 
 AUEIGULAB CONFESSION 
 
 I COME now to the thorny subject of Auricular Con- 
 fession, on which I beHeve the hatred and passion 
 of militant Protestantism is so concentrated that, if 
 that stumblingblock could be removed, the opposi- 
 tion even to advanced Eitualism would be half 
 disarmed. Now I believe, for my part, that the 
 confessional is, under certain circumstances, liable 
 to abuse and danger, and ought, under all circum- 
 stances, to be hedged round by judicious precautions. 
 I shall indicate some of these further on. But I 
 must begin with some preliminary observations for 
 the sake of clearing the ground and getting rid of 
 some fallacies. 
 
 It is popularly supposed that the clergy have a 
 craving for hearing confessions. There are upwards 
 of twenty-three thousand clergy in the Church of 
 England, and that there should be a few morbidly 
 constituted men among so many is possible. But 
 that the mass of the clergy, or even a fraction of the 
 High Church party, should desire to hear confes- 
 sions, or would consent to hear them except from 
 a stern sense of painful duty, is to me incredible. 
 
218 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Even if a man were so abnormally constituted, and 
 had so little sense of the responsibility and sacred- 
 ness of his office, as to wish to hear confessions from 
 a motive of curiosity, he would surely soon have a 
 surfeit of it. I am inclined to think that most men 
 would, as a mere matter of choice, as soon be surgeons 
 to a leprous hospital as habitual confessors. Human 
 nature is, in some aspects of it, a weird mystery. 
 * The corruption of the best ' is proverbially ' the 
 worst ' kind of corruption. The brutes live accord- 
 ing to their nature, and in their free wild state 
 enjoy life. Man violates the laws of his nature and 
 is capable of falling far below the brutes. And this 
 tendency increases and takes new shapes under a 
 highly developed civilisation, and among all classes. 
 To many a clergyman, I doubt not, the confessional 
 has been a frightful revelation of the cancerous 
 ramifications of sin, sometimes under a fair exterior. 
 That any considerable number of men would 
 volunteer in such work except from an imperative 
 feeling of duty I do not believe. I believe, moreover, 
 that the increase of confession in the Church of 
 England has come from the laity rather than from 
 the clergy. Perhaps I may, without impertinence, 
 give my own experience. I have never invited 
 any one to confess to me except in the ordinary 
 course of reading the exhortation in the Communion 
 Service, and I have, in the whole course of my 
 ministerial career, received the confessions of just 
 three persons. These I received reluctantly and 
 unavoidably. But many persons have asked me to 
 
AUEICULAR CONFESSION 219 
 
 receive their confessions. It is a task from which I 
 have always shrunk ; and as nearly the whole of my 
 ministerial life has been spent in London, I have 
 been able to avail myself of the alternative offered 
 in the Prayer Book by sending those who came to 
 me ' to some other discreet and learned minister of 
 God's Word.' But if I had been an incumbent 
 where this alternative was not possible, I should 
 certainly feel bound to hear the confessions of all 
 who came to me, much as I should dislike it. I do 
 not think that an incumbent has any choice in such 
 cases. I read some time ago a speech made at a 
 Protestant meeting by the Vicar of a parish in a 
 large town in the North. He denounced confession 
 and illustrated his own practice by a story. A man 
 called upon him one day, he said, and astonished him 
 by asking him to hear his confession. As soon as 
 he recovered his self-possession he said to his visitor, 
 * Get thee behind me, Satan,' and dismissed him. 
 And that Vicar was cheered. Now it does seem to 
 me a little hard that God's minister should on 
 Sunday invite to confession any one whose conscience 
 is troubled, and then on Monday tell him to go to 
 the Devil for being such a fool as to accept the 
 invitation. 
 
 How did the Vicar know that the parishioner 
 whom he repulsed so rudely had not then arrived at 
 a critical point in the development of his character, 
 when the unburdening of his conscience and the 
 counsel and advice of his spiritual pastor might have 
 made all the difference between ruin and salvation ? 
 
220 THE EEFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Is it not a frightful responsibility to turn away any 
 one who comes to seek comfort in the way which 
 the Church has provided ? 
 
 Another common fallacy is that the confessor 
 worms out family secrets, and thus sows the seeds of 
 dissension between husbands and wives, parents and 
 children. The fact, I believe, is that no names are 
 allowed to be mentioned in confession. I find this 
 rule laid down in manuals for confessors both in the 
 Eoman and Anglican Churches, and I believe the 
 rule is universal. In his speech in the House of 
 Commons at the opening of Parliament this session, 
 Mr. Samuel Smith denounced a book (' The Priest's 
 Prayer Book ') which he evidently had not read, for 
 he made a ridiculous quotation which is not in the 
 book, and which must have been supplied to him by 
 some one on whom he relied too implicitly. In that 
 book there are ' Notes on Confession ' for the 
 guidance of such clergy as hear confessions. I 
 quote the following : — 
 
 He [the confessor] is to interrupt in any of the 
 following cases : (1) if the penitent import the name of 
 any person into his confession — he is there to confess his 
 own sins, not another's ; (2) if he begins making excuses 
 for himself ; (3) if he be prolix, or wandering from the 
 point; (4) if he be coarse. 
 
 Again : — 
 
 As a general rule he is to avoid questioning the 
 penitent (except in case of absolute necessity), and 
 especially as to kinds of sin to which he has made no 
 reference in his confession. 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 221 
 
 Again : — 
 
 The priest should take most especial care not to suggest 
 any new sinful idea to the mind of the penitent, nor teach 
 him any evil formerly unknown to him. This is unspeak- 
 ably important in the case of very young persons, since 
 for them ignorance of evil is often better even than 
 knowledge of good. 
 
 Another popular fallacy is the opinion that 
 manuals written for the exclusive use of confessors, 
 and going into details, are samples of what passes 
 between confessors and penitents. It would be as 
 reasonable to suggest that manuals of anatomy and 
 pathology furnish a fair specimen of the conversa- 
 tions between a doctor and his patients. If a clergy- 
 man hears confessions at all, he ought to be instructed 
 in a number of things of which he is likely to be 
 ignorant, and manuals are necessary for that purpose. 
 I have never read that much abused book, * Tlie 
 Priest in Absolution.' But I know that it was 
 written by the incumbent of one of the most 
 wretched parishes in London ; a man of singularly 
 pure and holy life, who worked himself to death 
 among the poor. The book was doubtless largely 
 based on his own experience, and probably dealt 
 with gross sins and abnormal forms of vice. These, 
 alas ! exist in rank abundance, but happily unknown 
 and undreamt of in certain strata of society ; and 
 also unknown to many of the clergy. And yet, 
 unless they know them, they are as helpless in 
 dealing with considerable sections of the community 
 as a doctor would be who should start a practice 
 
222 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 without any previous training in the anatomy and 
 maladies of the human frame. *The Priest in 
 Absolution ' was intended for clergy only. It was 
 not sold to the public ; but a gentleman of strong 
 Protestant opinions, calling one day on a clerical 
 friend, found the book on his table, and during the 
 momentary absence of his friend from the room, 
 pocketed the volume, and gave it to one of the 
 officials of a Protestant society, which scattered 
 extracts from it broadcast as specimens of what 
 passed in the confessional. Some years previously 
 the police confiscated a pamphlet called ' The Con- 
 fessional Unmasked,' which consisted of excerpts 
 from a Eoman Catholic manual for confessors. The 
 great hero of the recent Albert Hall meeting was 
 Mr. John Kensit, of whom I read for the first time 
 in ' Truth ' of August 15, 1889, as follows : — 
 
 Where is the Vigilance Committee ? During the last 
 two or three weeks hawkers have been parading London 
 with truckloads of an abominable publication called * The 
 High Church Confessional.' From a cursory view of one 
 of the numerous copies with which I have been favoured 
 I should say that a more obscene work was never publicly 
 offered for sale, and this filthy poison is being sold up and 
 down the streets, under the very noses of the police, at 
 the price of twopence. The publisher is one Kensit, of 
 the * City Protestant Book Depot,' 18 Paternoster Eow, 
 who boasts that he has sold 225,000 copies. It is nothing 
 less than a public scandal that this Kensit and his 
 associates should be at large, while Mr. Vizetelly is in 
 gaol ; for if what the latter has done be a crime, the 
 crime is certainly infinitely worse when committed under 
 the cloak of religion and morality. 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 223 
 
 Mr. Labouchere, who has been pubhcly thanked 
 by several judges for his exposure of sundry impos- 
 tures, renewed his attack on Mr. Kensit a year ago 
 in a series of scathing articles, taking the paragraph 
 which I have just quoted for his text. The follow- 
 ing quotation will serve as a specimen : ^ — 
 
 On the appearance of this paragraph Mr. Kensit sent 
 me a letter, in which he referred to a ' most unwarranted 
 attack made on him as a publisher,' dropped dark hints 
 of the advice which he was seeking from his 'legal 
 adviser,' and called upon me, pending this advice, for an 
 explanation or apology. Having nothing to apologise for, 
 I adopted the other alternative, and gave Mr. Kensit an 
 explanation. I reminded him that a well-known publisher 
 had just been sent to prison for publishing translations 
 of the works of an eminent French novelist, which, in the 
 opinion of a magistrate or jury — I forget which — were 
 held to trangress the bounds of decency ; and I pointed 
 out that * The High Church Confessional ' contained page 
 after page of the most loathsome indecency and obscenity, 
 that is to say, the detailed discussion, not merely of 
 subjects which conventional delicacy enjoins silence about, 
 but of vice and depravity in their foulest and most dis- 
 gusting phases. Mr. Kensit having boasted that 225,000 
 copies of this work had been sold, and it being notorious 
 that the publication was being hawked about the streets 
 for the delectation of the prurient-minded, young and old, 
 I urged that Mr. Kensit was as deserving of imprisonment 
 as Mr. Vizetelly, the publisher of Zola's novels, and that 
 it behoved the National Vigilance Association, who had 
 prosecuted in the one case, to take the same course in the 
 other. 
 
 > Truth, September 22, 1898. 
 
224 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Whether or not Kensit took the opinion of his * legal 
 adviser ' upon these remarks I do not know ; but the only 
 response he vouchsafed to them was a further letter com- 
 pounded of abuse and religious cant, in which among 
 other things he boasted that my denunciation of him as 
 a purveyor of the foulest and most pernicious literary 
 garbage had produced a widespread inquiry for his publi- 
 cations, and given a gratifying stimulus to his trade. This 
 led me to look a little more closely into his trade, and I 
 found the work which had been denounced in ' Truth ' 
 was only one of a whole library of obscene publications, 
 one at least of them far more revolting in tone and corrupt 
 in tendency than ' The High Church Confessional.' There- 
 upon I appealed further to the Vigilance Association, 
 among the members of which were many eminent and 
 respected men, both in Church and State, to put the law 
 in force against Kensit without delay. A new and un- 
 expected turn was then given to the controversy by the 
 discovery that Kensit himself occupied the position of 
 ofi&cial publisher to the Vigilance Association, so that the 
 publications of that body were stored upon his shelves, in 
 all their virgin purity, side by side with the Protestant 
 obscenities of Kensit, like the antidote and the poison 
 upon the shelves of a chemist's shop. It was obvious 
 from this that the National Vigilance Association were in 
 a somewhat difficult position in undertaking the prosecu- 
 tion of Kensit, but they appeared to recognise that it 
 behoved them to take action of some kind, and after 
 having made some inquiry into the nature of Kensit'a 
 trade, they eventually relieved him of his position as their 
 publisher. 
 
 Mr. Labouchere has lately stated, in ' Truth ' 
 that Mr. Kensit is using the district post-office over 
 which he presides as a receptacle for the regular 
 
AUEICULAR CONFESSION 225 
 
 sale of these pamphlets. Mr. Kensit has, no doubt, 
 persuaded himself that he is thereby doing God 
 service. That question I leave to the judgment of 
 the public. 
 
 But the truth is that a certain class of minds 
 appear incapable of reasoning dispassionately on 
 this subject*. Men who do give their reason fair 
 play find no difficulty in perceiving that there are 
 two sides to the question. It would be difficult to 
 name a man of calmer and more judicial mind than 
 the late Sir George Cornewall Lewis. No one will 
 suspect him of Romanism, and he was certainly no 
 advocate of clerical supremacy, either in domestic 
 or political affairs. But he could see both sides of a 
 disputed question, and could deal fairly with things 
 which by no means appealed to his sympathies. 
 His opinion on the subject under discussion is there- 
 fore of some value. This is what he says : — 
 
 It may be here remarked that an unjust prejudice has not 
 unhequently been raised in Protestant countries against 
 the treatises which are prepared for the use of confessors 
 in the Church of Rome. . . . The more difficult and 
 doubtful of the cases likely to come before the confessor 
 have been discussed separately, and have given rise to the 
 ))ranch of practical divinity called casuistry. Casuistry is 
 the jurisprudence of theology ; it is a digest of the moral 
 and religious maxims to be observed by the priest, in 
 advising or deciding upon questions which come before 
 him in confession, and in adjudging the amount " oi 
 penance due to each sin. As confession discloses the 
 most secret thoughts and acts of the penitent, and as 
 QOthing, however impure, is concealed from the confessor, 
 
 Q 
 
226 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 it is necessary that he should be furnished with a manual 
 in which these subjects are discussed. Now such a 
 manual, if properly considered, is not more justly ob- 
 noxious to the charge of gratuitous indecency than a legal 
 or medical treatise, in which similar subjects are ex- 
 pounded without any reserve of language.^ 
 
 And as regards the general system he says : — 
 
 The system of Auricular Confession and the direction 
 of consciences, as practised in the Church of Eome, is 
 founded on a theory similar to that on which the custom 
 of professional consultations rests. The confessor may be 
 considered as a vicarious conscience, in like manner as 
 professional advice is vicarious prudence. If the penitent 
 makes a full and true confession, the confessor or spiritual 
 director pronounces or advises with a complete knowledge 
 of the circumstances of the case, probably with a know- 
 ledge of the peaitent's character and position, and 
 always with the impartiality of a judge — free from per- 
 sonal concern in the matter, and unbiased by passion or 
 interest. Seeing how blind and partial a judge each man 
 is in his own case, and how unconsciously the moral 
 judgment with respect to our own actions is perverted by 
 the inclinations, it cannot be doubted that such a coun- 
 sellor, in ambiguous cases of conduct, such a ductor duhi- 
 tantiurti, would be generally beneficial, if the moral code 
 which he administers was well framed, and if his opinion 
 or advice was always honest and enlightened. Unfor- 
 tunately, however, it happens that the system of moral 
 rules which guides the discretion of the Catholic con- 
 fessor is founded on a narrow-minded and somewhat 
 superstitious theology, so far as it proceeds upon the 
 distinctive tenets of the Church of Eome ; and that the 
 
 ' On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion, p. 120. 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 227 
 
 desire of domestic dictation, and of regulating the affairs 
 of families, so natural in an unmarried clergy, gives too 
 often an improper bias to the influence of the spiritual 
 director.^ 
 
 De Quincey, too, while condemning the abuse of 
 casuistr}^, maintains that ' without casuistry of some 
 sort or other, no practical decision could be made in, 
 the accidents of daily life. Of this, on a fitter 
 occasion,' he adds, ' I could give a cumulative proof.' ^ 
 
 And Hallam, a critic who will not be suspected 
 of partiality towards the Boman system, and who 
 disapproved of confession, though praising 'the 
 judicious temperament ' which at the Keformation 
 'left it to each man's discretion,' writes as 
 follows : — 
 
 It is very difficult, or perhaps beyond the reach of any 
 human being, to determine absolutely how far these 
 benefits, which cannot be reasonably denied to result from 
 the rite of confession, outweigh the mischiefs connected 
 with it. There seems to be something in the Eoman 
 Catholic discipline (and I know nothing else so likely) 
 which keeps the balance, as it were, of moral influence 
 pretty even between the two religions, and compensates 
 for the ignorance and superstition which the elder 
 preserves : for I am not sure that the Protestant system 
 in the present age has any very feasible advantage in this 
 respect ; or that in countries where the comparison can 
 fairly be made, as in Germany and Switzerland, there is 
 more honesty in one sex, or chastity in the other, when 
 they belong to the Eeformed Churches.^ 
 
 ' On the Influence of Authority in Matters of Opinion, pp. 124, 
 125. 
 
 '^ Works, vol. xiij. p. 34. * Constitutional History, i. 120. 
 
 Q 2 
 
228 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 The second passage which I have quoted from 
 Sir George Cornewall Lewis undoubtedly hits the 
 chief sources of danger in the system of the Confes- 
 sional as practised in the Church of Eome. And it 
 is to be observed that the distinguished author 
 himself confines his strictures to the Koman system. 
 A great deal of the moral theology now in vogue in the 
 Church of Rome appears to me, so far as my reading 
 enables me to judge, to be exceedingly w^ell calculated 
 to enslave the conscience of the penitent and place his 
 will very much at the mercy of his director. The 
 system is elaborated out into such a complicated 
 network of details, and is withal so full of pitfalls, 
 that those who cojiscientiously resort to it must soon 
 feel the necessity of leaning on the arm of the con- 
 fessor in everything — even in the petty trivialities 
 of daily life. The Jesuits, in particular, have so 
 developed the system of direction as to imperil the 
 sense of personal responsibihty in those who come 
 under its control. This, indeed, is no more than 
 might have been expected, for the long and severe 
 discipline of a Jesuit's novitiate has for its prime 
 object the complete extinction of the slightest quiver- 
 ings of independence in the human will. When, 
 therefore, the Jesuit novice becomes himself the 
 director of other consciences, he will naturally aim at 
 reducing them to the same condition of unquestion- 
 ing dependence which his own training must have 
 taught him to regard as the very ideal of Christian 
 perfection. The penitent is therefore advised to 
 confess frequently, and to confide to his director every 
 
AURICULAR CONFESSION 229 
 
 wayward fancy and every evanescent peccadillo that 
 may chance to flit across his mind. 
 
 With a certain class of minds this sort of 
 discipline becomes at once a necessity and a luxury, 
 and the effect of it is to diminish the sense both of 
 personal responsibility and of the heinousness of sin. 
 That is an opinion which I am confident I share 
 with a large number of Roman Catholics ; so at least 
 I have been told by thoughtful and devout members 
 of the Church of Eome, ecclesiastics as well as lay- 
 men, both in England and on the Continent, I have 
 no doubt that the school of Loyola has produced 
 some of the noblest types of self-sacrifice and saint- 
 liness ; but is it unfair to say of it as a religious 
 system that it seems admirably calculated to impress 
 upon the mind the wisdom of endeavouring to make 
 the best of both worlds ? It is coeval with the 
 Renaissance, and owes, no doubt, to that semi-pagan 
 reaction against the religion, of the Cross much of its 
 original impulse and of its rapid success. It caught 
 the sentiment of the age on the bound, and adroitly 
 adapted itself to the new phase of Christianity which 
 the Revival of Letters had made popular in Western 
 Europe. The ascetic side of religion was now odious 
 and out of fashion, and the Jesuit sought to guide the 
 new fashion by swimming with it. The world had 
 learnt to love a less strict and less austere religion, 
 and a less strict and less austere religion it should 
 have. One sees the contrast in everything on w^hich 
 the Jesuit has left his mark. His very architecture 
 is of the earth, and is redolent of the boudoir. 
 
230 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Go into any old cathedral — it need not be Gothic — 
 which was reared under the influence of the sad, yet 
 triumphant, feelings inspired by the Sacrifice of 
 Calvary, and then enter a Jesuit church — I care not 
 where — and you cannot fail to see that you have 
 virtually visited the shrines of two different kinds of 
 ■ religion. The former suggests sublime and melan- 
 choly reveries, a sentiment of human misery, the 
 va,gue divination of ' a city which hath foundations ' 
 somewhere beyond the shifting sands of time, and in 
 which the weary heart shall at last find peace, and 
 be enabled to solve many a dark riddle that now per- 
 plexes and distresses it. 
 
 A Jesuit church awakes sentiments of quite 
 another kind. You feel that this world is not 
 so bad after all. "Wealth and comfort and prettiness 
 surround you. Smiling angels beam upon you from 
 every cornice, and the Madonna is no longer the 
 Mater Dolorosa with sad pale face, but a drawing- 
 room helle who has an eye for the last fashion. 
 Religion, in short, has laid aside her grave and 
 sombre aspect, and has become gay and coquettish. 
 ' Our business,' says Addison, ' is to be easy here, 
 and happy hereafter.' The Jesuit has reduced the 
 maxim to a system, and works it through the con- 
 fessional. Trust him, submit your will to his, and 
 you will find that the yoke of Christ is indeed easy 
 and His burthen light. He is provided with a com- 
 prehensive and most accommodating code of casuistry 
 that knows how to evade obligations which it may 
 be inconvenient to fulfil. 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 231 
 
 No wonder that the Jesuits became, and still are, 
 the most popular of confessors.. No wonder that 
 wealth flowed rapidly into their coffers, and that 
 their churches and colleges glittered with marble 
 and precious stones. But the result has been unfor- 
 tunate. The popularity of the Jesuits in the 
 confessional and the hold which they obtained over 
 the education of a great part of Europe had the effect 
 of creating a school of casuistical divinity which has 
 been prejudicial to morality, and which is mainly 
 responsible for the popular odium to which the en- 
 tire system of confession is exposed. 
 
 Sir George Lewis may be right in thinking that 
 it is ' natural ' for ' an unmarried clergy ' to have 
 ' the desire of domestic dictation and of regulating 
 the affairs of famihes ' when the clergy are made 
 into a separate caste by a system of compulsory 
 celibacy. Blanco White — a most sincere and 
 honest man through all his mental aberrations — 
 attributed much of the evils of the Boman Church 
 to compulsory celibacy — ' that most wicked and 
 mischievous part of the Boman system,' as he calls 
 it. ' The Church of Bome,' he adds, ' her clergy, 
 high and low, are fully aware of the dvils which the 
 law of celibacy produces. Their support of that 
 odious law is not a sin of ignorance.' ^ Our Lord 
 Himself declared that the gift of continence was 
 an exceptional one, demanding great force of will. 
 How can multitudes of men know at the age of 
 twenty-one or twenty-four whether they have a 
 
 • Life of Blanco White, vol. i. p. 108. 
 
232 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 vocation for a celibate life ? The Russian and 
 Oriental Churches go to the opposite extreme and 
 insist on the parochial clergy being married. Our 
 own Church takes the middle course and leaves her 
 clergy free to marry or remain single. I am not 
 sure that it v^ould not have been wiser to restrict" 
 marriage to such clergy as had means to support a 
 wife and family. 
 
 It can hardly be doubted that the universal 
 enforcement of celibacy must have the effect, among 
 other evils, of raising the barrier of caste between 
 the clergy and the laity. The clergy come to regard 
 themselves as a separate body, with separate 
 interests and separate duties, and are apt to resent 
 any claim on the part of the laity to a share in the 
 management of ecclesiastical affairs. The laity of 
 the Boman Communion have now no voice what- 
 ever in the counsels of their Church. Bishops and 
 priests are set over them without their consent, 
 and they must receive, with implicit obedience, 
 whatever rules of discipline, or articles of faith, or 
 system of education, their spiritual rulers may 
 choose to impose upon them. 
 
 To this kind of Sacerdotalism no one can object 
 more strongly than I do. But what Hkelihood is 
 there of its ever taking root in the Church of 
 England? The pulse of the English clergy re- 
 sponds to all the movements of the national life 
 just as freely as that of the laity. Their politics, 
 indeed, may preponderate in one direction, though 
 certainly not so much as formerly ; but, at all 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 233 
 
 events, it is not in the direction of a spiritual 
 supremacy. They can have no temptation what- 
 ever, that I can imagine, to interest themselves in 
 ' family affairs,' and we may therefore dismiss that 
 objection to the confessional, so far at least as it 
 concerns the clergy of the Established Church of 
 England. And, indeed, even in the Church of Kome 
 the objection lies more against the system of direction 
 than against that of confession. The two may 
 generally go together ; but they need not, and the 
 ofhce of director has frequently been exercised by a 
 layman. I frankly think that the practice of direc- 
 tion is becoming more prevalent than is wholesome 
 in our own communion. I am not disposed to deny 
 that it may be useful occasionally in some cases ; 
 but its tendency is to generate a morbid scrupulosity 
 and to blunt the sense of personal responsibility. 
 And I think that frequent confessions are, as a rule, 
 liable to the same objection. 
 
 But the remedy for these and other dangers is 
 not an indiscriminate denunciation of confession, 
 but a frank recognition of it, by the rulers of the 
 Church, to the extent and within the limits which 
 the Church herself has plainly prescribed. Nothing 
 can be worse than the present state of things, and it 
 says much for the purity and discretion of our clergy 
 that no scandal has arisen from it. There is not the 
 slightest check upon the youngest and most inex- 
 perienced curate except his own sense of what is 
 right. By the common law of the Church, recognised 
 in our Prayer Book, every incumbent is entitled to 
 
234 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 hear the confessions of those who come to him. 
 But no other priest has a right to hear confessions 
 without the Bishop's licence. Would it not be 
 better to recognise facts and regularise what the 
 Church permits ? Voluntary confessions cannot be 
 prevented, but they may be and ought to be put 
 under proper restrictions, so that all danger may be 
 reduced to a minimum. If this were done, I believe 
 that much of the prejudice against confession would 
 vanish, and people would see that under judicious 
 safeguards it may be useful as medicine, if not as 
 food. Let us glance at some of the reasons which 
 may be urged in favour of its use under proper 
 conditions. And I begin with the opinion of the 
 judicious Hooker : — 
 
 Because the knowledge how to handle our own sores 
 is no vulgar or common art, but we either carry towards 
 ourselves, for the most part, an over-soft and gentle 
 hand, fearful of touching too near the quick ; or else, 
 endeavouring not to be partial, we fall into timorous 
 scrupulosities, and sometimes into those extreme dis- 
 comforts of mind from which we hardly do ever lift up 
 our heads again; men thought it the safest way to 
 disclose their secret faults, and to crave imposition of 
 penance from them whom our Lord Jesus Christ hath 
 left in His Church to be spiritual and ghostly physicians, 
 the guides and pastors of redeemed souls, whose office 
 doth not only consist in general persuasions unto amend- 
 ment of life, but also in the private particular cure of 
 diseased minds. ^ 
 
 Self-knowledge is proverbially the hardest of all 
 
 ^ Eccles. Pol. Bk. vi. c. iv. [7.] Ed. Keble. 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 235 
 
 to master,^ and no progress at all can be made to- 
 wards it without the practice of strict periodical 
 self-examination. But how many practise this ? 
 Now one of the uses of confession is that it neces- 
 sitates a habit of self-examination. Moreover, 
 persons commit sins frequently from ignorance of 
 what they are doing. And this is true especially of 
 young people. We are apt to give the youth, of 
 both sexes, credit for more innocence than many 
 of them are entitled to. The tree of the knowledge 
 of good and evil is as alluring now as it was of old, 
 and young minds often pluck the forbidden fruit, 
 and have their minds ' opened ' to an extent which 
 would astonish parents and teachers if they knew 
 it. If the hidden life of our public, and still more 
 of our private schools, whether for boys or girls, 
 could be written, it would throw a lurid light on the 
 records of many a crime and premature death. I 
 am persuaded that if the dispassionate opinion of 
 medical men could be got they would say that their 
 art, sometimes unavailing, would in many cases 
 have been unnecessary if some of their patients had 
 in time ' opened their grief ' to some ' discreet and 
 learned minister of God's Word.' 
 
 Probably no man of our time had so large and 
 varied an experience in this matter as the late Sir 
 Andrew Clark. He often talked to me on the 
 
 * ' E coelo descendit TvSoQi creavrdv.^ Juvenal, Sat. xi. 27. Juvenal's 
 allusion is to the legend that this command, which was written in 
 golden characters on the porch of the temple of Delphi, had Apollo 
 for its author. 
 
236 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 subject, and I believe that many parents received 
 invaluable aid from him in the management of their 
 children. One thing he felt very strongly, namely, 
 the dire need of v^arning young people, of both 
 sexes, v^hen they reach the critical age of transition 
 from puberty to adolescence. It v^ould be most 
 salutary, he thought, that there should then be 
 a full confession to some discreet person — parent, 
 doctor, or clergyman. An entirely frank confidence 
 on the one hand, and timely warning on the other, 
 at the parting of the ways, would prevent many a 
 sad wreck in after life. For the young are then 
 commonly launched upon a world of unwonted 
 temptations, with new emotions, new passions, 
 physical changes, all stirring them, and no one to 
 enlighten them about the mysteries of their own 
 nature and the perils that await them. And thus, 
 in sheer ignorance, habits are often contracted in 
 early youth which undermine the constitution, 
 make large contributions to our lunatic asylums, 
 and consign many lives of fair promise to a pre- 
 mature grave. That was the opinion of perhaps 
 the most competent authority of our generation. 
 I shall never forget a conversation which I once 
 had with the most attractive youth, in mind and 
 body, whom I have ever known — bright, cheerful, 
 generous, handsome, full of noble impulses, with a 
 soul as pure as crystal, and withal most manly, and 
 devoted to manly sports. After leaving Eton, and 
 while preparing for the army, he came one day to talk 
 to me about the sore need of establishing a public 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 237 
 
 opinion in support of purity in our public schools, such 
 as now exists in support of truthfulness. ' A boy 
 loses caste,' he said, ' and is disgraced, who has been 
 found out lying. Is it not possible to create a public 
 opinion among schoolboys in favour of purity, so 
 that a boy should lose caste and be disgraced among 
 his fellows who should be known to be guilty of 
 impurity ? ' His idea was that guilds of purity 
 might be formed at public schools for the purpose 
 of creating such public opinion as he desired. 
 
 Mysterious are the ways of Providence. After 
 joining a cavalry regiment this charming young 
 fellow was stationed at York, and used sometimes 
 to stay with me at Eipon from Friday to Monday. 
 During one of these visits he asked me if I would 
 agree to be his almoner. He had been accustomed 
 since he had received an allowance to give away the 
 tithe of it as belonging to God and not to himself, 
 and distributing his little charities out bf what 
 remained. ' My tithe,' he said, ' might at present 
 help some deserving youth through the university. 
 When I come of age it will come to a nice sum.' 
 He would then have come into possession of a fine 
 property. The matter was to be settled between us 
 on his next visit a fortnight afterwards. But that 
 visit was never paid. His horse slipped on a tramway 
 rail, and a noble life was removed to another sphere 
 when on the threshold, as it seemed, of great useful- 
 ness in this. He was full of sympathy for the 
 sufferings of the poor, and intended to devote some 
 part of his future hfe to their service. 
 
238 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 From motives of modesty and humility he made 
 me promise to keep his plans secret even from his 
 nearest relations. I should have done so had his 
 life been spared. But I considered that his death 
 relieved me from my promise, and I told the story 
 in a monthly magazine. And I have repeated it 
 here to show the need of instilling seeds of purity 
 into the minds of the young, as it presented itself 
 to a fine youth who had passed through the ordeal 
 unscathed. Though opposed, therefore, to the en- 
 forcement of confession on young people as a con- 
 dition of confirmation or first communion, I think 
 there is much to be said for Sir Andrew Clark's 
 opinion that at that most critical period the young 
 should be warned, and in some cases invited to 
 make a confession to one whom they can trust. 
 If parents should shrink from that duty themselves, 
 they should certainly confide it to some one else ; 
 and I do not know that any one would be better 
 equipped for the task than a minister of religion, 
 who would combine the solemnity of religion with 
 the warnings of a friend. We are all impressed, 
 more or less, by the visible emblems of religion. 
 And confession to a man in surplice and stole is apt 
 to impress the mind — of the young especially — more 
 than to the same man sitting in an armchair in his 
 study. But the consent of parents should ordinarily 
 be obtained. I say * ordinarily ' because many 
 cases occur in our large towns where parents are 
 the last persons to advise their children aright. 
 
 Sermons are all very well ; but even the best of 
 
AURICULAE CONFESSION 239 
 
 sermons must deal in generalities, and must avoid 
 some subjects altogether. It may be thought by 
 some that this is an advantage. I doubt it. Many 
 a moral sore goes on festering unto death because 
 there is no skilful hand to probe the wound. But 
 this can only be done in private confession. 
 
 Again, why are so many of the sermons one hears 
 jejune and pointless when they deal with the interior 
 life ? Is it not because our clergy have, for the most 
 part, so little practical acquaintance with the anatomy 
 of the human soul ? Their sermons want directness 
 and are apt to evaporate in platitudes. Who would 
 trust himself to a physician who derived all his know- 
 ledge from books, having never walked a hospital or 
 studied the anatomy of the human frame ? 
 
 Dissenting preachers often excel the English 
 clergy in point of directness and force, chiefly, I 
 believe, because confession, though not under that 
 name, is largely practised an^ong the Dissenters, 
 especially the Wesleyans, but without the safeguards 
 of the Church system. 
 
 In truth, all persons of any pretence to earnest 
 religion make their confessions some time or other, 
 and that into mortal ears or through material media : 
 one class to the friend of their soul or the wife of 
 their bosom ; another in their poems ; another in 
 their sermons ; another in what are technically called 
 ' confessions.' It is a natural craving of the human 
 heart for sympathy and help, coupled with a desire 
 to disclose its sins. 
 
 But may we not confess to God and obtain for- 
 
240 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT' 
 
 giveness without the intervention of human agents ? 
 Unquestionably. But let this be considered. In 
 the first place, why should we confess to God at all ? 
 Certainly not with the view of telling Him anything 
 of which He is ignorant, but because words react 
 upon impressions, and fix and deepen them in the 
 mind. It is very hard to realise the omnipresence 
 of God — that He hears every word we utter and 
 knows our most secret thoughts ; and the conse- 
 quence is that in confessing our sins to God alone 
 it is not easy to have that sense of shame, which is 
 of the essence of true contrition, and which is such 
 a powerful preservative against temptation. Private 
 confessions to God are therefore too commonly 
 couched in those general terms in which, according 
 to the adage, * deception lurks.' 
 
 But why not confess to some friend or relation ? 
 Why go to a priest ? Far be it from me to say that 
 this would not be useful. But such confession is 
 subject to two defects, and is exposed to at least one 
 danger. It cannot give the sense of relief conse- 
 quent on a confession followed by absolution, and 
 it lacks that combination of authority with sympathy 
 which is characteristic of what is called ' Sacramental 
 Confession.' ^ And, after all, it is easier to ' make a 
 clean breast of it ' to an authorised minister of God 
 
 1 I cannot understand why tliis term should be exposed to so 
 much opprobrium, for it has virtually the sanction of the Book of 
 Homilies. 'Absolution is no such Sacrament as Baptism and 
 Communion are ; . . • but in a general acceptation the name of a 
 Sacrament may be attributed to anything whereby an holy thing is 
 signified.'— Sermon on Common Prayer and Sacrainents, part i. 
 
AUErCULAE CONFESSION 241 
 
 than to the most tender of friends or relatives. The 
 knowledge that he acts ministerially, and that the 
 secret will be religiously kept, gives the necessary 
 courage, which would otherwise, in most cases, be 
 lacking. The very strength of our love is apt to 
 forbid a full disclosure of our inner self to an object 
 of ordinary human attachment, for fear lest the 
 discovery might alienate his love. For, as the poet 
 sings : — 
 
 Each in his hidden sphere of joy or woe, 
 Our hermit spirits range and dwell apart ; 
 
 Our eyes see all around in gloom or glow 
 
 Hues of their own, fresh borrowed from the heart. 
 
 And it is well 
 
 For what, if heaven for once its searching light 
 Lent to some partial eye, disclosing all 
 
 The rude bad thoughts that in our bosom's night 
 Wander at large, nor heed love's gentle thrall? 
 
 Who would not shun the dreary uncouth place ? 
 
 As if, fond leaning where her infant slept, 
 A mother's arm a serpent should embrace ; 
 
 So might we friendless live, and die unwept. 
 
 And there is also the risk, in private confession 
 to a friend, of ostentation. So subtle are the devices 
 of self-love that egotism may lurk in the very con- 
 fession of our sins unless there be some special 
 guarantee for that element of shame to which I have 
 referred above. The Wesley an relations of ' experi- 
 ences ' are admitted, I believe, to minister largely to 
 spiritual pride. But when the confession is invested 
 
 B 
 
242 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 with a religious sanction, and is made on bended 
 knees and to Almighty God (for every auricular 
 confession is addressed primarily to God, and to the 
 Priest only as His Minister), there is a solemnity and 
 reality about it which is fatal to pride and self- 
 conceit. Confession to a Minister of religion im- 
 presses, I believe, upon the mind a consciousness of 
 guilt which does not ordinarily come of confession 
 to a friend, or even to God. ' The flesh is weak ' in 
 the best of us, and they are very few to whom 
 religious ordinances are not a help in realising their 
 relation to the unseen, but omnipresent, God. 
 
 I have admitted that the practice of confession is 
 by no means free from danger ; but the dangers are 
 not generally those which are commonly supposed. 
 Persons, who know nothing about the subject prac- 
 tically, imagine that because manuals written for the 
 guidance of confessors go into a number of details, 
 confessors are therefore in the habit of examining 
 their penitents on these details. This, of course, is 
 quite a mistake. Mr. Capes, ^ in a letter on this 
 subject to the ' Guardian,' declared that all the time 
 he was a Eoman Catholic, though he was in the 
 habit of confessing regularly, no question was ever 
 asked him which he would object to see published in 
 the newspapers ; and I believe that this is the 
 
 ' The late Eev. J. M. Capes was an Anglican vicar who joined 
 the Church of Eome in 1845, and returned to the Church of England 
 on the proclamation of Papal Infallibility in 1870. He became then 
 for some time assistant to Mr. Stopford Brooke when that able and 
 admirable man was still in the service of the Church of England. 
 
AUEICTJLAE CONFESSION 243 
 
 experience of almost every one who makes a habit 
 of confession. There may be cases in which ques- 
 tions of a certain kind may be necessary ; but they 
 are cases in which there is no danger of suggesting 
 the sin to the penitent, for it has already left its 
 stain. Besides, our Catechism bids us examine our- 
 selves in preparation for the Holy Communion ; and 
 the Exhortation in the Communion Office directs that 
 this examination should be ' by the rule of God's 
 commandments,' which is also the usual rule in 
 auricular confession. Now a real self-scrutiny as to 
 our transgressions against the Ten Commandments, 
 to be effectual, must involve self-examination in 
 details ; and this seems to me far more hazardous 
 than enumeration in confession, just in proportion 
 as the security for shame is less complete, and the 
 accompaniments of place and circumstances are less 
 solemn. Self-examination, if it be really searching, 
 is one of the most difficult of mental processes. Its 
 real value is in the degree of its minuteness, and 
 even persons who are used to it, and really do know 
 something of themselves, can hardly dispense with 
 the use of manuals. 
 
 In a remarkable passage in his Autobiography 
 Goethe attributes his own defection from Christianity 
 to the inefficiency of the Lutheran system of auri- 
 cular confession, which now commonly deals in 
 generalities and avoids all details. The passage is 
 really a beautiful exposition of the Sacramental 
 system, ' the Protestant worship,' in his opinion, 
 ' lacking fulness in general,' and having ' too few 
 
244 THE KEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Sacraments.' The passage is too long to quote; the 
 following extract will suffice for my purpose : — 
 
 In my time I had been confided to the religious in- 
 struction of a good old infirm clergyman, who had been 
 confessor to the family for many years. The Catechism, 
 a Parajjhrase of it, and the Scheme of Salvation, I had at 
 my fingers' ends. I lacked not one of the strongly proving 
 biblical texts, but from all this I reaped no fruit ; for as 
 they assured me that the honest old man arranged his 
 chief examination according to an old set form, I lost all 
 pleasure and inclination for the business, spent the last 
 week in all sorts of diversions, laid in my hat the loose 
 leaves borrowed from an older friend, who had gotten 
 them from the clergyman, and unfeelingly and senselessly 
 read aloud all that I should have known how to utter 
 with feeling and conviction. 
 
 But I found my good will and my aspirations in this 
 important matter still more paralysed by a dry, spiritless 
 routine, when I was now to approach the confessional. 
 I was indeed conscious to myself of many failings, but of 
 no great faults ; and that very consciousness diminished 
 them, since it directed me to the moral strength which lay 
 within me, and which, with resolution and perseverance, 
 was at last to become master over the Old Adam. We 
 were taught that we were much better than the Catholics 
 for this very reason : that we were not obliged to acknow- 
 ledge anything in particular in the confessional, nay, that 
 this would not be at all proper even if we wished to do 
 it. This last did not seem right to me ; for I had the 
 strangest religious doubts, which I would readily have had 
 cleared up on such an occasion. Now, as this Was not 
 to be done, I composed a confession for myself, which, 
 while it well expressed my state of mind, was to confess 
 to an intelligent man, in general terms, that which I was 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 245 
 
 forbidden to tell him in detail. But when I entered the 
 old choir of the Barefoot Friars, when I approached the 
 strange latticed closets in which the reverend gentlemen 
 used to be found for that purpose, when the sexton opened 
 the door for me, when I now saw myself shut up in the 
 narrow place, face to face with my spiritual grandsire, 
 and he bade me welcome with his weak nasal voice, all the 
 light of my mind and heart was extinguished at once, the 
 well-conned confession-Speech would not cross my lips ; 
 I opened, in my embarrassment, the book which I had in 
 hand, and read from it the first short form I saw, which 
 was so general that anybody might have spoken it with 
 quite a safe conscience. I received absolution and with- 
 drew, neither warm nor cold ; went the next day with my 
 parents to the Table of the Lord, and, for a few days, 
 behaved myself as was becoming after so holy an act. 
 
 In the sequel, however, there came over me that evil, 
 which from the fact of our religion being complicated by 
 various dogmas, and founded on texts of Scripture, which 
 admit of several interpretations, attacks scrupulous men 
 in such a manner, that it brings on a hypochondriacal 
 condition, and raises this to its highest point, to fixed 
 ideas. I have known several men who, though their 
 manner of thinking and living was perfectly rational, 
 could not free themselves from thinking about the sin 
 against the Holy Ghost, and from the fear that they had 
 committed it. A similar trouble threatened me on the 
 subject of the communion, for the text, that one who un- 
 worthily partakes of the Sacrament, eateth and drinketh 
 damnation to himself, had very early already made a 
 monstrous impression upon me. Every fearful thing 
 that I had read in the histories of the middle ages, of the 
 judgments of God, of those most strange ordeals, by red- 
 hot iron, flaming-fire, swelling water, and even what the 
 Bible tells us of the draught which agrees well with the 
 
216 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 innocent, but puffs up and bursts the guilty, — all this 
 pictured itself to my imagination ; and formed itself into 
 the most frightful combinations, since false vows, hy- 
 pocrisy, perjury, blasphemy, all seemed to weigh down 
 the unworthy person at this most holy act, which was so 
 mach the more horrible, as no one could dare to pro- 
 nounce himself worthy, and the forgiveness of sins, by 
 which everything was to be at last done away, was found 
 limited by so many conditions, that one could not with 
 certainty dare appropriate it to oneself. 
 
 This gloomy scruple troubled me to such a degree, and 
 the expedient which they would represent to me as 
 sufficient seemed so bald and feeble, that it gave the bug- 
 bear only a more fearful aspect, and as soon as I had 
 reached Leipsic, I tried to free myself altogether from 
 my connection with the Church.^ 
 
 I am pleading, however, for nothing more than 
 liberty in this matter, and for a rational treatment 
 of a most important and delicate subject. I wish 
 people to see that there are tv^o sides to the question, 
 and that it cannot be cavalierly dismissed by rhetorical 
 platitudes about ' the principles of the Eeformation.' 
 Let the Bishops grapple v^ith it openly and courage- 
 ously. Let them see that only competent persons 
 are allov^ed to hear confessions ; and by competent 
 persons I mean persons who are ' discreet and 
 learned,' that is, trained in moral divinity and certi- 
 fied to be otherwise fit for the office. This is what 
 the words * discreet and learned ' mean in the Ex- 
 hortation in our Communion Office. It is a technical 
 expression, and occurs frequently in, for example, 
 
 ' Autobiography, vol. i. pp. 248, 250. Engl. Transl. 
 
AURICULAE CONFESSION 247 
 
 Peter Lombard, Aquinas, and Bonaventura, in the 
 sense of an authorised confessor.^ Let the Bishops 
 inquire into the facts before they hastily condemn a 
 
 ' It may be well to give some evidence of this. The compilers of 
 the Prayer Book were trained in the usual text-books of moral theology, 
 and scholastic language came natural to them. By canon law every 
 parish priest was entitled to hear confessions in his own parish, but 
 not other«priests, unless they had a special faculty from the bishop 
 of the diocese. Aquinas says : ' Dicendum est quod electio discreti 
 sacerdotis non est nobis commissa, ut ex nostro arbitrio facienda, 
 sed de licentia superioris, si forte proprius sacerdos esset minus 
 idoneus ad apponendum peccatis salutare remedium.' — Suinvm, 
 Suppl. pt. iii. qusest. viii. art. iv. 6. 
 
 Again : ' Praeterea, potestatem quam habet sacerdos in populo 
 habet ab episcopo. Sed ex ilia potestate potest confessionem audita. 
 Ergo et eadem ratione alius, cui episcopus potestatem concedet.' 
 Ibid. Art. v. 
 
 Peter Lombard says : ' Quaerendus est sacerdos sapiens et discretus, 
 qui cum potestate simul habeat judicium, qui si forte defuerit, con- 
 Uteri debet socio.' In the same chapter he says : ' Si tamen defuerit 
 sacerdos, proximo vel socio est facienda confessio.' — Lib. iv. De Sacr. 
 List. xvii. 5. 
 
 Here, as in Aquinas, we note two points on which those old 
 theologians and experts in moral pathology laid remarkable em- 
 phasis : (1) that not every priest had a right to hear confessions, but 
 only those who had the episcopal licence to certify that they were 
 ' discreti et sapientes,' or ' prudentes ; ' (2) the salutary influence of 
 confession even to a layman when a priest was not available. The 
 Venerable Bede also insists on this in his Commentary on the 
 Epistle of St. James. 
 
 I will now give some Anglican examples. In a Provincial Con- 
 stitution of Archbishop Edmund it is said : ' De popnitentia preeci- 
 pimus : quod diaconi poenitentias daro non praesumant, nisi in his 
 casibus : cum sacerdos non potest, vel absens est ; vel stulte, vel 
 indiscrete [i.e. through lack of licence] non vult ; et mors imminet 
 ffigroto.' Lyndwood says on the word ' aegroto ' in the above : * Qui 
 desiderat confiteri. Tali namque casu potest non solum diaconus, 
 sed etiara laicus confessionem ffigroti audire ; immo et mulier hoc 
 potest. Et hoc verum, ad ostendendum fidem sacra menti ; sacra- 
 
248 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 discipline of whose practical working many of them 
 are entirely ignorant. The public mind is saturated 
 with gromidless prejudices and misapprehensions 
 which none could so effectually dissipate as the 
 Bishops. The fear, for instance, that the privacy of 
 family life is likely to be invaded in the confessional 
 is, I believe, quite unfounded. Penitents go to con- 
 fess their own sins, not those of others, and the 
 mention of names is emphatically forbidden. 
 Would it not be well to inquire, too, whether 
 English clergymen are ever in the habit of re- 
 ceiving the confessions of any against the wishes of 
 their natural guardians ? But if children go to 
 confession with the full approbation of their parents, 
 and wives with the consent of their husbands, what 
 right have irresponsible outsiders to interfere in the 
 matter ? It is these meddlers who, in fact, invade 
 the sanctity of private houses. ' The heart knoweth 
 its own bitterness, and a stranger ' has surely no 
 right to dictate the method of its treatment. 
 
 All that I have said so far goes to support the 
 wise and cautious observations of the Primate on this 
 subject. It is really a layman's question. It is for 
 the laity to say whether they will go to confession or 
 abstain. If they choose to go, parish priests are 
 bound by the law of the Church to hear their conf es- 
 
 mentum tamen deficit, quia nuUus potest vere absolvere nisi sacerdos.' 
 Lib. iii., Tit. 24. 
 
 In Eeynold's Constitutions frequent mention is made of priests 
 'provident and discreet,' and 'prudent and discreet men,' always 
 with the meaning of licensed confessors.— See Johnson's Canons, 
 vol. ii., Nos. 1222, 9 ; 1281, 8 ; 1322, 10; 1378, 4. 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 249 
 
 sions. Let that be recognised, and let the Bishops 
 forbid others without special licence to certify that 
 they are, in the language of the Prayer Book, * dis- 
 creet and learned ministers of God's Word.' And 
 let it also be laid down absolutely that all confessions 
 must be heard in church, with open door. The old 
 English canons are urgent on this point. For ex- 
 ample, it is said in one of Keynold's Constitutions : 
 ' And let the priest choose such a place in the Church 
 for hearing confessions as is open to the view of all ; 
 and never take the confession of any, especially of a 
 woman, in secret, unless in case of necessity, or on 
 account of the sickness of the penitent.' ^ If we are 
 to have confession at all — and I do not see how it is 
 to be prevented — let it be put under strict rules and 
 safeguards. At present we have the choice of two 
 systems of confession. According to one system, a 
 person — man or woman, young or old, married or 
 single — who has any scruples, goes to the parson's 
 house and is closeted with him in his study or vestry, 
 without any of the formal solemnities of religion ; 
 and they talk together perhaps on the most delicate 
 subjects in strict privacy. By the other system it is 
 arranged that the parson is in his church in surplice 
 and stole at a stated time. The penitent — if a 
 woman, veiled from recognition by the priest or any 
 one else— kneels and makes confession in thepresence, 
 though out of hearing, of all but the priest. Women 
 may always confess incognito. 
 
 Now I put it to any man of the world to say 
 
 ' Johnson's Canons, ii., 1322, 8. 
 
•250 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 which he thinks the safer of these two systems. Yet 
 we are such creatures of prejudice that while no 
 objection is made to the former system — which is 
 surrounded wath peril — the mere mention of the 
 latter is enough to drive a number of otherwise 
 sensible persons clean off their mental balance. 
 
 I quote another strict rule from one of our old 
 English canons : — 
 
 And let priests beware that they do not inquire of 
 their penitents concerning the sins of other persons, or 
 the names of the persons with whom they themselves 
 have sinned, but only the circumstances and quality of 
 the sin. Confession ought to be of what belongs to them- 
 selves, not to others.^ 
 
 Sir William Harcourt, Mr. Samuel Smith, and 
 others have pointed to Spain, Italy, and France as 
 examples of the evil effects of the confessional, and I 
 have in this chapter quoted Blanco White's testi- 
 mony as to its demoralising influence in Spain, 
 attributable, in his opinion, to the compulsory celi- 
 bacy of the clergy, combined with compulsory con- 
 fession. It would be illogical to conclude that the 
 same effects would follow when confession is entirely 
 voluntary and the clergy are allowed to marry. But 
 I am disposed to distrust these rhetorical generalisa- 
 tions altogether. Hallam, as we have seen, questions 
 the common allegation that sexual immorality dis- 
 tinguishes, in any marked way and as cause and 
 effect, Eoman Catholic from Protestant population s» 
 
 ' Johnson, ibid. 
 s 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 251 
 
 and appeals to the Protestant and Eoman Catholic 
 cantons of Switzerland by way of example. No one 
 would venture to say that the Boman Catholics of 
 Great Britain are more immoral than the Protestant 
 population ; and the sexual morality of Ireland is 
 conspicuously higher than that of England, Scotland, 
 and Wales. Indeed, as it happens, the sexual im- 
 morality of Wales and Scotland, where the confes- 
 sional hardly exists, is lower than that of England, 
 where confessions are less uncommon. Would a 
 Protestant think it fair if one were to argue from 
 this that the higher rate of immorality in Wales 
 and Scotland is due to the comparative absence of 
 the confessional ? To argue that things which 
 happen to be coincident must be related as cause and 
 effect is to reason like the rustic who attributed 
 Goodwin Sands to Tenterden Steeple. 
 
 It must be admitted, I think, that compulsory 
 confession and compulsory celibacy together have a 
 natural tendency towards sexual immorality, although 
 the case of Ireland proves that the tendency can be 
 counteracted by national characteristics, and perhaps 
 by the purifying effect of a long discipline of suffer- 
 ing. What we may say with truth is that where 
 the national standard of morality is low, confession, 
 especially if it be compulsory and celibacy be en- 
 forced on the clergy, is very likely to work injuriously. 
 It certainly did so in the Kingdom of the Two 
 Sicilies under the Bourbon regime. To this I can 
 bear some personal testimony. I received some part 
 of my early education in Southern Italy, and mixed 
 
252 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 a good deal with all classes of the population in the 
 Kingdom of Naples, urban and rural, some time after 
 the collapse, of the Bourbon dynasty, while the old 
 state of things was still fresh in the memory of the 
 population. I found the priesthood in the worst 
 possible odour. They were popularly accused, not 
 only of gross immorality, but of betraying the secrets 
 of the confessional in addition. It was commonly 
 believed that the Government used the confessional 
 for discovering political opinions and secrets. Men 
 were often flung into prison immediately after con- 
 fession, which was compulsory under that terrible 
 despotism in a manner not dreamt of in this country. 
 All adults were obliged, under pain of civil penalties, 
 to receive the Holy Communion at stated intervals, 
 to be preceded in every case by confession. To 
 ensure that they had been to confession and received 
 absolution, the priest supplied each penitent, after 
 absolution, with a metal medal, ^ which was presented 
 at the altar as a condition of communion. But 
 when the secrecy of the confessional became generally 
 discredited, while resort to it periodically was never- 
 theless compulsory, a way was found by which the 
 law was evaded while seemingly obeyed. The priests 
 sold the * tokens ' for a trifle without insisting on 
 confession, and the apocryphal ' penitents ' received 
 
 ' This custom of certifying fitness for communion by means of 
 vouchers used to prevail in Scotland, perhaps does still, among the 
 Presbyterians, and also among some Episcopal congregations. The 
 metal vouchers were called ' tokens,' and were collected in church 
 before communion, in proof that intending communicants had been 
 examined and pronounced fit by the minister. 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 253 
 
 the Sacrament unsuspected. Can anything be 
 imagined better calculated to degrade and discredit 
 religion and sap the foundations of morality ? And 
 yet it is not so very long ago since the Sacramental 
 test, though under a less odious form, prevailed among 
 ourselves — a sacrilege to which must be largely 
 credited the low views about the Sacrament, together 
 with its infrequent and slovenly administration. It 
 is almost impossible to exaggerate the debased con- 
 dition of the priesthood in Southern Italy after the 
 liberation of the Neapolitan Kingdom. The mass of 
 the laity rebounded from the yoke of an intolerable 
 tyranny to utter irreligion, and the corrupt priests 
 lost their livelihood. I have myself been more than 
 once accosted in the streets of Naples by needy 
 priests offering for a franc to say a mass for the soul 
 of any of my friends or relations. These are the 
 ' mass-priests ' of whom we read so much in the 
 literature of the English Keformation ; and these are 
 ' the sacrifices of masses ' denounced in the Thirty- 
 first Article as 'blasphemous fables and" dangerous 
 deceits.' 
 
 I was so shocked by the state of the Church in 
 Southern Italy that on my return to England I took 
 the liberty of writing a full account of my experiences 
 to Dr. Newman (he was not then Cardinal). With 
 his characteristic kindness he sent me, young as I 
 was, and a stranger, a most friendly reply ; and that 
 was the commencement of a highly prized friendship 
 with which he honoured me till his death. The 
 following extract from his letter is interesting, and as 
 
254 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 I know that it contains nothing which he regarded 
 as private, I may quote it : — 
 
 I am afraid I cannot doubt matters are very bad in 
 Italy, as you say. No one makes more ruinous con- 
 fessions of the state of the Itahan priesthood than St. 
 Alfonso Liguori. And I do not know how one can wish 
 for the continuance of a state of things which seems 
 hopelessly bad. Everything I have heard of the regirne 
 of the Bourbons makes me rejoice in their overthrow, 
 and I trust they will never be restored. A distinguished 
 Eoman prelate, who was here last year, said that the 
 new generation will be brought up without any religion 
 at all. He did not see any hope for Italy ; and he said the 
 Pope had very few supporters. I suppose things must 
 be worse before they are better. And this reconciles me 
 to what else would be insupportable — the sacrilege and 
 blasphemy which prevail there. It is difficult to, balance 
 crimes, but there is something more revplting in ' holding 
 the truth in unrighteousness ' than in persecuting it. 
 
 No part of Mr. Walsh's romance about the 
 Oxford Movement excited my indignation more 
 than his gratuitous impeachment of the honour and 
 veracity of men like Newman and Keble and 
 Church. It would be possible to destroy any man's 
 reputation by Mr. Walsh's methods of controversy ; 
 garbled quotations, insinuations, unproved asser- 
 tions, suppressiones veri equivalent to suggestiones 
 falsi. Even the four Evangelists would fare badly 
 under such treatment. Nothing impressed me more 
 in my long intercourse with Cardinal Newman than 
 his transparent honesty. With true wisdom — un- 
 like Cardinal Manning in that respect — he was not 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 255 
 
 blind to the faults and corruptions of the Church of 
 Kome, while his loyalty to, and his belief in, her 
 never, I believe, wavered after he joined her com- 
 munion. While himself a believer in Papal infalli- 
 bility under certain conditions, he nevertheless 
 strongly disapproved of the manner and precipitancy 
 of Dr. Dollinger's excommunication. And surely 
 every unprejudiced reader of his ' Apologia ' will 
 acquit him of the dishonesty which Mr. Walsh 
 imputes to him as one of the leaders of the Oxford 
 Movement. It is not Eoman Catholics alone, or 
 Anglican churchmen alone, or those alone who have 
 been purified and braced by his unrivalled Parochial 
 Sermons, who are concerned in the reputation of 
 Newman. The whole English-speaking race is 
 entitled to resent an attempt to besmirch the good 
 name of a man who sacrificed for conscience' sake 
 all that the world holds dear, and who has enriched 
 the English tongue with some of the noblest master- 
 pieces in its literature. 
 
 But to return to the subject of confession. I 
 was much struck by a letter from a Fellow of the 
 Koyal College of Surgeons which appeared in the 
 ' Times ' in the first week of September, 1898. He 
 complained that ' many persons in isolated positions ' 
 are, to his knowledge, ' put to the inconvenience and 
 expense of a long journey ' because their own parish 
 priests will not hear their confessions. And then he 
 bears the following testimony : — 
 
 I should like to make a further remark on the state- 
 ment that habitual confession results in mental en- 
 
256 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 feeblement. This has been so repeatedly stated that no 
 doubt a vast number of people believe it to be a fact. 
 But I may fairly ask for some evidence. I have never 
 seen it so stated by any one who has been in the habit 
 of hearing confessions or by any one who habitually goes to 
 confession. And I hold that only those who have the ex- 
 perience are fit judges in the matter. I take my own case, 
 if you will for the moment permit me to be an egoist. I am 
 oversixtyyearsof age. For the last thirty years I have been 
 going to confession, sometimes at long intervals, more fre- 
 quently at shorter ones. I am "a member of the medical 
 profession, a Fellow of my college, a hospital surgeon, and 
 have attained some repute. I judge myself to be about the 
 last man to be infected with morbid influences. My 
 wife and my grown-up children go to confession. They 
 none of them seem to be affected with mental feebleness. 
 A vast number of my friends, some in my own profession, 
 others lawyers, others hard-headed men of business, go 
 to confession, and I fail to see the dreadful deterioration 
 which is set forth. I am an Alpine climber, and have 
 the personal acquaintance of numbers of the finest race 
 of men, the Swiss guides. They are the most devout 
 men I know, and they all * go to their duties.' The whole 
 thing is a figment of the brain unsupported by a single 
 shred of evidence. One other thing I should like to state. 
 In all my long experience of confession, made to many 
 priests, I can never remember having one single ques- 
 tion put to me. This statement as to examination of 
 penitents is a pure fiction. 
 
 I really do not know what answer is to be made 
 to a statement of that sort. I have never heard or 
 read that the English soldiers who fought at Agin- 
 court or Crecy, or Irish regiments at Waterloo or 
 in the Crimea, were made less brave and manly than 
 
AUKICULAR CONFESSION 257 
 
 other men by going to confession. Let abuses of 
 confession be guarded against by all means, and let 
 no one practise it who prefers to do without it. But 
 when that is said it seems to me that the question is 
 exhausted. Indiscriminate denunciation of confes- 
 sion within these limits is not only unreasonable ; it 
 is misleading in addition, for it diverts the attention 
 of the public from the premonitory symptoms of the 
 dangers which invariably lead to the decay of national 
 life. The Koman satirist complained bitterly that 
 ' Syrian Orontes had flowed into the Tiber,' and 
 flooded the city on the Seven Hills with the effemi- 
 nate luxury and pollutions of the East ; so that it 
 had ceased to be any advantage to the Koman youth 
 to have in infancy inhaled the air of the Aventine 
 and been nourished on the Sabine olive.* He reverts 
 to the theme in another place, and contrasts the old 
 Roman virtue, when Eome was poor, with the 
 degeneracy which the spoils of a conquered world 
 had bred. ' In days of yore their humble fortune 
 preserved the Latin women chaste, and their lowly 
 roofs were kept from the contamination of vice by 
 toil, by short slumbers, by hands galled and hardened 
 with the Tuscan fleece, and Hannibal close to the 
 city, and their husbands standing guard on the 
 
 Jam pridem Syfus in Tiberim defluxit Orontes, 
 Et linguam, et mores, et cum tibicine chordas 
 Obliquas, nee non gentilia tympana secum 
 Vexit, et ad circum jussas prostare puellas ; 
 Ite quibus grata est picta lupa barbara mitra ! 
 Kusticus ills tuus sumit trediedipna, Quirine, 
 Et ceromatico fert niceteria colic ! — Juv. Sat. iii. 62-67. 
 
 S 
 
258 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Colline tower. Now we suffer the evils of long 
 peace ; luxury, more cruel than war, broods over us 
 and avenges a conquered world. No crime is want- 
 ing, or deed of lust, from the time that Eoman 
 poverty came to an end. Henceforth the Sybaris 
 flowed to these hills, and Ehodes, and Miletus, and 
 garlanded, saucy, drunken Tarentum.' ^ 
 
 Does not London now present to the eye of him 
 who penetrates below the fair surface of its gilded 
 exterior many of the symptoms which fired the 
 indignation of Juvenal, and revealed to his prescient 
 eye the inevitable Decline and Fall which Gibbon 
 has described in detail ? But, to pass by the loath- 
 some side of the picture, let us glance at what lies 
 open to the observation of all. London attracts not 
 only the wealth of the world and the luxury which 
 wealth carries in its wake ; it also robs the provinces, 
 as old Kome robbed hers, of much wealth and intel- 
 ligence and enterprise on which they have a fair 
 claim, and without which they are so much the 
 poorer. In the early part of this century most of 
 the nobility and gentry of Scotland never dreamt of 
 having a house in London for ' the season.' Many 
 of them did not visit London for an interval of 
 years ; and not a few thought it unnecessary to take 
 their families even as far as Edinburgh, except for 
 - an occasional ball or visit. Their ' town houses ' 
 meant their houses in the county town. They lived 
 simple, frugal, and many of them cultivated and re- 
 fined, lives among their people. A feeling of mutual 
 ' Juvenal, Sat. vi. 287-298. 
 
AUEIGULAE CONFESSION 259 
 
 esteem and confidence thus grew up between the 
 lord and laird on the one hand, and the people on 
 the estate on the other. Now all who are ' in 
 society ' feel bound to spend a portion of each year 
 in London, and are insensibly drawn into the vortex 
 of its dissipation and its ruinous competition in 
 luxury. What is the consequence ? Impoverished 
 landlords ; mortgaged estates ; the old mansions 
 occupied by strangers, who have no interest in the 
 country, or sympathy with its people ; and a feeling 
 of dangerous alienation spreading and deepening be> 
 tween the owners of the soil and its tillers ; in a word, 
 the precise condition of things which was so largely 
 instrumental in producing the French Revolution. 
 
 Our police courts have lately lifted some corners 
 of the veil that hides a state of social corruption in 
 our midst which it is impossible to describe in 
 detail, but which Juvenal describes in his sixth 
 Satire as precipitating the fall of Eome. Noble 
 Eomans — like Tacitus, for example — who were 
 capable of looking above and beyond the follies and 
 frivolities of the hour, were oppressed with a pro- 
 found sentiment of sadness and foreboding. Recog- 
 nising the futility of resistance to the tide of 
 corruption, and the impotence of mere law to stay 
 the plague, they despaired of national regeneration, 
 and were driven to the conclusion that human life 
 had become empty and void, and the world a huge 
 imposture.^ Only a few weeks ago the police found, 
 
 ' ' Ludibria lerum humanarum cunctis in negotiis.' — Tacitus, 
 A7in. iii. IS. 
 
260 THE EBFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 on the premises of a blackmailing quack, letters — 
 covering only a period of three months — from sixteen 
 thousand women, of all classes, enclosing hush 
 money to conceal their having bought a drug to 
 procure abortion. Will the most prejudiced de- 
 nouncer of confession venture to affirm that a 
 judicious use of confession might not help to arrest 
 this secret sapping of our national life? The 
 clergy and medical men know more about these 
 things than the general public. I have already said 
 that I have never received the confessions of more 
 than three persons, circumstances enabling me to 
 send those who came to me to some more experi- 
 enced clergyman. But I have at different times 
 received letters from total strangers, asking my 
 advice on the most delicate subjects, and dealing 
 with matters which, from inexperience, I did not at 
 the time fully understand. In such cases I have 
 asked permission to erase name and address, and 
 anything likely to identify the writers, and consult 
 the late Sir Andrew Clark. In every case permission 
 was granted, and in giving my advice to my corre- 
 spondents I have always insisted on my letter or 
 letters being shown to the husband, when my cor- 
 respondent was a wife, and always with the happiest 
 results. These were not confessions in the technical 
 sense of the word, and I mention them to show how 
 impossible it is, even for the clergy themselves, to 
 put a stop to these confidential communications. I 
 do not suppose that my experience is at all excep- 
 tional. One preaches a sermon or publishes a book, 
 
AUEICULAE CONFESSION 261 
 
 and a hearer or reader finds something that pricks 
 the conscience or throws a flash of Hght on some 
 hidden and perhaps unsuspected sin ; and the 
 preacher or author is consulted personally or by- 
 letter. What is he to do ? Is he to turn a deaf ear 
 to the cry of a soul in distress ? Suppose he does, 
 and then hears that the person whom he repulsed 
 has committed suicide or gone to the bad ; will not 
 the remorseful thought that he might have saved 
 that soul, and refused, haunt him to his dying day ? 
 The clergy are, indeed, in an intolerable position if 
 they are bidden by the Church, on the one hand, to 
 invite all who ' cannot quiet their own consciences * 
 to resort to them for help, and are then denounced 
 as ' perjured priests ' and reprobates for fulfilling the 
 duty imposed upon them by the Church. 
 
 And how slow people are to realise the folly of 
 trying to fight against nature ! 
 
 Naturam expellas furc£i ; tamen usque recurret, 
 Et mala perrumpet furtim fastidia victrix. 
 
 It is not ' murder ' only that ' will out.' Just as 
 the human body struggles to expel an invading 
 poison, and it is the healthiest body that struggles 
 hardest, so the human soul strives, and the purest 
 strives most, to cast out sin of every kind. It is no 
 use answering that this can be done by confessing 
 to God alone. We must take human nature as we 
 find it, and the simple fact is that there are human 
 beings who crave for human sympathy, and realise 
 the Divine forgiveness more easily if it reaches them 
 
262 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 through the sound of a human voice. Consolation 
 in sorrow comes really from God just as truly as the 
 forgiveness of sins. Is there, then, no virtue in the 
 touch of a sympathising hand, in the sob of a 
 sympathising voice, in the glance of a sympathising 
 eye? What is the meaning of the Incarnation if 
 ' the high and lofty One who inhabiteth Eternity ' 
 was as accessible when ' dwelling in the unapproach- 
 able light ' as He was when He appeared in human 
 form among men, feeding the hungry, cleansing the 
 lepers, comforting mourners, weeping over graves, 
 raising the dead, casting out devils, pardoning 
 sinners, taking up squalid children in His arms and 
 blessing them ? It is not a question of God forgiv- 
 ing any one who confesses to Him from a contrite 
 heart without human intervention, but of man's 
 realising the Divine forgiveness more when it reaches 
 him through the ministry of his fellows. And I re- 
 peat that the objection is equally valid against inter- 
 cessory prayer — indeed against any intervening 
 media. Why kneel in confession and prayer to 
 God ? Why confess and pray at all to the Omni- 
 scient One who knows our thoughts and needs before 
 we utter them ? It is we who need these aids, not 
 God, who bestows His gifts through the ministry of 
 men and angels and innumerable material channels 
 for our benefit, not from His necessity. 
 
 I am persuaded that a great deal of the prejudice 
 against voluntary confession, under proper safe- 
 guards, arises from ignorance of the facts and from 
 want of reflection. Of course, if a clergyman is dis- 
 
AUEICULAR CONFESSION 263 
 
 honourable, he can abuse the confidence reposed in 
 him ; but he can more easily abuse confidential 
 intercourse of another kind, such as private inter- 
 views in his study or vestry. The fact that there 
 may be some dishonourable doctors in the medical 
 profession does not prevent men from trusting their 
 family doctors and allowing them to have private 
 interviews with their wives and daughters. The 
 business of life could not go on except on the prin- 
 ciple of mutual confidence ; and if the clergy are not 
 to be trusted to hear the spontaneous confessions of 
 such of their people as voluntarily resort to them, 
 that means that all private intercourse between 
 them and any of their parishioners ought to be 
 made penal. Short of that, the agita^ a against 
 confession is futile. But if, on the i aer hand, 
 drastic measures are to be adopted, they )ught to be 
 applied all round — to Nonconformist ministers and 
 Koman Catholic priests as rigorously as to'^.^he clergy 
 of the Established Church. For the plainX truth is 
 that confession, under whatever name, ^^pre vails 
 among all Christian denominations. Mr.' Moody 
 was in the habit of inviting private confessions at 
 all his meetings ; and if intercourse of a private kind 
 is to be allowed between'a pastor and the individual 
 members of his flock, does it not stand to reason 
 that the more such intercourse is surrounded with 
 the solemnities of religion, and the more open it is, 
 the better ? It is safer in a surplice and stole on the 
 part of the pastor than in a frock coat ; and safer in^ 
 a confessional box in open church — where the pastor 
 
264 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 need not know who is confessing to him — than in 
 the secrecy of a locked vestry or study. It is odd 
 how so practical a people as the English lose their 
 usual common sense when their prejudices are 
 violently excited. The sight of a confessional box 
 in church, which reduces all risk of scandal or 
 mischief to a minimum, is enough to drive people 
 crazy who see no harm in a secluded tete-a-tete 
 interview between pastor and penitent. The fact is, 
 they don't stop to think or reason ; they merely give 
 vent to their alarmed feelings ; like a charming old 
 lady whom I once knew. ' Dick,' said she one day 
 to a favourite grandson, ' I wish you would put 
 away that pistol. It is most dangerous.' * But, 
 dear Granny,' pleaded the boy, ' it is not loaded.' 
 ' Never mind, my dear,' said she, ' loaded or not, it 
 may go off.' 
 
 But it is time to consider what the Church of 
 England says upon this subject. For neither in 
 this nor in other matters do I desire to go beyond 
 her teaching. 
 
265 
 
 CHAPTEE VIII 
 
 THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 
 
 One of the commonplaces of the current controversy 
 on the so-called * Church Crisis ' is the assertion that 
 the Reformers condemned and repudiated the 
 doctrine and practice of auricular confession, and 
 that such confession has remained ever since under 
 the ban of the Church of England. Let us examine 
 that assertion in the light of history ; and let us 
 begin with the Book of Common Prayer. 
 
 In the year 1548 there was an ' Order for Com- 
 munion ' set forth containing an exhortation, in 
 which auricular confession was recommended in the 
 following language : — 
 
 ' And if there be any of you whose conscience is 
 troubled or grieved in anything, lacking comfort or 
 counsel, let him come to me, or to some other dis- 
 creet and learned priest, taught in the law of God, 
 and confess and open his sin and grief secretly, that 
 he may receive such ghostly counsel, advice, and 
 comfort that his conscience may be relieved, and that 
 of us (as of the Ministers of God and of the Church) 
 he may receive comfort and absolution, to the 
 satisfaction of his mind, and avoiding of all scruple 
 
266 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and doubtfulness ; requiring such as shall be satisfied 
 with a general confession not to be offended with 
 them that do use, to their further satisfying, the 
 auricular and secret confession to the priest ; nor 
 those also which think needful or convenient, for the 
 quietness of their own consciences, particularly to 
 open their sins to the priest, to be offended with 
 them that are satisfied with their humble confession 
 to God, and the general confession to the Church. 
 But in all things to follow and keep the rule of 
 charity ; and every man to be satisfied with his own 
 conscience, nor judging other men's minds or con- 
 sciences ; whereas he hath no warrant of God's 
 Word to the same.' 
 
 In the subsequent editions of the Prayer Book 
 the intending communicant, ' who cannot quiet his 
 own conscience,' is bidden to go to his parish priest, 
 ' or to some other discreet and learned Minister of 
 God's Word, and open his grief ; that by the ministry 
 of God's Holy Word he may receive the benefit of 
 absolution, together with ghostly counsel and advice, 
 to the quieting of his conscience and avoiding of all 
 scruples and doubtfulness.' 
 
 In the Office for the Visitation of the Sick, 
 through all the editions of the Prayer Book, the sick 
 person is directed to make a special confession of 
 sins preparatory to absolution ; but in the last re- 
 vision .the priest is ordered to ' move ' him to such 
 confession ; after which he is to absolve him in the 
 following words : — 
 
 * Our Lord Jesus Christ, Who hath left power to 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 267 
 
 His Church to absolve all sinners who truly repent 
 and believe in Him, of His great mercy forgive thee 
 thine offences. And by His authority committed to 
 me I absolve thee from all thy sins, in the Name of 
 the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. 
 Amen.' 
 
 Dr. Newman delivered a challenge on this 
 question which is worth quoting, and which, as 
 far as I know, has never been answered. It is as 
 follows : — 
 
 Let candid men consider the form of Absolution 
 contained in the Prayer Book, of which all clergymen. 
 Evangelical and Liberal, as well as High Church, and 
 (I think) all persons in University offices declare, that 
 'it containeth nothing contrary to the Word of God.' 
 
 I challenge, in the sight of all England, Evangelical 
 clergymen generally to put on paper an interpretation 
 of this form of words, consistent with their sentiments, 
 which shall be less forced than the most objectionable 
 interpretations which Tract XC. puts upon any passage in 
 the Articles.^ 
 
 Dr. Newman then quotes the form of Absolution 
 in the Prayer Book, and contrasts it with the Koman, 
 which, of the two, is certainly the milder form. 
 
 The right of pronouncing this absolution is by 
 the Church of England strictly confined to an 
 ordained priesthood. On the head of every priest in 
 the Church of England, be he High, or Low, or 
 Broad, a bishop laid his hands and pronounced these 
 words : — 
 
 • Ajpologia, p. 171. First Edition. 
 
268 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 * Keceive the Holy Ghost for the office and work 
 of a priest in the Church of God. Whose sins thou 
 dost forgive, they are forgiven ; and whose sins thou 
 dost retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful 
 dispenser of the Word of God and of His Holy 
 Sacraments : in the Name of the Father, and of the 
 Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.' ^ 
 
 Thus much for the direct evidence of the Prayer 
 Book. Let us now turn to another class of evidence. 
 
 In one of the Injunctions set forth in the first 
 year of Edward YI. there is an inquiry whether 
 ' parsons, vicars, curates, chantry priests, and other 
 stipendiaries,' ' have every Lent required their 
 parishioners in their confession to recite their Pater 
 Noster, the Articles of our faith, and the Ten Com- 
 mandments in English ; ' and this inquiry is repeated 
 in the Visitation Articles of Archbishop Cranmer in 
 the second year of Edward.^ The regular practice of 
 confession is here assumed. 
 
 Queen Elizabeth, soon after her accession, put 
 forth Injunctions, of which Archbishop Parker and 
 other bishops afterwards compiled '•Interpretations 
 and further Considerations.' Among them is the 
 following : ' Ecclesia Christi est, in qua purum Dei 
 Verbum prsedicatur, et Sacramenta juxta Christi ordi- 
 nationem administrantur ; et in qua clavium autJio- 
 ritas retinetur.' ^ 
 
 ' Mr. Frederick Verney, with the manly honesty which belongs 
 to his nature, declared lately in the Times that these words deterred 
 him, while a deacon, from proceeding to the order of priesthood. 
 ^ Cardwell's Doc. Ann. vol. i. pp. 26, 51. » Ibid. p. 240. 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 269 
 
 Among * Certain Articles of Beligion, set forth by 
 the order of both Archbishops, MetropoHtans, and 
 the rest of the Bishops, for the "aniformity of Doc- 
 trine .... to be read by all parsons, vicars, and 
 curates at their possession-taking, or first entry into 
 their cure,' is the following : * I do acknowledge 
 also that Church to be the spouse of Christ, wherein 
 the Word of God is truly taught, the Sacraments 
 orderly administered according to Christ's institution, 
 and the authority of the Keys duly used.' ^ 
 
 In the 113th Canon of 1603, the regular practice 
 of confession is taken for granted, as follows : — 
 
 * If any man confess his secret and hidden sins to 
 the Minister, for the unburdening of his conscience 
 and to receive spiritual consolation and ease of mind 
 from him, we do straitly charge and admonish 
 him, that he do not reveal and make known to any 
 person whatsoever any crime or offence so committed 
 to his trust and secrecy, under pain of irregularity.' 
 
 In the year 1696 Sir John Friend and Sir William 
 Parkins were executed at Tyburn for conspiracy 
 against the life of William III. Three English 
 clergymen, Messrs. Cooke, Snatt, and Collier, at- 
 tended them on the scaffold, and, with imposition of 
 hands, gave them absolution in the sight of the 
 assembled multitude. This was considered a grave 
 scandal, and the two Primates of the day (Tenison 
 and Sharp), together with twelve other Bishops then 
 'in and about London,' immediately put forth a 
 ' Declaration ' against this irregular proceeding. But 
 
 • Card well's Doc. Ann. vol. i. p. 261. 
 
270 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the ground which they take is not that the system 
 of private confession has been disallowed in our 
 Eeformed Church ; on the contrary, they quote 
 with approbation the Kubric which enjoins the 
 Minister to ' move ' the penitent * to make a special 
 confession of his sins,' and censure the offending 
 Ministers for not obeying it. ' If those Ministers,' 
 they say, ' knew not the state of these men's souls, 
 how could they, without manifest transgression of the 
 Church's order, as well as the profane abuse of the 
 power Christ has left with His Ministers, absolve 
 them from all their sins ? ' ^ 
 
 I do not know whether the office of Confessor of 
 the Koyal Household has ever been formally abo- 
 lished. It certainly existed in the early part of this 
 century, and long after the Great Bebellion at least 
 it was no sinecure. 
 
 In the 19th Canon of the Irish Church, passed 
 when Ussher was Primate and Bramhall Bishop of 
 Derry, it is ordered that ' The Minister of every 
 parish shall, tbe afternoon before the said adminis- 
 tration (of the Lord's Supper), give warning by the 
 tolling of the bell, or otherwise, to the intent that 
 if any have any scruple of conscience, or desire the 
 special ministry of reconciliation, he may afford it 
 to those that need it. And to this end the people 
 are often to be exhorted to enter into a special 
 examination of the state of their own souls ; and 
 finding themselves either extremely dull, or much 
 troubled in mind, they do resort to God's Ministers 
 
 • Cardwell's Doc. Ann. pp. 392-6. 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 271 
 
 to receive from them as well advice and counsel for 
 the quickening of their dead hearts and the subduing 
 of those corruptions whereunto they have been 
 subject, as the benefit of absolution likewise for the 
 quieting their conscience by the power of the keys, 
 which Christ hath committed to His Ministers for 
 that purpose.' ^ 
 
 Let this suffice as to the law of ' our Eeformed 
 Church ' on the subject of Confession, as embodied 
 in the Prayer Book and other formal and authori- 
 tative documents. And that auricular confession 
 was commonly practised in our Communion, at least 
 down to the religious catalepsy of the eighteenth 
 century, and even after by devout members of the 
 Church, is a fact which admits of abundant demon- 
 stration, as a few examples will show. 
 
 Hooker, as we learn from Izaak Walton in his life 
 of him, was absolved on his death-bed by Saravia, 
 'they being supposed to be confessors to each other.' 
 Bishop Andrewes, too, not only taught but practised 
 confession. In his ' Devotions ' he thanks God 
 ' qui aperuisti mihi portam spei confitenti et roganti 
 ex my ste riorum et clavium potestate^' ^ And it is re- 
 lated of him that when he was Prebendary of St. 
 Paul's it was his custom during Lent to be in the 
 Cathedral daily at certain hours to hear confessions. 
 Bishop Bull also, the great defender of the Nicene 
 Creed, who died in 1710, confessed and received 
 
 * Phillimore's Ecclesiastical Law, vol. i. p. 698. 
 ' Preces Quotidia.ncB, p. 266. 
 
272 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 absolution more than once during his last illness.^ 
 No one at all familiar with the diaries and chronicles 
 of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries will need 
 to be told that they afford abundant evidence that 
 the practice of auricular confession and absolution 
 was then recognised as one of the ordinary means 
 of grace. Let me quote two extracts from Kennet's 
 ' Register and Chronicle ' by way of example : — 
 
 I was chosen by the Duchess of York, as soon as she 
 was known to be so (saith Bishop Morley), to be her 
 spiritual director and guide in those things that con- 
 cerned her spiritual and everlasting condition ; and the 
 reason why she made choice of me to be so, rather 
 than any other of my order, was because she knew me 
 better, and because I had been her first instructor in 
 matters of religion many years before. In this relation 
 of mine to the Duchess I continued until after her 
 father's banishment, and all that time I must bear her 
 witness that she was not only a zealous Protestant 
 herself, according as it is by law established in the 
 Church of England, but zealous to make Protestants, 
 as appears by what she did for that counterfeit pre- 
 tended convert Macedo (whom the foresaid libeller 
 Maimbourg magnifies so much, though he knows he 
 proved himself to be an arrant impostor and profligated 
 wretch), and in her own deportment as devout and 
 charitable as ever I knew any of her age and sex : inso- 
 much as that besides her private prayers, morning and 
 evening, which she never omitted, she daily and hourly 
 observed the Canonical Hours of the Public Service of 
 God in her Chapel with those of her family. Neither 
 did she ever (as long as I was with her) omit the re- 
 
 ' Last Hours of Eminent Christians, p. 182. 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 273 
 
 ceiving of the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper once 
 every month at least, besides that of solemn Festivals 
 which she always received with the King in the Eoyal 
 Chapel. And akuays the day before she received she 
 made a voluntary confession of what she thought she had 
 offended God in, either by omission or commission, profess- 
 ing her sorrow for it, and promising amendment of it, and 
 then kneeling down she desired and received absolution 
 
 IN THE FORM AND WOEDS PRESCRIBED BY OUR ChURCH.* 
 
 Mr. Lenthall, Speaker of the Long Parliament, 
 who died on September 3, 1662, was attended in 
 his last illness by Dr. Bredock (also spelt Bride- 
 oake), Kector of Witney, and afterwards Bishop of 
 Chichester, who gives, in a letter preserved by 
 Kennet,^ an interesting account of his conversation 
 with the penitent Puritan. ' When I came to his 
 presence,' says Bredock, ' he told me " he was very 
 glad to see me ; for he had two great works to do, 
 and I must assist him in both ; to fit his body for 
 
 ' Rennet's Register and Chronicle, p. 385. Edition of 1728. 
 Those who object to the practice of confession are sometimes put to 
 hard shifts in explaining the language of the Prayer Book. To the 
 mind of any one not blinded by prejudice or ignorance, the Exhorta- 
 tion in the Communion Office plainly advises private confession, to 
 be followed by the only form of private absolution prescribed by the 
 Church, to all who have any scruples about their fitness for partaking 
 of the Sacrament. It would never occur to him that all that was 
 meant was that the penitent should have a private conversation with 
 his pastor, and listen to some passages of Holy Scripture, that he 
 might thereby ' receive the benefit of absolution ' I Yet this explana- 
 tion has been gravely offered by persons in authority. We see the 
 traditioral, as it is indeed the only legitimate, interpretation of the 
 passage in the place marked by capitals in the quotation in the 
 text. > 
 
 •' P. 762. 
 
274 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the earth and his soul for heaven : " to which 
 purpose he desired me to pray with him. I told 
 him the Church had appointed an Office of the 
 Visitation of the Sick, and I must use that. He 
 said " Yes, he chiefly desired the prayers of the 
 Church;" wherein he joyned with great fervency 
 and devotion. After prayers he desired absolution ; 
 I told him I was very ready and willing to pronounce 
 it ; but he must first come to a Christian confession 
 and contrition for the sins and failings of his life : 
 "Well, sir," said he, "then instruct me to my 
 duty." I desired him to examine his life by the 
 Ten Commandments, and wherein he found his 
 failings, to fly to the Gospel for mercy. Then I read 
 the Ten Commandments in order to him, mentioning 
 the principal sins against each commandment.' Dr. 
 Bredock then goes on to say that of course he omits 
 what the penitent told him ' under the seal of this 
 Office,' and only states what Mr. Lenthall autho- 
 rised him to publish. 'After this Office,' he adds, 
 * wherein, indeed, he showed himself a very hearty 
 penitent, he again desired the absolution of the 
 Church, which I then pronounced, and which he 
 received with much content and satisfaction : " For," 
 says he, " now, now indeed do I find the joy and 
 benefit of that Office which Christ hath left in His 
 Church ; " . . . The next day he received the 
 Sacrament, and after that work I desired him to 
 express himself to Dr. Dickenson (a learned physi- 
 cian, , Fellow of Merton College, who received the 
 Sacrament with him) concerning the King's death, 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 275 
 
 because he had only done it to me in confession ; 
 which he did to the same effect as he had to me.' 
 
 So much as to the doctrine of the Church of 
 England on this subject, as prescribed in her autho- 
 rised formularies, and illustrated in her practice. 
 It would be easy to show that the same doctrine is 
 taught and enforced by all her great divines ; but I 
 must again content myself with fairly representative 
 specimens. 
 
 The Catechism of Justus Jonas, which was trans- 
 lated, adopted, and authoritatively recommended by 
 Cranmer, contains the following passage : — 
 
 Now God doth not speak to us with a Voice sounding 
 out of heaven ; but He hath given the Keys of the King- 
 dom of Heaven, and the authority to forgive sin, to the 
 ministers of the Church. Wherefore let him that is a 
 sinner go to one of them. Let him acknoioledge and con- 
 fess his sin, and pray him that, according to God's Com- 
 mandments, he will give him absolution, and comfort him 
 with the word of grace and forgiveness of his sins. And 
 when the minister doth so, then I ought steadfastly to 
 believe that my sins are truly forgiven me in heaven. . . . 
 Wherefore, good children, give good ear to this doctrine ; 
 and when your sins do make you afraid and sad, then seek 
 and desire absolution and forgiveness of your sins of the 
 ministers tvhich have received a commission and command- 
 ment from Christ Himself to forgive men their sins; and 
 then your consciences shall have peace, tranquillity, and 
 quietness. But he that doth not obey this counsel, but 
 being either blind or proud, doth despise the same, he shall 
 not find forgiveness of his sins, neither in his own good 
 works, not yet in painful chastisements of his body, or any 
 other things whereto God hath not promised remission of 
 
276 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 sins, wherefore despise not absolution, for it is the com- 
 mandment and ordinance of God} 
 
 Bishop Latimer says : — 
 
 But to speak of right and true confession, I would to 
 God it were kept in England ; for it is a good thing. And 
 those which find themselves grieved in conscience might 
 go to a learned man and there fetch of him comfort of the 
 Word of God, and so come to a quiet conscience. . . . 
 And it grieveth me much that such confessions are not 
 kept in England. ^ 
 
 Bishop Eidley says : — 
 
 You have known me long indeed, in the w4iich time 
 it has chanced me, as you say, to mislike some things. 
 It is true, I grant ; for sudden changes without substantial 
 and necessary cause, and the heady setting forth of ex- 
 tremities, I never did love. Confession unto the minister, 
 which is able to instruct, correct, comfort, inform the weak, 
 wounded, and ignorant conscience, indeed I ever thought 
 might do much good to Christ's congregation, and so, I 
 assure you, I think even at this day.^ 
 
 Tn the Sixth of Archbishop Parker's Articles of 
 Visitation, in 1567, those are condemned who teach 
 'that mortal or voluntary sins, committed after 
 baptism, be not remissible by penance.' * 
 
 The following will shov^ Hooker's opinion : — 
 But concerning confession in private, the Churches of 
 Germany, as well the rest as Lutherans, agree all, that 
 all men should at certain times confess their offences to 
 God in the hearing of God's ministers, thereby to show 
 how their sins displease them ; to receive instruction for 
 
 ' Catechism, p. 202. "^ Sermons, ii. 399. Edit. 1824. 
 
 3 • Letter to one Martin West.' Wordsworth's Eccl. Biog. iii. 67. 
 
 * Cardwell's Doc. Ann. i. 341. 
 
THE EEFOKMATION AND CONFESSION 277 
 
 the warier carriage of themselves hereafter ; to be soundly 
 resolved, if any scruple or snare of conscience do entangle 
 their minds ; and, v^hich is most material, to the end that 
 men may at God's hand seek every 07ie his own particular 
 pardon, through the power of those keys, which the minister 
 of God using according to our blessed Saviour's institution 
 in that case, it is their part to accept the benefit thereof 
 as God's most merciful ordinance for their good, and, 
 without any distrust or doubt, to embrace joyfully His 
 grace so given them according to the word of our Lord, 
 which hath said, ' Whose sins ye remit, they are remitted.' 
 So that grounding on this assured belief, they are to rest 
 with minds encouraged and persuaded concerning the 
 forgiveness of all their sins, as of Christ's own word and 
 power, by the ministry of the keys.^ 
 
 Dr. Donne, Dean of St. Paul's, whom De 
 Quincey calls 'one of the subtlest intellects that 
 England has produced,' ^ is severe upon ' that torture 
 of the conscience, that usurpation of God's pov^er, 
 that spying into the counsel of princes, with which 
 the Church of Eome hath been deeply charged ; ' 
 but he is equally clear in favour of the system of 
 confession sanctioned by the Church of England. 
 For example : — 
 
 Confitebor Domino (says David), I will confess my 
 sins to the Lord : sins are not confessed if they be not 
 confessed to Him ; and if they be confessed to Him, in 
 case of necessity it ivill suffice, though they be confessed 
 to no other. Indeed, a confession is directed upon God, 
 though it be made to His minister : if God had appointed 
 
 » Eccl. Pol. Bk. vi. ch. iv. 14. 
 
 ■' Works, vii. 276. 
 
278 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT ^ 
 
 His angels or His saints to absolve me, as He hath His 
 ministers, I would confess to them. . . . Men come not 
 willingly to this manifestation of themselves, nor are they 
 to be brought in chains, as they do in the Eoman Church, 
 by a necessity of an exact enumeration of all their sins, 
 but to be led with that sweetness with which our Church 
 proceeds, in appointing sick persons, if they feel their 
 conscience troubled ivith any weighty matters, to make a 
 sjjecial confession, and to receive absolution at the hands 
 of the priest ; ' and then we are to remember that * every 
 coming to Hhe Communion is as serious a thing as our 
 oion transmigration out of the world, and we should do as 
 much here for the settling of our conscience as upon our 
 death-bed.' ^ 
 
 Bishop Hall can hardly be called a High Church- 
 man, yet here is a specimen of his teaching on the sub- 
 ject of auricular confession : — 
 
 If after all these penitent endeavours you find your 
 soul still unquiet, and not sufficiently apprehensive of a 
 free and full forgiveness, betake yourself to God's faithful 
 agent for peace : run to your ghostly physician ; lay your 
 bosom open before him ; flatter not your own condition ; 
 let neither fear nor shame stay his hand from probing and 
 searching the wound to the bottom ; and that being done, 
 make careful use of such spiritual applications as shall be 
 by him administered to you. This, this is the way to a 
 perfect recovery and fulness of comfort. 
 
 And again : — 
 
 Although therefore you may perhaps, through God's 
 goodness, attain to such a measure of knowledge and 
 resolution as to be able to give yourself satisfaction con- 
 cerning the state of your soul ; yet it cannot be amiss, out 
 ' Sermons, Ivi. 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 279 
 
 of an abundant caution, to take God's minister, along with 
 you, and making him of your spiritual counsel, to unbosom 
 yourself to him freely, for his fa>therly advice and con- 
 currence : the neglect whereof, through a kind of either 
 strangeness. or misconceit, is certainly not a little disad- 
 vantageous to the souls of many good Christians. The 
 Eomish laity make either oracles or idols of their ghostly 
 fathers : if we make ciphers of ours, I know not whether 
 we be more injurious to them or ourselves. They go 
 about to rack your consciences to a forced and exquisite 
 confession under the pain of no remission; but we 
 persuade you, for your own good, to be more intimate 
 with and less reserved from those whom God hath set 
 over you, for your direction, comfort, and salvation.^ 
 
 Bishop Overall, the author of the latter part of the 
 Church Catechism, makes the follov^ing inquiry in 
 the 21st Article of his Visitation in 1619 :— 
 
 Whether doth your minister, before the several times 
 of the administration of the Lord's Supper, admonish and 
 exhort his parishioners, if they have their consciences 
 troubled and disquieted, to resort unto him, or some other 
 learned minister, and open his grief, that he may receive 
 such ghostly counsel and comfort as his conscience may be 
 relieved, and by the minister he may receive the benefit of 
 absolution, to the quiet of his conscience and avoiding of 
 scruple. And if any man confess his secret and hidden sins, 
 be he sick or whole, to the minister, for the unburthening 
 of his conscience, and receiving such spiritual consolation, 
 doth or hath the said minister at any time revealed and 
 made known to any person whomsoever any crime or offence 
 so committed to his trust, contrary to the 113th Canon ? 
 
 Similar inquiries are to be found in abundance in 
 
 ' Works, vii. 453-5. 
 
280 THE EEFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the Visitation Articles of other bishops. I give 
 Overall's as a specimen of the general rule. 
 
 Bishop Cosin, v^ho v^as alv^ays proud to appeal 
 to the authority of ' My Lord and Master Overall,' 
 writes as follov^s : — 
 
 The Church of England, howsoever it holdeth not 
 Confession and Ahsolutio7i Sacramental, that is, made unto 
 and received from a priest, to he so absolutely necessary, 
 as that without it there can be no remission of sins ; yet 
 by this place it is manifest v^hat she teacheth. . . . Our 
 ' if he feel his conscience troubled ' is no more than his 
 ' if he find out his sins ' (' si inveniat peccata ') ; for if he 
 be not troubled with sin, what needs either Confession or 
 Absolution ? Venial sins that separate not from the grace 
 of God need not so much to trouble a man's conscience. 
 If he hath committed any mortal sin, then we require 
 confession of it to a priest, who may give him, upon his 
 true contrition and repentance, the benefit of absolution, 
 which takes effect according to his disposition that is 
 absolved. . . . The truth is, that in the priest's absolution 
 there is the tfue power and virtue of forgiveness, which 
 will most certainly take effect, 'unless an obstacle is 
 imposed,' as in Baptism.' 
 
 Jeremy Taylor says : — 
 
 It is a very pious preparation to the Holy Sacrament 
 that we confess our sins to the minister of religion : for 
 since it is necessary that a mah be examined, and a self- 
 examination was prescribed to the Corinthians in the 
 time of their lapsed discipline, that though there were 
 divisions amongst them, and no established governors, 
 yet from this duty they were not to be excused, and they 
 must in destitution of a public minister do it themselves, 
 but this is in case of such necessity : the other is better : 
 tliat is, it is of better order and more advantage that this 
 * Notes on Common Prayer, First Series, p. 163. 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 281 
 
 part of repentance and holy preparation be performed 
 under the conduct of a spiritual ' guide. And the reason 
 is pressing. For since it is life or death that is there 
 administered, and the great dispensation of the keys is in 
 that ministry, it were well if he that ministers did know 
 whether the person presented were fit to communicate or 
 no ; and if he be not, it is charity to reject him, and 
 charity to assist him that he may be fitted. There are 
 many sad contingencies in the constitution of ecclesiastical 
 affairs, in which every man that needs this help, and 
 would fain make use of it, cannot ; hut ivhen he can meet 
 loith the blessing, it loere luell it were more frequently used 
 and more readily entertained. 
 
 Again : — 
 
 But the priest's proper power of absolving, that is, of 
 pardoning (which is in no case communicable to any 
 man who is not consecrated to the ministry), is a giving 
 the penitent the means of eternal pardon, the admitting 
 him to the Sacraments of the Church and the peace and 
 communion of the faithful ; because that is the only way 
 really to obtain pardon of God ; there being in ordinary 
 no way to heaven but by serving God in the way which 
 He hath commanded us by His Son, that is, in the way 
 of the Church, which is His body, whereof He is Prince 
 and Head.^ 
 
 Chillingworth is a name to conjure with among 
 Protestants. His favourite maxim, ' The Bible and 
 the Bible only the religion of Protestants,' has become 
 a proverb. His name would evoke the plaudits even 
 of the Albert Hall demonstrators. Let us see then 
 what Chillingworth says : — 
 
 Since Christ, for your benafit and comfort, hath given 
 * Jeremy Taylor's Works, vii. 452, 484. Eden's Edition. 
 
282 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 such authority to His ministers, upon your unfeigned 
 repentance and contrition, to absolve and release you 
 from your sins, . . . therefore, in obedience to His 
 gracious will, and as I am warranted, and even enjoined, 
 by my holy mother the Church of England expressly, in 
 the Book of Common Prayer, in the rubric of visiting the 
 sick (which doctrine this Church hath likewise embraced 
 so far), I beseech you that by your practice and use you 
 will not suffer that commission which Christ hath given 
 to His ministers to be a vain form of words without any 
 sense under them ; to be an antiquated, expired commis- 
 sion, of no use nor validity in these days ; but whenso- 
 ever you find yourselves charged and oppressed, especially 
 with such crimes as they call ' Peccata vastantia con- 
 scientiam,' such as do lay waste and depopulate the con- 
 science, that you have recourse to your spiritual physician 
 and freely disclose the nature and mahgnancy of your 
 disease, that he may be able, as the cause shall require, 
 to proportion a remedy either to search it with corrosives, 
 or comfort and temper it with oil. And come not to him 
 only with such a mind as you would go to a learned man 
 experienced in the Scripture, as one that can speak com- 
 fortable, quieting words to you, but as one that hath 
 authority delegated to him from God Himself to absolve 
 and acquit you of your sins.^ 
 
 I do not know whether Bishop Ken's Manual, 
 composed for the use of Winchester scholars, is still 
 used in that illustrious school. A copy of it, which 
 I still possess, was given to me by the clergyman 
 who prepared me for my first communion, a very 
 moderate man, and it contains the following direc- 
 tion : — 
 
 In case, good Philotheus, you do find this examination 
 ' Works (Serm. vii.), pp. «3-4. 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 285 
 
 too difficult for you, or you are afraid you shall not rightly 
 perform it, or meet with any scruples or troubles of con- 
 science in the practice of it, I then advise you, as the 
 Church does, to go to one of your superiors in this place 
 to be your spiritual guide, and be not ashamed to un- 
 burthen your soul freely to him ; that, besides his ghostly 
 counsel, you may receive the benefit of absolution ; for 
 though confession of our sins to God is only matter of 
 duty, and absolutely necessary, yet confession to our 
 spiritual guide also is by many devout souls found to be 
 very advantageous to true repentance.^ 
 
 Archbishop Wake says : — 
 
 The Church of England refuses no sort of confession, 
 either public or private, which may be any way necessary 
 to the quieting of men's consciences, or to the exercise of 
 that power of binding and loosing which our Saviour 
 Christ has left to His Church. We have our penitential 
 canon for public offenders ; we exhort men, if they have 
 any the least doubt or scruple, nay, sometimes though they 
 have none, hut specially before they receive the Holy 
 Sacrament, to confess their sins. We propose to them the 
 benefit not only of ghostly advice hoio to manage their re- 
 pentance, but the great comfort of absolution too, as soon 
 as they have completed it. . . . When we visit our sick, 
 we iiever fail to exhort them to make a special confession 
 of their sins to him that ministers to them ; and when they 
 have done it, their absolution is so full that the Church of 
 Eome itself could not desire to add anything to it.^ 
 
 ' A Manual of Prayers for the use of the Scholars of Winchester 
 College, and all other devout Christians. To which are added Three 
 Hymns ; for Morning, Evening, and Midnight. By the Eight 
 Keverend Father in God, Thomas Ken, D.D., late Lord Bishop of 
 Bath and Wells. The thirty-fifth edition. P. 24. 
 
 ^ An Exposition of the Doctrine of the Church of England, p. 31. 
 
284 THE EEFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Dr. South asks : 
 
 Does the Church of England hold auricular or private 
 confession to the priest as an integral part of repentance 
 and necessary condition of absolution ? No : the Church 
 of England denies such confessions to be necessary, 
 either necessitate prcecepti, as enjoined by any law or 
 command of God ; or necessitate medii, as a necessary 
 part of pardon or remission of sins; and consequently 
 rejects it as a snare and a burden, groundlessly and 
 tyrannically imposed upon the Church. But so much of 
 private confession as may be of spiritual use for the dis- 
 burthening of a troubled conscience, unable of itself to 
 master or grapple with its own doubts, by imparting them 
 to some knowing, discreet, spiritual person, for his advice 
 and resolution about them; so much, I confess, the 
 Church of England does approve, advise, and allow of. 
 
 Bishop Short, who was more of an Evangelical 
 than a High Churchman, says : — 
 
 The evils and abuses arising from this custom had so 
 alienated the minds of most men from it, that it was 
 readily dispensed with ; but it has proved a misfortune to 
 our Church that the tide of opinion has carried us too far 
 towards the opposite extreme. The Scriptures never 
 speak of confession as obligatory in such a sense as the 
 injunctions of the Church of Eome had ordained. Con- 
 fession to a priest is nowhere mentioned as absolutely 
 necessary ; but reason, as well as the Word of God, 
 strongly points out, that to acknowledge our faults, espe- 
 cially to one vested with spiritual authority over us, must 
 be a most effectual means of restraining us from the com- 
 mission of sin. 
 
 ... In the Church of England the confession of 
 particular sins is recommended in the Exhortation to the 
 Sacrament, and the Visitation of the Sick ; but so little are 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 285 
 
 we accustomed to this most Scriptural duty, that these 
 recommendations are frequently unknown and generally 
 neglected, while scarcely a vestige remains of ecclesiastical 
 law for the restraint of vice.^ 
 
 Bishop Tomline, no High Churchman, while 
 condemning * the Popish Sacrament of Penance,' is 
 careful to add : — 
 
 Confession of sin to God is an indispensable duty, 
 and confession to priests may sometimes be useful by 
 leading to effectual repentance ; and therefore our Church 
 encourages its members to use confidential confession to 
 their priests, or to any other minister of God's Word.^ 
 
 The latitudinarian Bishop Burnet, while con- 
 demning compulsory confession, and recognising 
 dangers lurking even in voluntary confession, allows 
 that ' in the use of confession, when proposed as our 
 Church does, as matter of advice and not of obliga- 
 tion, we are very sensible many good ends may be 
 obtained.' ^ And not only so, but he was in the habit 
 of hearing confessions. A brother bishop having 
 asked him ' what absolution he used when people 
 came to confess to him,' adding that himself ' was 
 in the habit of using that in the Office for the Sick, 
 but wished to know what was Burnet's practice,' the 
 latter replied that ' in his opinion either was proper, 
 but that he himself used that in the Office for Holy 
 Communion.' '* 
 
 ' History of the Church of England, p. 170. 
 
 2 Scriptural Expos, of the XXXIX Articles, Art. XXV. 
 
 3 An Expos, of the XXXIX Art. p. 311. 
 
 * See Church and the World, 2nd series, p. 393. 
 
286 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Dr. Barrow, the great writer against Papal 
 
 Supremacy, says : — 
 
 If Christian men, having fallen into sin, or failed of 
 duty towards God, do seriously confess their faults, and 
 heartily repent thereof, when the ministers of the Church, 
 in God's name and for Christ's sake, do declare (or pro- 
 nounce) to them, so doing or so qualified, the pardon of 
 their sin and absolve them from it ; we need not doubt 
 that their sins are verily forgiven, and the pardon expressed 
 in words is effectually dispensed unto them.^ 
 
 One of the best accredited and most popular of 
 Anglican Vademecums is ' The Country Parson ' of the 
 saintly George Herbert, and here is his picture of ' the 
 parson comforting : ' — 
 
 In his visiting the sick or otherwise afflicted he fol- 
 loweth the Church's counsel, viz. in persuading them to 
 particular confession ; labouring to make them under- 
 stand the great good use of this ancient and pious 
 ordinance, and how necessary it is in some cases. 
 
 Wheatley's ' Eational Illustration of the Book of 
 Common Prayer ' is a work of great moderation, and 
 is commonly on the list of books recommended 
 by our bishops to candidates for ordination. Admit- 
 ting the existence of abuses in times past, Wheatley 
 says : ^ — 
 
 But no argument, sure, can be drawn, that because a 
 practice has been abused, it should therefore cease to be. 
 The abuses of it should be reformed, but not the practice 
 discontinued. 
 
 He then adopts as his own the charitable rule 
 
 ' ' An Exposition of the Creed,' Works, vii. 379. 
 2 Pp. 375, 37G. 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 287 
 
 laid down in the Order of Communion of 1548, 
 quoted on a previous page, and goes on : — 
 
 What could have been added more judicious than this, 
 to temper, on the one hand, the rigours of those who 
 were too apt at that time to insist upon confession as 
 absolutely necessary to salvation ; and to prevent, on the 
 other, a carelessness in those who, being prejudiced against 
 the abuse, were apt indiscriminately to reject the thing, as 
 at no time needful or useful in a penitent ? So that we 
 may still, I presume, wish, very consistently with the de- 
 termination of our Church, that our people would apply 
 themselves oftener than they do to their spiritual physi- 
 cians, even in the time of their health ; since it is much 
 to be feared they are wounded oftener than they complain, 
 and yet, through aversion of disclosing their sore, suffer it 
 to gangrene for want of their help who should work the 
 cure. 
 
 The philosophic Bishop Berkeley writes : — 
 
 I had forgot to say a word of confession, which you 
 mention as an advantage in the Church of Eome which is 
 not to be had in ours. But it may be had in our com- 
 munion by any who please to have it; and I admit it 
 may be very usefully practised.* 
 
 I possess two volumes entitled 'Enchiridion 
 Theologicum, or a Manual for the use of Students 
 in Divinity. By John Lord Bishop of London.' 
 Mine is the third edition, and was published in 
 1825. It is a compilation, and the author says : — 
 
 My choice has been principally directed to such works 
 as had the sanction of public authority, and which may 
 
 ' Letter to Sir John James. Berkeley's Works, iv. 278. 
 
288 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 therefore be relied on as containing the final and decided 
 opinions of our Eeformers approved of in the general by 
 the Church at large. 
 
 Among the documents in this collection is 'A 
 Short Catechisme or Playne Instruction, conteyning 
 the sum of Christian learning, set forth by the 
 King's Majesties Authoritie for all Scholemasters to 
 teach, 1553.' The Catechism has a distinctly 
 Evangelical flavour. But it teaches plainly enough 
 the doctrines of the Eeal Presence in the Eucharist, 
 and the power of the keys in the Church. Of the 
 former it says : — 
 
 Even as by bread and v^ine our natural bodies are 
 sustained and nourished, so by the body, that is the 
 flesh and blonde of Christ, the soule is fedde through 
 fayth, and quickened to the heavenlye and godly lyfe. 
 
 Of the latter : — 
 
 To this Church belong the keies whearwyth heaven is 
 locked and unlocked : for that is done by the ministration 
 of the worde; whereunto properly appertayneth the 
 power to bynde and louse ; to holde for gylty, and forgive 
 synnes. 
 
 Another document is ' Eules and Advices to the 
 Clergy of the Diocese of Down and Connor, by 
 Jeremy Taylor, Bishop of that Diocese.' Among the 
 Eules is the following (No. Ixviii.) : — 
 
 Let every minister exhort his people to a frequent 
 confession of their sins, and a declaration of the state of 
 their souls ; to a conversation with their minister in spiritual 
 things, to an inquiry concerning all the parts of their 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 289 
 
 duty; for by preaching, and catechising, and private 
 intercourse, all the needs of the soul can best be served ; 
 but by preaching alone they cannot. 
 
 Again, Kule Ixxii. says : — 
 
 A minister must not stay till he be sent for, but of his 
 own accord and care go to them, to examine them, to 
 exhort them to perfect their repentance, to strengthen 
 their faith, to encourage their patience, to persuade them 
 to resignation, to the renewing of their holy vows, to the 
 love of God, to be reconciled to their neighbours, to make 
 restitution and amends, to confess their sins, to settle their 
 estate, to provide for their charges, to do acts of piety and 
 charity, and above all things, that they take care they do 
 not sin towards the end of their lives. For if repentance 
 on our death-bed seems so very late for the sins of our 
 life, what time shall be left to repent us of the sins we 
 commit on our death-bed ? 
 
 Again (Kule xliii.) : — 
 
 Let not the humours and inclinations of the people 
 be the measures of your doctrines, but let your doctrine 
 be the measure of their persuasions. Let them know 
 from you what they ought to do ; but if you learn from 
 them what you ought to teach, you will give but a very 
 ill account at the day of judgment of the souls committed 
 to you. He that receives from the people what he shall 
 teach them is like a nurse that asks of her child what 
 physic she shall give him. 
 
 These are specimens of the teaching inculcated 
 as a matter of course by Bishop Jeremy Taylor in 
 an Irish Protestant diocese. And the Bishop of 
 London in the year 1825 recommends it, equally as a 
 matter of course, ' for the use of students in divinity * 
 
 u 
 
290 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT? 
 
 in England. A similar recommendation from the 
 present Bishop of London would probably provoke 
 from Sir William Harcourt a scathing denunciation 
 in the columns of the ' Times.' But let us come 
 down to our own time. 
 
 I suppose the late Dr. Vaughan would be 
 accurately described as an Evangelical Broad Church- 
 man. I enjoyed the great privilege of his friendship, 
 and I know that he held decided views as to the 
 expediency of private confession in certain cases. 
 But there is no need to draw on one's memory, for 
 his views are public property. In a volume of 
 'Addresses to Young Clergymen,' published in 1875, 
 he says : ' — 
 
 Most clergymen, whatever their Church views, find 
 themselves compelled sometimes to receive confessions. 
 In other words, they are the natural referees in cases of 
 conscience ; and cannot, if they would, evade the necessity 
 of ministering privately to spiritual disease. It may be 
 in the form of difficulties of believing. It may be in the 
 form of perplexities in acting. It may be in the form of 
 distresses about sin, the forgiveness of the past, or 
 strength against the present. In some form or other, the 
 study must sometimes be a confessional ; and one of the 
 most anxious, most trying, most exhausting parts of 
 the clergyman's day is given of necessity to this office. 
 
 The late Mr. Frederick Denison Maurice would 
 be generally recognised as the most distinguished 
 leader of the Broad Church party. I knew him well 
 enough to be able to say that nobody would be more 
 
 ' P. 34. 
 
THE EEFOKMATION AND CONFESSION 291 
 
 shocked than he by such demonstrations as the 
 recent Albert Hall meeting. The view of Sacerdo- 
 talism which I have endeavoured to explain in 
 previous chapters pervades his writings. Let one 
 specimen suffice : — 
 
 Now these facts are indisputable. 1. The whole 
 sacerdotal caste in Christendom has the name of ministers 
 or servants. From the Bishop of Eome down to the 
 founder of the last new sect in the United States of 
 America, every one who deals with the Gospel at all, or 
 pretends in any sense to have a Divine commission, 
 assumes this name as the description of his office. 2. The 
 most remarkable powder which these ministers have 
 claimed, and that on account of which the greatest 
 homage has been paid to them, is the power of absolving 
 or setting free. This claim has in a manner been 
 universal. - Luther believed that he was to absolve as 
 much as Tetzel. Every person who says that the sole 
 office of a minister is to preach the Gospel says so because 
 he believes that is the way to absolve. There are most 
 serious differences about the nature of the power and the 
 mode in which it is to be exercised, none at all about the 
 existence of it, and about its connection in some way or 
 other with the Christian ministry. ... It has been 
 believed, as a necessary consequence of the importance 
 attached to the Eucharist, that an order of men must 
 exist in the Christian Church corresponding to the priests 
 of the old dispensation, with the difference that the 
 sacrifice in the one case was anticipatory, in the other 
 commemorative. This office has been associated with the 
 absolving power of which I spoke just now.' 
 
 ' The Kingdom of Christ, vol. ii. pp. 109-111. The italics in 
 this passage are Maurice's. 
 
 u 2 
 
292 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Thus we see that this distinguished and revered 
 Broad Churchman gives as the tv^o notes of Christian 
 ministers, that they are an absolving and a sacrificing 
 priesthood in the sense expounded by Bramhall and 
 the representative school of Anglican divines in 
 general. And he emphasises v^hat I have been 
 insisting on, namely, that it is impossible to get 
 away from Sacerdotalism. It underlies and pene- 
 trates the whole system of the Providential Govern- 
 ment of the world. It argues a very loose and 
 shallow habit of thinking on theological subjects 
 not to see this. 
 
 So much, then, as to the doctrine of the Church 
 of England on the subject of auricular confession 
 and absolution. The popular notion that the repu- 
 diation of these formed a fundamental tenet of * the 
 Eeformation Settlement ' is one of the most curious 
 myths of history. The fact is that it was not a 
 burning question at all, or even a debatable question, 
 among the Eeformers. The Puritans who clamoured 
 against vestments and other ' relics of Popery ' said 
 nothing against confession. How indeed could they, 
 when not only Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and other 
 leading Peformers were advocates of it, but foreign 
 Protestants, Lutherans and Calvinists alike, upheld 
 the system, abolishing only its compulsory character ? 
 The Saxon, the Bohemian, and the Augsburg Con- 
 fessions of Faith insist on the duty of private 
 confession with a view to absolution through the 
 ministerial exercise of the power of the keys. 
 Luther's ' Shorter Catechism ' was accepted by the 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 293 
 
 Lutheran body as one of their dogmatic books. 
 One chapter is entitled ' On Confession : how those 
 of the simpler sort are to be instructed in it ; ' and it 
 opens thus : — 
 
 Confession compriseth two things : one, to con- 
 fess sins ; the other, to receive absolution or remission of 
 sins from the confessor or preacher of the Gospel, as if 
 from God Himself, and not to doubt, but firmly to believe 
 that through absolution the sins are remitted before God 
 in heaven. 
 
 The preface to the ' Formula of Concord ' says 
 that ' all the Churches of the Confession of Augsburg 
 approved and received this Catechism,' with others 
 that are named. ' So that they were propounded 
 publicly in churches and schools and some private 
 houses.' 
 
 It is not necessary to adduce further evidence of 
 the views of foreign Eef ormers ; but I may conclude 
 with the testimony of two eminent Lutherans. 
 The first is the illustrious Leibnitz, who says : — 
 
 I regard a pious, grave, and prudent confessor as a 
 great instrument of God for the salvation of souls ; for his 
 counsel assists us in governing our passions, in discover- 
 ing our vices, in avoiding occasions of sin, in making 
 restitution, in repairing injuries, in dissipating doubts, in 
 overcoming despondency, and, in fine, in removing or mi- 
 tigating all the ills of the soul. And if, in the ordinary 
 concerns of life, there is scarce anything more precious 
 than a faithful friend, what must it be to have a friend 
 who is bound, even by the inviolable obligation of a 
 Divine Sacrament, to hold faith with us and assist us in 
 our need ? ^ 
 
 » A System of Theology, p. 136* Engl. Transl. 
 
294 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 My other authority is the distinguished Danish 
 theologian, Martensen, whose able and learned 
 * Christian Dogmatics ' was one of the special books 
 which the late Dr. Vaughan used to recommend to 
 the large body of the younger clergy who looked 
 to him for guidance. There are many passages on 
 the subject in Martensen, who died only a few years 
 ago, but one will suffice : — 
 
 It cannot easily be denied that confession meets a 
 deep need of human nature. There is a great psycholo- 
 gical truth in the saying of Pascal, that a man often 
 attains for the first time a true sense of sin, and a true 
 stayedness in his good purpose, when he confesses his 
 sins to his fellow-man as well as to God.^ 
 
 I have now given a fair summary of the evidence 
 in favour of auricular confession presented by the 
 formularies of the Church of England and by 
 her representative divines — High Church, Broad 
 Church, and Low — down to our own time ; and I 
 ask all dispassionate men to compare it with the 
 violent denunciations of confession in Parliament, 
 in pamphlets, and on platforms. All who choose 
 have of course a right to denounce it, though it 
 baffles my wit to see how they are to stop it so long 
 as it is left voluntary. But what no one has a right 
 to do is to denounce as * lawless ' and ' disloyal ' any 
 of the English clergy who may think it their duty 
 to govern themselves by the explicit teaching of 
 the Church of England and the desires of such of 
 
 * Christian Dogmatics, p. 444. Engl. Transl. 
 
THE EEFOEMATION AND CONFESSION 295 
 
 the laity as come to them to * open their grief,' as 
 the Book of Common Prayer recommends. The 
 plain truth is that the agitators in this controversy 
 are wofully ignorant of the history of the Refor- 
 mation, and are entirely out of sympathy with the 
 authorised teaching of the Church which they 
 volunteer to champion. The preceding pages have 
 supplied abundant evidence of this, and we shall 
 find more as we proceed. But considering the 
 great names, intellectually and morally— including 
 men who by study and experience had a profound 
 knowledge of human nature — who have borne 
 testimony to the salutary influence of voluntary con- 
 fession under proper safeguards, is it not somewhat 
 rash to indulge in indiscriminate condemnation at the 
 instance of persons who have no personal knowledge 
 on the subject ? At all events, let it be clearly 
 understood that what the agitators are really de- 
 manding, though they do not seem to know it, is a 
 revision of the Prayer Book and a new Reformation 
 in harmony with the opinions and aspirations of 
 Lord Grimthorpe and Mr. Kensit. I doubt whether 
 the English people are yet prepared for this religious 
 development. 
 
296 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 CHAPTEK IX 
 
 THE II^TEEMEDIATE STATE 
 
 One of the points of attack in the present con- 
 troversy is the ancient custom of prayers for the 
 dead, which is assumed to be included in ' the 
 Romish doctrine concerning Purgatory ' condemned 
 in the Twenty-second Article. I am obliged to admit 
 that some of the younger clergy of the advanced 
 school among us do hold the Romish doctrine of 
 purgatory — though I believe without its worst 
 accompaniments — under the honest belief that it is 
 the doctrine of the primitive Church, and likewise of 
 the present Oriental Churches and of the Church of 
 England ; in fact, of Christendom, with the excep- 
 tion of the Tractarian party, whom it has become 
 the fashion among our neo-Catholics to regard as 
 theologians out of date. I made this amazing 
 discovery about three years ago ; and when I 
 challenged one of the representatives of this party 
 to the proof he referred me, as his prime authority, 
 to the ' Prselectiones ' of the Jesuit Father Perrone 
 of the Collegio Romano, the standard theologian of 
 modern Ultramontanism. 
 
 Some of our younger clergy, I fear, instead of 
 
THE INTERMEDIATE STATE 297 
 
 reading the ancient Fathers and the great divines 
 of our own Church, with their massive learning, 
 have got into the habit of reading modern Roman 
 books, Hke Perrone's elaborate work, and are thus 
 led to the fallacious conclusion that the theology 
 they find there is the Catholic faith— * the faith of 
 Christendom ' — as one of them has said — barring some 
 out-of-date Anglicans. The simple fact is that 
 Perrone's doctrine of the Intermediate State is not 
 only directly contrary to the doctrine of the Church 
 of England, but equally so to the doctrine of the 
 ancient Church, of all Oriental Christendom at the 
 present day, and even of the Eoman Church before 
 the Council of Florence in the fifteenth century. 
 Ajid neither the Council of Florence, nor the subse- 
 quent Council of Trent, sanctions the more recent de- 
 velopments of the doctrine of purgatory in the Eoman 
 Church. The Council of Trent, indeed, commits itself 
 to very little. It merely says : * There is a purgatory, 
 and the souls there detained are helped by prayer, and 
 chiefly by the acceptable sacrifice of the altar.' The 
 Catechism of the Council, however, is more definite. 
 It says : ' There is a purgatorial fire, where the 
 souls of the righteous are for a time purified by 
 torture {quo piorum animce ad definitum tempus 
 cruciate^ expiantur), that entrance may be opened 
 for them into the eternal home, into which nothing 
 that is defiled can enter.' And pastors are bidden 
 to be more diligent and frequent in the declaration 
 of this doctrine, ' because we are fallen on times in 
 which men w^ill not endure sound doctrine.' 
 
298 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 This is a considerable innovation on the doctrine 
 of undivided Christendom ; but it is far short of the 
 teaching of Perrone, which is now the dominant 
 doctrine of the Church of Kome, as we shall see 
 presently. Meanwhile our first concern is with the 
 limits within which the doctrine of prayers for the 
 dead may be held and taught in the Church of 
 England. 
 
 The first formal exposition of doctrine put forth 
 by the Reformers was the Ten Articles of 1536, 
 which were expanded a few years later into 'The 
 Institution of a Christian Man.' This careful and 
 elaborate summary of Christian doctrine was, with a 
 few additions, published by authority of Convocation 
 in the year 1543, under the title of ' The Necessary 
 Doctrine and Erudition for any Christipn Man,' and 
 was the work of a commission consisting of all the 
 bishops of the English Church, eight archdeacons, 
 and seventeen doctors of divinity, making forty-six 
 in all. The head of the commission was, of course. 
 Archbishop Cranmer. Hugh Latimer, then Bishop 
 of Worcester, was one of the number. On the 
 subject of ■' Prayer for Souls Departed ' the ' Neces- 
 sary Doctrine and Erudition ' says : — 
 
 Forasmuch as due order of charity requireth, and the 
 Book of Maccabees and divers ancient doctors plainly show, 
 that it is a very good and charitable deed to pray for souls 
 departed ; and forasmuch as such usage hath continued in 
 the Church for so many years, even from the beginning, 
 men ought to judge and think the same to be well done. 
 And truly it standeth with the very order of charity, a 
 Christian man to pray for another, both quick and dead, 
 
THE INTBEMEDIATE STATE 299 
 
 and to commend one another in their prayers to God's 
 mercy ; and to cause others to pray for them also, as well 
 in masses and exequies, as at other times, and to give alms 
 for them, according to the usage of the Church and ancient 
 opinion of old fathers ; trusting that these things do 
 not only profit and avail them, but also declare us to be 
 charitable 'folk, because we have mind and desire to profit 
 them which, notwithstanding they be departed this 
 present life, yet remain they still members of the same 
 mystical body of Christ whereunto we pertain. 
 
 And here is specially to be noted, that it is not in the 
 power or knowledge of any man to limit and dispense how 
 much, and in what space of time, or to what person par- 
 ticularly the said masses, exequies, and suffrages do profit 
 and avail ; therefore charity requireth that whosoever 
 causeth any such masses, exequies, or suffrages to be done 
 should yet (though their interest be more for one than for 
 another) cause them also to be done for the universal con- 
 gregation of Christian people, quick and dead ; for that 
 power and knowledge afore rehearsed pertaineth only unto 
 God, which alone knoweth the measures and times of His 
 own judgment and mercies. 
 
 Furthermore, because the place where the souls remain, 
 the name thereof, the state and condition which they be 
 in, be to us uncertain, therefore these, with all other such 
 things, must also be left to Almighty God, unto whose 
 mercy it is meet and convenient for us to commend them, 
 trusting that God accepteth our prayers for them ; reserv- 
 ing the rest wholly to God, unto whom is known their 
 estate and condition ; and not we to take upon us, neither 
 in the one part nor yet in the other, to give any fond and 
 temerarious judgment in so high things so far passing our 
 knowledge. 
 
 Finally, it is much necessary that all such abuses as 
 heretofore have been brought in by supporters and main- 
 
300 THE EEFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 fainers of the Papacy of Eome, and their complices, con- 
 cerning this matter, be clearly put away ; and that we 
 therefore abstain from the name purgatory, and no more 
 dispute or reason thereof. Under colour of which have 
 been advanced many fond and great abuses, to make men 
 believe that through the Bishop of Eome's pardons souls 
 might clearly be delivered out of it, and released out of the 
 bondage of sin ; and the masses said at Scala Coeli and 
 other prescribed places, phantasied by men, did there in 
 those places more proj&t more souls than another ; and 
 also that a prescribed number of prayers sooner than other 
 (though as devoutly said) should further their petition 
 sooner, yea specially if they were said before one image 
 more than another which they phantasied. All these, 
 and such like abuses, be necessary utterly to be abolished 
 and extinguished. 
 
 This is a remarkable statement from a com- 
 mission including not only Cranmer (its President) 
 and Hugh Latimer, but all the rest of the bishops 
 on the bench as well as the most eminent of the clergy. 
 It was afterwards sanctioned by Convocation without 
 a dissentient voice. Thus we see that the whole clergy 
 of England in the reign of Henry VHI. condemned 
 ' the Eomish doctrine of purgatory,' with its merce- 
 nary ' pardons,' and also the name on account of the 
 ' abuses ' attached to it, but retained the doctrine in 
 so far as it was held by ' the ancient doctors ' and 
 ' old fathers.' And let it be remembered that ' The 
 Necessary Doctrine and Erudition for any Christian 
 -Man' has never been withdrawn or repudiated by 
 the Church of England, and that no formulary of 
 doctrine — as Palmer has reminded us in a passage 
 
THE INTEEMEDIATBsJTATE^::V;>^ 301 
 
 already quoted — was put out between the reign of 
 Henry VIII. and that of EHzabeth. We may fairly 
 assume therefore that this statement on purgatory 
 is the key to the Twenty -second Article. 
 
 The next point that solicits our attention is the 
 First Prayer Book of Edward VI. In the Office for 
 the Burial of the Dead, when the priest throws 
 earth upon the corpse he says, ' I commend thy 
 soul to God the Father Almighty, and thy body to 
 the ground,' &c. 
 
 The next prayer begins thus : ' We commend 
 into Thy hands of mercy, most merciful Father, the 
 soul of this our brother departed, that when the 
 judgment shall come, which Thou hast committed 
 to Thy well-beloved Son, both this our brother and 
 we may be found acceptable in Thy sight, and we 
 may receive that blessing,' ^c. 
 
 The next prayer concludes thus : * Grant, we 
 beseech Thee, that at the day of judgment his soul, 
 and all the souls of Thy elect departed out of this 
 life, may with us, and we with them, fully receive 
 Thy promises, and be made perfect altogether, 
 through the glorious resurrection of Thy Son, Jesus 
 Christ our Lord.' 
 
 The Second Lesson is followed by some versicles, 
 of which the following are samples. The priest says, 
 with reference to the dead, * From the gates of hell,' 
 and the congregation reply, 'Deliver their souls, 
 Lord ! ' 
 
 Then follows a prayer, in which occurs this 
 petition : ' Grant unto this Thy servant that the 
 
302 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 sins which he committed in this world be not 
 imputed unto him, but that he, escaping the gates 
 of hell and pains of eternal darkness, may ever dwell 
 in the region of light, with Abraham, Isaac, and 
 Jacob, in the place where is no weeping, sorrow, nor 
 heaviness.' 
 
 This is almost a literal rendermg of a prayer in the 
 Apostolical Constitutions, which shows the practice 
 of the Christians orf the third century. The prayer 
 is as follows : ' Let us pray for our brethren 
 departed in the faith of Christ, that the most merciful 
 God, who has received the spirits of the deceased, 
 would forgive all their voluntary and involuntary 
 failings ; and that, being restored to the Divine 
 favour, they may have a place assigned them in the 
 region of the blessed ; in the bosom of Abraham, 
 Isaac, and Jacob ; in the company of those where 
 pain and sorrow and dissatisfaction have no place.' 
 
 But I may be told that the First. Prayer Book of 
 Edward VI. was superseded by the Second Prayer 
 Book, from which prayers for the dead were ex- 
 cluded. My answer to that objection, is this : The 
 very authority which published and sanctioned the 
 second book — ^.e. the Act of Uniformity —declared 
 explicitly and emphatically that it was not intended 
 as a condemnation or censure of anything contained 
 in the first book. The Act of ParHament, by which 
 the second book of King Edward was ratified, states 
 that there was nothing in the first book but what 
 was * agreeable to the Word of God and the primitive 
 Church, and very comfortable to all good people desir- 
 
THE INTERMEDIATE STATE 303 
 
 ingto live in Christian conversation.' The Act then 
 goes on to explain ' that such doubts as had been 
 raised in the use and exercise thereof proceeded 
 rather from the curiosity of the minister and mis- 
 takers than from any other worthy cause.' This Act 
 of Uniformity bears still stronger testimony to the 
 excellence and orthodoxy of the first book, for it 
 declares that ' by the aid of the Holy Ghost it was 
 with one uniform agreement concluded.' 
 
 I think I am right, therefore, in asserting that in 
 substituting the Prayer Book of 1552 for that of 
 1549, the Church of England was as far as possible 
 from refusing her sanction to anything contained in 
 the latter. She expressly guarded against any such 
 inference in the passages which I have just quoted ; 
 and therefore the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. 
 cannot be quoted as any argument in favour of the 
 view that the Church of England does not sanction 
 prayers for the dead. They were excluded under 
 pressure from Calvin, acting on the English Re- 
 formers through the boy-king and through Bucer 
 and Peter Martyr, who were then holding positions, 
 of considerable influence in England. Calvin's 
 objection to prayers for the dead was natural 
 enough ; for they were inconsistent with his doctrine 
 that the great mass of mankind are irrevocably fore- 
 ordained to eternal damnation, while the small flock 
 of the elect, whose fall was impossible, were privi- 
 leged to enter heaven as soon as they passed away 
 from earth. But the Church of England has ever 
 instinctively recoiled against the unchristian cruelty 
 
304 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of the Calvinistic system, and has never without 
 protest accepted, even temporarily, any of its funda- 
 mental tenets. 
 
 The Second Prayer Book of Edward VI. was, of 
 course, abolished on the accession of Queen Mary in 
 1553. When Queen EHzabeth ascended the throne 
 in 1558 she took immediate steps to restore some of 
 the most important omissions in the Prayer Book 
 of 1552, and her Primer of 1559, published by 
 authority, contains prayers for the dead. The Marian 
 persecution, however, had caused such an anti-Koman 
 reaction that even the strong Tudor will of Queen 
 Elizabeth could do comparatively little against it. 
 Those who had fled to the Continent during the reign 
 of Mary now returned with soured, and in some 
 cases vengeful, feelings, and thought that it was 
 impossible to rush too far or too fast in a direction 
 opposite to that of Kome. Such a period of feverish 
 excitement was not very favourable to a policy of 
 moderation, and Queen Elizabeth, backed as she was 
 by the support of the old leaders of the Eeformation, 
 found it impossible to restore, as she wished to do, 
 the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. in its integrity. 
 But all the alterations made were in that direction. 
 The commemoration of the faithful departed was not, 
 however, restored to its old place in the prayer for 
 the Church militant till the last review in 1661. 
 
 The present state of the question, then, so far as 
 the Church of England is concerned, I take to be this. 
 In the years 1536, 1543, and 1549, she gave, freely, 
 deliberately, and publicly, her sanction to the doctrine 
 
THE INTEKMEDIATE STATE 305 
 
 of prayers for the dead, and that sanction she has 
 never since withdrawn. On the only occasion on 
 which she seemed to do so (1552), she w^as careful to 
 put on record, through the mouths of the spiritual 
 and temporal organs of the nation, a distinct protest 
 that that was not her intention. And as a matter of 
 fact, prayer for the dead was not altogether excluded 
 even from the Second Prayer Book of Edward VI., 
 though it was certainly reduced to very narrow 
 compass. * There was one clause,' says the very 
 inoderate Wheatley, * permitted to stand' in the 
 Prayer Book of 1552, ' viz. in the prayer that imme- 
 diately follows the Lord's Prayer, in which, till the 
 last review, we prayed that we with this our 
 BROTHER, and all others departed in the true faith 
 of God's holy name, may have our perfect consum- 
 mation and bliss' He goes on to say, what we all 
 know^ that the Puritans at the Savoy Conference 
 objected to the words, ' with this our brother,' not 
 because it implied, as it certainly did, prayers for the 
 dead, but because, in Wheatley' s language, ' they did 
 in general object against all that expressed any 
 assurance of the deceased party's happiness, which 
 they did not think proper to be said indifferently 
 over all that died.' The words were therefore, and 
 on that ground only, omitted in the last revision. 
 But Wheatley contends : — 
 
 That the sentence, as it is still left standing, may well 
 enough be understood to imply the dead as well as the 
 living. For we pray (as it is now) that ' we, witlv all 
 those that are departed in the true faith of God's holy 
 
 X 
 
•306 THE EEFOEMATIOl^ S:BTTLEMENT 
 
 'name, may 'have our perfect consummation and bliss ' ; 
 which is not barely a supposition that all those who are 
 so departed will have their perfect consummation and 
 ■bliss, but a prayer also that they may have it, viz. that 
 we with them, and they with us, may be made perfect 
 together, both in body and soul, in the diernail and ever- 
 lasting glory of God. 
 
 Wheatley then adds a passage (too long to quote) 
 'from Bishop Cosin, strongly supporting his own 
 \iew. Palmer, too — I mean the learned author of 
 the ' Origines ' and of the ' Treatise on the Church ' — 
 declares that 'the great divines of the English 
 Church ' are not opposed to the doctrine, and that 
 * the Church of England herself has never formally 
 condemned prayers for the dead, but only omitted 
 them in her Liturgy ' — an omission v^hich he con- 
 tends had been partially restored v^hen the reasons 
 which caused the omission were no longer in force. 
 
 I have restricted my quotations to Wheatley and. 
 Palmer because they are acknowledged as standard 
 authorities, and are generally recommended by our 
 bishops, I believe, to candidates for ordination. It 
 would be easy to produce a cloud of witnesses in 
 support of Sir W. Palmer's assertion that ' the great 
 divines of the English Church ' sanctioned prayers 
 for the dead both by precept and example. Jeremy 
 Taylor, Bishop Bull, Bishop Overall (the author of 
 the, sacramental part of our Church Catechism), 
 Thorndike, Collier, Field, Barrow, Andrewes, and 
 the saintly Wilson and Ken make up a catena which 
 might very easily be extended. Archbishop Sheldon 
 
THE INTEEMEDIATE STATE 307 
 
 and Bishop Blandford, men of no extreme opinions, 
 confessed that it was their daily practice to pray for 
 the dead ; and Thorndike and Bishop Barrow beg 
 the prayers of the faithful for their souls in the 
 epitaphs which they left behind them.^ 
 
 A few years ago the legality of prayers for the 
 dead came before an English court, and was ex- 
 pressly affirmed by the Dean of the Arches in the 
 case of Woolfrey v. Breeks.. ' Bpes mea Christus. 
 Pray for the soul of J. Woolfrey. It is a holy and 
 wholesome thought to pray for the dead.' This was 
 the inscription which originated the trial. The 
 Incumbent refused to admit it into the churchyard, 
 on the ground that the Church of England did not 
 sanction prayers for the dead. But the court over- 
 
 ' Barrow's epitaph is as follows : — 
 
 ' Exuviae Isaaci Asaphensis Episcopi, in manum Domini depositas, 
 in spem Isetae resurrectionis, per sola Christi merita. vos trans- 
 euntes in domum Domini, domum orationis, orate pro conservo vestro 
 ut inveniat misericordiam in die Domini.' 
 
 Wheatley, too, left the following epitaph for his own tomb : — 
 
 'Keader, join for him in the ejaculation of St. Paul : — The Lord 
 grant unto him that he may find mercy of the Lord in that day.' 
 
 These epitaphs show not only that their authors believed that the 
 Church of England sanctioned prayers for the dead, but, further, 
 Wheatley's belief that Onesiphorus was dead when St. Paul prayed 
 for him, a belief of which a dispassionate consideration of the facts 
 hardly leaves a doubt. 
 
 Bishop Heber, a man of moderate opinions, was an advocate for 
 prayers for the departed on Scriptural and Patristic grounds. He 
 writes : ' The early Christians, most of them, believed that the con- 
 dition of such persons ' as were in Hades ' might be made better, 
 and a milder sentence be obtained for their errors and infirmities 
 from the Almighty Judge by whom the doom of all creatures shall 
 be finally settled.' (See his letter in the Diary of a Lady of 
 Quality, p. 255.) 
 
 X 2 
 
308 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ruled the objection, and sanctioned the inscription, 
 on the ground (I am quoting the language of the 
 judgment) that it ' was not illegal, as by no canon or 
 authority of the Church in these realms had the 
 practice of praying for the dead been expressly pro- 
 hibited.' The judge took his stand on the First 
 Prayer Book of Edward VI., on which the Act of 
 Uniformity which sanctioned the Second Book 
 stamped its approval. In strict law the Church of 
 England sanctioned, and still sanctions, all prayers 
 publicly offered within the precincts of her church- 
 yards. But when the question was put to the test 
 and an officer of the Church of England attempted 
 to forbid prayers for the dead, and it was decided 
 that he had no power to refuse his sanction, it seems 
 to me extraordinary that any persons, at all ac- 
 quainted with the facts of the case, should commit 
 themselves to the untenable position that prayers 
 for the dead are forbidden by the Church of England. 
 
 But it does not follow that because the Church 
 of England has never refused to sanction prayers for 
 the dead, such prayers are in themselves right and 
 proper. In order to come to a true conclusion on 
 this head it is necessary, of course, that we should 
 understand clearly what prayers for the dead mean 
 and imply. 
 
 Now the first observation that an impartial study 
 of the question will suggest to an unprejudiced 
 inquirer is that prayers for the dead are not only 
 coeval with Christianity, but anterior to it. That 
 they are coeval with Christianity it would be easy to 
 
THE INTERMEDIATE STATE 309 
 
 prove by a chain of evidence which may be considered 
 demonstrative. This has never been disputed by 
 any writer of considerable eminence, whatever Jiis 
 own views may have been. Neander freely admits 
 it, and so, though somewhat grudgingly, does our 
 own latitudinarian Bishop Burnet. It may not, 
 however, be so well known that the lawfulness and 
 even duty of prayers for the dead has been always 
 allowed and acted on by the Jews. Among a host of 
 witnesses that might be cited in proof of that asser- 
 tion, I will content myself with the following 
 quotation from Jeremy Taylor : — 
 
 We find, he says, by the history of the Maccabees,^ 
 that the Jews did pray and make offerings for the dead, 
 which also appears by other testimonies, and by their 
 form of prayers still extant, which they used in the 
 captivity. Now it is very considerable that, given our 
 Blessed Saviour did reprove all the evil doctrines and 
 traditions of the Scribes and Pharisees, and did argue, 
 concerning the dead and the Resurrection, against the 
 Sadducees, yet He spake no word against this public 
 practice, but left it as He found it ; w^hich He, who came 
 to declare to us all the will of the Father, would not 
 
 ' ' For if he had not hoped that they that were slain should have 
 risen again, it had been superfluous and vain to pray for the dead. 
 And also in that he perceived that there was great favour laid up for 
 those that died godly, it was an holy and good thought. Whereupon 
 he made a reconciliation for the dead, that they might be delivered 
 from sin ' (2 Maccabees xii. 44, 45). This attests the practice of the 
 Jews, of which, indeed, we have clear evidence in the ritual of the 
 Temple and Synagogue, in which our Lord must often have joined. 
 In a book of 'Daily, Sabbath, Festival, and occasional prayers, 
 according to the Ritual of the German and Polish Jews,' are several 
 beautiful prayers for the dead. 
 
310 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 have done if it had not been innocent, pious, and full of 
 charity. 
 
 I will now assume that I have established these 
 three statements : — (1) That the Church of England 
 has nowhere refused her sanction to prayers for the 
 dead. (2) That such prayers have been sanctioned 
 by the Christian Church from the beginning. (3) 
 That the Christian Cliurch inherited them, with our 
 Lord's tacit sanction, from the Jewish Church. If 
 this be admitted, it follows, I think, that the doctrine 
 is founded on some truth or group of truths, which 
 have their roots in our nature. What are these 
 truths ? Let us think for a moment. 
 
 Consider the mass of mankind, and you will find 
 it impossible to accept the Calvinistic theory, which 
 divides the race by an invisible but impassable gulf, 
 even in this life, making it absolutely impossible for 
 those who are on opposite sides ever to exchange 
 positions. If the study of human nature teaches 
 anything certain, it is this — that man's eternal 
 happiness results from the development of his 
 nature to the fullest perfection of which it is capable, 
 and that such development is, with God's help, in 
 man's own power. But how few even approximate 
 to that perfection here ! Will not the facts of the 
 world around us force home on any thoughtful mind 
 the conviction that the vast majority of mankind 
 pass out of this life with undeveloped characters — 
 far indeed from that perfection of their powers 
 which would enable them to see and enjoy the vision 
 
THE INTERMEDIATE STATE 311 
 
 of ' the King in His beauty ; ' but far also — blessed 
 be God ! — from that utter and hopeless demorahsa- 
 tion of character to which Aristotle gives the name 
 of uKoXaala, and which the writer of the Epistle to 
 the Hebrews characterises as past possibility of 
 repentance. 
 
 The question therefore arises, What happens to 
 this multitude of neutral characters when death 
 severs their connection with this life? Our sense 
 of natural justice revolts against the idea of their 
 being eternally lost. Our knowledge of human 
 nature, on the other hand, assures us that such 
 persons could no more enjoy the pure delights of the 
 heavenly life than an ignorant clown could enjoy 
 himself in a royal drawing-room ; and, since human 
 character does not develop per saltum, if these 
 persons are ever at all to be 'made meet for the 
 inheritance of the saints in light,' their growth in 
 grace will not cease with the last breath of this 
 earthly life ; their training must still go on till they 
 are able with unclouded eyes to behold the Sun of 
 Righteousness. 
 
 The reader's thoughts will, of course, have 
 anticipated my remark that this train of reasoning 
 leads logically to some doctrine of purgatory. It 
 does, and the Judicial Committee of the Privy 
 Council, in the case of ' Essays and Eeviews,*" 
 decided that some kind of purgatory was an admis- 
 sible doctrine in the Church of England. Tha 
 purgatory which Mr. Wilson contended for success- 
 fully extended,, it is true„ indefinitely beyond what 
 
312 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 he calls * the great adjudication ' ; but that fact makes 
 no difference to my argument. Now, surely, the 
 fact that the Court of Appeal admitted Mr. Wilson's 
 doctrine of purgatory as compatible with his position 
 as a beneficed clergyman is a legal confirmation of 
 the distinction which Dr. Newman drew, in Tract 
 Ninety, between * the Komish doctrine of purgatory,' 
 censured in the 22nd Article, and any other doctrine 
 of purgatory. And this distinction is still further 
 marked by the fact that in the original form of the 
 Article the doctrine was condemned as * the doctrine 
 of schoolmen.' As the controversy between the two 
 Churches proceeded, it naturally became more per- 
 sonal, and so for ' the doctrine of schoolmen ' was 
 substituted 'the Komish doctrine.' The Article 
 could hardly be aimed at -the Tridentine decree on 
 the subject, for that decree did not exist when the 
 Thirty-nine Articles were published. We have 
 already seen that the decree of Trent only says : — 
 * There is a purgatory, and the souls there detained 
 are helped by prayer, and chiefly by the acceptable 
 sacrifice of the altar.' Nothing beyond that state- 
 ment is de fide in the Church of Eome. A Eoman 
 Catholic is not committed to anything beyond the 
 bare statement that there is a place intermediate 
 between this hfe and perfect bliss, where imperfect 
 souls are trained for perfection and helped by the 
 prayers of the Church on earth. In a selection from 
 the writings of St. Catherine of Genoa, pubhshed by 
 Cardinal Manning, I find the pains of purgatory 
 explained to mean the flames of divine love con- 
 
THE INTEEMEDTATE STATE 313 
 
 suming the soul with longings which cannot be 
 satisfied till it is sufficiently purified to be able to 
 enjoy the full fruition of • the Godhead. * When the 
 soul finds itself on its way back,' she says, 'to its 
 first state (of innocence), it is so kindled with the 
 desire of becoming one with God, that this desire 
 becomes its purgatory. . . . The instinct by which 
 it is kindled and the impediment by which it is 
 hindered constitute its purgatory.' That is the 
 thought which permeates and underlies all her views 
 on the subject of purgatory, and her writings have a 
 distinguished place in the Church of Eome. 
 
 Those who are acquainted with Dr. Newman's 
 beautiful 'Dream of Gerontius,' will remember the 
 subjective view which he takes of the pains of 
 purgatory. The guardian angel which bears the 
 soul of Gerontius into the presence-chamber of the 
 Eternal King thus describes what followed : — 
 
 The eager spirit has darted from my hold, 
 And with intemperate energy of love 
 Flies to the dear feet of Emmanuel ; 
 But, ere it reach them, the keen sanctity, 
 Which, with its effluence, like a glory, clothes 
 And circles round the Crucified, has seized, 
 And scorch'd, and shrivell'd it ; and now it lies 
 Passive and still before the awful throne. 
 O happy, suffering soul ; for it is safe, 
 Consumed, yet quicken'd, by the glance of God. 
 
 On coming to itself, the soul is represejited as 
 singing a plaintive prayer to be ' taken away ' from 
 
314 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the ravishing vision of its God to a place of purifica- 
 tion : — 
 
 There, motionless and happy in my pain, 
 
 Lone, not forlorn, — 
 There will I sing my sad perpetual strain 
 
 Until the morn. 
 There will I sing, and soothe my stricken breast, 
 
 Which ne'er can cease 
 To throb, and pine, and languish, till possest 
 
 Of its Sole Peace. 
 
 Do not let us be frightened by mere words in 
 such way as to discard any truth. Purgatory means 
 a place of purification ; and which of the sons of 
 men, except the Son of Man, has ever left this earth 
 so pure as to need no purging before admission to 
 the presence of the all-pure God? Let us rescue 
 words, good in themselves, from any accretion of 
 error that may have gathered round them. This is 
 a wiser plan than to cast them away, with, perchance, 
 some precious truth clinging to them. 
 
 Another truth which underlies the doctrine of 
 prayers for the dead I believe to be this : that the 
 race of man, and pre-eminently the Christian portion 
 of it, is one family, and that death does not and can- 
 not destroy that network of natural interest and 
 sympathies which binds us together and make us 
 necessary to each other on earth. The great evil of 
 our nature, the cause of nearly all its woes, is selfish- 
 ness — the repudiation of our family relationship and 
 responsibilities. How does God contrive to cure us 
 of that selfishness? By making us necessjary to 
 
THE INTEEMEDIATE STATE 315 
 
 each other. Hence the duty of intercessory prayer ; 
 and if the Church on earth and the Church in 
 Paradise be one, why should intercessory prayer 
 cease at death ? ' To forbid prayers for the dead, 
 Mr. Gladstone once said to me, ' is to undermine the 
 doctrine of prayer for the living.' This view is 
 strongly supported by the late E. H. Hutton, in one 
 of those thoughtful essays which he used to con- 
 tribute to the ' Spectator.' ^ 
 
 One of the most difficult of mental exercises is to 
 realise the existence of the spiritual world as an 
 objective reality, inhabited by spiritual beings, in- 
 cluding the souls of the departed : not unconscious, 
 not idle, not unprogressive, but active, docile, 
 unlearning and learning, and thus going on to 
 perfection. The Twenty-second Article, indeed, so 
 far from condemning every doctrine of purgatory, 
 appears to sanction some doctrine of purgatory. 
 For to condemn a particular doctrine of purgatory is 
 to imply a permissible doctrine ; such, for instance, 
 as Mr. Gladstone, following Butler, expresses as fol- 
 lows : ' The Christian dead are in a progressive state, 
 and the appointed office of the interval between 
 death and resurrection is reasonably believed to be 
 the corroboration of every good and holy habit, and 
 the effacement of all remains of infirmity and vice.' ^ 
 That is the doctrine of the great Anglican divines, 
 
 • The Essay on Prayers for the Dead has just been republished, 
 with others, by his niece. See Aspects of Religious and Scientific 
 Thought, No. xxxi. 
 
 2 Studies subsidiary to Btctler^s Works, pp. 153-4. 
 
316 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and it is surely the doctrine of reason and charity. 
 Nor is behef in the purification and moral develop- 
 ment of souls in the intermediate state confined to 
 High Churchmen. The late Dean Stanley held it 
 strongly. Indeed, a good pari of this chapter was 
 in substance contributed by me, on the Dean's advice, 
 to the ' Contemporary Eeview,' in an article which 
 he had read in manuscript with entire approval. 
 Maurice also was a firm upholder of the doctrine ; 
 and so was Charles Kingsley, as any one can see for 
 himself by consulting his * Letters and Memoirs of 
 his Life,' by his widow.^ In one of his letters to 
 myself, after remarking on Puritan eschatology — 'i.e. 
 the doctrine which the Puritans (as far as I know) 
 first introduced, namely, that the fate of every man 
 is irrevocably fixed at the moment of death ' — he 
 proceeds : — 
 
 I need not tell you that this is not the Catholic 
 doctrine ; that the Church has held, from a very early age, 
 the belief in an intermediate state. That belief was 
 distorted and abused, in later times, as the Eomish 
 doctrine of purgatory. But the denunciation of that 
 doctrine in the Thirty-nine Articles (as Dr. Newman 
 pointed out in Tract Ninety) does not denounce any 
 primitive doctrine of purgatory ; nay, rather allows it by 
 the defining adjective * Eomish.' That this Puritan 
 eschatology is no part of the creed of the Church of 
 England is proved by her final rejection of the Article 
 affirming endless punishment. It is as well here to say 
 that I do not deny endless punishment. 
 
 The truth is that if we give our hearts fair play 
 
 ' Vol. ii. pp. b95-6. . First Edition. 
 
THE INTEEMEDIATE STATE 817 
 
 and free scope, prayer for the departed is a natural 
 impulse. The heart of man instinctively refuses to 
 believe in death as its natural and final portion. It 
 searches for its vanished kindred, and will not believe 
 that thej^ cease to be, or that its interest in them, or 
 theirs in it, is broken. It is a universal sentiment of 
 humanity, seen in various forms and under divers con- 
 ditions : in an Old Mortality going up and down the 
 country laboriously renewing the time-worn tomb- 
 stones of the Covenanters, and in the great orator of 
 Athens, who knew the spell that it held when he 
 put a moment's fire into the breasts of his degenerate 
 countrymen by invoking ' the dead at Marathon.' 
 It is also seen in those legends of many lands which 
 represent some hero or national benefactor as enjoy- 
 ing a happy immunity from the last debt of humanity : 
 our own Arthur still living in the vale of Avalon, or 
 the great Barbarossa sleeping in his mystic cave till 
 his country needs his trusty sword. 
 
 The fact is, we all pray for the dead — at least, all 
 loving hearts do. When our beloved pass away 
 from us we follow them with our longing thoughts, 
 we speculate on their condition in the world unseen, 
 we wish them well. And what is a wish but a 
 prayer inarticulate? ^ Every good and holy desire,' 
 says Hooker, * though it lack the form, hath notwith- 
 standing in itself the substance, and with Him the 
 force, of a prayer. Who regardeth the very moanings 
 and sighs of the heart of man.' And what is that 
 philosophic threnody ' In Memoriam ' — one of the 
 greatest poems in our language — but a passionate 
 
318 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 protest against any admission that death can separate 
 hearts that have loved each other on earth ? See, 
 too, how prayer for the departed breaks out of the 
 heart instinctively in the poet's noble ode on the 
 death of the Duke of Wellington : — 
 
 God accept him ; Christ receive him. 
 
 I wonder if it has ever occurred to any of those 
 who denounce prayers for the dead as a flagrant 
 proof of disloyalty to the Church of England that 
 they include Her Majesty and the royal family in 
 that dishonouring accusation. For prayers for the 
 departed are said at the anniversary services held in 
 memory of the departed members of the royal family. 
 At Prince Henry of Battenberg's funeral, the offi- 
 ciating priest prayed : ' Give rest, Christ, to Thy 
 servant with Thy Saints,' which is substantially out 
 of the ancient liturgies. 
 
 Those who have read the very interesting * Life of 
 Princess Alice,' by her sister Princess Christian, will 
 remember some passages of exceeding pathos relating 
 to the tragic death of Princess Alice's boy. Her 
 second son, a bright child of two years, known in 
 her letters as 'Frittie,' fell out of a .'window while 
 her back was momentarily turned, atid was killed 
 before her very eyes. Born during his father's 
 absence in the war with France, and delicate from 
 his birth, he was endowed with the intellectual 
 brightness which often goes with feebleness of 
 bodily organisation, and was naturally a special pet 
 of his mother. The sudden quenching of his life by a 
 
THE INTEKMEDIATE STATE 319 
 
 violent death was of course a terrible blow to her, 
 which she bore with heroic fortitude. There is a 
 wonderful pathos in some of her Teferences to her 
 lost treasure — a vivid vision of suppressed sorrow 
 which almost enables us to see her grief : — 
 
 He was such a bright child. It seems so quiet next 
 door. I miss the little feet, the coming to me, for we 
 lived so much together. . . . He loved flowers so much. 
 I can't see one along the roadside without wishing to 
 pick it for him. In my own house it seems to me as if I 
 never could play again on that piano where little hands 
 were nearly always thrust when I wanted to play. ... I 
 had played so often lately that splendid, touching funeral 
 march of Chopin's, and I remember it is the last thing I 
 played, and then the boys were running in the room. 
 Having so many girls, I was so proud of our two boys ! 
 The pleasure did not last long, but he is mine more than 
 ever now. He seems near me always, and I carry his 
 precious image in my heart everywhere. 
 
 Who can read these moving sentences, these 
 chastened moanings of a bruised heart, without 
 feeling that the habitual attitude of the bereaved 
 mother's heart was one of prayer for her lost boy ? 
 How natural the habit is comes out incidentally in 
 one of Princess Alice's letters. * Ernie,' the elder 
 boy, ' always prays for Frittie ; and talks to me of 
 him when we walk together.' 
 
 I am persuaded that much of the unbelief and 
 agnosticism of the day is due to two causes : first, the 
 vague and unreal way in which the spiritual world 
 is regarded by the mass of professing Christians, and 
 
330 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 preached about by a large number of the clergy ; 
 secondly, 'the Puritan eschatology,' which distressed 
 Charles Kingsley, and which teaches that all the 
 saved pass straight to heaven at the moment of 
 death. That is a view which reason, when it seriously 
 considers it, cannot accept. Very few are they who 
 are fit to enjoy the Beatific Vision when they pass 
 from earth into the spiritual realm. Newman says, 
 in one of the most striking of his Parochial Sermons, 
 that, 'if we could imagine a punishment for an 
 unholy, reprobate soul, we perhaps could not fancy 
 a greater than to summon it to heaven.' Indeed, it 
 must be so, for the key to happiness is correspon- 
 dence with our environment. But what concord 
 could there be between holiness and unholiness? 
 between a matured sinner and a glorified saint ? 
 between the diabolic and the angelic temper? 
 between Christ and Belial ? Here good and evil 
 are so mingled that we cannot realise their mutual 
 and irreconcilable antagonism. In heaven they 
 would face each other at opposite poles, mutually 
 repellent. To admit an unholy man to heaven 
 would therefore be no boon to him. Of all imagi- 
 nable places, he would find himself least at home 
 there. His whole nature would need transformation. 
 But that is not the work of a moment, of an hour, 
 of a day • it is a slow, gradual process, governed by 
 the law which tarns impressions into habits, and 
 habits into character. Heaven is intended for 
 certain characters, and none but they could ever 
 enjoy it. 
 
THE INTEEMEDIATE STATE 321 
 
 But we are not, in this matter, dealing with full- 
 fledged wickedness, but with inchoate characters, 
 and characters that have been moulded awry from 
 no fault of their own — multitudes born and reared 
 in the midst of such surroundings as gave them no 
 chance of avoiding the evil and choosing the good. 
 These two classes doubtless form a large proportion 
 of Christians, to say nothing of the heathen. The 
 moral sense of any thinking man will rebel against 
 the notion that all those creatures of an almighty, 
 all-seeing, all-loving God are doomed to an eternity of 
 suffering. And it is because this is the doctrine 
 of much of our popular theology that so many have 
 rejected Christianity altogether, in mistake for a 
 spurious counterfeit. 
 
 The Catholic doctrine— by which I mean, as 
 our Church means, the doctrine of Christendom 
 while it was still one — is very different. Avoiding 
 the rashness of passing judgment on any individual, 
 let him be the greatest of heresiarchs — for the 
 Athanasian Creed condemns characters, not persons ; 
 Arians, not Arius — it teaches that there is an inter- 
 mediate state where the imperfect are made perfect, 
 the ignorant enlightened, the vacillating confirmed, 
 the crooked made straight. That this process of 
 amelioration will in many cases involve pain who 
 can doubt ? ' We have no right,' as Mr. Gladstone 
 says in one of his profound ' Studies subsidiary to 
 Butler's Works,' ^ * to assert that " the redeeming 
 and consummating process will be accomplished 
 
 ' P. 254. 
 
 Y 
 
322 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 without an admixture of salutary and accepted 
 pain." ' Multitudes pass out of this life with crooked 
 characters, from no fault of their own, like limbs 
 badly set, and requiring to be unset or broken before 
 they can be made straight. For these and for the 
 crowds of Christians who pass out of life neither very 
 bad nor very good, unformed in religious habits 
 either for heaven or for hell, Puritan eschatology 
 makes no provision. They are not fit for heaven : 
 who will dare to say that they are lost? The 
 Church, supported by Holy Scripture, provides for 
 them in the Intermediate State. 
 
 Dr. Welldon, now Metropolitan of India, a 
 broad-minded Evangelical, insists on the Christian 
 doctrine of prayers for the departed, and on the fact 
 of retributive discipline going on in the Intermediate 
 State : ^ — 
 
 But if a variety of destinies in the unseen world, 
 whether of happiness or of suffering, is reserved for man- 
 kind, and yet more if the principle of that world is not 
 inactivity but energy or character or life, it is reasonable 
 to believe that the souls, which enter upon the future 
 state with the taint of sin clinging to them in whatever 
 form or degree, will be slowly cleansed by a disciplinary 
 or purificatory process from whatever it is that, being 
 evil in itself, necessarily obstructs or obscures the vision 
 of God. The parable of Dives and Lazarus seems clearly 
 to indicate a certain moral progress as the effect of retric 
 butive discipline.^ 
 
 This is the class of religious questions which 
 
 ' The Hope of Immortality, chap. vi. 
 
 2 See a striking passage on the need of purgatorial discipline, in 
 the late Mr. W, R. Greg's Enigmas of Life, chap, vii, 
 
THE INTEEMEDIATE STATE 323 
 
 interest working men and women much more than 
 those which are supposed to constitute a ' crisis in 
 the Church ; ' and Members of ParHament who think 
 otherwise ' are up in a balloon,' to quote a celebrated 
 phrase of Mr. Gladstone. I had some experience of 
 this five years ago while delivering a course of 
 sermons on the Intermediate State in Ripon Cathe- 
 dral. The sermons were reported in full in some 
 Yorkshire papers and in one London paper. This 
 brought upon me a mass of letters from all parts 
 of the kingdom, chiefly from working men. The 
 following may serve as a specimen : — 
 
 Thank God for the new energy to persevere your 
 sermon on ' The Many Mansions ' has put into a person, 
 of * weak and wavering will.' To such natures — and their 
 name is legion — sermons are too often simply 'dampers.* 
 They don't give us hope, and it is hopelessness, more than 
 anything else, that drives us to despair, and to giving up 
 persevering. We hard-working people have little time or 
 inclination to read religious books, and such of us as care 
 for religion look to sermons for instruction by the way. 
 Too often we get on the one side, ' The Church, the 
 Church,' and, on the other, ' Conversion ' and ' Only believe.' 
 If only we could get such a Christ-like Gospel as yoii 
 preach, there would not be so many unbelievers and ones 
 quite indifferent to religion amongst us. I know several 
 who say, 'What's the good of trying? I always break 
 down. I'm sick and weary of it all.' I've felt so myself, 
 but. never will again after that sermon. Hope will make 
 me persevere. 
 
 I quote this, italics and all, as an illustration of 
 the kind of teaching for which the working classes 
 
 Y 2 
 
324 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 are hungering. They will go, and do go, to the 
 churches where they get it, and lights, and coloured 
 vestments, and incense, will not repel, but rather 
 attract them. Ceremonial is nothing in itself ; but 
 it may be made a useful auxiliary of religious as of 
 civil life. 
 
 I will now quit this part of the subject with a 
 beautiful passage from Tennyson's * Mqrte d' Arthur,' 
 where the duty of praying for the dead is argumenta- 
 tively enjoined in the person of the poet's hero. 
 
 Pray for my soul. More things are wrought by prayer 
 
 Than this world dreams of. Wherefore let thy voice 
 
 Eise like a fountain for me night and day. 
 
 For what are men better than sheep or goats 
 
 That nourish a blind life within the brain, 
 
 If, knowing God, they lift not hands of prayer 
 
 Both for themselves and those who call them friend ? 
 
 For so the whole world round is every way 
 
 Bound by gold chains about the feet of God. 
 
 Now I come to the modern Eoman doctrine of 
 Purgatory, which some of our younger clergy 
 strangely mistake for the doctrine of the Catholic 
 Church — that is, of the Church of ' the ancient 
 fathers and doctors ' to which our own Church 
 refers us. That doctrine is based on two articles of 
 belief : first, that purgatory is a place of torment, 
 differing only from the torments of hell in point of 
 duration ; secondly, that souls are constantly passing 
 from purgatory to heaven, with more or less delay 
 according to their moral condition and the interest 
 taken in them, and the masses said for them by 
 
THE INTEEMEDIATE STATE 325 
 
 friends on earth. The late Kev. W. Palmer, who 
 had an intimate knowledge of the Greek Church, 
 states the difference between the Latin and Oriental 
 Churches with general accuracy as follows : ^ — 
 
 The doctrine of Purgatory is taught by the Latins, and 
 is rejected by the Greeks. The doctrine of the Fathers 
 and of the early Church, of the present Greek or 
 * Orthodox ' Church, and of all the other separated 
 Eastern Churches, is this, that generally speaking, and 
 upon the whole, the state of the faithful departed is a 
 state of light, and rest, and peace, and refreshment ; of 
 happiness far greater than any belonging to this life, yet 
 inferior to that which shall be enjoyed after the resurrec- 
 tion and the final Judgment. The doctrine of the Latins, on 
 
 ' Dissertations on the Orthodox Communion, pp. 124-5. — This 
 Palmer was a brother of the late Lord Selborne : a most 
 learned and able man, who spent several years in Eussia, studying 
 the history and doctrines of that Church and kindred Churches. 
 Eventually he joined the Church of Kome. He must be distin- 
 guished from the Kev. Sir William Palmer (previously quoted), also 
 a most learned man, and author of the well-known Treatise on the 
 Church of Christ, of the Origines Liturgicce, and other works. He 
 lived and died an English Churchman. 
 
 Of the purgatorial fire Bellarmine says : • It is the common mind 
 of theologians that it is true and proper fire, and of the same kind 
 as our element.' And he gives the volcanic fire of iEtna as an 
 illustration [De Purg. ii. 11). The late Father Faber says of his 
 Church : ' It loves to represent purgatory simply as a hell which is 
 not eternal. Violence, confusion, wailing, horror, preside over its 
 description. It dwells, and truly, on the terribleness of the pain of 
 sense which the soul is mysteriously permitted to endure. The fire 
 is the same fire as that of hell, created for the single and express 
 purpose of giving torture' {All for Jesus, pp. 335-7). 
 
 It is hardly an exaggeration to say that this sort of teaching 
 represents a different religion from that of which we read in the 
 early centuries of Christianity. 
 
326 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the other hand, is this, that generally speaking, and upon 
 the whole, the state of the faithful departed is a state of 
 penal torment, differing from that of hell only in the 
 certainty of future deliverance. 
 
 Palmer admits, however, that, although the 
 Greeks reject the word * purgatory ' on account of its 
 evil associations, they nevertheless believe that 
 many of the departed are in an imperfect condition, 
 with stains of sin cleaving to them ; and ' of such 
 they think as needing the prayers and oblations of 
 the Church on earth to procure their refreshment, 
 and to lighten them tcov Kars^ovrcov avrous dvtapSv. 
 On the other hand, the Latins think of the higher 
 souls that they either go straight through purgatory, 
 or are speedily released from it.' 
 
 The doctrine of the Eastern Church, in all its 
 branches, is thus seen to be identical with that of 
 the ancient Church and of the Church of England. 
 It believes that no disembodied spirit has ever 
 entered, or ever will enter, heaven, till after the 
 general resurrection. And this is the unanimous 
 doctrine of the primitive Church. By ' heaven ' I 
 mean the realm of the Beatific Vision, the ' kingdom ' 
 into which our Lord says that He will invite the 
 saints — evidently for the first time — after the final 
 Judgment. This explanation is necessary because 
 the Bible almost always speaks of heaven in the 
 plural — 'the heavens.' The spiritual world, He 
 tells us in another place, is a sphere of ' many 
 mansions,' abodes suited to the ethical condition, 
 and needs of each of the diversified multitudes who 
 
, THE INTEKMEDIATE STATE 321 
 
 constantly pass from earth into the unseen home. 
 And as progress, in one direction or another, is a 
 law of intellectual and moral life, we may assume 
 that souls in the Intermediate State, while waiting 
 for the Judgment, rise from sphere to sphere in the 
 altitude of being in proportion to the purification of 
 their characters and the expansion of their faculties. 
 The present Pope, a few years ago, invited all 
 the Eastern Churches and the people of England to 
 acknowledge his supremacy and prerogatives, and 
 restore the unity of Christendom by submission to 
 him. The Patriarch of the Orthodox Eastern 
 Church sent a powerful answer, signed by himself 
 and his suffragans, declaring that there could be 
 no union till the Church of Eome abandoned her 
 innovations and heterodox doctrines, and returned 
 to the faith of the ancient fathers and councils — the 
 ground always taken by the Church of EnglsCnd. 
 This is what the Eastern bishops say on the subject 
 of the Intermediate State : ' The one Holy CathoHc 
 and Apostolic Church of the seven (Ecumenical 
 Councils, in accordance with the inspired teaching 
 of Holy Scripture and with the Apostolic tradition 
 of old, in praying invokes the mercy of God for 
 pardon and repose of those who are asleep in the 
 Lord. But the Papal Church, from the twelfth 
 century onward, invented and accumulated in the 
 person of the Pope — as if he enjoyed exclusively 
 some special privilege — a multitude of innovations 
 respecting purgatory, the superfluity of grace in 
 saints, and its distribution among those deficient 
 
328 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 in it, and such like ; and she has further propounded 
 the belief in a complete recompense of the just 
 before the general Kesurrection and Judgment/ 
 That sums up clearly and tersely the complete 
 subversion of the ancient doctrine by the Church 
 of Eome. The two cardinal errors of that sub- 
 version are (1) the doctrine that purgatory is, if I 
 may use the expression with reverence, a sort of 
 clearing-house for souls, under the jurisdiction and 
 control of the Pope and his delegates the clergy ; 
 and (2), growing out of this doctrine, a traffic in 
 souls, culminating in the shameless abuses associated 
 with the name of Tetzel, and which did more to 
 bring about the Eef ormation, especially in Germany, 
 than any other cause. 
 
 I have discussed at some length in another work ^ 
 the subject of the Intermediate State and the Koman 
 doctrine of Purgatory, especially the belief that souls 
 pass through purgatory to the enjoyment of the 
 Beatific Vision before the Judgment Day. Those 
 who wish to consult the authoritative Eoman teaching 
 on that point will find it stated with great clearness 
 in Perrone's ' Prselectiones.' ^ 
 
 As to the traffic in indulgences and pardons, I 
 know well that Eoman Catholics in this country and 
 in most enlightened countries would energetically 
 condemn the abuses which flourished in such rank 
 luxuriance at the period of the Eef ormation. But 
 all danger of their recurrence cannot be regarded as 
 
 * Life Here and Hereafter : Longmans. 
 
 2 Vol. i. pp. 806-848. Paris edition of 1842. 
 
THE INTEEMEDIATE STATE 329 
 
 out of the question while the exorbitant claims of 
 the Papacy, and its needs as aspiring to temporal 
 dominion, remain uncancelled. I may be supposed, 
 even by some Eoman Catholics, to exaggerate the 
 claim of the Papacy to jurisdiction over souls beyond 
 the grave. But the truth is that I might have used 
 stronger language. To give an example : The late 
 Pope, in replying to a deputation of Belgians who had 
 presented him with a papal tiara on June 18, 1871, 
 used these words : — 
 
 ' Ye offer me gifts : a triple crown, symbol of my 
 triple royal dignity, in Heaven, on earth, and in 
 Purgatory. And my kingdom will not perish, 
 because the Pope will always be, as I have been. 
 Pope, wherever he may be ; at one time in his own 
 States, to-day at the Vatican, some other day in 
 prison. But I accept this crown as a symbol of 
 resurrection. It will not serve me to-day, but 
 certainly in the days of my triumph.* ^ 
 
 These discourses were addressed ' to the faithful 
 of Rome and of the world,' with the sub-title ' a tutti 
 i fedeli di Roma e dell' orbe,' and were carefully 
 revised by the Pope himself. How far do they fulfil 
 
 * Discorsi del Sommo Pontefice Pio IX, pronunziati in Vaticano 
 ai Fedeli di Roma e delV orbe dal principio della sua prigione fino al 
 presente, 3 vols. The passage which I have quoted is in the first 
 volume, p. 133, and is as follows in the original : ' Voi mi offrite dei 
 doni : un Triregno, simbolo della mia tripla dignita reale, nel Cielo, 
 sopra la terra, e nel Purgatorio. E il Mio regno non perira, perch^ 
 il Papa sara, come fu, sempre Papa, dovunque ei sia ; una volta nei 
 suoi Stati, oggi al Vaticano, un altro giorno in prigione. Ma lo 
 accetto questa corona, come un simbolo di risorgimento. Ella non 
 mi servira oggi, ma bensi nei giorni del trionfo.' 
 
330 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the conditions of infallible utterances, as defined by 
 the Vatican decree ? It is an interesting question, 
 on which I may have something to say when I come 
 to discuss the question of Infallibility. Meanwhile I 
 trust that I have sufficiently explained the doctrine of 
 the Church of England regarding the Intermediate 
 State, and shown wherein it differs from the teaching 
 of the Church of Rome. 
 
331 
 
 CHAPTEE X 
 
 ECCLESIASTICAL COUETS AND THE 
 ORNAMENTS RUBRIC 
 
 TuBfortiter in re was more conspicuous than the 
 suaviter in modo in the statement lately put forth 
 by the Council of the English Church Union. That 
 is usually the case with statements declaring 
 doctrines, whether religious or political. They aim, 
 if drawn up by honest men, at directness and terse- 
 ness, and avoid rhetoric and vagueness. And the con- 
 sequence is that they commonly startle persons who 
 are not familiar with such subjects. But it is some- 
 times good for people to be startled. It sets them 
 athinking, and drives them back on first principles. 
 Now it happens that the sentence which has caused 
 most excitement in the statement of the English 
 Church Union is the one sentence which is capable 
 of the easiest defence. Here it is : ' We have denied, 
 and we deny again, the right of the Crown or of 
 Parliament to determine the doctrine, the discipline, 
 and the ceremonial of the Church of England.' 
 
 This frank utterance has made the cup of Sir 
 William Harcourt's indignation overflow in a torrent 
 of invective. He denounces Lord Halifax as * the 
 
332 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ecclesiastical Jack Cade,' leading an ' open rebellion ' ; 
 and he declares dogmatically that ' the only reply to 
 this nonsense which it is necessary to give is that 
 the Crown and Parliament, when they enacted the 
 Prayer Book in the teeth of the bishops and the 
 clergy, did determine all the conditions of the 
 Church of England as established by law, and have 
 continued to do so for more than three centuries.' 
 And Sir "William goes on to declare that the allega- 
 tion which he denounces as ' open rebellion ' * is a 
 direct denial of the first principles of the English 
 Reformation, which was the work of the laity for the 
 laity, who also in the tribunals for the final decision 
 of Church functions have provided for themselves a 
 necessary and adequate safeguard.' 
 
 I venture humbly and respectfully, but decidedly, 
 not only to traverse every one of these statements, 
 but to prove that the assertion, which Sir WilHam 
 Harcourt has stigmatised as a signal for * open 
 rebellion,' is nothing more than a platitude of con- 
 stitutional law. I recognise the temerity of such an 
 assertion in opposition to a distinguished statesman 
 and lawyer, who is, moreover, one of the most 
 formidable intellectual athletes among living contro- 
 versialists. But I am sure that Sir WilHam 
 Harcourt will be the last to resent my rashness, for 
 he has himself set me the example by sundry excur- 
 sions into the field of theology, which has lain as 
 much outside his normal studies as that of law has 
 lain outside mine *To the law and to the testi- 
 mony,' then. In opposition to Sir Wilham Harcourt 
 
THE ORNAMENTS RUBEIC 333 
 
 I respectfully lay down, and shall endeavour to 
 prove, the following propositions : — 
 
 1. That the English Eeformation was much / 
 more a political than a theological movement ; the 
 professed aim of the Keformers being to liberate the 
 Church and nation from the domination and inter- 
 meddling of the Pope. The Eeformers disclaimed 
 any intention to create a new Church, or a new 
 creed, or a new ceremonial further than by the 
 abolition of certain abuses and accretions which had 
 in the course of ages got mixed up with the ancient 
 ceremonial of the Church of England. Both clergy 
 and laity appealed to the Church of the CEcumenical 
 Councils (universally accepted) as the standard of 
 faith and worship. 
 
 2. That it is incorrect to say that ' the Crown and 
 Parliament enacted the Prayer Book in the teeth of 
 the bishops and clergy,' and that neither Crown nor 
 Parliament has ever claimed or exercised the right 
 of determining the doctrine, discipline, or ceremonial 
 of the Church without the Church's own sanction. 
 
 3. That this implies no derogation from the 
 constitutional supremacy of the Crown in matters 
 ecclesiastical. 
 
 1. The first two propositions belong to the 
 region of ecclesiastical history more than to that of 
 law, and there perhaps it is not presumptuous for me 
 to say that I am perhaps more at home — at least I 
 ought to be — than Sir William Harcourt. But his 
 authority would nevertheless be likely to overpower 
 mine, and I shall therefore appeal to names which 
 
334 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Sir William himself will admit to be not inferior to 
 his own. 
 
 No man of our time studied the history of the 
 [Reformation with a more unbiased mind, a more 
 minute care, or a more comprehensive grasp of the 
 whole subject than Mr. Gladstone. He was singu- 
 larly well equipped for the task. To a wide and 
 accurate range of reading he added a remarkable 
 aptitude for theological and legal studies, and his 
 eristic discipline in the House of Commons made 
 him sharp to detect a flaw in an argument. Brought 
 up an Evangelical, he began his special study of the 
 Keformation with his mind biased, as far as it was 
 biased at all, in that direction. Having no foregone 
 conclusion to uphold, he kept his mind open to such 
 light as an impartial study of facts might shed 
 upon it. Now this is what Mr. Gladstone says : — 
 
 With us the question lay simply between the nation 
 and the Pope of Rome, and its first form as a religious 
 question had reference purely to his supremacy. . . . 
 That the question of the English Reformation was 
 eminently and specially national ; that it was raised as 
 between this island of the free on the one hand, and an 
 ' Italian priest ' on the other, is a remarkable truth which 
 derives equally remarkable illustrations from our history. 
 The main subject of contention between the State and the 
 Romanists, or recusants as they were called, was not 
 their adhesion to this or that Popish doctrine, but their 
 acknowledgment of an unnational and anti-national head. 
 To meet this case the oath of supremacy was framed. . . . 
 The British Government -required of its subjects the 
 renunciation, not of Popish doctrines, but of the ecclesi- 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBRIC 335 
 
 astical supremacy of the Pope. ... It was not the 
 existing Church as a rehgious institution, but the secular 
 ambition of the Papal See, against which security was 
 sought by renouncing its jurisdiction.^ 
 
 Newman's bias, after he became a Koman 
 Catholic, would have been to make the most of the 
 religious question as the motive cause of the Eefor- 
 mation. But he was an honest man and had 
 studied the question conscientiously, and this is his 
 conclusion : — 
 
 Not any religious doctrine at all, but a political 
 principle, was the primary English idea at that time 
 [reign of Elizabeth] of 'Popery.' And what was that 
 principle, and how could it best be kept out of England ? 
 What was the great question in the days of Henry and 
 Elizabeth? The Supremacy. . . . Did Henry VIII. 
 religiously hold justification by faith only? Did he 
 disbelieve Purgatory? Was Elizabeth zealous for the 
 marriage of the clergy ? or had she a conscience against 
 the Mass ? The supremacy of the Pope wa's the essence 
 of the * Popery ' to which, at the time of the Articles, the 
 Supreme Head or Governor of the English Church was 
 so violently hostile.^ 
 
 Freeman had a religious devotion to the virtue 
 of historical accuracy, and he comes to the same 
 conclusion as Mr. Gladstone and Cardinal New- 
 man : — 
 
 Nothing was further from the mind of either Henry 
 the Eighth or of Elizabeth than that either of them was 
 
 ' The State in its Relations ivith the Church, pp. 174, 189-90. 
 ^ A;pologia, p. 1G2, The italics are Newman's. 
 
336 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 doing anything new. Neither of them ever thought for 
 a moment of establishing a new Church or of estabhshing 
 anything at all. In their own eyes they were not esta- 
 blishing but reforming ; they were neither pulling down 
 nor setting up, but simply putting to-rights. They were 
 getting rid of innovations and corruptions ; they were 
 casting off an usurped foreign jurisdiction, and restoring 
 to the Crown its ancient authority over the State ecclesi- 
 astical.^ 
 
 The late Dr. Brewer edited, with learned intro- 
 ductions, several of the volumes published under the 
 auspices of the Master of the Kolls. His introduc- 
 tion to the papers relating to the reign of Henry VIH. 
 makes a goodly quarto volume of 572 pages. He had 
 studied the history of the sixteenth and seventeeth 
 centuries with great care, and he agrees in the main 
 with the authorities already cited : — 
 
 But the Reformation did not owe its origin to Tyndal 
 or to Parliament ; to the corruptions of the clergy, or to 
 oppression of the Ecclesiastical Courts. There is no 
 reason to suppose that the nation as a whole was discon- 
 tented with the old religion. Facts point to the opposite 
 conclusion. . . . Nor, considering the temper of the 
 English people, is it probable that immorality could have 
 existed among the ancient clergy to the degree which the 
 exaggeration of poets, preachers, and satirists might lead 
 us to suppose. The existence of such corruption is not 
 justified by authentic documents, or by an impartial and 
 broad estimate of the character and conduct of the nation 
 before the Reformation. . . . But though the Reformation 
 advanced no further [than the abolition of Papal 
 Supremacy] in the reign of Henry VIII., and he still 
 
 > Disestablishment and Disendowment, p. 38. 
 
THE ORNAMENTS RUBEIC 337 
 
 maintained the rites, ceremonies, and doctrines of the 
 ancient faith, it was already in his reign irrevocably 
 established.^ 
 
 Macaulay's summing up of the Eeformation 
 period is not remarkable for its accuracy, and is 
 scornful and somewhat flippant. But he, too, 
 makes the supremacy the testing question. Elizabeth 
 as well as Henry VIII., he says, 
 
 certainly had no objection to the theology of Rome. 
 The Royal supremacy was to supersede the Papal ; but 
 ' the Catholic doctrines and rites were to be retained in 
 the Church of England.' Elizabeth clearly discerned 
 the advantages which were to be derived from a close 
 connection between the monarchy and the priesthood. 
 At the time of her accession, indeed, she evidently 
 meditated a partial reconciliation wdth Rome; and 
 throughout her whole life she leaned strongly to some of 
 the most obnoxious parts of the Catholic system.^ 
 
 But we are not dependent on second-hand testi- 
 mony for our knowledge of the position taken up 
 by Elizabeth; her words are on record. In her 
 Admonitions of 1559 she declares that she ' neither 
 doth nor ever will challenge any other authority 
 than that was challenged and lately used by the 
 noble kings of famous memory. King Henry VIII. 
 and King Edw^ard VI., which is, and was, of ancient 
 time due to the Imperial Crown of this Eealm.' 
 And again, in the year 1569, on the suppression of 
 
 ' Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII. iv. 551. 
 2 Essays, i. 131, 133. 
 
 Z 
 
338 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the northern rebeUion, the Queen published a pro- 
 clamation, in which she said 
 
 that she claimed no other ecclesiastical authority than 
 had been due to her predecessors ; that she pretended no 
 right to define articles of faith, or to change ancient 
 ceremonies formerly adopted by the Catholic and 
 Apostolic Church . . . ; but that she conceived it her duty 
 to take care that all estates under her rule should live in 
 the faith and obedience of the Christian religion ; to see 
 all laws ordained for that end duly observed; and to 
 provide that the Church be governed by archbishops, 
 bishops, and ministers. 
 
 And then she assured her people that she meant 
 not 
 
 to molest them for religious opinions provided they did 
 not gainsay the Scriptures, or the Creeds Apostolic and 
 Catholic, nor for matters of religious ceremony as long as 
 they should outwardly conform to the laws of the realm, 
 which enforced the frequentation of Divine service in the 
 ordinary churches.^ 
 
 It would be easy to go on multiplying authorities ; 
 but these will suffice to establish my first proposition, 
 that the motive cause of the Reformation was 
 political rather than doctrinal, and was centred in 
 the question of the Papal supremacy. 
 
 2. I now proceed to give evidence for my second 
 proposition. Sir William Harcourt has offered only 
 one piece of evidence in support of his view that the 
 Prayer Book is the offspring solely of the Crown 
 
 » Lingaid's Hist. v. 295. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 339 
 
 and Parliament ' in the teeth of the bishops and 
 clergy.' His solitary proof, which he appears to 
 regard as crucial, is the opposition to the Uniformity 
 Act of 1559 by all the bishops present in the House 
 of Lords in that division, and the verbal omission 
 from the Act afterwards of the words * the Lorda 
 spiritual ' as assenting to the Act. I shall examine 
 that point presently. But why does Sir William 
 fix on that year and that Act of Uniformity exclu- 
 sively as if it possessed a sacrosanct character and 
 nullified all that preceded and succeeded it ? For no 
 other reason that I can imagine than that it is the 
 only fact in the whole history of the Keformation 
 which gives a colourable pretext to his theory. 
 There are other Acts of Uniformity before and after 
 1559 in which the assent of the Lords spiritual is 
 mentioned. Why should they be excluded from the 
 evidence available on this subject? That style of 
 controversy will never do. It offends equally the 
 canons of logic, justice, and historical criticism. Now 
 let us look at the facts. 
 
 The norm of our present Prayer Book is to be 
 found in the ' Order of the Communion ' published 
 on March 8, 1548. It was compiled by seven 
 bishops (including Archbishop Cranmer and Bishop 
 Kidley), and the Deans of Christ Church, Oxford, 
 St. Paul's, Lincoln, Exeter, the Master of Trinity, 
 Cambridge, and Dr. Kobertson, afterwards Dean of 
 Durham. 
 
 This service left the Office of the Mass to be said 
 in Latin to the end of the consecration prayer and the 
 
 z 2 
 
340 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 communion of the priest, but added to it in English 
 what is substantially our present Communion Office. 
 This was used by authority of Parliament, but 
 was compiled by authority of the Church. It 
 was followed by the First Prayer Book of Edward VI., 
 y^hich is the basis of our present Prayer Book. It 
 prescribed, among other things, the use of the 
 Eucharistic vestments ; and the Act of Uniformity 
 which sanctioned it declares that it is in harmony 
 with 'the pure Christian religion taught by the 
 Scriptures,' as well as with 'the usages in the 
 primitive Church,' and that it was drawn up ' by the 
 aid of the Holy Ghost.' This Act of Uniformity 
 purports to have been passed by ' the Lords spiritual 
 and temporal and the Commons in this Parliament 
 assembled.' So far we have no trace of ' the Crown 
 and Parliament ' ' enacting the Prayer Book in the 
 teeth of the bishops and clergy.' 
 
 At this juncture, unfortunately, a number of 
 foreign Reformers — iconoclasts in religion and re- 
 publicans in politics — came to England, and were 
 placed in positions of great influence, including the 
 chairs of theology at the Universities. They were 
 in the confidence of the astute Calvin, who hoped by 
 their aid to overthrow the constitution of the 
 English Church and reconstruct it on the model of 
 Geneva. His recommendations were backed up by 
 some influential persons at Court, who calculated, as 
 Hallam and Macaulay have pointed out, that a new 
 Beformation on the Swiss pattern would be certain 
 to relieve the Church of much property which 
 
THE OENAMENTS KUBRIC 341 
 
 nobody could use so profitably as themselves. The 
 precocious mind of the priggish boy who occupied 
 the throne of the Tudors was completely turned by 
 the artful flatteries of these men. He w^as persuaded 
 to regard himself as a second good Josiah,' whose 
 name would be blessed by future generations as a great 
 reformer. But the bishops set their faces against 
 the revolutionary proposals of the foreign Reformers, 
 and the King, finding himself thus balked of pos- 
 thumous renown, told Sir John Cheke that when 
 Parliament met he should effect his purpose by 
 exercise of his Eoyal authority.^ There is no proof 
 of his having ever executed that threat. Cardwell 
 surmises that 'the Convocation w^as induced to 
 delegate its authority to a commission appointed by 
 the King '^ ; but Lord Selborne, rejecting that view, 
 has proved {' Defence of the Church of England 
 against Disestablishment,' pp. 57-64) that the Book 
 of 1552 received the formal authority of Convocation. 
 Considering the genesis of the Second Book, the 
 wonder is that so few alterations were made of a 
 serious character. Some of the alterations, indeed, 
 were in the nature of improvements ; '^ others affected 
 
 • Strype's Memorials of Cranmer, ii. 9. 
 
 2 ' Hoc non me parum recreat quod mihi D. Checus indicavit : si 
 noluerint ipsi [episcopi], ait, efficere ut quas mutanda sint mutentur, 
 rex per seipsum id faciet ; et cum ad parliamentum ventum fuerit 
 ipse suae Majestatis authoritatem interponet.' — See Peter Martyr's 
 Letter to Bucer in Strype's Memorials of Cranmer, ii. 663. 
 
 ^ The Two Liturgies of King Edward VI. p. xviii. 
 
 ■* This is frankly admitted by a hostile witness : — ' Without doubt 
 subsequent revisions of the Book of Common Prayer [of 1549] have 
 
342 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the integrity of the ancient ceremonial sanctioned by 
 the First Book ; none touched the essence of doctrine. 
 Cranmer disliked the alterations which the Second 
 Book made in the Communion Office. He was a 
 great admirer of the Book of 1549, in the compila- 
 tion of which he took a leading part. Writing of it 
 he says : * The manner of the Holy Communion, 
 which is now set forth within this Eealm, is agreeable 
 with the institution of Christ, with St. Paul, and the 
 old primitive Apostolic Church, and with the right 
 faith of the Sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross.' * He 
 solicited Bucer's opinion of the Book, and Bucer 
 replied that he ' found nothing in it but what was 
 either taken out of the Word of God, or at least not 
 contrary to it, if fairly interpreted' — an opinion 
 which he revoked afterwards under the influence of 
 those who were set on organic changes. 
 
 Cranmer, as usual, played a weak and vacillating 
 part. Wedded to the First Book and opposed to 
 any further changes, he lacked the courage to resist 
 the King and his powerful prompters. So he ended 
 by swimming with the current, but recorded his 
 opinion of the aims and character of the new 
 
 introduced elements which, although it may not be easy to justify 
 them by the test of antiquity, have given to the daily service a 
 breadth or even a certain dignity which is altogether wanting in the 
 book of 1549.' ' The Prayer Book of 1549 relaxes the obligation of 
 private recitation [of matins and vespers] altogether, but this was 
 reimposed in the Second Book of 1552.' Edward VI. atid the Book 
 of Common Prayer. By Francis Aidan Gasquet, O.S.B., pp. 36, 39. 
 ' One of the additions in the Second Book was the order to recite 
 the Athanasian Creed on several Saints' days aa well as on the great 
 festivals. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 343 
 
 Eeformers in a letter of protest to the King's 
 Council, in reply to a Eoyal mandate that he should 
 peruse and report upon the Second Book. The drift 
 of his protest may be gathered from the following 
 extract : — 
 
 I know your Lordships' wisdom to be such as that I 
 trust ye will not be moved with these glorious and unquiet 
 spirits which can like nothing but that is after their oiun 
 fancy ; and cease not to make trouble when things be most 
 quiet and in good order. If such men should be heard, 
 although the Book were made every year anew, yet it 
 should not lack faults in their opinion.^ 
 
 This is a pregnant comment on the declaration of 
 the Act of Uniformity which ratified the Second 
 Book, namely, that ' such doubts as had been raised 
 in the use and exercise ' of the First Book proceeded 
 rather from * the curiosity of the ministers and mis- 
 takers than from any other worthy cause.' 
 
 This Act, which was passed on April 6, 1552, 
 ordered the use of the Second Book on the 1st of the en- 
 suing November. The copies of the Book which were 
 printed in the interval, however, were so full of errors, 
 that — partly for this reason, and partly, as it seems, 
 because the King was anxious to have the Book 
 revised still further in the interest of the Puritans — 
 an Order in Council was issued on September 27 
 cancelling the whole edition and forbidding the issue 
 of any more copies. On the 6th day of the 
 following July the boy-king, who had been ailing for 
 some months previously, died ; and his Second 
 * State Papers {Domestic) Edward VL xv. 15« 
 
344 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Book of Common Prayer died with him. It seems 
 tolerably clear that its adoption was very irregular 
 and partial, and of questionable legality.^ Its use 
 would have been illegal before the Feast of All Saints, 
 1552. But all the copies printed up to the end of 
 September in that year had been suppressed by the 
 Order in Council already referred to. There is not a 
 fragment of proof, that I know of, to show that any 
 other edition had been printed in the meantime. 
 There is evidence that the Second Book was used 
 in some churches in the interval, for it was covered 
 by Act of Parliament. It is for lawyers to decide 
 how far the Order in Council affected its legality. 
 It was pretty evident before the end of 1552 that 
 the King was dying, and the perilous uncertainty as 
 to the succession filled the minds of those in 
 authority with apprehensions which were not likely 
 to leave much room for deliberations about the new 
 Prayer Book. The King himself too, knowing that 
 his illness was incurable, had to think of other 
 matters than the disputatious letters of Calvin and 
 the flatteries of self-seeking courtiers. The Duke of 
 Northumberland, who after the death of the Protector 
 really ruled the kingdom, was bent on securing the 
 
 ' See Letter of George Withers to the Prince Elector Palatine 
 {Zurich Letters, Second Series, ii. 159, 160). Speaking of the sup- 
 pressed edition of the Second Prayer Book he says : ' But the King, 
 who truly feared God, not being yet satisfied with these improve- 
 ments, was about to put the last finish to this work, and appointed 
 a day for the assembling of both Houses of Parliament. All were 
 full of hope and expectation ; but in the meantime our most excellent 
 King was taken away by an untimely death.' 
 
THE ORNAMENTS RUBRIC 345 
 
 sceptre for his daughter-in-law, the unfortunate 
 Lady Jane Grey, and had actually persuaded the 
 King to appoint her his successor by Letters Patent. 
 The partisans of Mary were equally resolute on the 
 other side ; and in the prospect of a struggle which 
 promised to be as desolating as the Wars of the 
 Eoses, the small knot of Puritanical Reformers and 
 their nostrums were forgotten. 
 
 This is the nearest approach in all the history of 
 the Reformation to Sir William Harcourt's assertion 
 that * the Crown and Parliament enacted the Prayer 
 Book in the teeth of the bishops and clergy.' But 
 it is an approach only. For the Uniformity Act of 
 1552 was passed with the assent of the Lords 
 spiritual as well as temporal. Sir William, however, 
 was mainly thinking of the Uniformity Act of 1559. 
 On that occasion it is undoubtedly true that all 
 the bishops present in the House of Lords voted 
 against the Act. It is equally true that the Act 
 itself omits all express mention of the spiritual 
 Lords as assenting parties to the Act, using only the 
 phrase, ' with the assent of the Lords and Commons.' 
 But this is not decisive, for the same phrase is used 
 in tte Uniformity Act of 1552, when the spiritual 
 peers were assenting parties. The Uniformity Act 
 of 1549 is still more to the point, for after mention- 
 ing 'the Lords spiritual and temporal and the 
 Commons in this present Parliament assembled ' as 
 assenting to the Act, it afterwards speaks of 'the 
 assent of the Lords and Commons in this present 
 Parliament assembled ' — the very phrase on which 
 
346 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Sir William Harcourt fastens in the Elizabethan 
 Acts of 1559 and 1552. 
 
 But Sir William has a second string to his bow. 
 The Elizabethan Act says : * And for due execution 
 hereof, the Queen's most excellent Majesty, the 
 Lords temporal and all the Commons in this present 
 Parliament assembled, doth in God's name earnestly 
 require and charge all the archbishops, bishops, and 
 other ordinaries, that they shall endeavour them- 
 selves to the uttermost of their knowledge, that the 
 due and true execution hereof may be had through- 
 out their dioceses and charges, as they will answer 
 before God for such evils and plagues wherewith 
 Almighty God may justly punish His people for 
 neglecting His good and wholesome law,' &c. This 
 proves nothing. Obviously the spiritual peers 
 could not ' earnestly require and charge ' themselves 
 to do anything even if they had been assenting parties 
 to the Act. Thus we see that the phrase which has 
 delighted Sir William Harcourt, and which forms the 
 corner-stone of his novel theory of the Reformation, 
 vanishes like those frail substances which look beauti- 
 ful when disentombed from some ancient sepulchre, but 
 crumble to pieces when exposed to the light of the sun. 
 
 But there is more to be said on this matter. 
 The year after the Uniformity Act of 1559, Elizabeth 
 put out a Latin version of the Prayer Book, with 
 some alterations and additions which brought it 
 nearer the Book of 1549. In the Letters Patent 
 which authorised this Latin Book she says expressly 
 that the Book of 1559 was passed * with the consent 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 347 
 
 of the three Estates of the Eealm.' ^ This is a flat 
 contradiction of Sir William Harcourt's assertion. 
 Yet there is undoubtedly an apparent discrepancy 
 between the votes of the bishops against the Act of 
 Uniformity and the Queen's unequivocal assertion 
 in a formal State document that the Act of Uni- 
 formity was passed ' with the assent of the three 
 Estates of our Eealm,' namely, the Lords spiritual, 
 the Lords temporal, and the Commons. This is 
 said in the face of Parliament and the nation, and 
 there is no contradiction from any quarter, not even 
 from the bishops. What is the explanation? I 
 venture to offer the following. 
 
 When the Act oT Uniformity was passing through 
 Parliament ten out of the twenty-six sees were 
 vacant through death, leaving sixteen bishops as peers 
 of Parliament. Of these, nine voted against the third 
 reading of the Act. One was absent through illness 
 and others for no assignable reason. The Bill was 
 thus opposed by just one more than a third of the 
 whole bench, and of these more than half were dis- 
 qualified by canonical and statutory law. All the 
 episcopal consecrations in the reign of Mary are in 
 that category, for they were made by authority of 
 
 * * Omnibus ad quos praesentes iitersB pervenerint, salutem. Cum 
 mem ores officii nostri erga Deum Omnipotentem (cujus providentia 
 principes regnant) legibus quibusdam saluberrimis, consensu trium 
 Begni nostri statuum, sancitis, anno regni nostri primo, Eegium 
 nostrum consensum libenter praebuerimus : inter quas una lex lata 
 est, ut Preces publicas una et eadem certa et praescripta precandi 
 forma, lingua vulgari et vernacula, passim in Ecclesia Anglicana 
 haberentur,' &c. 
 
348 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the Pope which had been, from 1534, renounced by 
 the Convocations of the Church lawfully convened ; 
 and this canonical renunciation was never repealed 
 by either Convocation. Moreover, thirteen bishops, 
 canonically and legally appointed, had been deprived 
 by Mary without pretence of sanction from the 
 ecclesiastical law of England, and intruders were 
 thrust into their sees. In addition. Queen Elizabeth 
 and her advisers took the precaution of fortifying 
 their position by statute as well as by canon law 
 before enforcing the Act of Uniformity. 
 
 Mary's statute restoring the Papal Supremacy 
 was secured before the Uniformity Act reached the 
 House of Lords, and the Marian bishops could be 
 thus legally as well as canonically disqualified as 
 spiritual peers, although they were not as yet formally 
 deprived. This is the very objection that Bonner 
 afterwards took to the consecration of Archbishop 
 Parker and the other Elizabethan bishops, namely, 
 that the Ordinal used lacked statutory authority,^ 
 not having received the assent of Parliament. But 
 the Queen had anticipated this objection by supplying 
 the legal defects of the Ordinal ; a precaution which 
 some Koman Catholic writers have perverted as if 
 it meant the rectification by the Queen of some flaw 
 in the act of Consecration. 
 
 The view therefore which EHzabeth and her 
 
 ministers appear to have taken of the negative votes 
 
 of the Marian bishops is that they were null and 
 
 void, the voters being disqualified on grounds both 
 
 * White's Lives of the Elizabethan Bishops, p. 36. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 349 
 
 legal and canonical. Had they supported the Act 
 and accepted the situation, it is probable that their 
 position would have been legalised, like that of 
 the Ordinal. As it was, their votes were ignored, 
 and the assent of the new bishops was assumed. 
 The Act of Uniformity, therefore, on which Sir 
 William Harcourt relies, assumes the assent of the 
 spiritual peers, and the Queen positively asserts it 
 without a dissentient voice. Two things are con- 
 spicuous in Elizabeth's conduct all through that 
 troubled period : one, her anxiety to have the law 
 on her side ; the other, pace Sir William Harcourt, 
 her peremptory repudiation of any right on the part 
 of the laity to legislate for the Church. The spiritual 
 peers constitute the first of the three estates of the 
 Bealm, and whatever lawyers may think now, it is 
 unquestionable that in the time of Elizabeth and 
 previously an Act of Parliament would have been 
 considered of doubtful authority, if not altogether 
 invalid, passed in a Parliament where the spiritual 
 state was ignored. ' In the Parliament Boll of 
 21 Eich. n. it is said that many ordinances have 
 been disannulled because the State of the clergy 
 were not present in Parliament at the making of 
 them. So that the distinction between Estates in 
 the kingdom and Estates in Parliament, as if the 
 bishops were one of the first and not of the second, 
 is merely imaginary, and leaves one Estate unrepre- 
 sented in Parhament.' ^ Elizabeth had far too much 
 
 ^ De Lolme On the English Constitution, pp. 134-5. I owe this 
 quotation to Mr. James Parker. 
 
350 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 respect for precedent to run any risk of that sort. 
 Certainly this view of the Constitution came down 
 at least to the Great KebelHon. When the bishops 
 were turned out of the House of Lords by the Long 
 Parliament they protested against any legislation 
 enacted in their absence as null and void. 
 
 Elizabeth's repudiation of the right of the House 
 of Commons to interfere in ecclesiastical affairs, 
 except by way of sanction for ecclesiastical matters 
 brought before it either by Eoyal authority or by 
 the House of Lords, where the Church was repre- 
 sented by the bishops, could be illustrated by various 
 examples. Let two suffice. The case is put succinctly 
 and clearly by a very able and learned foreign writer 
 on the English Constitution, Dr. Eudolph Gneist, 
 Professor of Law in the University of Berlin. He 
 writes : — 
 
 When in 14 Elizabeth a bill touching the rites and 
 ceremonies of the Church had been read a third time, the 
 Queen declared to the House, through the Speaker, that 
 ' no bill concerning religion should be proposed or received 
 into this House, unless the same be first considered and 
 approved by the clergy.' This, however, referred to the 
 initiation of legislation touching the Church, and actually 
 formed a new province, as to which no precedent cpuld 
 be found for the cooperation of Parliament. On the 
 contrary, the interference of the Commons with the 
 internal affairs of the Church, as well as all taxation of 
 spiritualties, had always been energetically rejected.^ 
 
 The author gives no reference, but there is a 
 parallel passage in the Calendar of State Papers 
 ' Hist, of the Engl. Const, ii. 149. English translation. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBKIC 351 
 
 edited by Mrs. Green. ^ As late as the year 1593, in 
 a speech dehvered by Sir Edward Coke, Speaker of 
 the House of Commons, we find this language. He 
 tells the House that he had been sent for by her 
 Majesty, who directed him to tell the House, among 
 other things, ' that it is in her power to call Parlia- 
 ments and to end them, and to assent to or dissent 
 from anything done therein. Secondly, that in her 
 Majesty's pleasure, delivered to them by the Lord 
 Keeper, it was not meant that they should meddle 
 either in matters of State or ecclesiastical causes; 
 and she wondered that any should be so forgetful of 
 her commandment, or so bold as to attempt a thing 
 so expressly contrary to that she had forbidden. She 
 further directs that if they attempt to exhibit any 
 Bills tending to matters of State or reformation in 
 causes ecclesiastical, the Lord Keeper, on his alle- 
 giance, shall refuse to read them.' 
 
 The Queen here refers to her having previously 
 
 * forbidden ' this sort of intermeddling in ecclesiastical 
 affairs on the part of the House of Commons, and 
 
 * wonders that any should be so forgetful of her 
 commandment.' This probably refers to a petition 
 jpresented to the Queen in the year 1586 by the 
 House of Commons, praying for reforms in the 
 direction of Puritanism. Her Majesty sent a snub- 
 bing and sarcastic reply, of which the drift may be 
 gathered from the following quotation : — 
 
 Her Majesty is fully resolved by her own reading and 
 princely judgment upon the truth of the reformation 
 » Calendar of Eliz. 1591-4, p. 322. 
 
352 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 which we have akeady, and mindeth not now to begin to 
 settle herself in causes of religion. Her Majesty hath 
 been confirmed in her said judgment of the present 
 reformation by the letters and writings of the most famous 
 men in Christendom, as well of her own dominions as 
 of other countries. Her Majesty thinks it very incon- 
 venient and dangerous, while our enemies are labouring 
 to overthrow the religion established as false and erroneous, 
 that we, by new disputations, should seem ourselves to 
 doubt thereof. Her Majesty hath fully considered, not 
 only of the exceptions that are made against the present 
 reformation, and doth find them frivolous, but also of the 
 platform that is desired, and accounteth it most prejudicial 
 unto the religion established, to her crown, to her 
 government, to her subjects. Her Majesty thinketh that, 
 though it were granted that some things were amiss in 
 the Church, yet seeing she is fully persuaded, and 
 knoweth it to be true, that for the very substance and 
 grounds of true religion no man living can justly control 
 them ; to make every day new laws in matters of circum- 
 stances and of less moment (especially touching religion) 
 were a means to breed great lightness in her subjects, to 
 nourish unstayed humour in them, in seeking still for 
 exchanges. * Malum est et reipub. noxium assuefieri 
 homines ad faciHtatem mutandarum legum.' If anything 
 were amiss it appertaineth to the clergy more properly to 
 see the same redressed. ' Unicuique in sua arte credendum. 
 Quam quisque norit artem in hac se exerceat. Navem 
 agere ignarus navis timet.' Her Majesty takes your 
 petition herein to be against the prerogative of her 
 crown. For by their full consents it hath been confirmed 
 and enacted (as the truth herein requireth) that the full 
 power, authority, jurisdiction and supremacy, in Church 
 causes which heretofore the popes usurped and took to 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 353 
 
 themselves, should be united and annexed to the Imperial 
 Crown of this Eealm.* 
 
 Yet Sir William Harcourt picks out Elizabeth's 
 reign in particular as the auspicious era, when the 
 laity got their feet on the necks of the clergy and 
 reformed the Prayer Book *in the teeth of the 
 bishops and the clergy ! ' I humbly submit that, 
 inasmuch as men's heads are soft in comparison with 
 stone walls, it is ill luck for a controversialist to run 
 his head against the stone walls of history. 
 
 But I am willing to be generous and to test my 
 case by subsequent periods of history. Sir William 
 Harcourt's theory is vitiated by another fatal flaw. 
 The following letter appeared from his pen in the 
 * Westminster Gazette ' in the first week of last 
 July :-— 
 
 The Eeformation Statutes. 
 
 To the Editor of 'The Westmmster Gazette.* 
 
 Sir, — My attention has been called to some comments 
 in your paper of June 30 upon the citation I made from 
 the Act of Uniformity to show that it was enacted by the 
 authority of the * Lords Temporal and the Commons ' 
 alone, to the exclusion of the * Lords Spiritual.' 
 
 The statute from which I read in the House of 
 Commons was, I need not say, the great Eeformation x\ct 
 of BHzabeth, in which this notable circumstance is 
 specially recorded (1 Eliz., cap. 2). The note in the 
 Eevised Statutes, vol. i., p. 472, gives the reason. The 
 same observation applies to the preceding Eeformation 
 
 ' Cardwell's Synodalia, ii. 559-61. • 
 
 A A 
 
354 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Act of Uniformity of Edward VI. (5 and 6 Ed. VI., cap. 1, 
 Revised Statutes, vol. i., p. 437). 
 
 These were the Reformation statutes by which the 
 doctrines and practice of the Church of England were 
 established by law, on its separation from the Church of 
 Rome, and were enacted not with the authority of the 
 ' Spiritualty ' but against their consent. 
 
 I did not, of course, refer (as you seem to suppose) to 
 the Bestoration enactment of Charles II., which was in 
 no sense a Beformation statute, and was passed under 
 very different conditions. 
 
 Your obedient servant, 
 
 W. V. Harcouet. 
 
 I have already shov^n that Sir William has care- 
 lessly misread the statutes of Edward YI. and 
 Elizabeth to v^hich he refers. But let us assume, 
 for the sake of argument, that his construction of 
 them is correct. What then? Edward's Act is 
 dead, and has no more legal force than the laws of 
 Lycurgus. Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity, on the 
 other hand, was abolished by the Long Parliament, 
 and was revived by the Uniformity Act of 1662. 
 On that Act it rests. Now the Prayer Book sanc- 
 tioned by the Act of 1662 was not Elizabeth's Prayer 
 Book, but that Prayer Book as revised by the clergy, 
 w^ho made several additions to it, in the reign of 
 James I. That revision was never submitted to 
 Parliament. It rested solely upon the Eoyal 
 authority ratifying by Letters Patent the action of 
 the Metropolitan and of the other clerical Commis- 
 sioners. The Prayer Book thus revised, without any 
 
THE OENAMBNTS EUBEIO 355 
 
 interference on the part of Parliament, was at the 
 Eestoration handed over to the Convocations of the 
 two Provinces for its final revision. The Northern 
 Convocation elected delegates to co-operate with the 
 Convocation of Canterbury, and their united labours 
 resulted in 600 alterations. This last revision passed 
 the Lords and was then sent down to the Commons, 
 who, while maintaining their right to discuss the 
 book thus amended, abstained from doing so out of 
 deference to Convocation. So deferential, indeed, 
 were they that they even shrank from correcting a 
 clerical error in the Baptismal Service, and remitted 
 it to Convocation, which thereupon deputed the 
 Bishops of Durham, St. Asaph, and Carlisle to make 
 the correction. The Act of Uniformity then author- 
 ised the revised Prayer Book in the following words : 
 * Be it enacted by the King's Most Excellent Majesty, 
 by the advice, and with the consent, of the Lords 
 spiritual and temporal, and of the Commons as- 
 sembled in this present Parliament,' &c. This Act 
 is now the statutory charter of the clergy, and if any 
 previous Act conflicts with it, it is a commonplace of 
 law, with which even laymen are familiar, that if two 
 Acts of Parliament differ, it is the second that pre- 
 vails. Why, then, does a distinguished lawyer and 
 statesman, like Sir William Harcourt, repudiate 
 *the Bestoratio7i enactment of Charles 11.,' and* 
 declare that it ' was in no sense a Beformation 
 statute, and was passed under very different circum- 
 stances ' ? I can imagine no other reason than the 
 fact that the last Act of Uniformity, which is now 
 
356 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the basis in secular law of the Prayer Book, shatters 
 Sir William Harcourt's theory in pieces, and gives 
 statutory force to Queen Elizabeth's dictum, that * if 
 anything were amiss, it appertaineth to the clergy to 
 see the same redressed.' ^ It is of course natural 
 that Sir "William should dislike a statute of which 
 the history furnishes a complete refutation of his 
 whole argument. But is it not a characteristic mark 
 of lawlessness to pick and choose among laws, insist- 
 ing on those of which we approve, and rejecting those 
 which we dislike? Surely Sir William is himself 
 here violating the very code of morals which he is 
 trying to impose with such draconic rigour on the 
 clergy. 
 
 The last attempt made by an external authority 
 to legislate for the Church in matters of doctrine, 
 discipline, and ceremonial, was William III.'s 
 scheme in 1689. The King attempted to impose 
 his scheme on the Church without the assent of 
 Convocation, but was arrested by addresses from 
 both Houses of Parliament, praying that, * according 
 to the ancient practice and usage of this kingdom in 
 time of Parliament, his Majesty would be graciously 
 pleased to issue forth his writs, as soon as con- 
 veniently might be, for calling a Convocation of the 
 clergy of this kingdom, to be advised with in ecclesi- 
 astical matters.' ^ He was obliged to comply. Convo- 
 cation was summoned and the scheme was laid before 
 
 ' See KennetVs Register, p. 680 ; and Documents relating to the 
 Act of XJniformity, p. 453. 
 « Pari. Hist. v. 210. 
 
THE ORNAMENTS RUBRIC 357 
 
 it. The Upper House, under the influence of the 
 Erastian Primate, Tillotson, was favourably dis- 
 posed ; but the Lower House of Convocation, after 
 animated debates and conferences with the Upper 
 House, rejected the scheme, and made an end 
 of it.^ Parhament disclaimed for itself and the 
 Crown the right to determine the doctrine, the 
 discipline, or the ceremonial of the Church of 
 England; in other words, vindicated proleptically 
 the proposition which Sir William Harcourt has 
 denounced as * a direct denial of the first principles 
 of the Keformation, which was the work of the 
 laity for the laity.' Nobody can master a subject 
 more thoroughly than Sir William Harcourt when 
 he gives his mind and devotes a sufficient time 
 to it. Witness his mastery of finance, which was 
 comparatively new ground to him till he became 
 Chancellor of the Exchequer. It is quite evident, 
 from his speeches in Parliament and his letters to 
 the ' Times,' that he has never seriously studied the 
 history of the Keformation at all. He has simply 
 adopted a popular tradition, and assumed its accuracy 
 without any attempt to verify it. The tradition is 
 a pure myth, as I think I have now shown. 
 
 But before I pass to my next proposition it may 
 be well to note a few of the items in the scheme 
 which Convocation rejected. It recommended 
 the disuse of 'the chanting of Divine service in 
 Cathedral Churches ; ' of ' the Apocryphal Lessons 
 
 • Cardwell's Hist, of Conf. ch. ix. ; Lathbury's Hist, of the Con- 
 vocation of the Church of Engl. ch. xi. 
 
358 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and those of the Old Testament which are too 
 natural,' and 'all the legendary Saints' days.' It 
 recommended that *if any refuse to receive the 
 Sacrament of the Lord's Supper kneeling, it may be 
 administered to them in their pews ; ' that ' distinction 
 of meats in Lent be abolished ; ' * that the rubric 
 which obliges ministers to read or hear common 
 prayer publicly or privately every day be changed to 
 an exhortation to the people to frequent those 
 prayers ; ' ' that the absolution in the Morning and 
 Evening Prayer may be read by a deacon, the word 
 ''priest" in the rubric being changed into " minister; " 
 and those words and remission be put out as not 
 very intelligible ; ' that ' all high titles or appella- 
 tions of the King, Queen, &c., shall be left out of 
 the prayers, such as " Most illustrious, religious, 
 mighty," &c.' 
 
 There was a lively debate as to whether the 
 Church of England should be called ' Protestant.' 
 The Lower House rejected the term as ' equivocal,' 
 * since Socinians,' &c., were so designated, and it 
 was dropped accordingly. In my humble opinion the 
 Church of England has done wisely in refusing to 
 admit the term ' Protestant ' as entering into the 
 definition of her claims. It is a negative term, 
 and things are properly defined by their properties, 
 not by their accidental negations. ' The Protestant 
 faith ' is a contradiction in terms. The note of faith 
 is * I believe ; ' of Protestantism, * I do not believe.' 
 It is a grievous mistake to place the essence of a 
 Church in the negation of something which it 
 
THE OKNAMENTS EUBEIG 359 
 
 repudiates, and thus tie its life to the existence of 
 error. To tell me that a man is a ' Protestant ' is 
 to tell me absolutely nothing more about his religious 
 opinions than that he is not a Eoman Catholic. It 
 is a definition which embraces every man who is 
 not a Eoman Catholic ; not only orthodox Christians 
 but Socinians, Mormons, Comtists, Agnostics, and 
 even Atheists. Every Church is Protestant in so 
 far as it protests against error, but to fix upon that 
 characteristic as its raison d'etre is an absurdity, 
 and is very bad tactics in addition. The Pope and 
 Cardinal Vaughan take good care to designate the 
 Church of England as ' Protestant,' while they claim 
 a monopoly of the term ' CathoHc,' and it would be 
 playing into their hands to acquiesce in that position. 
 The Church of England claims to be the Catholic 
 Church of this land, and it is by a true instinct that 
 she has always refused to surrender that title to the 
 amorphous designation of Protestant. It is just 
 because of my loyalty to the Church of England 
 and my opposition to the errors and domination of 
 the Church of Kome that I refuse to call myself by 
 a name which signifies nothing positive, and sur- 
 renders the whole ground of controversy to the 
 Church of Eome. Burke says, with his usual 
 accuracy and sagacity : — 
 
 It is not a fundamental part of the settlement at the 
 Eevolution that the State should be Protestant without 
 any qualification of the term. . . . Our predecessors in 
 legislation were not so irrational (not to say impious) as 
 to form an operose ecclesiastical establishment, and even 
 
360 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 to render the State itself, in some degree, subservient to 
 it, when their rehgion (if such it might be called) was 
 nothing but the negation of some other. This always 
 appeared to me a monster of contradiction and absurdity, 
 . . . The Church of Scotland knows as little of Pro- 
 testantism undefined as the Church of England and 
 Ireland do. She has by the articles of union secured to 
 herself the perpetual establishment of the Confession of 
 Faith, and the Presbyterian Church government. In 
 England, even during the troubled interregnum, it was 
 not thought fit to establish a negative religion ; but that 
 Parliament settled the Presbyterian as the Church 
 discipline ; the Directory as the rule of public worship ; 
 and the Westminster Catechism as the institute of faith.* 
 
 Sir William Harcourt will not, I am sure, im- 
 peach the loyalty or orthodoxy of Edmund Burke. 
 But when he says that Lord Halifax * might as well 
 deny the right of the Crown and Parliament to tax 
 the people ' as deny their right to alter the creed and 
 ceremonial of the Church, he forgets that Crown 
 and Parliament did not claim the right to tax that 
 portion of the people which constitutes the clergy. 
 The clergy taxed themselves in Convocation by 
 constitutional right till they voluntarily resigned 
 that right in the reign of Charles II. And Speaker 
 Onslow, in a note to a passage in Burnet's ' History 
 of his own Times ' (iv. 508), says that in the Act of 
 Parliament which accepted this resignation of right 
 by Convocation, ' there is an express saving of the 
 right of the clergy to tax themselves in Convocation 
 if they think fit.' The origin of the exclusion of 
 
 * • A Letter to Sir Hercules Langrishe, M.P.' Works, iv. 517. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBKIC 361 
 
 the clergy of the Church of England from the House 
 of Commons is the fact of their having a Parliament 
 of their own (Convocation), where they were taxed by 
 their representatives. The Act of 1796 excluding 
 all men in Episcopal orders, so as to get rid of 
 Home Tooke, who had given up his clerical profes- 
 sion, was an unjust and oppressive extension of the 
 old rule. So that Sir "William Harcourt's illustra- 
 tion, instead of being, as he intended it, a reductio 
 ad ahsurdum of Lord Halifax's dictum, in fact 
 confirms it. 
 
 3. My third proposition is that the doctrine which 
 I have laid down on this point derogates in no way 
 from the constitutional supremacy of the Crown 
 in matters ecclesiastical. There is much confusion 
 in the public mind on this subject. The Koyal 
 Supremacy operates within well-defined limits. 
 Henry VIII. extorted from the clergy, after much 
 difficulty, the title of ' Supreme Head of the Church 
 of England,' but with the qualifying clause : ' As far 
 as the law of God allows,' During the first year of 
 Mary's reign the royal writs ran : * Mary, by the 
 grace of God Supreme Head of the Church of 
 England.' After the repeal of the anti-papal legis- 
 lation of her father the title of course became illegal. 
 But Elizabeth would not palter with it in any sense, 
 and in the first statute of her reign, restoring the 
 ancient jurisdiction of the Crown over all estates of 
 the Realm, the title of * Supreme Head of the Church ' 
 was dropped, and that of ' Supreme Governor of all 
 persons and in all causes, ecclesiastical as well as 
 
362 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 civil,' was substituted for it. That has been the 
 legal title of our Sovereigns ever since. And it is a 
 perfectly defensible title even from the point of 
 view of the strictest Churchman. Nor is England 
 the only country where the Sovereign, under what- 
 ever title, exercises powers quite as ample as those 
 covered by the Queen's Supremacy. At least before 
 the Vatican Council there was practically no difference 
 in this respect between England and Continental 
 Catholic countries. What difference the Vatican 
 decrees have made I do not know. Emile Ollivier, 
 who was Prime Minister of the French Government 
 when the Council met, declared afterwards that the 
 proclamation of Papal infallibility was equivalent to 
 separation between Church and State caused by the 
 Pope.^ 
 
 Austria has always been considered very loyal to 
 fche Holy See ; yet the Eoyal Supremacy in Austria 
 is quite as stringent as in England. I remember 
 Dr. Dollinger pointing out to me, immediately after 
 the passing of the Falk Laws in Germany, that they 
 hardly went beyond the scope of the laws of the 
 Austrian Empire ; and any one who reads Count 
 Ferdinand dal Pozzo's ' Catholicism in Austria ' will 
 agree with Dr. Dollinger. Take the following : — 
 
 When any society whatsoever enters into the State 
 its members have a right to the protection of the 
 State, in order to enforce the observance of the con- 
 
 ^ ' Je ne connais pas, depuis 89, d'ev6nement aussi considerable ; 
 c'est la separation de I'Eglise et I'Etat, op6ree par le pape lui- 
 meme.' — L'Eglise et VEtat au Concile du Vatican, i. 399. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 363 
 
 ventions, and all the conditions of the society. If any 
 member be injured in his rights, and, on the other hand, 
 the directors of the society refuse to do him justice, 
 the injured member may apply to the Sovereign, asking 
 the redress of his grievances and administration of 
 justice. The Sovereign, however, ought to grant it in a 
 manner suitable to the nature of the society itself. On this 
 principle are grounded the applications known under the 
 various denominations of a recourse to the yrince — apj^eal 
 ah abusu, &c. They are substantially complaints addressed 
 to the prince or to his tribunals, against the decisions of 
 ecclesiastical superiors, when there is reason to believe 
 that they have misapplied their powers. In the early 
 ages of the Church applications of this description 
 frequently occurred. St. Athanasius, condemned by the 
 Council of Tyre, implored the aid of Constantine. In the 
 same way St. Chrysostom, patriarch of Constantinople, 
 unjustly reprobated by the Synod of the Oak, petitioned 
 the Emperor Arcadius for protection. . . . But were the 
 question to turn on purely ecclesiastical matters, the 
 application to the prince should only be admitted when 
 it is averred that the ecclesiastical judge has somewhat 
 violently injured the applicant in not following the legal 
 rules in his proceedings.^ 
 
 All the subjects of Her Majesty are entitled to 
 this amount of protection from the civil Courts : not 
 members of the Established Church merely, but 
 Nonconformists of every description, including 
 
 * Pp. 118-9, cf. pp. 113, 114, where it is shown that 'the placet 
 royal is required to validate every ecclesiastical decree, whether of 
 discipline or of doctrine, and whether proceeding from local eccle- 
 siastical tribunals or from the Pope.' 
 
 Count dal Pozzo was an eminent Austrian lawyer, who was for 
 a time President of the Imperial Court of Genoa when Northern 
 Italy was under Austrian rule. 
 
364 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Boman Catholics. Two or three instances will prove 
 this. Some years ago a Roman Catholic nun in 
 Ireland was dismissed from her convent and from 
 conventual life altogether. She appealed to the 
 civil tribunals, and her appeal was heard. But a still 
 more striking case is that of Father O'Keeffe, who 
 in the year 1873 appealed to the Court of Queen's 
 Bench in Ireland against an ecclesiastical sentence 
 of Archbishop Cardinal Cullen, who was, moreover. 
 Papal Legate. The Cardinal acted on a Rescript 
 from the Pope in addition to his Legatine authority. 
 The Court differed on some points of the case; but 
 the Chief Justice sustained Father O'Keeffe on all 
 points. 
 
 In the year 1881 some trustees of a chapel in 
 Huddersfield appealed to the civil Court against 
 the election of a minister of the name of Stannard 
 on the ground that he preached false doctrine. I 
 quote from the ' Times ' report : ^ — 
 
 This schedule contained the ten following articles : — 
 ' 1. The Divine inspiration of the Holy Scriptures and 
 their sole authority and entire sufficiency as the rule of 
 faith and practice. 2. The Unity of God with the proper 
 Deity of the Father, of the Word, and the Holy Spirit. 
 
 3. The universal and total depravity of man and his 
 exposure to the anger of God on account of his sins. 
 
 4. The sufficiency of the atonement which was made for 
 sin by our Lord Jesus Christ, and His ability and willing- 
 ness to save all who come to Him for salvation. 5. Free 
 justification by faith, and by faith alone, in the Lord 
 Jesus Christ. 5. The necessity of the Holy Spirit's in- 
 
 ' Feb. 2, 1881. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 365 
 
 fluence in the work of regeneration and also in the work 
 of sanctification. 7. The predestination according to 
 God's gracious purpose of a multitude which no man can 
 number unto eternal salvation by Jesus Christ. 8. The 
 immutable obligation of the moral law as the rule of 
 human conduct. 9. The resurrection of the dead, both 
 just and unjust. 10. The eternal happiness of the 
 righteous, and the everlasting punishment of the wicked.' 
 The principal ground of the plaintiffs' case was that the 
 tone and character of Mr. Stannard's public teaching 
 from the pulpit were not in harmony with this doctrinal 
 standard. 
 
 The High Court of Justice decided in favour of 
 the plaintiffs on the doctrinal question. Other 
 instances might be quoted, both in England and 
 Scotland, of appeals from the ecclesiastical Courts 
 of non -established religious bodies to the secular 
 tribunals. So that the disestablishment of the 
 Church of England would not liberate it at all from 
 the jurisdiction of the Crown through its regular 
 Courts. There is no escape from the Eoyal Supre- 
 macy. The Sovereign is the fountain of justice, 
 and a final appeal must always lie to him where 
 civil rights are concerned. No English Churchman 
 who knows anything about the matter would deny 
 so elementary a proposition, and I do not find it 
 denied in the manifesto of the English Church 
 Union which has stirred Sir William Harcourt's 
 wrath. To deny the authority of the Judicial 
 Committee of the Privy Council in ecclesiastical 
 causes, and to claim, at the same time the restoration 
 of the Church's own Courts, is by no means to deny 
 
366 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the authority of the Crown or the Eoyal Supremacy. 
 Let us consider this. 
 
 The principle for which I am contending is 
 clearly set forth in the grand preamble of the Statute 
 of 1532, as follows : — 
 
 Where, by divers sundry old authorities, histories, and 
 chronicles, it is manifestly explained and expressed that 
 this Eealm of England is an empire, and so hath been 
 accepted in the world, governed by one supreme head 
 and king, having the dignity and royal estate of the 
 imperial crown of the same ; unto whom a body politic* 
 compact of all sorts and degrees of people, divided in 
 terms and by names of spiritualty and temporalty, been 
 bounden and owen to bear, next to God, a natural and 
 humble obedience : he being also institute and furnished by 
 the goodness and sufferance of Almighty God with plenary, 
 whole, and entire power, preeminence, authority, prero- 
 gative, and jurisdiction, to render and yield justice and final 
 determination to all manner of folk, resiants, or subjects 
 within this his Eealm, in all causes, matters, debates, 
 and contentions happening to occur, insurge, or begin 
 within the limits thereof, without restraint or provocation 
 to any foreign princes or potentates of the world : the 
 body spiritual whereof having power, when any cause of 
 the law divine happened to come in question, or of 
 spiritual learning, then it was declared, interpreted, and 
 shown by that part of the said body politic called the 
 spiritualty, now being usually called the Enghsh Church, 
 which always hath been reputed, and also found of that 
 sort, that both for knowledge, integrity, and sufficiency 
 of number, it hath been always thought, and is also at 
 this hour, sufficient and meet of itself, without the inter- 
 meddling of any exterior person or persons, to declare and 
 determine all such doubts, and to administer all such 
 
THE OENAMENTS KUBEIG 367 
 
 offices and duties, as to their rooms spiritual doth ap- 
 pertain : for the due administration whereof, and to keep 
 them from corruption and sinister affection, the king's 
 most noble progenitors, and the antecessors of the nobles 
 of this Eealm, have sufficiently endowed the said Church 
 both with honour and possessions : and the law temporal, 
 for trial of property of lands and goods, and for the 
 conservation of the people of this Eealm in unity and 
 peace, without rapine or spoil, was and yet is adminis- 
 tered, adjudged, and executed, by sundry judges and 
 ministers of the other part of the said body politic, called 
 the temporalty : and both these authorities and juris- 
 dictions do conjoin together in due administration of 
 justice, the one to help the other. 
 
 Here, then, we see drav^n, with sculptured pre- 
 cision, the line of demarcation between the respective 
 domains of the spiritualty and temporalty ; each 
 independent of the other so long as it keeps within 
 its own borders and observes its own laws and pre- 
 scribed rules of procedure ; while the Sovereign is 
 supreme over both, to see that each administers 
 justice fairly and in accordance with the laws 
 belonging to each. This is now the charter of con- 
 stitutional law that regulates the mutual relations 
 of the spiritualty and temporalty, and there could 
 hardly be a more direct contradiction than it offers 
 to Sir William Harcourt's dictum in his letter to the 
 * Times ' of March 9, namely, that the claim of the 
 spiritualty to adjudicate within its own domain ' is 
 a direct denial of the first principles of the English 
 Eeformation, which was the work of the laity for the 
 laity, who also in the tribunals for the final decision 
 
368 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of Church questions have provided for themselves a 
 necessary and adequate safeguard.' 
 
 And the great luminaries of English constitu- 
 tional law have always drawn and emphasised the 
 distinction which Sir William Harcourt dismisses 
 with scorn. It would be difficult to appeal to a 
 greater name in that respect than that of Lord 
 Coke, who says, not as a matter admitting of con- 
 troversy, but as an axiom of law, — 
 
 As in temporal causes the King, by the mouth of his 
 judges in his Courts of Justice, doth judge and determine 
 the same by the temporal laws of England, so in causes 
 ecclesiastical and spiritual . . . the same are to be 
 determined and decided by the ecclesiastical judges 
 according to the King's ecclesiastical laws of this Eealm.* 
 
 And in his Fourth Institute (321) he observes : — 
 
 And certain it is that this kingdom has been best 
 governed, and peace and quiet preserved, when both 
 parties — that is, when the justices of the temporal Courts 
 and the ecclesiastical judges — have kept themselves 
 within their proper jurisdiction, without encroaching or 
 usurping one upon another. And where such encroach- 
 ments or usurpations have been made, they have been 
 the seeds of great trouble and inconvenience. 
 
 The encroachments of the Judicial Committee on 
 the spiritual domain are a striking illustration of 
 this last observation. 
 
 The distinction between the spiritual and temporal 
 jurisdiction is exemplified in various ways. For 
 
 ' Cawdrie's case. 
 
THE OENAMENTS RUBEIO 369 
 
 instance, Convocation is in a manner more indepen- 
 dent of the Crown than ParHament. It is not, as 
 ParHament is, the Sovereign's Council. He is not 
 its head, nor does he open or prorogue it, as he does 
 Parhament. The Primate is its head, and opens 
 and prorogues it, and it is not power but leave that 
 Convocation has to seek for the purpose of making 
 canons ; and its canons remain in being, though 
 without coercive force, without the Boyal assent, 
 which may be given years afterwards ; whereas a 
 bill that has passed both Houses of Parliament 
 ceases to be unless it has received the Royal assent 
 before the end of that session. Again, canons 
 receive the Royal assent in the gross ; Parliamentary 
 bills, one by one. 
 
 The Judicial Committee has itself disclaimed 
 any right to adjudicate on the doctrine or ceremonial 
 of the Church of England. The Court has merely 
 claimed the right, when appealed to, to interpret 
 legal documents according to the principles of law. 
 The Court laid down this rule very plainly in the 
 Gorham case, as the following quotations will 
 show : — 
 
 ' It is not for the Court to decide whether opinions are 
 theologically sound or unsound, but whether such opinions 
 are contrary or repugnant to the doctrines which the 
 Church of EDgland, by its Articles, Formularies, and 
 Eubrics, requires to be held by its ministers. 
 
 ' The Court will apply to the construction of the 
 Articles and Liturgy the same rules which have been 
 long established, and are by law applicable to the con- 
 struction of all written instruments, assisted only by the 
 
 B B 
 
370 THE REFOKMATION SBTTLBMENt 
 
 consideration of such rational or historical facts as may 
 be necessary for the understanding of the subject-matter 
 to which the instruments relate, and the meaning of the 
 words employed, 
 
 * In all cases in which the Articles, considered as a 
 test, admit of different interpretations : Held, that any 
 sense of which the words fairly admit may be allowed, if 
 that sense be not contradictory to something which the 
 Church has elsewhere allowed or required ; and if there 
 be any doctrine on which the Articles are silent or 
 ambiguously expressed, so as to be capable of two mean- 
 ings : Held, that it was intended to leave that doctrine to 
 private judgment, unless the Eubrics and Formularies 
 clearly and distinctly decide it. . . . 
 
 ' The Court has no jurisdiction or authority to settle 
 matters of faith, or to determiiie what ought in any par- 
 ticular to he the doctrine of the Church of England ; its 
 duty extends only to the consideration of that which is by 
 law established to be the doctrine of the Church of 
 England, upon the true and legal construction of the 
 Articles and Formularies.' 
 
 Again : ' This Court, constituted for the purpose of 
 advising Her Majesty in matters which come within its . 
 competency, has no jurisdiction or authority to settle 
 matters of faith, or to determine what ought in any 
 particular to be the doctrine of the Church of England. 
 Its duty extends only to the consideration of that 
 which is by law established to be the doctrine of the 
 Church of England, upon the true and legal consideration 
 of her Articles and Formularies ; and we consider that it 
 is not the duty of any Court to be minute and rigid in 
 cases of this sort. We agree with Sir William Scott in 
 the opinion which he expressed in Stone's Case, in the 
 Consistory Court of London : " That if any Article is 
 really a subject of dubious interpretatio7i, it tvould be 
 
THE ORNAMENTS RUBRIC 371 
 
 highly improper that this Court should fix on one meaning, 
 and prosecute all those who hold a contrary opinion 
 regarding its iiiterpretation.'" ' ^ 
 
 The Judicial Committee, in the Purchas case, 
 quoted this rule of judicial interpretation with ap- 
 probation, and then proceeded immediately to violate 
 it in the most extraordinary manner ; not intention- 
 ally of course, but owing to their entire ignorance of 
 the whole subject with which they had to deal — an 
 ignorance stimulated by very strong unconscious 
 bias. 
 
 What I have now said may suffice to show that 
 in asking for restoration of spiritual Courts for the 
 trial of spiritual causes Churchmen are demanding 
 nothing revolutionary, nothing unreasonable, but, 
 on the contrary, are merely claiming their just rights 
 guaranteed to them by the British Constitution. 
 
 But it may be useful to exemplify this by the 
 case of the Presbyterian Established Church of 
 Scotland. It is, within its own domain, entirely 
 independent of the civil power. After the Koyal 
 Commissioner has formally opened the General As- 
 sembly on behalf of the Sovereign, the Moderator 
 formally opens it on behalf of the spiritualty ; and 
 this dual exercise of jurisdiction is also observed 
 at the prorogation of the Assembly. All the Courts 
 are purely ecclesiastical, and are quite independent 
 of the secular Courts, provided they administer 
 their own laws within the limits of their proper 
 
 ' Brooke's Privy Council Judgments, pp. 1, 2, 35. 
 
 B B 2 
 
372 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 jurisdiction. This has been sometimes disputed on 
 the ground that the lay elders are constituent 
 members of the Courts. But the objection is un- 
 tenable : first, because the elders are appointed 
 entirely by the Church, the Sovereign and the civil 
 power having absolutely nothing to do v^ith it ; 
 secondly, because the elders, if not spiritual persons, 
 are certainly ecclesiastical persons. 
 
 A layman may be an ecclesiastical person in law, 
 his status in that respect depending on the status 
 of the person or body from whom he derives his 
 jurisdiction, and the questions with which he has to 
 deal. A bishop's chancellor is an ecclesiastical judge, 
 though a layman ; and so was the Dean of the 
 Arches. But the Scotch elders are ecclesiastical per- 
 sons for an additional reason. They are a constituent 
 element of the ministry. Their proper designation 
 is not ' lay elders,' but ' ruling elders ; ' and they are 
 set apart for their office at a solemn service in 
 church. Their ecclesiastical character is plainly 
 indicated by the questions put to them before their 
 appointment to their ministry. For example : ' Are 
 you persuaded that the Lord Jesus Christ, the only 
 King and Head of the Church, has therein appointed 
 a government distinct from, and not subordinate, to, 
 civil government ? Are zeal for the glory of God, 
 love to the Lord Jesus Christ, and a desire to save 
 souls, and not worldly interests or expectations, as 
 far as you know from your own heart, your great 
 motives and chief inducements to enter into the 
 office of ruling elder? Have you used undue 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 373 
 
 methods, by yourself or others, to obtain the call of 
 this Church? Do you adhere to your acceptance 
 of the call to become ruling elder of this Church ? 
 Do you engage, in the strength of the grace that is in 
 Christ Jesus, to perform with diligence and faithful- 
 ness the duties of ruling elder, watching over the 
 flock of which you are called to be an overseer, in 
 all things showing yourself to be a pattern of good 
 works, and giving a conscientious attendance upon 
 the meetings of this (Kirk) session, and also of 
 superior Courts when called to sit as a member in 
 them?' 
 
 That in matters of legislation and judicature the 
 estabhshed Church of Scotland is, within its own 
 domain, absolutely independent, is not open to con- 
 troversy : it is a matter of fact. It has no power to 
 alter its authorised formularies without the sanction 
 of Parliament ; but within that frontier it is quite 
 independent. When I was asked by Archbishop 
 Tait to give evidence before the Ecclesiastical Courts 
 Commission in 1883 I w^ent carefully into this ques- 
 tion and consulted competent persons in Scotland, 
 among others Dr. Grub, a learned historian and 
 professor of law in the University of Aberdeen, and 
 Dr. Boyd of St. Andrews C A. K. H. B.'), who held 
 the office of Moderator of the General Assembly; 
 and they all assured me that from a decision of a 
 properly conducted ecclesiastical tribunal in Scotland 
 there is absolutely no appeal. But there is no need 
 to labour the matter, for the point has been judicially 
 decided : for instance, in the case of Sturrock v. Greig. 
 
374 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 In that case Lord Justice Clerk Hope declared as 
 follows : — 
 
 The first section [of the ' Confession of Faith '] an- 
 nounces a great truth of the Church, liable to misappre- 
 hension doubtless, but a doctrine which is the foundation 
 of the whole authority and government of the Church 
 over its members ; that is, that in the matter of disci- 
 pline, whether as to doctrine or evil practice, or non- 
 observance of Church ordinances, the Church is exercising 
 a government through its Church officers, appointed by 
 the Lord Jesus, distinct from the civil magistrates. 
 Whatever questions have been raised as to the wider effect 
 of this declaration, to which I need not now advert, this 
 is undeniable, that in regard to discipline the authority 
 of the Church, as a distinct and separate government, is 
 so derived from that source. To that declaration, as the 
 foundation of the exercise of Church censure over the 
 members of the Church, I think Courts of law must give 
 full effect as much as to any other statutory enactment. 
 It is not our business to consider the truth of that declara- 
 tion ; if it were, I should be prepared to defend it. 
 Neither are we to consider whether it will arm men with 
 alarming power, capable of producing great mischief. 
 The statute has given the remedy in the Courts which it 
 trusted— in the appeals competent to the Superior Church 
 Courts. 
 
 He goes on to say that the Church Courts 'have 
 been trusted as a separate government. The 
 declaration of the authority under which they act 
 assumes that it must be separately administered, 
 free from control, from subjection, or subordination 
 to civil tribunals.' 
 
 The Court went even so far as to decide that — 
 
THE ORNAMENTS RUBRIC 375 
 
 No action for damages will lie against a Church 
 Court of the Established Church for any sentence or 
 judgment pronounced by them in a proper case of disci- 
 pline duly brought before them, regularly conducted, and 
 within their competency and province as a Church Court, 
 even although it be averred that the judgment w^as pro- 
 nounced maliciously and without probable cause. ^ 
 
 So that there is absolutely no remedy if the Eccle- 
 siastical Courts follow their own regular procedure. 
 
 In the case of Lockhart v. The Presbytery of 
 Deer, the four judges of the First Division of the 
 Court of Session laid dow^n the law in similar 
 terms. The Lord President, in delivering judgment, 
 said : — 
 
 We have just as little right to interfere with the pro- 
 ceedings of the Church Courts in matters of ecclesiastical 
 discipline as we have to interfere with the proceedings of 
 the Court of Justiciary in a criminal question.^ 
 
 I may add to these instances a case which Lord 
 Halifax has lately published in the ' Times.' The 
 decision, which was delivered on June 29, 1870, is as 
 follows : — 
 
 A minister of the Established Church in Scotland was 
 suspended by the presbytery of Dunkeld for six months, 
 during which time he was compelled to pay £55 to his 
 assistant for discharging the duties of the cure. The 
 General Assembly, which is the supreme and final Church 
 Court, composed exclusively of ministers and elders, was 
 
 ' The Law of Creeds in Scotland, by A. Taylor Innes. The case 
 of Sturrock v. Greig was in 1849. 
 '^ Ibid. p. 231. 
 
376 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 not satisfied with the decision of the presbytery, and in 
 May 1870 ordered the presbytery to proceed to a fresh 
 trial on the same charge. Upon this the minister prayed 
 the civil Courts to suspend the judgment of the Assembly 
 on the ground that the Assembly had exceeded its juris- 
 diction. The Court of Session, however, held that the 
 proceeding complained of being within the exclusive 
 jurisdiction of the Church Courts, it had no power to 
 review them. The following were the decisions of the 
 judges : — 
 
 It appears to the Lord Ordinary that the whole matter 
 was a question of ecclesiastical law and procedure, of 
 which it was the exclusive province of the General 
 Assembly to judge, and with which the Court of Session 
 had no right to interfere. If the Court were to do so it 
 would simply be reviewing the proceedings of the supreme 
 Ecclesiastical Court. 
 
 The Lord Justice Clerk : Within their spiritual pro- 
 vince the Church Courts are as supreme as we are 
 within the civil, and, as this is a matter relating to the 
 civil discipline of the Church and solely within the cogni- 
 sance of the Church Courts, I think we have no power to 
 interfere. 
 
 Lord Cowan : I am of the same opinion. The 
 Assembly is the supreme tribunal in ecclesiastical offences, 
 whether attaching to the morality of ministers or to 
 alleged heretical opinions. I repudiate the idea of a 
 civil Court being entitled to overrule the deliverances of 
 the Assembly in matters of that kind. It may be that 
 incidentally and necessarily the civil interests of the 
 clergyman may be affected. Every such judgment pro- 
 nounced by the Ass3mbly has necessarily that effect, but 
 because the civil interests of the man found guilty of an 
 offence may be affected, is that any reason for the civil 
 Courts interfering? By no means. The procedure 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 377 
 
 having regard to offences cognisable by the Church 
 Courts, and to be followed, on conviction, by ecclesiastical 
 pains and penalties, the Church Courts had supreme and 
 exclusive jurisdiction. 
 
 Lord Benholme : Within their own department the 
 law of the land gives the Assembly an exclusive and final 
 jurisdiction. The General Assembly is the supreme 
 Ecclesiastical Court in Scotland. 
 
 How mild, after all this, seems the denial of the 
 English Church Union that Crown and Parliament 
 have a ' right to determine the doctrine, discipline, 
 and ceremonial of the Church of England ' ! That 
 dictum has been in force in Scotland for centuries, 
 and with the best results all round. Justice has 
 been so administered in the Ecclesiastical Courts 
 as to give at least as much satisfaction as the 
 decisions of the secular tribunals. Yet Lord 
 Halifax is, in Sir William Harcourt's opinion, an 
 ' ecclesiastical Jack Cade ' because he claims for 
 the Church of England what the Constitution has 
 guaranteed to her, and what we see in operation in 
 Scotland without any of those evils and dangers 
 which our Cassandras on this side of the Tweed 
 threaten as the result of restoring to the Church 
 the jurisdiction of which she has been deprived, in 
 violation of that very Keformation Settlement to 
 which those who wish to cripple her energies so 
 loudly appeal. 
 
 If, indeed, the Judicial Committee had proved 
 itself a competent tribunal, and given general satis- 
 faction in dealing with ecclesiastical questions, the 
 
378 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 flaw in its origin and title might have been forgotten 
 or condoned. For Englishmen are patient of 
 anomalies and irregularities as long as they work 
 well in practice. But of all the Courts that have 
 ever dispensed justice in England none, I venture to 
 think, has proved itself so entirely incompetent as 
 the Judicial Committee has done in adjudicating 
 upon ecclesiastical questions. Ignorance and un- 
 conscious bias have presided over its judgments in a 
 degree which is hardly credible to those who have 
 not examined its deliverances in detail. And the 
 result is that their Lordships have landed us in 
 chaos. Their decisions, like the pots in the fable 
 that went sailing down the stream, crack each other. 
 It is impossible to obey one judgment without 
 violating another. They are judgments of policy, 
 not of law, and vary with the passion or prejudice 
 of the occasion and the popular strength at the back 
 of the impugned doctrines or practices. It is this, I 
 believe, even more than its secular character, which 
 has so discredited the decisions of the Judicial 
 Committee. That is an indictment which ought not 
 to be made against an august tribunal without proof. 
 I proceed, therefore, to give my proof. 
 
 The . First Prayer Book of Edward VI. has 
 the following Eubric in the beginning of the Com- 
 munion Office : — 
 
 Upon the day, and at the time appointed for the 
 administration of the Holy Communion, the priest that 
 shall execute the holy ministry shall put upon him the 
 vesture appointed for that ministration, that is to say, a 
 
THE ORNAMENTS RUBRIC 379 
 
 white albe plain, with a vestment or cope. And where 
 there be many priests or deacons, then so many shall be 
 ready to help the priest in the ministration as shall be 
 requisite, and shall have upon them likewise the vestures 
 appointed for their ministry, that is to say, albes with 
 tunioles. 
 
 The Second Prayer Book of Edward expunged 
 this Kubric and substituted the following : — 
 
 And here is to be noted that the minister at the time 
 of the Communion, and at all other times in his ministra- 
 tion, shall use neither alb, vestment, nor cope ; but being 
 archbishop or bishop, he shall have and wear a rochet, 
 and being a priest or deacon, he shall have and wear a 
 surplice only. 
 
 Thus we see that when Parliament — I have 
 discussed elsewhere the sanction of Convocation to 
 this Book — intended to abolish the old Eucharistic 
 vestments, it said so in plain straightforward lan- 
 guage which anybody could understand. 
 
 Both the Prayer Books of Edward w^ere abolished 
 by Mary's legislation, and when Elizabeth came to 
 the throne she was most anxious to restore the First 
 Prayer Book of Edward and retain the ancient 
 ceremonial. Failing to carry her point so far, she 
 appointed a small company of divines to revise 
 Edward's Second Book under the presidency of 
 Parker, who, however, was absent most of the time 
 on account of illness. The Puritan element was 
 represented by Sandys. Secretary Cecil, doubtless 
 by instruction from the Queen, sent a series of 
 
380 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 suggestions to the committee, including the follow- 
 ing :— 
 
 Whether such ceremonies as were lately taken away 
 by King Edward's [Second] Book might not be resumed, 
 not being evil in themselves ? Whether the image of the 
 cross were not to be retained? Whether processions 
 should not be used ? Whether, in the celebration of the 
 Communion, priests should not use a cope beside a 
 surplice ? ' 
 
 This points to the direction in which the Queen 
 desired that alterations should be made. The divines, 
 however, did not act on these suggestions. They 
 left the Kubric forbidding the vestments. But the 
 Queen refused to sanction the revised book until 
 provision was made for the ' ornaments ' abolished 
 by the Book of 1552. The following clause was 
 therefore inserted into the Act of Uniformity which 
 legalised the revised Prayer Book : — 
 
 Provided always, and be it enacted, that such orna- 
 ments of the Church and of the ministers thereof shall 
 be retained and be in use as was 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 appointed and 
 authorised under the Great Seal of England for causes 
 ecclesiastical, or of the metropolitan of this realm. And 
 also that if there shall happen any contempt or irreverence 
 to be used in the ceremonies or rites of the Church, by 
 the misusing of the orders appointed in this book : the 
 
 ' Strype's Ann. vol. i. pt. i. pp. 122-3. 
 
THE OENAMENTS RUBEIC 381 
 
 Queen's Majesty may, by the like advice of the said Com- 
 missioners, or metropohtan, ordain and publish such further 
 ceremonies or rites as may be most for the advancement 
 of God's glory, the edifying of the Church, and the due 
 reverence of Christ's holy mysteries and sacraments. 
 
 In a contemporary Latin translation of this Act 
 of Uniformity the first sentence of this clause is 
 rendered :— 
 
 ' Provisum atque statutum sit, quod talia ecclesiastica 
 ornamenta et ministrorum ejusdem conservabuntur, et 
 Usui subservient, quemadmodum mos erat in hac ecclesia 
 Anglicana ex auctoritate Parliamenti in anno secundo 
 Regni Eegis Edwardi Sexti,' 
 
 ' As v^as the custom in this Church of England * 
 makes rather better sense than the English Version, 
 and may be taken as the contemporary interpreta- 
 tion. 
 
 There is a slight verbal difference, but no differ- 
 ence of meaning, between the language of the 
 statute and the language of the Kubric of Elizabeth's 
 Prayer Book, which is as follows : — 
 
 And here is to be noted, that the minister at the time 
 of the Communion, and at all other times in his ministra- 
 tion, shall use such ornaments in the Church as were in 
 use by authority of Parhament in the second year of the 
 reign of King Edward VI., according to the Act of 
 Parliament set in the beginning of this book. 
 
 To any mind, not blinded by prejudice, and 
 fairly acquainted with the history of the period, both 
 Rubric and Statute are quite plain and unambiguous. 
 
382 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 The Statute reserved the right to enforce, as circum- 
 stances permitted, the full ritual of the second year 
 of Edward VI. That was impracticable for the 
 present, but a way was left open for it. It was 
 ' further ceremonies or rites ' that the Queen con- 
 templated, not any prohibition of those legalised by 
 the Act. This is plainly the meaning of the ' other 
 order ' for which the Act of Uniformity makes 
 provision, and this natural interpretation of the Act 
 is corroborated by a mass of external evidence, as I 
 shall prove presently. 
 
 The Long Parliament abolished the Ornaments 
 Eubric on the very ground iihat it kept in legal being 
 the Eubric of the Book of 1549, which prescribed the 
 Eucha^istic vestments. At the Kestoration Con- 
 vocation and Parliament restored the Ornaments 
 Eubric, slightly altered, although warned by the 
 Puritans that it would * bring back ' the vestments ; 
 and it now reads as follows : — 
 
 And here is to be noted, that such ornaments of the 
 Church, and of the ministers thereof, at all times of their 
 ministration, shall be retained and be in use, as were in 
 the Church of England, by the authority of Parliament, in 
 the second year of the reign of King Edward the Sixth. 
 
 The Act of Uniformity which ratified this 
 Eubric says nothing about 'other order.' This is 
 the last statutory pronouncement on the subject, 
 and it is obvious, on all recognised rules of interpre- 
 tation, that if any previous enactment of any kind 
 comes into collision with our present Eubric, that 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBRIC 383 
 
 enactment is ipso facto repealed. When the lan- 
 guage of a statute is plain it must be construed 
 literally. This has been declared so often from the 
 Bench that it must be taken as an axiom of legal 
 interpretation. In Edrick's Case the judges said : — 
 
 ' They ought not to make any construction against 
 the express letter of the Statute ; for nothing can so 
 express the meaning of the makers of the act as their 
 own direct words, for iiidex animi — sermo. And it would 
 be dangerous to give scope to make a construction in any 
 case against the express words, when the meaning of the 
 makers doth not appear to the contrary, and when no 
 inconvenience will therefrom follow, and therefore a 
 verbis legis 7i07i est recedendum' ' In fact,' says Stephens, 
 'when the Legislature has used words of a plain and 
 definite import, it would be very dangerous to put upon 
 them a construction which would amount to holding that 
 the Legislature did not mean what it has expressed. The 
 fittest in all cases where the intention of the Legislature is 
 brought into question is to adhere to the loords of the 
 Statute, construing them according to their nature and 
 import in the order in which they stand in the Act of 
 Parliament.' 
 
 'The good expositor,' says Lord Coke, 'makes every 
 sentence have its operation to suppress all the mischiefs ; 
 he gives effect to every word in the Statute. He does 
 not construe it so that anything should be vain and 
 superfluous, nor yet makes exposition against express 
 words ; for viperina est expositio qucB corrodit viscera 
 textus {PoivUer's Case, 34), but so expounds it that 
 one part of the x\ct may agree with the other, and all 
 may stand together. But the best expositors of all Acts 
 of Parliament in aU cases, are the Acts of Parliament 
 themselves, by construction and conferring the parts of 
 
384 THE REFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 them together : optima statuti interpretatrix est {pmnihus 
 particulis ejusdem inspectis) ipsum statutu7n.' • 
 
 The Judicial Committee acted on this recognised 
 rule of legal interpretation in the case of Liddell v. 
 Westerton. The question before the Court was the 
 ornaments of the Church, including altar vestments. 
 Eeferring to the First and Second Prayer Books of 
 Edward VI. the Court said : — 
 
 The Queen was in favour of the First, but she was 
 obliged to give way, and a compromise was made, by 
 which the services were to be in conformity with the 
 Second Prayer Book, with certain alterations ; but the 
 ornaments of the Church, whether those worn or those 
 otherwise used by the minister, were to be according to 
 the First Prayer Book. 
 
 Then the Court quotes the clause on ecclesiastical 
 ornaments in the Uniformity Act of 1559, and says 
 that ' the Rubric to the new Prayer Book ' was 
 ' framed to express the same thing.' The Court 
 then proceeds : — 
 
 It will be observed that this Rubric does not adopt 
 precisely the language of the Statute, but expresses the 
 same thing in other words. The Statute says * such 
 ornaments of the Church and of the ministers thereof 
 shall be retained and be in use ; ' and the Rubric, * that 
 the minister shall use such ornaments in the Church.' 
 The Rubric to the Prayer Book of January 1, 1604, adopts 
 the language of the Rubric of EUzabeth; but they all 
 obviously mean the same thing, that the same dresses 
 
 ' Bonhayii's Case. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 385 
 
 and the same utensils or articles which were used under 
 the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. may still be used. 
 
 This is in accordance with law, grammar, and 
 common sense. And the Court was a strong one, 
 consisting of the Lord Chancellor (Cranworth) ; 
 Lord Wensleydale ; the Chancellor of the Duchy of 
 Cornwall (Mr. Pemberton Leigh) ; Sir John Patte- 
 son ; Sir William Maule ; Archbishop Sumner ; 
 Bishop of London (Tait). In the Purchas and 
 Kidsdale cases, which gave a directly contrary 
 decision, the Judicial Committee feJt that the 
 Liddell v. Westerton judgment was an awkward 
 obstacle in their way, and they tried to surmount 
 the difficulty by alleging that the question of the 
 minister's vestments was not before that Court. But 
 that is a sophism. The question of altar vestments 
 is in pari materia with ministerial vestments, and 
 the Court of 1857 said so expressly when it affirmed 
 that ' the ornaments of the Church, whether those 
 worn, or those otherwise used by the minister, were 
 to be according to the Pirst Prayer Book.' There is 
 no doubt about it, and nothing but the imperious 
 exigencies of a foregone conclusion could have 
 induced a Court of Justice to take refuge in so 
 manifest a fallacy as that perpetrated in the Purchas 
 and Kidsdale cases. 
 
 And now let us come to close quarters with the 
 decisions in the Purchas and Kidsdale cases. These 
 two Courts reversed the plain meaning of the 
 Rubric ol 1662. They deliberately changed an 
 
 c c 
 
386 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 injunction into a prohibition. The Eubric, it is 
 admitted on all hands, taken by itself, orders the 
 use of the Eucharistic vestments. The Court, in 
 the Eidsdale case, frankly admitted this. How, 
 then, did that Court, following the decision in the 
 Purchas case, manage to turn the Kubric upside 
 down and make it mean precisely the contrary of 
 what it plainly says ? The following is the answer 
 as given by the Court in the Purchas case : — 
 
 The vestment, or cope, alb, and tunicle, were ordered 
 by the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. They were 
 abolished by the Prayer Book of 1552, and the surplice 
 was substituted. They were provisionally restored by 
 the Statute of Elizabeth, and by her Prayer Book of 1559. 
 But the Injunctions and x\dvertisements of Elizabeth 
 established a new order within a few years from the 
 passing of the Statute, under which chasuble, alb, and 
 tunicle disappeared. The Canons of 1603-4, adopting 
 anew the reference to the Eubric of Edward VI., 
 sanctioned in express term's all that the Advertisements 
 had done in the matter of the vestments, and ordered the 
 surijlice only to be used in parish churches. The revisers 
 of our present Prayer Book, under another form of words, 
 repeated the reference to the second year of Edward VI., 
 and they did so advisedly, after attention had been called 
 to the possibility of a return to the vestments. 
 
 Their Lordships accordingly declared the Eucha- 
 ristic vestments illegal. 
 
 Keally this is enough to take one's breath away. 
 Will the reader try to realise what it means '? The 
 Queen, as we have seen, refused peremptorily to 
 sanction the Second Prayer Book of Edward unless 
 
THE OENAMENTS RUBKIC 387 
 
 certain alterations were made in it, and especially a 
 provision for the restoration of the entire ritual and 
 ecclesiastical ornaments of the second year of 
 Edward. She carried her point. The Rubric for- 
 bidding the Eucharistic vestments was expunged 
 from the Prayer Book of 1552. Their legality was 
 restored by a special clause in the Act of Uniformity, 
 and by a new Rubric displacing the prohibitory one 
 of 1552. Now why, in the name of reason and 
 common sense, should the Queen take all this 
 trouble, and put forth all her Tudor determination 
 of purpose, if her intention all the while was to 
 prohibit the vestments ? They were prohibited by 
 a distinct Rubric in the Prayer Book which she 
 restored. Why not leave the prohibition? Why 
 insist, on the contrary, on substituting another 
 Rubric reversing the prohibition ; and, not satisfied 
 with that, inserting a special clause in the Statute 
 to legalise the vestments ; if her sole purpose was to 
 get rid of them altogether? Elizabeth was a very 
 able woman, with a will of iron. If we are to recog- 
 nise this exhibition of Privy Council law as accurate, 
 we must reverse the judgment of history and pro- 
 nounce Elizabeth to be little better than a fool — one 
 of those spoilt vacillating sovereigns who change 
 their minds from day to day for the mere love of 
 change, or out of what the Americans call * sheer 
 cussedness.' She makes a tremendous fuss and 
 braves powerful opposition to restore the Eucharistic 
 vestments, and all for the purpose of giving herself 
 statutory power to undo what she had done ! That 
 
 c c 2 
 
388 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 is what the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council, 
 not in the cynical spirit of the old augurs, but 
 calmly, deliberately, and with all the honesty of 
 religious zealots, ask us to believe ! Credat Judceus 
 Apella ; non ego. Nor am I singular in my incredu- 
 lity. The Purchas judgment has been raked and 
 riddled by legal criticism. I quote the following 
 from a powerful pamphlet by Justice Sir John 
 Taylor Coleridge, one of the ablest and most 
 cautious judges who ever adorned the bench : — 
 
 The Act of Uniformity [which covers the Ornaments 
 Eubric] is to be construed by the same rules exactly 
 as any Act passed in the last Session of Parliament. 
 The clause in question (by which I mean the Eubric in 
 question) is perfectly unambiguous in language, free from 
 all difficulty as to construction ; it therefore lets in no 
 argument as to intention other than that which the words 
 themselves import. There might be a seeming difficulty 
 in fact, because it might not be known what vestments 
 were in use by authority of Parliament in the second 
 year of King Edward VI. ; but this difficulty has been 
 removed. It is conceded in the Eeport that the vest- 
 ments, the use of which is now condemned, were in use 
 by authority of Parliament in that year. Having that 
 fact, you are bound to construe the Eubric as if those 
 vestments were specifically named in it, instead of being 
 only referred to. If an Act should be passed to-morrow 
 that the uniform of the Guards should henceforth be 
 such as was ordered for them by authority, and used by 
 them in the 1st Geo. I., you would first ascertain what 
 that uniform was ; and, having ascertained it, you would 
 not inquire into the changes which may have been made, 
 many or few, with or without lawful authority, between 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 389 
 
 the 1st Geo. I. and the new Act. All these that Act, 
 specifying the certain date, would have made wholly 
 immaterial. It would have seemed strange, I suppose, 
 if a commanding officer, disobeying the statute, had said 
 in his defence^* There have been many changes since 
 the reign of George I. ; and as to " retaining," we put a 
 gloss on that, and thought it might mean only retaining 
 to the Queen's use ; so we have put the uniforms safely in 
 store.' But I think it would have seemed more strange 
 to punish and mulct him severely if he had obeyed the 
 law, and put no gloss on plain words. ^ 
 
 There we have the true judicial mind, construing 
 a legal document according to the recognised canons 
 of legal interpretation. The Long Parliament made 
 a clean sweep of the Church and Prayer Book, 
 and at the Restoration Convocation and Parliament 
 restored the Ornaments Eubric, Advertisements and 
 Injunctions of Elizabeth notwithstanding, and in 
 spite also of the remonstrance of the Puritans, 
 who declared, with the tacit approval of the bishops, 
 that the restoration of the Eubric would mean the 
 legal restoration of the vestments. The present 
 Rubric therefore has absolutely no legal connection 
 whatever with anything that happened in the reign 
 of Elizbeth or any other reign. There is no reference 
 in it, directly or by implication, to anything that 
 went before it except the legal ritual and ecclesiastical 
 ornaments of the second year of Edward VI. ; and 
 the Act of Uniformity, which sanctioned it, says 
 nothing about any * other order.' The Rubric stands 
 
 ' Remarks on Beport of Judicial Committee, pp. 7, 8, 
 
390 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 by itself, clear, unambiguous, and forbidding any 
 construction in discord with its plain grammar. The 
 construction put upon the Eubric by the Court in 
 the Purchas case is an outrageous violation of all 
 the principles of British law and all the dictates of 
 common justice. Instead of interpreting the exist- 
 ing law, the Court, under cover of its judicial pre- 
 rogative, acted the part of a legislature, repealing 
 one law and substituting another. And nobody is 
 more quick- sighted to detect this lawless raiding by the 
 judicature into territory not its own than the judges 
 themselves when they are free from the influence of 
 a domineering bias. One of the judges in the Ridsdale 
 case was the late Lord Selborne ; a highly honourable 
 and devout man, and enjoying the highest reputation 
 as a lawyer. He gave the sanction of his name, 
 with entire conscientiousness, to one of the grossest 
 miscarriages of justice ever perpetrated by a British 
 Court of law. And this he did in violation of rules 
 and principles which he was himself foremost to 
 defend when his prejudices were not strongly enlisted 
 against the still small voice of justice. Let me give 
 an example. It will be in the recollection of some 
 of my readers that Mr. Bradlaugh was prosecuted by 
 amember of the House of Commons in order to recover 
 damages for his sitting and voting after a majority of 
 the House had refused to let him either aflirm or take 
 the oath. The question came before the House of 
 Lords for judgment on April 9, 1883, and the judg- 
 ment was delivered by Lord Selborne, who was then 
 Lord Chancellor. I extract the following from the 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBKIC 391 
 
 report of the ' Daily News ' of the following 
 day: — 
 
 The Lord Chancellor, having referred at length to the 
 authorities bearing upon the point, said the argument at 
 the bar had satisfied him that the grounds upon which 
 the judgment appealed against rested could not be 
 maintained. The language of the Act afforded no 
 sufficient ground for implying an intention on the part of 
 the Legislature to give the common informer as well as 
 the Crown a right of action for the penalty. One of his 
 noble and learned friends, he understood, was of opinion 
 that though the words of the xAct of 1866 might not by 
 themselves afford any sufficient ground for such an 
 intention, it might, nevertheless, be implied according to 
 the true principles applicable to the construction of the 
 statute. He (the Lord Chancellor) thought it would be 
 legislation and not interpretation to import into the Act, 
 by any inference from repealed enactments, provisions 
 . . . which the Act itself did not contain. 
 
 This is sound law, and is a direct, though uncon- 
 scious, condemnation of the Kidsdale and Purchas 
 judgments. 
 
 But not only are those judgments a violation of the 
 rules of law and grammar ; they are in direct conflict 
 with the plain facts of history in addition. The 
 theory on which they are based is that the phrase, 
 * until other order,' in the Act of Uniformity, means 
 that the ritual of Edward VI. 's second year was now 
 restored until the Queen saw her way to the aboli- 
 tion of it. I have already remarked on the unspeak- 
 able absurdity of that assumption ; but let us grant it 
 for the sake of argument. Certain Advertisements 
 
392 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLJBMENT 
 
 were drawn up in 1564 by Archbishop Parker and 
 some of the bishops, on the initiative of the Queen ; 
 and in these Advertisements the use of the cope was 
 made imperative in cathedral and collegiate churches 
 at the celebration of the Eucharist. The Purchas 
 judgment says, by a characteristic blunder, that 
 this applied only to high festivals. Anxious to 
 restrict the use of the vestments as much as possible, 
 theil: Lordships eagerly snatched at any plausible 
 excuse that would enable them to carry out their 
 purpose. The Advertisements say nothing about 
 high festivals ; but the 24th Canon says : — 
 
 In all cathedral and collegiate churches the Holy 
 Communion shall be administered upon principal feast- 
 days ; sometimes by the bishop, if he be present, and 
 sometimes by the dean, and at some time by a canon 
 or prebendary, the principal minister using a decent 
 cope, and being assisted with the gospeller and epistler 
 agreeably, according to the Advertisements published 
 Anno 7 EHz. 
 
 From this the Court inferred that the cope is 
 lawful ' upon principal feast-days.' If the judges 
 had taken the trouble to carry their research as far 
 as the next Canon, they would have read : ' In the 
 time of Divine Service and Prayers in all cathedral 
 and. collegiate churches, when there is no Com- 
 munion, it shall be sufficient to wear surplices.' 
 This clearly implies that the cope was to be used 
 whenever the Holy Communion was administered. 
 What these two Canons show, and also the Advertise- 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 393 
 
 merits, is the lax observance of the Kubrics, both in 
 the time of EHzabeth and in that of James I. And 
 the Canons and Advertisements at the same time 
 shatter another of the dogmatic blunders with 
 which the judgment bristles. Here it is : — 
 
 Their Lordships remark further that the doctrine of a 
 minimum of ritual, represented by the surplice, with a 
 maximum represented by the mediaeval vestments, is 
 inconsistent with the fact that the Eubric is a positive 
 order, under a penal statute, accepted by each clergyman 
 in a remarkably strong expression of ' assent and consent,' 
 and capable of being enforced with severe penalties. 
 
 It is really trying to the temper to criticise 
 calmly a judgment which positively revels in igno- 
 rance. When their Lordships indited the words 
 which I have quoted they had the Advertisements 
 and Canons before them. The former say : ' Item, 
 that in cathedral churches and colleges the Holy 
 Communion be ministered upon the first or second 
 Sunday of every month at the least.' The Canon 
 says, ' upon principal feast-days.' And this, more- 
 over, in cathedral and collegiate churches only. It 
 was still rarer in ordinary parish churches. Yet the 
 Prayer Book enjoins a weekly celebration at least. 
 And as to the ' remarkable ' stringency of subscrip- 
 tion, ' capable of being enforced with severe penalties,' 
 let us see what Archbishop Bancroft, who Hved in 
 the reign both of Elizabeth and James, says : — 
 
 How carelessly subscription is exacted in England I 
 am ashamed to report. Such is the retchlessness of 
 
394 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 many of our bishops on the one side, and their desire to 
 be at ease and quietness to think upon their own affairs ; 
 and on the other side such is the obstinacy and intoler- 
 able pride of that factitious sort [i.e. the Puritans], as 
 that betwixt both sides, either subscription is not at all 
 required, or if it be, the bishops admit them so to qualifie, 
 it, that it were better to be omitted altogether. If the 
 best and the learnedest man in Christendom e were in 
 Geneva, and should oppose himself to anything that the 
 Church there holdeth, if he escaped with his life, he might 
 thank God ; but he should be sure not to continue as a 
 minister there. There is no Church established in 
 Christendome so remisse in this point as the Church of 
 England : for, in effect, every man useth and refuseth 
 what he hsteth. Some few of late have been restrained, 
 who had almost raised the land into an open sedition. 
 But also they followed their own fancies, and may not be 
 dealt with withall (forsooth) for fear of disquietness.^ 
 
 Compare this with the rosy picture which the 
 Judicial Committee give us of the Arcadian peace 
 and imiversal obedience to Eubrics in the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries. The Puritans of that 
 time knew better, and so, to their dire distress and 
 discomfort, did the bishops who tried to extort from 
 them a very slender minimum of rubrical obser- 
 vances. 
 
 But what was the purpose of the Advertisements? 
 There was a maxim in the Koman law, which, by 
 the way, is commonly misunderstood, as if it meant, 
 ' What's the use ? ' When a Koman judge washed 
 to find a clue to the intention of an act, he asked Cui 
 
 • Survey of the Pretended Holy Diacipline^ p. 249. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBRIC 395 
 
 bono ? ' to whose advantage ? who would benefit by 
 it ? ' Who would benefit by the Advertisements ? 
 Against whom were they directed ? The Judicial 
 Committee say that they were directed against those 
 who Wore * the mediaeval vestments ; ' against, that 
 is, the vast majority of the English clergy. There 
 were nine thousand parish priests when Elizabeth 
 ascended the throne, besides other clergy ; and of 
 these all but two hundred at most conformed to 
 the new regime. It was to conciliate this mass of 
 clergy, with the laity in sympathy with them, that 
 Elizabeth insisted on restoring the ritual of the 
 second year of Edward, thus leaving matters to go 
 on without any change in the service of public 
 worship that would much offend the eyes of the 
 usual worshippers. The Advertisements, according 
 to the Judicial Committee, were directed entirely 
 against those quiet country and town clergy who 
 continued to wear the old vestments and practise 
 the old ceremonies under the protection of the Act 
 of Uniformity. The old mode of worship ' was pro- 
 visionally restored,' the Judicial Committee tell us, 
 in order to be immediately put under ban, and thus 
 dash the hopes of the great multitude who had been 
 conciliated by the concession. Yet, marvellous to 
 say, not a cry of distress, not a remonstrance, not a 
 murmur escapes from the menaced and harassed 
 majority, who were the victims of this capricious 
 and mocking cruelty on the part of the Queen. But 
 the ' little flock ' of the returned Puritans, as one of 
 themselves describes them, make the welkin ring 
 
396 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 with their complaints against the restored worship 
 of Edward's second year, and against the enforce- 
 ment of the minimum sanctioned by the Advertise- 
 ments. They evidently never heard of the con- 
 struction put upon the Act of Uniformity and 
 Ornaments Eubric by the Judicial Committee three 
 hundred years afterwards; Let us take a few 
 examples. One of the chief Puritan leaders was 
 George Withers, and his testimony is valuable as 
 showing the view which the Puritans at the time 
 took of the ' other order ' in the Act of Uniformity of 
 1559. This is what Withers says of the state of 
 things on the accession of Elizabeth : — 
 
 The second form of prayers, which Edward left behind 
 him at his death, was restored to the Church. But the 
 ceremonies which, as was above stated, were retained in 
 the Church at the first Eeformation of Edward, are 
 restored under the same name. Power, moreover, 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 newer reforma- 
 tion adopted the round wafer, after the manner of that 
 used by the Papists.^ 
 
 This is an indisputable proof that the ' other 
 order ' of the Act of Uniformity was understood at 
 the time to mean the correction of defects, not the 
 abolition of the legal standard. The wonder is how 
 any one could think otherwise. The Act itself 
 
 > Zurich Letters, Second Series, p. 161. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 397 
 
 expressly provides for the addition of ' further 
 ceremonies or rites ' in the event of ' any contempt 
 or irreverence to be used in the ceremonies or rites 
 of the Church by the misusing of the orders ap- 
 pointed in this book.' As an instance of what the 
 Queen meant by ' other order,' we have her letter, 
 ' given under our signet at our Palace of West- 
 minster, the 22nd of January, the third year of our 
 reign,' and addressed to four of her Commissioners, 
 ' so authorised by our Great Seal,' the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury, Bishop of London, ' William Bil, our 
 Almoner, and Walter Haddon, one of the masters of 
 our requests.' She begins by giving them to under- 
 stand * that where it is provided by Act of 
 Parliament, holden in the first year of our reign, 
 that whensoever we shall see cause to take further 
 order in any rite or ceremony appointed in the Book 
 of Common Prayer,' &c. She enjoins on them to 
 see to 'the comely keeping and order of the said 
 churches, and especially of the upper part, called the 
 chancel/ finding that there were ' great disorders, 
 and the decays of churches, and in the unseemly 
 keeping and order of the chancels and such like.' 
 These disorders the Commissioners are to correct, 
 ' specially that in all collegiate and cathedral 
 churches, where cost may be more probably allowed, 
 one manner to be used ; and in all parish churches 
 also, either the same, or at the least the like, and 
 one manner throughout our realm.' ^ 
 
 ' Strype's Life of Parker, iii. 46, 
 
398 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 This shows what the Queen was aiming at, 
 and what she meant by ' other ' or ' further order.' 
 She restored in law, in spite of Puritan opposition, 
 the order of worship of 2 Edward VI. That was 
 her standard ; but the practice in many places was 
 very different. Immediately on her accession the 
 Puritan party showed their hand, and therefore she 
 prudently secured statutory power to take ' other 
 order ' for the purpose of checking their lawlessness. 
 That is the plain meaning of that clause of the Act, 
 and it is also the meaning of the Advertisements. 
 The letter which I have just quoted is good evidence, 
 for instance, of the enforcement of the cope, with 
 the congruous vestments of the Epistoler and 
 Gospeller. It did not mean that those vestments 
 were thereby made illegal in parish churches, but 
 that they were to be a pattern to parish churches 
 when the latter could afford, or could be prevailed 
 upon to adopt, a higher ritual. Parish churches 
 were to have ' either the same ' as cathedrals, ' or at 
 the least the like.' The cathedrals were to be the 
 models at which parish churches were, as far as prac- 
 ticable, to aim. 
 
 The immediate cause of the Advertisements was 
 a letter addressed by the Queen, on January 25, 
 1564,* to Archbishop Parker, ' requiring him to 
 confer with the bishops of his province, and others 
 having ecclesiastical jurisdiction ; for the redressing 
 disorders in the Church, occasioned by different 
 
 * Strype's Life of Parler, iii, 65. 
 
THE ORNAMENTS RUBRIC 399 
 
 doctrines and rites, and for the taking order to admit 
 none into preferment but those that are conformable.' 
 In this letter she rebukes ' the Primate, and other 
 the bishops of your province with suffrance of 
 sundry varieties and novelties, not only in opinions, 
 but because in external ceremonies and rites there is 
 crept in and brought into the Church by some few 
 persons, abounding more in their own senses than 
 wisdom would, and delighting in singularities and 
 changes, an open and manifest disorder, and offence 
 to the godly, wise, and obedient persons, by diversities 
 of opinions and changes, and specially in the 
 external, decent, and lawful rites and ceremonies to 
 be used in churches.' 
 
 The meaning of this is perfectly plain. The 
 disorders were all caused 'by some few persons, 
 abounding more in their own senses than wisdom,' 
 and setting themselves against 'the external, 
 decent, and lawful rites and ceremonies to be used 
 in churches.' There is no manner of doubt what 
 those were. They were the full ritual of 2 Edward 
 .VI. : Eucharistic vestments, lights at celebration of 
 the Holy Communion, ceremonial use of incense, &c. 
 And the lawlessness of this noisy faction is con- 
 trasted unfavourably with ' the godly, wise, and 
 obedient persons '— that is the nine thousand parish 
 priests who practised the mode of worship enjoined 
 by the Act of Uniformity and Ornaments Kubric, 
 which is admitted even by the Purchas and Eidsdale 
 judgments to have been lawful at the date of this 
 letter of Elizabeth, and for two years afterwards. 
 
400 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 The Queen accordingly ' requires, enjoins, and 
 straitly charges you, being the MetropoHtan, accord- 
 ing to the power and authority which you have 
 under us over the province of Canterbury (as the 
 hke we will order for the province of York) , to confer 
 with the Bishops your brethren, such as be in 
 commission for causes ecclesiastical,' and ' so to 
 proceed by order, injunction, or censure, according 
 to the order and appointment of such laws and 
 ordinances as are provided by Act of Parliament, 
 and the true meaning thereof ; ' and also ' to observe, 
 keep, and maintain such order and uniformity in all 
 the external rites and ceremonies, both for the 
 Church and for their own persons, as by laws, good 
 usages, and orders, are already allowed, well pro- 
 vided, and established.' 
 
 Surely it needs a triple panoply of prejudice to 
 see in these instructions any hint, still less any 
 order, to alter the law and upset the order of worship 
 prescribed by Statute and Eubric. On the contrary, 
 the Primate and his coadjutors are to devise means 
 whereby the lawless clergy may be made to conform 
 to the existing law. The Ornaments Eubric, instead 
 of being condemned as ' provisional,' is upheld as 
 * established.' 
 
 The Queen concludes : — 
 
 And in the execution hereof we require you to use all ex- 
 pedition, that to such a course as this is shall seem neces- 
 sary : that hereafter we be not occasioned, for lack of your 
 diligence, to provide* such further remedy, by some other 
 sharp proceedings, as shall percase not be easy to be borne 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 401 
 
 by such as shall be disordered : and therewith also we 
 shall impute to you the cause thereof. 
 
 Strype has the following note here : — 
 
 This last paragraph was substituted in the room of 
 some other words, which I find written by Cecil's own 
 hand in a former rough draught, which (carrying some- 
 thing in them that might be made use of in favour of those 
 Dissenters) the Queen, I suppose, commanded to be 
 struck out, and the words above inserted in the place 
 thereof. The words of the rough draught were as 
 follows : ' And yet in the execution hereof we require you 
 to use all good discretion, that hereof no trouble grow in 
 the Church ; neither that sach as of frowardness and 
 obstinacy forbear to acknowledge our supreme authority 
 over all sorts of our subjects be hereby encouraged any- 
 wise to think that we mean to have any change of policy, 
 or of the laws already made and established, but that the 
 same shall remain in their due force and strength.' 
 
 Surely this is decisive of the intention with 
 which the Advertisements were framed. The Queen's 
 minister tones down , a little the stringent and 
 menacing language of the Queen, yet enjoins that 
 her Majesty's intentions shall be carried out with 
 such discretion that the lawless clergy shall not be 
 * encouraged anywise to think ' that there is going to 
 be any change of policy ' or of the laws already 
 made, but that the same shall remain in their due 
 force and strength.' But even this is too mild for 
 the Queen. She strikes it out, and inserts in its 
 place a threat of * other sharp proceedings ' against 
 the recalcitrants. 
 
402 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 In obedience to the Queen's commands, says 
 Strype : ^ — 
 
 The Archbishop and some of the other Bishops of 
 the Ecclesiastical Commission proceeded to compile cer- 
 tain Articles, to be observed partly for due order in the 
 public administration of the Holy Sacraments, and partly 
 for the apparel of persons ecclesiastical. These Articles were 
 printed with a Preface this year 1564, by Eeginald Wolf, 
 according to Bishop Sparrow's Collections, and entitled 
 Advertisements. Though by a writing on the backside 
 of the fair copy that was sent to the Secretary, when they 
 were first framed, it seems they were not presently pub- 
 lished nor authorised. For these are the words written 
 upon them by the Secretary's own hand, March 1564, 
 Ordinances accorded by the Archbishop of Canterbury, dc. 
 in his province. These were not authorised nor published. 
 
 Strype proceeds : — 
 
 The matter, I suppose, was this : When these Articles 
 (by Leicester's means no question) were refused to be 
 confirmed by the Queen's Council, the Archbishop, how- 
 ever, thought it advisable to print them under his and the 
 rest of the Commissioners' hands, to signify at least what 
 their judgment and will was ; and so let their authority 
 go as far as it would. Which was probable to take effect 
 with the greater part of the clergy ; especially considering 
 their canonical obedience they had sworn to their Dio- 
 cesans. But because the book wanted the Queen's 
 authority they thought fit not to term the contents thereof 
 Articles or Ordinances, by which name they went at first, 
 but by a modester denomination, viz. Advertisements. 
 
 This was the reason that there is some difference in 
 
 » Strype's Life of Parker, i. 313 
 
THE OKNAMENTS EUBKIC 403 
 
 the Preface thereof, as we have it printed in Bishop 
 Sparrow's Collections from that which is in the MS. copy 
 sent unto the Secretary. That Preface is all the same, 
 but only, whereas in the MS. it ran thus : [The Queen's 
 
 Majesty -hath by the assent of the Metropolitan, and 
 
 with certain other the Commissioners in causes eccle- 
 siastical, decreed certain rules and orders to be used, as 
 hereafter followeth] : in the said Collections we read thus : 
 
 [The Queen's Majesty hath by her letters directed unto 
 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury, and Metropolitan, required, 
 enjoined, and strictly charged, that with assistance and 
 conference had with other Bishops, namely such as be in 
 commission for causes ecclesiastical, some orders may be 
 taken whereby all diversities and varieties among them of 
 the clergy and the people, as breeding nothing but conten- 
 tion, offence, and breach of common charity, and be against 
 the laws, good usages, and ordinances of the realm,^ might 
 be reformed and repressed, and brought to one manner of 
 uniformity throughout the whole realm : that the people 
 may thereby quietly honour and serve Almighty God in 
 truth, concord, unity, peace, and quietness, as by her 
 Majesty's said letters more at large doth appear. Where- 
 upon by diligence, conference, and communication in the 
 same, and at last by assent and consent of the persons 
 beforesaid, these rules ensuing have been thought meet 
 and convenient to be used and followed.] There be also 
 some other small alterations. As the word constitutions 
 in the MS. is changed into temporal orders in the Collec- 
 tions : and positive laws in discipline is changed into rules 
 in some part of discipline, I have also diligently com- 
 pared the printed book with the aforesaid MS. copy, 
 
 * These words in italics, in the published form of the Advertise- 
 ments, as well as the Queen's letter to the Primate, show that the 
 intention was to level up to the standard of the Ornaments Rubric, 
 not to level down to a lower standard. 
 
 p D 2 
 
404 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and find them different in many places, and sundry 
 things are left out which are in the copy; the Arch- 
 bishop thinking fit in that manner to publish them, 
 because of their luant of the stamp of authority to oblige 
 persons to the observance of them. 
 
 The difference between the original draught of 
 the Advertisements and the form in which they were 
 published in 1566, here pointed out by Strype, marks 
 the difference between the stamp of authority and 
 the absence of it. The Queen kept on urging the 
 Primate to repress the lawlessness of the Puritans. 
 That well-meaning but weak man, in his turn, 
 implored the Queen and her Council to give the seal 
 of authority to the Episcopal Advertisements. This 
 the Queen and the Council steadily refused to do. 
 The poor Primate complained that he could not 
 enforce the Advertisements on his own authority, 
 especially in London, which was the headquarters 
 and stronghold of the Puritans, and which was under 
 the jurisdiction of a Puritan bishop. 'An ox,' said 
 the distracted Archbishop, * cannot draw more than 
 he can.' Strype says : — 
 
 But all this pains and labour had not a success 
 answerable. The Queen had followed the Archbishop 
 with repeated commands to press the ecclesiastical 
 orders. And she was in such good earnest to have them 
 observed all her kingdom over, that she had now willed 
 the Archbishop of York to declare in his province also 
 her pleasure determinately to have them take place there. 
 But her Majesty's Council was backward to empower and 
 eountenanee our Archbishop in his endeavours for that 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 405 
 
 purpose. This, with the clamour and rage of the dis- 
 senting clergy and their adherents, and the hard names 
 they gave him, quite discouraged the good man. He 
 liked not the work, especially being accompanied with so 
 much severity ; but it was out of obedience to the Queen, 
 who was continually calling upon him, and ordering the 
 Secretary to write to him, to quicken him. But finding 
 his own inability to do her that service she required of 
 him, he very often and earnestly sent to the Secretary, 
 that the Queen's Council might stand by him with their 
 authority. But he could not obtain his desirs.^ 
 
 On April 28, 1566, the Primate wrote a pathetic 
 letter to Cecil, in which he says : — 
 
 The Queen's Majesty willed my Lord of York to de- 
 clare her pleasure determinately, to have the order to go 
 forward. I trust her Highness hath devised how it may 
 be performed. I utterly despair therein as of myself : 
 and therefore must sit still, as I have now done, always 
 waiting either her toleration, or else further aid. Mr. 
 Secretary, can it be thought that I alone, having sun and 
 moon against me, can compass this difliculty? If you, 
 of her Majesty's Council, provide no otherwise for this 
 matter than as it appeareth openly, what the sequel will 
 be, horresco vel reininiscendo cogitare. 
 
 At last the Queen authorised the publication of 
 the Advertisements, after the erasure of every 
 sentence and expression which implied the formal 
 and legal authority of the Sovereign under the 
 * other order ' clause of the Act of Uniformity. 
 The Primate now felt that he could enforce the 
 Advertisements at least upon the ringleaders of the 
 
 ^ Strype's Parker, i. 451. 
 
406 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 lawless Puritan ministers, and he proceeded against 
 them with more rigour, but only with partial 
 success. The Puritans were furious ; but they were 
 quick to mark the difference between the legal value 
 of the Advertisements and documents bearing the 
 legal stamp. For instance, in a letter written by 
 one of the leading Puritans, without date, but 
 evidently after the issue of the Advertisements, the 
 writer says : — 
 
 In what way the Sacraments are disfigured by human 
 inventions will easily appear from the public form of 
 prayer, the royal Injunctions, and the Admonitions, or (as 
 they call them) the Advertisements of the Bishops. 
 
 In brief, then, the state of the case is as follows : 
 On coming to the throne, the Queen made a strenuous 
 effort to restore the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. 
 Failing in this, she had the Eubric against the 
 Eucharistic vestments expunged from the Prayer 
 Book of 1552, with sundry other changes, before 
 she sanctioned the restoration of that Book. More- 
 over, she insisted on the addition of a clause in the 
 Act of Uniformity, restoring in its integrity the rule 
 of public worship in legal use in the second year of 
 Edward YI., and incorporated this, with a slight 
 verbal alteration, in a Eubric prefixed to the new 
 Book. She made these alterations and additions a 
 sine qua non of her sanctioning the Book. And 
 knowing the revolutionary and intractable temper 
 of the Puritans, she took the precaution — being a 
 stickler for law — of giving herself power in the Act of 
 
THE OBNAMENTS RUBRIC 407 
 
 Uniformity to take * other order ' — explained, a few 
 lines later, as adding ' further ceremonies and rites ' 
 —as occasion might require. Under this sanction 
 she published, the following year, under the authority 
 of Eoyal Letters Patent, a Latin version of the 
 Prayer Book, with some changes which brought it 
 nearer the First Prayer Book of Edward VI. ; e.g. 
 the restoration of the Rubric sanctioning the reserva- 
 tion of the Sacrament for the Sick. Every action 
 which she took in virtue of the ' other order ' sanc- 
 tioned by the Act of Uniformity was in the direction 
 of enforcing the law of the Ornaments Eubric. In 
 no single case did she take any action to abridge in 
 any particular the standard of public worship pre- 
 scribed by that Rubric. The lawlessness of the 
 Puritans had at last become so rampant, that the 
 Queen wrote a strong letter to the Primate enjoining 
 him to take action with his suffragans to devise 
 means for curbing this clerical lawlessness of ' a few 
 persons,' and enforcing obedience to the 'established 
 laws.' The Advertisements of 1564 were the result. 
 But the Queen, while urging Parker to action against 
 the Puritans, persistently refused to give to the 
 Advertisements the sanction provided for by the 
 Act of Uniformity. In 1566 she gave an informal 
 sanction to the publication of the Advertisements ; 
 and in consequence of this informality the original 
 title of ' Admonitions ' was altered to ' Advertise- 
 ments,' and every passage and word were struck out 
 which implied legal authority. Thus shorn of legal 
 authority, the Advertisements were published. 
 
408 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Why did the Queen refuse to give legal authority 
 to the Advertisements? There v^ere two reasons. 
 The first v^^as that the Advertisements fell short of her 
 expectation. It is clear from her letter to Parker that 
 she vi^ished him and his colleagues to make the Orna- 
 ments Bubric the standard at v^hich they v^ere to 
 aim. Instead of this they adopted a rule of an ideal 
 maximum sanctioned by the Statute and Kubric — 
 and practised by the vast majority of parish priests, 
 as is evident from their silence — and a realisable 
 minimum, to be enforced on the rebellious minority. 
 The Queen had no objection to their enforcing this 
 minimum rule on their own authority ; but, with an 
 unconsciously prophetic eye to Privy Council law, 
 she refused to give the stamp of legality to anything 
 short of the Ornaments Kubric. 
 
 Her second reason was partly political, and 
 partly personal. Her Council, with their natural 
 aversion to the stirring up of a swarm of Puritan 
 hornets buzzing about their ears, acted on the 
 Melbournean maxim, ' Can't you let it alone ? ' 
 But some members of the Council and powerful 
 courtiers were in sympathy with the Puritans, 
 thinking them the winning side. Preeminent among 
 these was the Queen's favourite, the Earl of 
 Leicester. To him Pilkington, the puritanical 
 Bishop of Durham, made a passionate appeal in 
 favour of toleration for the Puritans.^ Thus the 
 imbroglio ended in the compromise of publishing 
 the Advertisements, with the informal sanction of 
 • Strype's Parker, iii. 69. 
 
THE OKNAMENTS EUBEIC 409 
 
 fche Queen, but without endowing them with the 
 force of legal instruments. Collier says, with strict 
 accuracy, that * the Queen, as was observed, refused 
 to confirm these " Advertisements," though drawn 
 at her direction.' And he adds that ' the '' Advertise- 
 ments " were checked at present by the interposing 
 of the Earl of Leicester, of Knolles, and some other 
 Court patrons of Dissenters.' ^ 
 
 Soames, an expert in the history of the Reforma- 
 tion, says : — 
 
 Hence a formal approval of the Lambeth regulations 
 was found unattainable. Had their tenor been disliked, 
 the proceedings upon them which quickly followed never 
 would have occurred. Elizabeth, however, withheld her 
 name, on the plea that it was unnecessary, the prelates 
 having already sufficient authority to act as she wished. 
 Their position thus became highly difficult and invidious. 
 It is plain enough that any reluctance to act would have 
 been immediately resented at Court, yet all the painful 
 proceedings in which they soon became involved might 
 be colourably represented as chiefly flowing from their 
 own intolerance. . . . This publication [of the Advertise- 
 ments] cites the Queen's letter [to Parker, quoted above] 
 as an authority ; her ministers therefore could not have 
 disapproved it. No signatures, however, are printed but 
 those of the Primate and of the Bishops, Grindal, Cox, 
 Guest, Home, and Bullingham. The original document 
 appears to have been signed by others besides ; but this 
 
 ' Eccl. Hist. vi. 391, 392, 419 ; cf. Strype's Parker, i. 320. ' In 
 the meantime the Archbishop and his fellows of the Ecclesiastical 
 Commission did go on, as far as they could, to reduce the Church 
 to one uniform order, the Queen still calling upon them so to do, 
 reckoning their own authority sufficient.' 
 
410 THE EBFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 is immaterial, as it has none but ecclesiastical authority 
 to plead.' 
 
 I venture to assert, therefore, on the evidence, 
 that the Advertisements had no force whatever in 
 law. And I make that assertion without the 
 slightest bias, and purely in the interest of historical 
 accuracy. For the truth is that the legal status of 
 the Advertisements is entirely irrelevant to my argu- 
 ment, though it is absolutely essential to the case 
 set up by the Purchas and Eidsdale judgments. I 
 have shown that the Advertisements were directed 
 exclusively against the Puritan Nonconformists. In 
 her letter to Parker, already quoted, the Queen 
 draws a pointed contrast between the disobedience 
 of the Puritans and the silent acquiescence of the 
 mass of the clergy in the order of public worship 
 prescribed by the Ornaments Eubric. Whittingham, 
 Dean of Durham, in a long appeal to Leicester, 
 indirectly confirms the distinction thus marked by 
 the Queen. ' Alas ! my lord,' he exclaims, ' that 
 such compulsion should be used towards us, and 
 so great levity towards the Papists. How many of 
 the Papists enjoy liberty and livings which neither 
 hath sworn obedience to the Queen's Majesty, nor 
 yet do any part of duty towards their miserable 
 flocks,' i.e. after Puritan methods. ^ This bears out 
 
 • Elizabethan Religious Hist. pp. 42-3. 
 
 2 Strype's Parker, iii. 83. The relation in which Leicester was 
 with the Puritans is shown by the next paragraph of this letter : 
 ' noble Earl, at least be our patron and stay in this behalf, that 
 we lose not that liberty which hitherto by the Queen's Majesty's 
 benignity we have enjoyed with comfort and quietness.' 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 411 
 
 what I have argued in a previous part of this work, 
 namely, that the Queen tacitly sanctioned all the 
 old ritual, provided the new Prayer Book was 
 accepted. 
 
 It is thus evident, beyond all possibility of doubt, 
 that the Advertisements were directed against the 
 Puritans, and against them alone, and were intended 
 to enforce against them a minimum of ritual,^ namely,' 
 the Eucharistic vestments in cathedral, collegiate, 
 and college churches,^ the surplice in the parish 
 churches, and the prescribed vestments for outdoor 
 wear. In other words, the Advertisements prescribed 
 the low- water mark below which the Puritans must 
 not recede, while leaving the high- water mark where 
 the Ornaments Eubric had left it. This was indeed 
 doing no more than giving a quasi-sanction to exist- 
 ing practice. One of the leading Puritans, writing 
 on August 16, 1563 — that is, more than six months 
 before the Advertisements were heard of — said : ' I 
 am speaking of that round cap and popish surplice, 
 
 ' The Judicial Committee dismissed with scorn the argument 
 that the Advertisements insisted on a minimum of ritual observances, 
 while leaving the legal maximum undisturbed. Yet the Advertise- 
 ments say so in so many words. For instance, the Advertisements 
 insist on the clergy ' reading at least one chapter of the Old and another 
 of the New Testament every day,' and having a monthly celebration 
 of the Holy Communion. If we are to adopt the law of the Judicial 
 Committee we must conclude that it is illegal for the clergy to 
 administer the Holy Communion every Sunday, or to read two chapters 
 of each Testament daily, as the Eubric orders. There is indeed no 
 end to the absurdities in which their Lordships' reasoning would 
 land us. See Collier, Hist. vi. 391. 
 
 ^ In the ecclesiastical language of that day ' collegiate ' embraces 
 college chapels. 
 
412 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 which are now enjoined us, not by the unlawful 
 tyranny of the Pope, but by the just and legitimate 
 authority of the Queen.' ^ That means the authority 
 of the Ornaments Kubric, for there was no other 
 legal authority at the time. In other words, such 
 indulgence was shown to the Puritans, that a 
 minimum of ritual observances was conceded to 
 them, provided they conformed to it loyally. 
 
 It is almost inconceivable, and would be in- 
 credible did we not know it to be a fact, that, 
 on the state of facts now described, two Courts 
 of the highest dignity, and consisting of able and 
 upright men, would in our own time — and in cases 
 which involved penal consequences — deliberately 
 declare that a set of episcopal regulations of the 
 year 1564, which never received legal authority, 
 abrogated a statutory order of the year 1662, which 
 makes no reference whatever to them, or to any 
 other document. The legal rule is that when two 
 statutes are in conflict the later practically abrogates 
 as much of the former as runs counter to it. But 
 here we have — not a statute, but — a sort of episcopal 
 pastoral abrogating an Act of Parliament passed a 
 
 ' Zurich Lett. i. 134. The editor of the English translation of these 
 Letters throws out the following suggestion : ' It may be well, however, 
 to observe that the original word rendered by the term Surplice ap- 
 pears sometimes to have been used by the writers when, according to 
 the Injunctions, the cope, and perhaps some other habits, may have 
 been included or intended ; and, indeed, considerable uncertainty seems 
 to have prevailed as to the occasions on which these vestments were 
 respectively used, as well as to the precise meaning of some of the 
 terms by which they were designated in the original letters ' (vol. ii. 
 Preface, p. ix). 
 
THE OENAMENTS RUBEIO 413 
 
 century later ! Sir William Harcourt stood aghast 
 at the bare idea of the two Primates giving a decision 
 which might not be on all fours with the Purchas 
 judgment. But when he has realised the facts, 
 I cannot help thinking that he will welcome any 
 decision of that kind from any quarter, and that 
 he will, moreover, take the English Church Union 
 and the whole tribe of Eitualists to his bosom for 
 their resistance to judgments which make an epi- 
 scopal pastoral repeal an Act of Parliament enacted 
 a hundred years afterwards. 
 
 I might stop here, for I respectfully claim to 
 have proved that the Purchas and Eidsdale judg- 
 ments are a gross perversion of justice, history, logic, 
 and grammar. The Advertisements gone, their Lord- 
 ships' whole case collapses, and they are left 
 floundering in the deep, like Sindbad and his com- 
 panions when the whale, which they had mistaken 
 for an island, sank beneath them. But it may be 
 instructive to examine briefly some of the reasons, 
 in addition to the Advertisements, which conducted 
 the Court to its extraordinary conclusion. 
 
 * From the passing of the Act of Uniformity,' 
 say their Lordships, ' there is abundant evidence to 
 show that the vestments in question were not used 
 at all.' It is a characteristic of their Lordships, in 
 the two wonderful judgments which I am consider- 
 ing, to make their own ignorance the measure of 
 other people's knowledge. If the assertion were 
 true, it would not avail them. I do not know how 
 far non-user would protect a man from the enforce- 
 
il4 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ment of an obsolete statute against him. The 
 validity of the wager-of-battle law was upheld by 
 the Courts not so long ago ; and the following case 
 occurred in our own time. A man happened to 
 stumble on an old unrepealed statute, in which it 
 was enacted that a tailor who made the buttons of 
 a suit of clothes of the same cloth as the suit could 
 not recover payment. He immediately ordered 
 a number of suits with buttons of the same 
 material, and afterwards refused to pay. The 
 tailor sued him, and the defendant pleaded the 
 statute. The judge made some unpleasant obser- 
 vations on his conduct, but admitted that he had 
 the law on his side. The law was immediately 
 repealed. 
 
 But however the case may stand with regard to 
 the enforcement of an obsolete statute, there is no 
 question at all that obedience to it is not penal. 
 That was the point before their Lordships, and their 
 plea of non-user is a pure irrelevancy. But it is not 
 only irrelevant, it is inaccurate in addition. It was 
 premature on the part of their Lordships to assume 
 that what they did not know did not exist. Let us 
 see. 
 
 The Advertisements, as we have seen, were 
 made applicable to both provinces. In 1570 Grindal 
 was translated to York, and he gives a doleful 
 account of what he found there. Popery was, in his 
 opinion, rampant. York minster seemed to be 
 * another church rather than a member of the rest * 
 of the churches with which he had been familiar. 
 He notes ' three evil qualities in the northern 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 415 
 
 province: great ignorance, much deafness to better 
 [i.e. Puritan] instructions, and great stiffness to 
 retain wonted errors.' So he set himself to purify 
 the minster and other churches from the order of 
 worship and ornaments which he found there. 
 Accordingly he issued Injunctions abolishing rood- 
 screens, albs, tunicles, censers, crosses, candlesticks, 
 images, altars ; the crucifix also, which was to be 
 displaced by the royal arms, or some other 'con- 
 venient -crest.' And the minister was henceforth 
 to be * vested only in a surplice with sleeves,' 
 and to read the prayers from a desk outside 
 the chancel, with his face always turned to the 
 congregation. This was an exhibition of lawless- 
 ness even by the rule of the Advertisements, and his 
 lawless temper soon afterwards got Grindal into 
 trouble. The Queen suspended him for the rest of 
 his life. But Grindal makes some remarkable 
 admissions. Here is one : — 
 
 When the Queen first began to reign, the Popish 
 religion being cast off, she reduced religion to that 
 condition wherein it was while Edward VI. was alive. 
 And to this all the states of the kingdom with full consent 
 gave their voices in the great Council of the nation called 
 the Parliament. The authority of this Council is so great 
 that the laws made therein could not by any means be 
 dissolved, unless by the same that made them. In that 
 form of religion set up by King Edward there were some 
 commands concerning the habits of ministers, and some 
 other things, which some good men desired might be 
 abolished or mended. But the authority of the law 
 hindered them from doing anything that way; yet the 
 law allowed the Queen, with the counsel of some of the 
 
416 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Bishops, to allow some things. But indeed nothing was 
 either altered or diminished {At veto de lege nihil nee 
 mutatum 7iec imminutum est). 
 
 When we bear in mind that this was after the 
 Advertisements, and that Grindal was one of the 
 commissioners who compiled them, and whose sig- 
 nature they bear, his letter proves to demonstration 
 that the Advertisements neither altered nor dimin- 
 ished any part of the Ornaments Kubric. On the 
 other hand, his Injunctions issued in the diocese of 
 York in 1570 prove that the eucharistic vestments 
 were at that time in use there in parish churches as 
 well as in cathedrals. 
 
 Strype tells a story which sounds very modern, 
 and which would have brought down upon Grindal 
 the lash of Sir William Harcourt. A man of the name 
 of Smith told the Archbishop, when he was Bishop of 
 London, * that he would as lief go to mass as to some 
 churches ; and such was the parish church where 
 he dwelt, and that he was a very Papist who 
 officiated there. But the Bishop said that they 
 ought not to find fault with all for a few ; and that 
 they might go to other places.' ^ The present Bishop 
 of London is a good historian, and probably he con- 
 sidered himself safe in courteously giving Mr. 
 Kensit the advice which a Puritan predecessor had, 
 three centuries before, given to a similar Protestant 
 brawler. 
 
 The Court in the Purchas case asserted that its 
 interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric was in 
 
 ' Strype's Grindal pp. 158, 171. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 417 
 
 harmony with the expositio contemporanea ' from 
 the days of Ehzabeth to about 1840.' The fact is 
 precisely the reverse. Scarcely a single writer of 
 eminence during that period can be named who does 
 not assert or assume that the Ornaments Bubric 
 means what it says — that is, that the entire ritual of 
 the second year of Edward has been legally in posses- 
 sion from the year 1559. To refute their Lordships' 
 dictum in detail would need a volume ; but crucial 
 examples will suffice. I have already quoted from a 
 letter written by Withers, a Puritan leader, after the 
 Advertisements. The following quotations show 
 that the vestments and other ritual of Edward's 
 second year were understood to be still legal imme- 
 diately after the bishops, under pressure from the 
 Queen, began to enforce the minimum allowed by 
 the Advertisements. Eeferring to the accession of 
 Elizabeth, Withers writes : — 
 
 The high Parliament of the whole realm was 
 assembled, Popery again cast out, and the second form 
 of prayers, which Edward left behind him at his death, 
 was restored to the Church. But the ceremonies which, 
 as was above stated, were retained in the Church at the 
 first reformation of Edward, are restored under the same 
 name. Power, moreover, 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 newer reformation adopted the round wafer after the 
 pattern of that used by the papists. . . . What must we 
 say when most of them [the clergy] are Popish priests, 
 
 E E 
 
418 THE BEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 consecrated to perform mass ; and the far greater part of 
 the remainder are most ignorant persons, appointed at 
 the will of the people, not to the ministry of the word, 
 but to repeat the office of the day or festival, which 
 almost any child might do without any difficulty.^ 
 
 Here we have the contemporaneous testimony of 
 a leading Puritan to the following facts : (1) that the 
 Legislature of 1559 restored the entire ritual of the 
 second year of Edward VI ; (2) that the Advertise- 
 ments intended to enforce that ritual by ' additional 
 ceremonies * and not to diminish it in any particular ; 
 
 (3) that most of the beneficed clergy were then 
 'popish priests,' and unbeneficed priests whose 
 duty it was ' to repeat the office of the day or festival ; ' 
 
 (4) that this was in accordance with ' the will of the 
 people.' In plain words, the mass of the clergy 
 carried on Divine Service as they did during the 
 reign of Mary, with the same vestments and 
 ceremonies, but using the English Prayer Book. 
 This piece of contemporary evidence is of itself 
 enough to shiver the whole fabric of ignorant 
 assumptions on which the Purchas and Ridsdale 
 judgments are founded. 
 
 Another contemporary Puritan witness is Jerome 
 Zanchius. In a letter to Queen Elizabeth dated 
 from Heidelberg ' Sept. 10, 1571 ' — that is, more 
 than five years after the publication of the Advertise- 
 ments — Zanchius writes : — 
 
 Your most gracious Majesty may believe me that the 
 restoration of such Popish vestments will be a far greater 
 
 ' Zurich Lett. ii. 161, 163. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 419 
 
 evil than may appear at the first glance, even to those 
 who are most sharp-sighted. For I seem to see and hear 
 the monks calling out from their pulpits, and confirming 
 their people in this ungodly religion by your Majesty's 
 example, and saying, ' What ? Why, the Queen of 
 England herself, most learned and prudent as she is, is 
 beginning by degrees to return to the religion of the holy 
 Eoman Church ; for the most holy and consecrated 
 vestments of the clergy are now resumed.' ^ 
 
 In the same letter he stigmatises those * resumed ' 
 vestments as ' the ridiculous and execrable garments 
 of the mass-priests,' 'the sacerdotal vestments in 
 the ministry.' He also objects to * the order about 
 wearing the linen surplice.' Two inferences are 
 fairly deducible from this letter : (1) that Zanchius 
 had no doubt about the legality of the Eucharistic 
 vestments five years after the publication of the 
 Advertisements ; (2) that he clearly understood the 
 difference between this and the enforcement of the 
 surplice as a minimum. * The garments of the 
 ungodly mass-priests,' * the sacerdotal vestments,' 
 * the holy and consecrated vestments,' cannot mean 
 the surplice, and must mean the ordinary Eucharistic 
 vestments. The surplice was not in itself a 
 sacerdotal vestment, nor was it consecrated except 
 when used with the full vestments of the mass. 
 The word ' vestment ' by itself commonly includes 
 the whole Eucharistic suit, and not merely the 
 chasuble. 
 
 In the year 1564, when Archbishop Parker was 
 
 » Zurich Lett ii 343. 
 
 B H 2 
 
420 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 engaged on the Advertisements, he invited the 
 representatives of the Puritans to formulate their 
 objections to the vestments, which they did in 
 categorical form. He replied point by point, and the 
 objections and answers show plainly that all the 
 sacerdotal vestments were in question. For instance : 
 it was objected that the vestments obscured the 
 ministry because by their appeal to the eyes they 
 were an obstacle to the contemplation of spiritual 
 things. The Archbishop replies that the ministry, 
 on the contrary, is made more conspicuous to pious 
 minds by decorous vestments, and he instances the 
 sacerdotal petalon worn by St. John the Evangelist 
 as recorded by Eusebius, and the use of sacrificial 
 vestments by Cyprian.^ 
 
 Parker also canvassed in December of the same 
 year, after he had drawn up the Advertisements, the 
 opinions of Bucer and Alasco, the two leading foreign 
 opponents of the vestments. The latter declared that 
 ' the use of those vestments could not be sanctioned 
 by any Church without impiety.' Bucer stigmatised 
 them as ' like the Aaronic vestments, and of the same 
 
 * Contra usum vesluum argumenta. Eesjwnsiones. 
 
 viii. 
 Ministerium obscurant vestes, quia Non magis quam vestes usitat8e,qui- 
 
 incurrentes in oculos hominum, remoran- bus vuJgus ut plurimum capitur. Eru- 
 tur a contemplatione rerum spiritualium. endi erunt oculi : si quae remorantur 
 
 quovis modo a contemplatione spiritua- 
 lium, penitus tollerentur. Atqui piis 
 conspicuum magis redditur ministerium 
 decora veste. Hinc in ecclesiastica his- 
 toria legimus de vestibus Joannis Evan- 
 gelistae, qui gestavit petalum, seu lami- 
 nam pontificalem. Et Cyprianus dederit 
 birrhum carnifici, dalmaticam vestem 
 dlaconis, et stetit in lineis. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 421 
 
 material, shape, and colour as those used by the 
 Papists ' ^ — a description which cannot possibly apply 
 to the surplice. 
 
 My next piece of evidence is from Sir John 
 Maclean's ' Parochial and Family History of the 
 Deanery of Trig Minor in the County of Cornwall,* 
 Part II., p. 343. The reader will there find an 
 inventory of Church goods a year after the publication 
 of the Advertisements, and two years after they were 
 drawn up and publicly discussed. There we have 
 it on record that the two churchwardens of the 
 parish church of Bodmin gave a voucher for having 
 then * received into their hands and keeping, of the 
 said Nicholas Cory, Mayor, and of all the whole 
 parish aforesaid, to he used aiid occupied to the 
 honour of God, in the same church, from the day and 
 year aforesaid [i.e. the Sth of Elizabeth'] foreward 
 all such goods and ornaments as followeth ; and hath 
 taken upon them and their successors to yield a true 
 reckoning of all the same goods and ornaments and 
 delivery thereof, to make without delay to the said 
 Nicholas Cory and his successors, for the time being 
 Mayor, and to all the whole parish of Bodmin 
 aforesaid, this time twelvemonth.' Among these 
 ornaments, ' to be used and occupied to the honour of 
 God in the same parish church, from the day and 
 year aforesaid ' (i.e. 15G7),are several sets of chasubles, 
 albs, and copes, the use of which, according to the 
 Purchas and Eidsdale judgments, was at the time 
 illegal and highly penal. It will not do to say that 
 
 » Strype's Parker, i. 387, 342. 
 
422 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Cornwall was a long way from London, and the 
 Mayor, churchwardens, and parishioners did not 
 know about the publication of the Advertisements. 
 It did not take a year for news to travel from London 
 to Bodmin ; and, moreover, the existence of the 
 Advertisements was well known all through the 
 previous two years, although the publication of them 
 did not receive the informal sanction of the Queen 
 till 1566. Besides, it would have been the duty of 
 the bishop of the diocese to lose no time in making 
 known to his clergy and churchwardens the change 
 made in the statute law by the Advertisements, if 
 such change had really been made.^ 
 
 Four years later than the Bodmin case — i.e. in 
 1571 — the will of a Somersetshire gentleman of the 
 name of Humphrey Coles, a Justice of the Peace, 
 and therefore presumably acquainted with the law, 
 was proved by the Solicitor-General of the day, who 
 was one of the executors, and of course familiar with 
 the law. Among other things the will says : — ■ 
 
 I will to the churchwardens of the parish church of 
 Corff, in the county of Somerset, to the use of the same 
 church, mid maintenance of Divine Service there, the cope 
 [which, according to the Purchas and Eidsdale judgments, 
 had been for five years illegal in parish churches] of 
 velvet, embroidered, that my loife lent to the parishioners 
 there, and all vestments and other furniture of mine what- 
 
 * The inventory from which I have quoted mentions also the use 
 of ' Jesus' cotes, tormentor's cotes, and devil's cotes.' These belonged 
 to the wardrobe of the Miracle Plays, which continued to be acted 
 long after the Eeformation, generally in the churchyards, but some- 
 times in the churches. 
 
THE OKNAMENTS KUBEIC 423 
 
 soever the churchwardens have, meet for the maintenance 
 of Divine Service there. 
 
 Surely the most ardent worshipper of Privy 
 Council law will not seriously contend that it took 
 five years for the news of the alleged abrogation of 
 the statutory Eubric by an episcopal fiat to reach the 
 county of Somerset. But let us proceed. Skipping 
 over the reign of James, which offers no evidence of 
 importance either way, we come to the year 1641, 
 when a Committee of the House of Lords suggested 
 * whether the Eubric should not be mended, where 
 all vestments in time of Divine Service are now [i.e. 
 in 1641] commanded which were used 2 Edward VI.' 
 The Committee which made this suggestion con- 
 sisted of ten earls, ten bishops (including the learned 
 Ussher), and ten barons, who were assisted by some 
 of the most distinguished divines of the day. Surely 
 no one who is not dominated by a foregone conclu- 
 sion will believe that the Bench of Bishops in 1641, 
 and the most learned men in the kingdom, could 
 have been under the delusion that * all ' the vestments 
 of Edward's second year were then * commanded,' 
 if they had all, except the surplice, been notoriously 
 illegal since 1566. The thing is incredible. In 
 1644 the suggestion of 1641 was carried into effect 
 by an Act of Parliament, which ordained that * no 
 copes, surplices, or superstitious vestments, roods or 
 rood-lofts, or holy-water font, shall be or be any 
 more used in any church or chapel within this realm.' 
 But the * superstitious vestments ' here mentioned, 
 it has been argued, did not mean the chasuble, but 
 
424 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the square cap and tippet. That is nonsense, for 
 the cap and tippet were prescribed for outdoor 
 wear, not for use ' in any church or chapel.' The 
 * copes, surpHces, superstitious vestments ' of the Act 
 of 1644 clearly mean, and are convertible with, the 
 suggestion of 1641, which embraced * all vestments 
 which were used 2 Edward VI.' 
 
 Then came the Eevolution, the overthrow of the 
 Church, and the abolition of the Prayer Book, even 
 in private chapels, under the most cruel penalties. 
 On the restoration of the Church and monarchy the 
 Prayer Book was revised, and was sanctioned, with 
 the present Ornaments Kubric, by Act of Parliament. 
 It is a simple matter of fact that down to the 
 Purchas judgment not one reputable authority can 
 be cited who gives the slightest sanction to the 
 non-natural interpretation of the Judicial Committee. 
 It is not necessary to weary the reader with a 
 catena of authorities in favour of the plain meaning 
 of the Rubric. Let three well-known names suffice. 
 Wheatley's 'Rational Illustrations of the Book of 
 Common Prayer ' is a standard work, which is 
 generally found on the list of books recommended to 
 candidates for Holy Orders. It was published in 
 1722. After enumerating the vestments and other 
 ornaments in use in Edward's second regnal 
 year Wheatley says : ' These are the ministerial 
 ornaments and habits enjoined by our present 
 Rubric, in conformity to the first practice of our 
 Church immediately after the Reformation.' He 
 then quotes the Rubric of the Book of 1552, which 
 
THE OENAMENTS RUBEIC 425 
 
 abolished all vestments but the surplice, and adds : 
 'But in the next review, under Queen Elizabeth, 
 the old Eubrics were again brought into authority, 
 and so have continued ever since ; being established 
 by the Act of Uniformity that passed soon after the 
 Eestoration. ' ^ 
 
 Another well-known writer on the Prayer Book 
 is Archdeacon Sharp. In a series of Charges pub- 
 lished in 1753 Sharp, after quoting the 14th Canon, 
 writes as follows : — 
 
 And upon the 58th Canon, which enjoins Ministers 
 reading Divine Service, and administering the Sacraments, 
 to wear surplices, and graduates their withal hoods, I 
 need say the less, because it is superseded by the Rubric 
 before the Common Prayer in 1661, which is statute law, 
 and determines that all the ornaments of the Ministers at 
 all times of their ministration shall be the same as they 
 were by authority of Parliament in the second year of 
 Edward VI. So that the Injunction concerning the 
 habits and ornaments of Ministers which is at the end of 
 Edward VI.'s First Service Book, with its explanation in 
 the Act of Uniformity by Queen Elizabeth, is the legal 
 or statutable rule of our Church habits to this day, and is 
 so far from being explained by this Canon that it rather 
 serves to explain the Canon itself, as I shall show in an 
 instance or two. For, first, this Injunction of King 
 Edward's referred to in our present Rubric, though it 
 requires the surplice to be used in all parish churches and 
 chapels annexed to the same, yet doth in express words 
 give liberty to the clergy to use or not use the surplice in 
 their ministrations in other places, which is an indulgence 
 
 • P. 91. 
 
426 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 that the Canon doth not expressly give, and I even ques- 
 tion whether it can be fairly inferred from it. 
 
 And the other thing that I would observe in the said 
 Injunction is, that no order is given therein concerning 
 the use of the hood with the surplice in parish churches, 
 though the same is allowed to be used by dignitaries in 
 Cathedral Churches and in College Chapels. Therefore, 
 as I take it, the clause in this Canon, which enjoins 
 graduates to wear the hoods of their respective degrees 
 in parish churches, is not strictly binding, forasmuch as 
 the present Eubric, which is of later date and decisive of 
 all questions about the habits in ministration, refers us to 
 a rule by which the said practice is not required. 
 
 My third authority is the late Bishop Phillpotts 
 of Exeter, in his well-known answer to the parish- 
 ioners of Helston, when they desired him to prohibit 
 the use of the surplice in the pulpit : — 
 
 On this particular I have no difficulty in saying that 
 Mr. Blunt has been right since he has preached in his 
 surplice. The sermon is part of the Communion Service, 
 and whatever be the proper garb of the Minister in the 
 one part of that service, the same ought to be worn by 
 him throughout. The Eubric and Canons recognise no 
 difference whatever. The Eubric at the commencement 
 of * The Order for Morning and Evening Prayer ' says, 
 ' That such ornaments of the Church, and of the 
 Ministers thereof, at all times of their ministration, shall 
 be retained and be in use, as were in this Church of 
 England by the authority of Parliament, in the second 
 year of the reign of King Edward VI.' — in other words, 
 ' a white alb plain, with a vestment or cope.' These were 
 forbidden in King Edward VI.'s Second Book, which 
 ordered that ' The Minister at the times of the Com- 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 427 
 
 munion, and at all other times of his ministration, shall 
 use neither alb, vestment, nor cope, but being an arch- 
 bishop or bishop, he shall have and v^ear a rochet : and 
 being a priest or deacon, he shall have and wear a 
 surplice only.' This was a triumph of the party most 
 opposed to the Church of Eome, and most anxious to 
 carry reformation to the very furthest point. But their 
 triumph was brief. Within a few months Queen Mary 
 restored Popery ; and when the accession of Queen 
 Elizabeth brought back the Eeformation, she and the 
 Convocation, and the Parliament, deliberately rejected 
 the simpler direction of Edward's Second Book, and 
 revived the ornaments of the First. This decision was 
 followed again by the Crown, Convocation, and Parha- 
 ment, at the Eestoration of Charles II., when the existing 
 Act of Uniformity established the Book of Common 
 Prayer, with its rubrics, in the form in which they now 
 stand. 
 
 From this statement it will be seen that the surplice 
 may be objected to with some reason : but then it must 
 be because the law requires * the alb and the vestment or 
 cope.' 
 
 Why have these been disused ? Because the parish- 
 ioners — that is, the churchwardens who represent the 
 parishioners — have neglected their duty to provide them : 
 for such is the duty of the parishioners by the plain 
 and express Canon law of England (Gibson, 200). True 
 it would be a very costly duty, and for that reason, 
 most probably, churchwardens have neglected it, and 
 archdeacons have connived at the neglect. I have no 
 wish that it should be otherwise. But be this as it may, 
 if the churchwardens of Helston shall perform this duty, 
 at the charge of the parish, providing an alb, a vestment, 
 and a cope, as they might in strictness be required to do 
 (Gibson, 201), I shall enjoin the minister, be he who he 
 
428 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 may, to use them. But until these ornaments are pro- 
 vided by the parishioners, it is the duty of the minister to 
 use the garment actually provided by them for him, which 
 is the surplice. The parishioners never provide a gown ; 
 nor if they did, would he have a right to wear it in any part 
 of his ministrations. For the gown is nowhere mentioned 
 nor alluded to in any of the rubrics. 
 
 This decision is valuable not only on account of 
 the great ability and legal acumen of Bishop 
 Phillpotts, but for two other reasons. In the first 
 place it points to one main cause v^hy the Eucha- 
 ristic vestments fell into desuetude, namely, the un- 
 v^illingness of the parishioners to go to the expense 
 of providing them. Centuries before the Reforma- 
 tion we have evidence of constant disputes between 
 parishioners and incumbents as to the legal share of 
 each in providing the necessary ornaments of the 
 Church and of the Ministers. 
 
 Bishop Phillpotts's decision is valuable, in the 
 second place, because it gives proleptically a prac- 
 tical refutation of an assumption which underlies 
 the whole of the Purchas judgment, namely, that it 
 is inconceivable that the rulers of the Church should 
 have allowed the Eucharistic vestments to remain 
 in abeyance if they had really believed that they 
 were statutably binding. But here we have, in our 
 own generation, an eminent and fearless prelate in- 
 sisting on the strictly binding force of the Rubric as 
 regards the full Eucharistic vestments, yet declaring 
 his intention to rest satisfied with the use of the 
 surplice, unless indeed the parishioners should 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 429 
 
 provide the obsolete vestments ; in which case the 
 Bishop would put the law in force and compel their 
 use. Why should it be thought incredible that 
 bishops in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries 
 should take the same view of their duty in this 
 respect as a recent late Bishop of Exeter ? 
 
 So much for the Judicial Committee's ' clear and 
 ohundant expositiocontempora?iea' against the legality 
 and use of the Eucharistic vestments from the year 
 1566 * to about 1840.' The assertion, like the rest of 
 their Lordships' arguments, is entirely against the 
 evidence. But even if no evidence were producible 
 it would prove nothing. Being legal, the presump- 
 tion is in favour of their use, not universally, owing 
 to the negligence of clergy and parishioners in pro- 
 viding them, but here and there in places where 
 they had not been made away with. The onus pro- 
 bandi is on the objectors. But I have produced in- 
 controvertible evidence of the use of the 1547-8 ritual 
 years after the date given by the Judicial Committee 
 for its legal and actual extinction. I now offer the 
 following piece of evidence that this ritual was not 
 only legal, but was in use down to the eve of the 
 Great EebelHon, and after the Restoration. I have a 
 curious and very rare tract now lying before me, 
 bearing the following title : ' Lambeth Faire, 
 wherein you have all the Bishops' Trinkets set to 
 sale. Printed Anno Doni. 1641.' It is a satirical 
 description, in rhyme, of a public sale of * the orna- 
 ments of the Church and of the Ministers thereof * 
 then in use. The Bishops having been ' put downe ' 
 
430 THE EBFOEMATION ' SETTLEMENT 
 
 by Parliament, are supposed to preside at the sale of 
 the now useless ' trinkets.' Let us see what sort of 
 ' trinkets ' they were : — 
 
 This being done of Bishops, all the Crew 
 Began with speed their wearing Eobes to shew, 
 And with extended voyce they all did cry, 
 Come, Customers, see what you lack, and buy ; 
 Here's Vestments Consecrate, all sorts and sizes. 
 
 Here we have two facts stated : first that * vest- 
 ments consecrate ' were then among the ornaments 
 of the Church of England ; secondly, that they were 
 then in use, for they are offered for sale as ' wearing 
 robes,' not as antiquarian relics. Now the only 
 ' vestments consecrate ' being the Eucharistic vest- 
 ments properly so called, this reference to them as 
 ' wearing robes ' seems to me conclusive, at least so 
 far as this, that they were then considered by the 
 Puritans as among the chief grievances to be got rid 
 of. But, according to the Purchas judgment, they 
 had been ' swept away with severe exactness ' more 
 than seventy years previously. 
 
 Among other ' trinkets ' described in ' Lambeth 
 Faire ' are the following : ' a crucifix,' ' crosier staffe,' 
 'crosses,' 'high altars,' 'sacred fonts,' 'guilt (sic) 
 cherubims,' ' bellowing organs,' ' curious hymnes,' 
 'mitres,' 'bells baptized,' 'golden slippers conse- 
 crated ' and ' emboss 'd with Holines Divine.' The 
 following passage, moreover, seems to show con- 
 clusively that what are called altar lights were then 
 in use : — 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBRIC 431 
 
 Wax Candles, Tapors, another cries and calls, 
 These brought I with me from Cathedrall Paules ; 
 They'l scare fche Divele, and put him unto flight, 
 When he perceives a consecrated light ; 
 When we at Mattens and at Even-song were, 
 We had them by us then devoid of feare ; 
 They'l bring delight unto your eyes and nose, 
 They burn so cleare and smell so like a Eose, 
 And when you think that it hath burnt enough, 
 Then blow it out, you shall not smell the snuffe, 
 Or else you may on whom you will bestow it ; 
 They'l joy to think a Bishop once did owe it. 
 
 In 1688 Eichard Baxter and some of his friends 
 made proposals for the reform of the Prayer Book, 
 and they insisted that ' among the most necessary 
 alterations of the Liturgy ' was * that the Eubric for 
 the old ornaments which were in use in the second 
 year of King Edward YI. be put out.' 
 
 The following entry in a parish register was sent 
 to me some years ago by a friend. It is written in 
 the register between 1704 and 1705 : — 
 
 The ornaments of the parish church of Wellow : — 
 
 Item. — Two chalises parcell guilt ; and one silver 
 chalise unguilt. 
 
 Item. — One cope of red purple velvet ; with a pair of 
 vestments of the same. 
 
 Item. — One cope of blew velvet and a pair of vest- 
 ments of the same. 
 
 Item. — Three paire of satten vestments and a whyte 
 chysible. 
 
 Item. — Two alter cloaths of silke, and a paire of curteus 
 of silke. 
 
132 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Item. — A saye cloath and a buckram cloath, and a red 
 pawle. 
 
 Item. — A velvet coate, three knells of diaper, and one 
 of needle worke. 
 
 Item. — Too corporas cloaths, and flfour corporas casis. 
 
 Item. — Three alter cloaths of holland for the high alt. 
 
 Item. — Four banners ; two silke banners ; and a 
 crosse banner of silke and the stremoer of silke. 
 
 Item. — A brason pulley and an iron pin. 
 
 Item. — A greate brasse pan ; and five platters of tin. 
 
 Item. — One table cloath. 
 
 Item. — A handle of a pax of silver. 
 
 Item. — Too silver candlesticks and a seynser of silver, 
 with pax of silver. 
 
 The copy of a bill of the ornaments of the church of 
 Wellow, delivered to Farmer Bull and William Coole, 
 churchwardens ; with the same parcell above written ; 
 delivered to them by the parish of Wellow. 
 
 It is not necessary to expose all the blunders of 
 the Judicial Committee ; but two of them deserve a 
 passing notice. They laid it down as a fact, too 
 patent to need argument or illustration, that the 
 order to use a surplice excludes by necessary im- 
 plication the use of a chasuble or cope, since both 
 could not be worn at the same time. The fact is 
 that a surplice or alb (which is a narrower surplice) 
 is always worn under the Eucharistic cope or 
 chasuble, as their Lordships would have seen if they 
 had read the Eubrics of Edward's Book, which 
 orders 'the priest that shall execute the holy 
 ministry ' to ' put upon him the vesture appointed 
 for that ministration, that is to say, a white albe 
 plain, with a vestment or cope.' 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 433 
 
 Another of their Lordships' extraordinary dicta is 
 that omission mean's prohibition, or, as they express 
 it, that every Kubric *by necessary impHcation 
 abohshes what it does not retain.' If this is good 
 law, it is broken every week in every church in the 
 land. Pulpits are illegal, and organs, and hoods, 
 and stoles of any kind. Indeed their Lordships, 
 with that capricious consistency which occasionally 
 visits their reasoning, have actually forbidden stoles 
 of any colour or no colour. So that every clergyman 
 who wears a stole is acting as illegally as he who 
 wears a chasuble. Their Lordships' rule would have 
 made havoc of Divine Service before the Beforma- 
 tion as well as since. The first Bubric of the 
 Hereford Missal, for example, prescribes the use of 
 the alb and amice for the officiating priest. Are we 
 to infer from this that he was forbidden to wear the 
 chasuble ? Of course we know the contrary. The 
 Kubric in the York Missal supplies a still more 
 ludicrous illustration. ' When the priest washes his 
 hands before Mass,' it says, ' he shall say this 
 prayer.' Does that forbid him to wear any eccle- 
 siastical vestments at all '? 
 
 I say it with all submission, but I believe that 
 their Lordships have here contradicted a funda- 
 mental principle of English law. Greek law said : 
 Quce lex non jubet vetat} Our law, following the 
 Boman, says : Quce lex non jubet jpermittit} Mr. 
 
 • Tcii }xkv yap iffri tuv SiKaicov rcb Kara nraffav apcT^v inrh rod vo/jlov 
 rcTayfifva, oiov oh K^\evei a/iroKTivvvvai kavrhu 6 vojjios, & 5e /i^ /ceAeyei, 
 airayopevei. Aristotle, Eth. bk. v. ch. 11. 
 
 - » Cum apud GraBCos leges non juris tantum sed virtutis causa 
 
 FF 
 
434 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Archibald Stephens, who was counsel for the 
 prosecutor in Sheppard v. Bennett, reduced their 
 Lordships' maxim to an absurdity. He argued that 
 * the Second Prayer Book of Edward prohibited all 
 manual acts in the Prayer of Consecration ' because 
 it did not enjoin them. This was too much for the 
 Court, and gave rise to the following interpellation : 
 
 Lord Justice Mellish : Was there no direction to break 
 the bread ? 
 
 Mr. Stephens : There was no direction. 
 
 Archbishop of York : Your argument would prove too 
 much. 
 
 Lord Chancellor : There must, ex necessitate, here be 
 some manual acts. 
 
 Mr. Stephens : My contention is, there were none ; and 
 your Lordships have already ruled that * omission is 
 prohibition.' 
 
 Archbishop of York : Then in 1552 the minister could 
 not take the paten or the chalice in his hand ? 
 
 Mr. Stephens : No. 
 
 With that neat refutation ad absurdum I leave 
 the matter. 
 
 I have remarked in a former chapter on the 
 fallacy of assuming that either non-user or even non- 
 existence of the vestments is any -proof of their 
 illegality. But the Judicial Committee repeatedly 
 appeal to this alleged fact as conclusive evidence of 
 illegality. They find bishops asking in their Visita- 
 
 ferrentur, legibus prsecepta continebantur quibus magistratus edice- 
 bant quae fieri vellent. Apud nos autem, stricto jure inter Eomanos 
 jam orto, lex nihil jubet, sed quae fieri nolit, edicit, ita ut contraria 
 Aristoteli jam nunc obtineat regula : quce lex non jubet permittit. — 
 Jklichelet, Commentar. ad AristoL Ethic. Nicom. p. 195. 
 
THE OENAMBNTS EUBRIC 435 
 
 tion Articles whether the minister wore a surpHce, 
 and their Lordships take this as ' proof that the 
 chasuble was illegal. But a better knowledge of 
 the history of the times would have shown them 
 that it was not a case of surplice against chasuble, 
 but of surplice against ' a horseman's cloak ' or 
 ordinary secular dress. The difficulty was to get the 
 Puritan clergy ^ to wear any clerical vestments of 
 any kind. Moreover, copes and chasubles were 
 sometimes valuable spoil, and were often sold to 
 the highest bidder, or privately disposed of. I have 
 already quoted Burleigh's description of the ruin and 
 desolation which Puritanism had wrought in matters 
 of religion over large tracts of the country. Numbers 
 of Sir William Harcourt's devout Protestant laity 
 engaged heartily in the work of reformation on 
 Puritan models for the sake of the loot. So that a 
 witty divine of the day declared in a published 
 sermon that * Popish lands make Protestant land- 
 lords.' Let me corroborate here by independent 
 evidence the doleful picture drawn by Burleigh. In 
 an official Eeport to the Queen's Council, in the 
 thirty-fourth year of Elizabeth's reign, on the con- 
 dition of Lancashire and Cheshire, I find the follow- 
 ing description : — 
 
 Small reformation has been made there by the 
 Ecclesiastical Commission, as may appear by the empti- 
 
 ' To prevent misunderstanding let me say that the Puritanism of 
 the Elizabethan era had scarcely anything in common with the 
 Evangelicalism of our day or with ordinary Protestant Nonconfor- 
 mity. Its residuary legatees are the Kensits and the Church Asso- 
 ciation. 
 
 FF 2 
 
436 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ness of churches on Sundays and holy days, and the 
 multitudes of bastards and drunkards. Great sums have 
 been levied under pretence of the Commission ; but the 
 counties are in worse case than before, and the number of 
 those who do not resort to Divine Service greater. The 
 people lack instruction, for the preachers are few, most 
 of the parsons unlearned, and many of the learned not 
 resident ; and divers unlearned daily admitted into very 
 good benefices by the bishop. . . . Some of the coroners 
 and justices of the peace and their families do not frequent 
 church ; and many of them have not communicated at 
 the Lord's Supper since the beginning of her Majesty's 
 reign. . . . Alehouses are innumerable, and the law for 
 suppressing and keeping them in order is unexecuted ; 
 whereby toleration of drunkenness, unlawful games, and 
 other great abuses follow. Although their Lordships [of 
 the Council] have often written to the justices for redress, 
 small or no reformation has followed ; and cockfights 
 and other unlawful games are tolerated on Sundays and 
 holy days during Divine Service, at which justices of the 
 peace and some Ecclesiastical Commissioners are often 
 present.^ 
 
 That was the state of degradation, social and 
 religious, to which Puritanism reduced England, 
 wherever it got 9, free hand, in the reign of Elizabeth. 
 And such is the state to which the spiritual descen- 
 dants of those Puritans — the Church Association 
 and its allies — would reduce England now, if they 
 had their way ; not intentionally, of course, but 
 from their ignorance of human nature and of 
 the forces which tend to elevate it and make for 
 righteousness. It took a long time to raise the 
 
 * Calendar of State Papers: Domestic, 1591-1594, pp. 158--9. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 437 
 
 clergy from the degraded state to which the aUiance 
 of Erastianism and Puritanism had reduced them. 
 Here is Swift's description of the social condition of 
 the English vicar of his day : — 
 
 He hath a house and barn in repair, a field or two to 
 graze his cows, with a garden and orchard. No guest 
 expects more from him than a pot of ale ; he lives like an 
 honest plain farmer, as his wife is dressed but little better 
 than Goody. He is sometimes graciously invited by the 
 squire, where he sits at a humble distance ; if he gets the 
 love of his people, they often make him Httle useful 
 presents ; he is happy by being born to no higher 
 expectation, for he is usually the son of some ordinary 
 tradesman or middling farmer. His learning is much of 
 a size with his birth and education ; no more of either 
 than what a poor hungry servitor can be expected to 
 bring from his college.^ 
 
 If the English people wish to get that class of 
 clergy back, undoubtedly the Protestant agitators 
 are going the right away about it. Let the Puri- 
 tanico-Erastian principle have its way, and let the 
 Church be regarded as an ordinary human institution, 
 looking to the State for its doctrine, its discipline, and 
 its ceremonial, as if it were a department of the 
 Civil Service, and the result will be that men of 
 brains, of education, and of self-respect will refuse 
 to take orders, and Swift's class of peasant 
 * servitors ' will take their place. As a ' profession * 
 the Church is the poorest. I imagine that the 
 average pay of the . clergy at this moment is under 
 200Z. a year. What but the love of God and pity 
 
 * Writings on Religion and tlie Church, i. 267. 
 
438 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 for human misery and sorrow could tempt a man 
 of ordinary brains and education to dedicate his 
 life to the toil, anxieties, and worry of so poorly 
 paid a profession? A few years after my ordina- 
 tion I felt the need of study for proficiency in my 
 calling. I gave up accordingly three years to study, 
 devoting my leisure to journalism, and helping some 
 of my brother clergy on Sunday. Without hard 
 work I made a fair income; and I claim nothing 
 more than ordinary brains and education. Why 
 should a man abandon such a position for the sake 
 of 2001. a year, or less, and much harder work, with 
 the addition of being made ' the offscouring of all 
 things,' and the sport of ignorant bigotry and 
 Philistinism at Albert Hall demonstrations ? We 
 have been hearing complaints for some time past 
 that the proportion of ' honours ' men, and even of 
 University men, who take orders, is growing alarm- 
 ingly smaller every year. No self-respecting man, 
 if he be not impelled by the love of God and the 
 ' enthusiasm of humanity,' will care to be made the 
 target of Sir William Harcourt's invective, or be 
 smitten with the jawbone of Lady Wimborne's 
 ubiquitous donkey. 
 
 But to return to the Judicial Committee. What 
 but the most childlike ignorance of the condition of 
 England from Elizabeth's accession to the Restora- 
 tion, and for some time after, could have persuaded 
 a body of upright and intelligent men that the 
 absence of costly vestments in scenes of irreligion 
 and desolation, such as I have described, is proof of 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBRIG 439 
 
 their illegality ? They might just as well have 
 decided that daily service and v^eekly celebrations of 
 the Holy Communion are illegal, for these were as 
 rare as the Eucharistic vestments under the tyranny 
 of Puritan lawlessness. Both were carried on all 
 through that period of spiritual desolation and 
 barrenness, but only here and there. 
 
 Mr. Tomlinson wrote a pamphlet against Arch- 
 bishop Benson's Lincoln judgment, and afterwards 
 expanded it into a book. The book is the offspring 
 of that prolific parent of myths, a mare's nest, and 
 its argument is so confused and so inconsistent with 
 facts, that I should have deemed it waste of time to 
 notice it, did I not find that men like Lord Grim- 
 thorpe have proclaimed this mare's nest to be a 
 wonderful discovery. People are in general so 
 ignorant of the history of the Reformation that they 
 are too prone to take a writer's valuation of himself or 
 of his friends for granted, without testing it. Lord 
 Grimthorpe always writes in the tone of an infallible 
 pope, who is master of all knowledge in heaven 
 above, or in the earth beneath, or in the water under 
 the earth ; and the unreflecting are apt to suppose 
 that a man who writes so confidently, and obtained 
 some reputation at the Parliamentary bar, is likely 
 to be right when he writes on subjects which he 
 has never studied, and of which he knows very little. 
 Knowledge of theology and of ecclesiastical history 
 and law is not necessary to success at the Parlia- 
 mentary bar ; but it is necessary in dealing with the 
 subjects which I am discussing ; and as Lord Grim- 
 
440 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 thorpe has become sponsor for the legitimacy of 
 Mr. TomHnson's hterary foundHng, it is perhaps 
 better to examine its claims. 
 
 Mr. Tomlinson's theory is that Elizabeth's Act 
 of Uniformity revived the Second Book of Edward, 
 ' v^ith one alteration or addition [quoting the Act] 
 of certain lessons to be used on every Sunday in the 
 year, and the form of the Litany altered and cor- 
 rected, and two sentences only added in the delivery 
 of the Sacraments,^ and none otheb oe otherwise.' 
 The capitals indicate the importance which Mr. 
 Tomlinson attributes to the last words of this 
 quotation. His inference is that these words had 
 the effect in law of re-enacting the Rubrics of the 
 book of 1552, one of which forbids the Eucharistic 
 vestments in express words. 
 
 The first observation which Mr. Tomlinson's 
 theory invites is that it is not only opposed to all 
 contemporary and succeeding evidence, but also 
 against every legal decision on the subject, including 
 the Purchas and Ridsdale judgments. All the 
 Puritans in the reign of Elizabeth, without a single 
 exception, assumed that the Act of Uniformity and 
 the Ornaments Rubric restored the vestments of 
 Edward's First Book. It legalised the Prayer Book 
 of 1552, except the Rubric on vestments ; and that 
 was expunged in favour of an order restoring the 
 vestments which the Rubric of the Second Book 
 forbade. That is the unanimous complaint of all 
 
 * I quote Mr. Tomlinson literally. In the original, of course, the 
 word is * Sacrament.' 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 441 
 
 the Puritans, English and foreign. Had they known 
 such a deadly flaw as Mr. Tomlinson imagines, 
 they would have been quick to point it out. That 
 is the first objection to Mr. Tomlinson's theory, and 
 it is fatal. 
 
 Next, it would prove too much. As a matter of 
 fact, no * alteration or addition of certain Lessons ' 
 was made when the Act passed, or for two years after- 
 wards. Moreover, an edition of the Prayer Book 
 came out in 1559, after the Act of Uniformity, with 
 the addition of the prayers for the Queen and the 
 clergy, the benediction, and the prayer beginning, 
 ' God, whose nature and property,' &c. From this 
 it follows that Mr. Tomlinson's quotation from the 
 Act of Uniformity contemplated not only what had 
 actually been then done, but also what it was 
 intended to do. Moreover, the * other order ' pro- 
 vided for in the Act would legalise the addition of 
 the Ornaments Rubric to the Act. It is strange 
 that a gentleman who upholds the legality of addi- 
 tions to the Act of Uniformity by means of Royal 
 Injunctions should denounce as a ' fraud ' the ad- 
 dition of the Ornaments Rubric by Royal authority. 
 
 But where is the proof that the Ornaments 
 Rubric was not in the copy of the Prayer Book 
 appended to the Act of Uniformity when it was 
 before Parliament? There is absolutely no proof, 
 not a scrap of tangible evidence. It is certain that 
 the Ornaments Rubric was in the first edition of 
 Elizabeth's Book, printed simultaneously with the 
 Act of Uniformity. Of that edition only two copies 
 
442 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 are known to exist. One is in the possession of 
 Lord Aldenham, and the other (Lord Ashburnham's 
 copy) came into Mr. Quaritch's possession last 
 summer. Its rarity may be guessed from the price, 
 184^. I had an opportunity of examining it, and 
 the Ornaments Eubric was in it. That Eubric is in 
 fact merely the Ornaments clause of the Act of 
 Uniformity, with a slight verbal alteration. 
 
 But Mr. Tomlinson's theory is exposed to another 
 deadly flaw. This gentleman, who is so stern a 
 censor of ' suppressions and misquotations ' ^ by 
 other people, is obliged by his theory to alter an Act 
 of Parliament, changing 'second' into ' seventh.' ^ 
 The Elizabethan Act of Uniformity legalises the 
 ritual of the second year of Edward VI. Mr. 
 Tomlinson, in order to get in the ritual of 1552, 
 forbidding the Eucharistic vestments &c., is forced to 
 read ' seventh ' for ' second.' And what is his defence 
 of this violent proceeding? A gross misinterpreta- 
 tion of the following Eoyal Injunction, which he 
 thinks, with the usual confidence of the discoverers 
 of mare's nests, reverses the plain language of an 
 Act of Parliament. It is a sad waste of time and 
 space to quote and discuss pure irrelevancies and 
 fads ; but Mr. Tomlinson has an idea that those who 
 receive the Ornaments Rubric in its plain gram- 
 matical meaning fight shy of the Thirtieth Injunction 
 
 ' He accuses myself of being ^facile priitceps in misquoting.' 
 There is no misquoting whatever in the passage to which he appeals 
 by way of proof. 
 
 2 The Prayer Book, Articles, and Homilies, p. 39. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIG 443 
 
 as fatal to their case. Here, then, is the Injunction 
 in full, with Mr. Tomlinson's portentous capitals : — 
 
 Item. — Her Majesty being desirous to have the 
 prelacy and clergy of this realm to be had as well in out- 
 ward reverence, as otherwise regarded for the worthiness 
 of their ministries, and thinking it necessary to have them 
 known to the people in all places and assemblies. Both 
 IN THE Church and without, and thereby to receive the 
 honour and estimation due to the Special Messengers 
 AND Ministers of Almighty God ; willeth and com- 
 mandeth that all archbishops and bishops, and all others 
 that be called or admitted to preaching or ministry 
 of the Sacraments, or that be admitted into vocation 
 ecclesiastical, or into any Society of learning in either of 
 the Universities, or elsewhere, shall use and wear such 
 seemly habits, garments, and such square caps, as were 
 most commonly and orderly received in the Latter Year 
 of the reign of King Edward the Sixth ; not thereby mean- 
 ing to attribute any holiness or special worthiness to the 
 said garments, but as St. Paul writeth : Omnia decenter 
 et secundum ordinem fiant (1 Cor. xiv. cap.). 
 
 Beyond all rational controversy this Injunction 
 refers to the ordinary garb of the clergy. They v^ere 
 to wear a clerical garb that would make ' them known 
 to the people in all places and assemblies.' Nor was 
 it enough to wear this clerical garb w^hen they went 
 to church : they must wear it everywhere. For some 
 had tried a compromise, putting on the clerical garb 
 when they went to church, either to officiate or to 
 worship, and exchanging it for ordinary lay dress 
 when they returned home. The Injunction orders 
 them to wear it always. It is as if the War Office 
 
444 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ordered all officers to wear uniform off duty as 
 well as on. Who would understand such an order 
 to mean that they were not to wear the regulation 
 full-dress uniform on the proper occasions ? 
 Three of the leading Puritans, writing in July 1566, 
 say :— 
 
 Our affairs are not altered for the better, but alas ! 
 are sadly deteriorated. For it is now settled and 
 determined that instead of common bread a small 
 unleavened cake must be used ; that the Communion must 
 be received kneeling ; that out of doors must be worn a 
 square cap, bands, a long gown, and tippet ; but in the 
 sacred service the white vestment and cope are to be 
 retained {in ministcrio autcm sacro vestis alba et ca;pa 
 retineantur)} 
 
 This was after the publication of the Adver- 
 tisements. The writers make no distinction 
 between parish churches and cathedrals, or between 
 ordinary days and high festivals. They simply say 
 that the * sacerdotal habit,' the * sacred vestments,' 
 are now beginning to be forced on the Puritan 
 clergy in celebrating the Holy Communion, while ' a 
 dress not common, but peculiar and distinct, was 
 prescribed for ordinary use.' ' Vestis alba ' means 
 alb rather than surplice. Yet Mr. Tomlinson calmly 
 tells his readers that the Thirtieth Injunction and 
 the Act of Uniformity refer to ' the surplice only.' 
 So that we are to understand that the clergy were to 
 wear ' the surplice only,' ' both in the church and 
 without.* It is really waste of time to discuss such 
 
 • Zurich Lett, second series, letter 50. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 445 
 
 nonsense, or would be if the public were not so 
 ignorant of the question. So let us follow Mr. 
 Tomlinson's reasoning a little further. 
 
 * Now the outdoor garb of the clergy,' he says, 
 
 * underwent no change whatever from the earlier to 
 the latter years of Edward VI.' Why, then, does the 
 Injunction say that those prescribed habits were such 
 
 * as were most commonly and orderly received in the 
 latter year of the reign of Edward the Sixth ' ? 
 Because, argues Mr. Tomlinson, that was the year of 
 the Second Prayer Book, which abolished all the 
 vestments except ' the surplice only ; ' and the 
 Thirtieth Injunction refers to the Bubric of that 
 Book. But what about the Act of Uniformity which 
 legalises the vestments of the second year of Edward ? 
 The two things are irreconcilable ; but what is that 
 to Mr. Tomlinson ? Hoc volo, sic jubeo ; sit pro 
 ratione volujitas. The reference to ' the latter year ' 
 of Edward VI. is simple enough to any one not 
 bound to maintain a theory per fas et 7iefas. The 
 persistent complaint of the Puritans was that while 
 restoring the Second Book of Edward, with a few 
 alterations, the Act of Uniformity brought back the 
 vestments of the second year of Edward instead of 
 leaving the Bubric which prescribed the surplice 
 only. That Bubric had been expunged from the 
 Book in favour of the clause ,in the Act which 
 re-enacted the Eucharistic vestments. That was the 
 grievance of the Puritans. But the Thirtieth 
 Injunction says in effect: 'But no such objection 
 lies against the outdoor habits on which we insist, 
 
446 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 for they were most commonly and orderly received 
 in the latter year of the reign of Edward VI.' — the 
 year to which the Puritans were always appealing. 
 That makes good sense of the Thirtieth Injunction. 
 Mr. Tomlinson's interpretation makes irretrievable 
 nonsense of it. 
 
 Here is one more specimen of Mr. Tomlinson's 
 method of reasoning. He quotes Sandys as 
 follows : — 
 
 The Parliament draweth towards an end. The last 
 book of service is gone through with a proviso to retain 
 the ornaments which were used in the first and second 
 year of King Edward, until it please the Queen to take 
 other order for them. Our gloss upon this text is that 
 we [clergy] shall not be forced to use them, but that 
 others [churchwardens &c.] in the mean time shall not 
 convey them away, but they may remain for the Queen. 
 
 The words within parenthesis are a suggestio 
 falsi on the part of Mr. Tomlinson, without an 
 atom of fact to support it. Strype, in quoting 
 the passage, says truly, ' But this must be looked 
 upon as the conjecture of a private man.' What 
 Sandys meant is what I have been contending for 
 all along, namely, that the Puritans, finding the 
 vestments restored in spite of their protests, fell 
 back on their second line of defence — i.e. that they 
 would not be forced to use them. The ' we ' does 
 not mean, as Mr. Tomlinson suggests, the clergy, 
 but Sandys and his fellow-Puritans. But Sandys's 
 letter contains one important point. He was one of 
 the revisers of the Second Book, and he says, in the 
 
THE OENAMENTS RUBETC 447 
 
 teeth of Mr. Tomlinson's theory, that the Act of 
 Uniformity restored the ornaments which were used 
 in the first and second years of King Edward. I am 
 not sure that we know for certain what the full 
 ceremonial in use under Edward's First Book was. 
 Probably it was the old ceremonial, hardly, if at all, 
 changed. But Sandys puts the matter beyond a 
 doubt by including the first as well as the second 
 year of Edward. The old ceremonial was of course 
 used unabridged in Edward's first year.^ 
 
 Mr. Tomlinson's dogmatism is always in an 
 inverse ratio to his knowledge. Here is an example. 
 He asserts peremptorily that * nobody ever paid the 
 slightest heed to the standard of 1549 during the 
 six years, 1559-66, which elapsed before the issue of 
 the Advertisements. Not a single bishop then wore 
 alb or chasuble, not a single priest wore alb or 
 tunacle, still less a " vestment " during all those six 
 years when, on the received theory, those " orna- 
 ments " were not merely permissible, but com- 
 pulsory.' Now considering that, with the exception 
 of two hundred at most, nine thousand parish priests 
 
 > The following quotation from Bucer's Censura, published in 
 1551 (see Dixon's Hist, of Ch. of Engl. iii. 291), shows that the 
 ceremonial in use under the First Book of Edward was the customary 
 one, the only difference consisting in the service being in English : — 
 
 ' I may add on ceremonies that in many of your churches there 
 is still found a studied representation of the execrated Mass, in 
 vestures, lights, bowings, crossings, washing of the cup, breathing 
 on the bread and cup, carrying the book from right to left of the 
 table, having the table where the altar was, lifting the paten and 
 cup, and adoration paid by men who nevertheless will not communi- 
 cate. All these should be forbidden.' 
 
448 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 retained their livings, all using the ^Id ritual, which 
 the Act of 1559 explicitly legalised, it would require 
 demonstrative proof that they all, or a majority, or 
 even a large number of them, suddenly left off the 
 mode of worship with which they were familiar, 
 and to which they were attached, for no rhyme or 
 reason. What evidence does Mr. TomHnson offer ? 
 Not a scrap. We are to take his infallible word for 
 it, the burden of proof being entirely on his back, 
 and the presumption against him amounting to 
 moral proof. But I have already given positive 
 evidence that ' the standard of 1549 ' was in matter of 
 fact followed during the period named and long 
 afterwards ; and my proofs could be multiplied. I 
 may add the following. In the ' Life of Sir Thomas 
 Smith ' it is recorded that among the ornaments of 
 his chapel in 1569 were ' vestment and alb for the 
 priest ; a Bible, and a pair of virginals instead of an 
 organ.' ^ That was three years after the publication 
 of the Advertisements ; and Smith occupied an 
 official and influential position. 
 
 With one more specimen of the way in which 
 Mr. Tomlinson is accustomed to get up his facts, I 
 will take my leave of him. ' That stiff High Church- 
 man, John Johnson,' he says, ' when he published 
 his " Clergyman's Vade-Mecum " in 1707, had not so 
 much as heard of Canon MacColl's theory.' True ; 
 but in subsequent editions Johnson confessed his 
 ignorance, retracted his error, and strenuously sup- 
 ported ' Canon MacColl's theory.' In a long com- 
 ' P. 171. 
 
THE^OENAMENTS EUBEIG 449 
 
 ment on the Ornaments Rubric in the fifth edition, 
 pubhshed in 1723, Johnson, speaking of the ' other 
 order ' of the Uniformity Act, says : — 
 
 Some have attempted to prove, that she did take such 
 Order ; but there is no certain proof of it ; nay, it is 
 evident enough that she did take no such Order : For 
 theEubric enjoining the same Ornaments that were used 
 in the first Book of Edward, still continued thro' her 
 reign, and the two following : And if she had taken such 
 Order ; yet the Eubric before Morning Prayer in oiu* 
 Present Liturgy, enforced by the Act of Uniformity, 
 14 Charles II., could not be affected by any Order 
 taken by Queen Elizabeth : therefore Bishop Gibson 
 truly says, ' Legally, the Ornaments of Ministers in 
 performing Divine Service are the same now, as they were 
 in the second year of Edward VL' 
 
 The Judicial Committee also condemned the use 
 of incense and altar lights on the same grounds as 
 the Eucharistic vestments, and their argument on 
 those points collapses with their argument against 
 the vestments. But I may cite the following 
 instances of the use of incense and altar lights after 
 the publication of the Advertisements. 
 
 In the * History of Trig Minor,' already quoted, 
 we have indisputable evidence not only of the use, 
 in the year 1567, of copes and chasubles of various 
 colours, but also of a ' ship of tin ' for incense, * a 
 censer of latten,' 'a lamp before the high altar,' 'a 
 sacring bell.' These took the place of ^two censers 
 of silver and two ships of silver,' which are found 
 in the inventory of 1539. They disappeared as 
 
 G G 
 
450 THE RBFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 valuable loot in the predatory zeal of interested ' re- 
 forfners ; ' and the fact that the parish provided 
 cheap ones in their place, which v^ere in use after 
 the publication of the Advertisements, is good evi- 
 dence against the ruling of the Judicial Committee. 
 In Bishop Lloyd's Form of Consecrating Churches, 
 &c., there is a service for the consecration of 
 candlesticks and of censers. While the Bishop is 
 placing the candlesticks ' upon the altar,' the 
 chaplain is directed to say : * Thy v^ord is a lantern 
 tinto my feet : and a light unto my paths. 
 
 ' For in Thee is the foundation of life : and in 
 Thy light shall v^e see light.' 
 
 This clearly implies that the altar candles v^ere 
 intended to be lighted. 
 
 So likewise when a censer is presented and re- 
 ceived, the clergy say : ' While the King sitteth at 
 his Table : my spikenard sendeth forth the smell 
 thereof. 
 
 ' Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as the 
 incense : and let the lifting up of my hands be as 
 the Evening Sacrifice.' 
 
 Now let it be remembered that the volume from 
 which these extracts are taken was published in the 
 beginning of last century ; that it was compiled by a 
 bishop's chaplain, and dedicated to the Bench of 
 Bishops ; that it was certainly used by the Bishop 
 whose chaplain compiled it ; and that it agrees sub- 
 stantially with various Forms of Consecration 
 Services which were in common use in the seven- 
 teenth century. Is it possible to beheve that the 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIO 451 
 
 observances which it prescribes were all the while 
 forbidden by law and unknown in practice ? 
 
 There is in the British Museum a MS. of Bishop 
 Sanderson's, with a sketch of his chapel and lettered 
 references after the Restoration ; and among other 
 things the following inventory gives us a peep into 
 his manner of administering the Holy Communion : 
 
 * The gilt canister for the wafers, like a wicker 
 basket lined with cambric ; a vessel with pipes for 
 the water of mixture ; basin and ewer for washing 
 before consecration, and a towel ; footpace of three 
 steps covered with Turkey carpet ; a censer in 
 which the clerk putteth the frankincense ; the 
 navicula, like the keel of a boat, with a half cover 
 for the incense.' 
 
 But the Judicial Committee has not only shown 
 its incompetence to act as a final court of appeal in 
 ecclesiastical causes by reason of its entire ignorance 
 of the matters on which it has to adjudicate ; it has, in 
 addition, displayed such a marked bias as to destroy 
 confidence in its fairness on the part of those who 
 have carefully examined its judgments. Its decisions 
 have been dictated by policy rather than by law. 
 It has invariably acquitted men who have been 
 powerfully supported by influential parties, and 
 condemned men who appeared to lack that support. 
 Gorham flatly contradicted the plain language of the 
 Prayer Book, yet was acquitted because his doctrine 
 was popularly identified— though quite erroneously— 
 with the doctrine of the Evangelical party. The 
 
 * Essays and Reviews ' and Mr. Bennett of Frome had 
 
 Q 8 2 
 
452 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 powerful parties behind them : therefore the accused 
 were acquitted. But the EituaHsts were supposed 
 to represent only a small party whose resentment 
 might be braved without danger. They were there- 
 fore condemned, against the plain letter of the law, 
 till an Archbishop declared in favour of the legality 
 of some things which the Judicial Committee had 
 condemned. That looked formidable ; therefore the 
 Judicial Committee supported the Archbishop. 
 
 A clergyman of the name of Dunbar Heath was 
 in 1860 tried for heresy on account of some confused 
 statements which he had published on the subject 
 of the Atonement. He was deprived by Dr. Lushing- 
 ton, Dean of the Arches Court, and appealed to the 
 Judicial Committee. And meanwhile he had taken 
 some steps to explain himself to his bishop and to 
 the Court. I quote the last paragraph of their 
 Lordships' judgment : — 
 
 Their Lordships have had their attention directed to a 
 letter addressed by Mr. Heath to the Lord Bishop of 
 Winchester on January 2, 1860, in which he states that, 
 if he has laid down any doctrine or position at variance 
 with the Articles or foi^mularies, he has done so un- 
 wittingly and in error, and in which he requests his 
 diocesan to point out in what respects he has done so, 
 that he may correct whatever error he has fallen into. 
 Another and more formal document has also been brought 
 before their Lordships, in which Mr. Heath has stated 
 that, if it appears to the Ordinary, and to the official 
 Principal of his Grace the Archbishop of Canterbury, 
 that his language does contain or teach a doctrine directly 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBKIC 453 
 
 contrary or repugnant to any of the Thirty-nine Articles 
 of Eehgion, he expresses his regret and revokes his error. 
 
 Who can doubt, who has followed the various 
 judgments of this august tribunal, that if Mr. Heath 
 had been supported by a powerful party their Lord- 
 ships would have welcomed his expression of regret 
 and revocation of any error he might have un- 
 intentionally taught ? But Mr. Heath had no back- 
 ing. He had been a Fellow of Trinity, Cambridge, 
 and was a high — I think senior — wrangler. But he 
 had, nevertheless, a very confused mind, as I often 
 had occasion to notice, for I used to meet him at the 
 Koyal Society of Literature, of which we were both 
 Fellows. He was always in the clouds when he 
 joined in our discussions, and seemed to labour 
 under an incapacity to give intelligible expression to 
 his ideas. He was emphatically a man towards 
 whom every possible indulgence ought to have been 
 shown on a charge of heresy. But the Court refused 
 to accept his general expression of regret and 
 retractation. ' They are unwilling to proceed to the 
 last step in their duty, but unless he expressly and 
 unreservedly revokes the errors of which he has 
 been thus convicted, their Lordships have no course 
 left but to advise her Majesty to confirm the 
 sentence of deprivation under the Act.' And 
 deprived Mr. Dunbar Heath was accordingly. An- 
 other proof of bias characteristic of the Judicial 
 Committee is the fact that a Eitualist was always 
 made to pay the costs, according to the usual rule, 
 
454 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 when he was condemned, but refused his costs in 
 several cases where judgment was in his favour. 
 
 I am sure that in making these complaints 
 against the fairness of the Judicial Committee I 
 shall carry with me the sympathy of all dispassio- 
 nate lawyers who may take the trouble to compare 
 my accusation with the facts. Some of the severest 
 impeachments of judicial impartiality that I know 
 have been uttered by lawyers. Lord Selborne, when 
 he sat in th^ House of Commons in 1868 as Sir 
 Boundell Palmer, offered a strong opposition to the 
 transference of election petitions from the House 
 of Commons to the judges, on the ground of what 
 he thought the inevitable political bias of the judges. 
 I quote his words : — 
 
 Judges, like other men, have their politics; but at 
 present cases in which political bias might be supposed 
 to affect their minds were rare, although in those cases 
 they frequently gave their judgments according to their 
 politics.^ 
 
 When the Supreme Court of Judicature Act was 
 before the House of Commons it was proposed by 
 the Government to give certain discretionary powers 
 to the judges in the matter of assessing costs, and 
 in a few other particulars. The Bar flew to arms 
 in dismay, and proclaimed its profound distrust of 
 the impartiality of our judges in cases where their 
 feehngs were Hkely to be engaged. Let two extracts 
 from the speeches of two distinguished barristers^ 
 
 ' Speech by Sir Koundell Palmer on Mr. Disraeli's Bribery Bill. 
 See Hansard, third series, cxcii. pp. 286-7. 
 ' Elevated to the judicial bench afterwards. 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBRIC 455 
 
 and members of the House of Commons suffice by 
 way of sample.^ Here is the opinion of Mr. 
 Lopes : — 
 
 When the proper time came he should move an 
 amendment that the Bill of Exceptions should be pre- 
 served. Again, under the Act of 1873 and this Bill, if a 
 judge misdirected a jury, or improperly received or 
 rejected evidence, a new trial was not to be granted, 
 unless the Court before whom the case came should be of 
 opinion that the miscarriage of justice was caused by the 
 misdirection, — unless the jury had been affected by it. 
 Judges were so apt to think they were right when they 
 were wrong, that this would be a very dangerous inroad 
 indeed. Hitherto, save in a few exceptional cases, costs 
 had always followed the event, and in no case was the 
 successful party deprived of his costs ; but the Bill 
 proposed to give a judge absolute discretion, so that a 
 judge who disapproved a verdict might order a success- 
 ful defendant to bear the costs of an action. 
 
 Mr. Watkin Williams used even stronger lan- 
 guage, as the following extract from his speech will 
 show : — 
 
 These Rules and Orders would be made by the 
 judges, and would come into operation, and then in the 
 month of March or next Easter the House might 
 interfere. But suppose the judges abohshed meanwhile 
 trial by jury. The Lord Chancellor might order cases to 
 be tried by a judge instead of before a jury, and when 
 the matter came to be discussed in Parliament, all 
 manner of proceedings would be taken under these Rules 
 and Orders, and they would be told that the greatest 
 inconvenience would be caused by the House repealing 
 ' See Times of July 6, 1875, 
 
466 THE BEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 them. He trusted that the House would never part with 
 this power. It might be said that the judges would 
 never do these things. Wouldn't they ? The first thing 
 done by these Eules and Orders was to abolish the Bill 
 of Exceptions which had been granted to suitors by 
 Edward I., to prevent caprice and the exercise of what 
 was called ' discretion ' on the part of the judges. The 
 Bill of Exceptions was one of the rights of the suitor. 
 The judges ought to administer the law, and ought not to 
 have the * discretion ' lohich would enable them to alter it. 
 Another exceptional feature in the Eules and Orders was 
 the power given to the Common Law judge over costs. 
 The power of giving costs would be in the discretion of 
 the judges, and it would totally alter the relations 
 between the judges and the Bar. It was right that in 
 Equity cases the judge should have the power of 
 deciding as to the payment of costs, because he has the 
 whole case before him. But imagine a case of libel, or of 
 interference with personal liberty, which would come 
 before a jury. If the judge took a view opposed to that 
 of the jury, he might avenge himself — and it was 
 necessary to speak out on this subject — by punishing the 
 counsel, the suitor, and the jury, because he differed with 
 them in opinion. . At present, if a judge manifested 
 caprice or lost his temper during a trial, the counsel bore 
 it patiently, because they knew that the judge was 
 subject to the laws. If he was wrong in his ruling they 
 tendered a bill of exceptions ; and if he overrode counsel 
 they had the jury to appeal to. The Eules and Orders 
 would alter all this, and produce changes such as no one 
 at present realised. 
 
 It appears then that the clergy are not the only 
 class in the community who gravely suspect the 
 partiality of our tribunals in questions where the 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 457 
 
 prejudices of the judges are tolerably certain to come 
 into play. And it must be allowed that the clergy 
 have special reasons for suspiciousness, inasmuch as 
 the questions which affect them are too often decided 
 by judges who have at best no more than the merest 
 rudimentary knowledge of them, and who conse- 
 quently commit themselves to statements and con- 
 clusions which those who have studied these ques- 
 tions know to be quite erroneous. There was a time 
 when English judges were profoundly versed in 
 ecclesiastical history and Canon Law. How many 
 are there on the Bench now who have seriously 
 studied these questions ? Is it so marvellous then 
 that men who have studied them feel no great respect 
 for judicial deliverances which, as in the case of the 
 Purchas judgment, bristle all over with blunders? 
 For myself, I know not why I should reject the 
 False Decretals of the Papacy and accept those of 
 the Judicial Committee. After all, Historic Truth 
 *is great, and will prevail,' the Purchas judgment 
 and its defenders notwithstanding. 
 
 But I hasten to add that I acquit the Judicial 
 Committee of anything worse than unconscious bias. 
 I have no doubt that the members of the Court have 
 always acted with entire conscientiousness. But 
 it is possible that the very conscientiousness of a 
 judge may tempt him unconsciously to bend the 
 law from the straight line of justice in the direction 
 of some interest which he conceives to be of para- 
 mount importance. So that his conscientiousness, 
 instead of being a protection to him, is a snare. The 
 
458 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 late Sir George Cornewall Lewis has some obser- 
 vations on this subject, which are so pertinent that 
 I shall take the liberty of quoting them :— 
 
 It is universally admitted that no man ought to be a 
 judge in his own case. But, if the case were not his 
 own, his competency to form a judgment upon it might 
 be indisputable. So if any political measure be proposed 
 which affects the interest of a profession, it may happen 
 that persons belonging to that profession, though 
 peculiarly competent to form an opinion respecting it, on 
 account of their experience and knowledge, are dis-. 
 qualified on account of the probable bias of their judg- 
 ment by personal considerations ; and that the requisite 
 indifference is only to be found among those who do not 
 belong to the profession. Such outlying persons may 
 be the only impartial judges in the matter. . . . The 
 operation of a personal interest in perverting the judg- 
 ment is so insidious, that great honesty, combined with 
 perpetual vigilance, is necessary in order to guard 
 against its influence. Men utterly incapable of telling a 
 deliberate untruth, or deliberately expressing an insincere 
 opinion, are nevertheless liable to be warped by personal 
 interest in the deliberate formation of opinions. When 
 a strong bias of this sort exists, their minds, ready to 
 receive every tittle of evidence on one side of a question, 
 are utterly impervious to arguments on the other. 
 Hence we see opinions, founded on a belief (and often a 
 radically erroneous belief) of self-interest, pervade whole 
 classes of persons. Frequently the great majority of a 
 profession, or trade, or other body, adopt some opinion in 
 which they have, or think they have, a common interest, 
 and urge it with almost unanimous vehemence against 
 the public advantage. On occasions of this kind, the 
 persons interested doubtless convince themselves of the 
 
THE OENAMENTS EUBEIC 459 
 
 reasonableness of the view which they put forward ; they 
 are guilty of no hypocrisy or insincerity; but their 
 judgment is warped by their belief as to their interest in 
 the question.^ 
 
 But the bias of self-interest is not always the most 
 powerful bias. Many a man who knows himself too 
 well to suffer the promptings of self-interest to bias 
 him is readily influenced by the interest which he 
 feels in a great cause or institution. Lord Cairns 
 and Lord Selborne were far above the motives of self- 
 interest. But the former was a very strong Puritan, 
 and both were devoted to the interest of the Church 
 as an Establishment, and allowed their minds, I be- 
 lieve, to be biased against a party who, they thought, 
 were imperilling the Establishment. I may shock 
 some of my friends, but I will frankly own that the 
 judge whom I should be disposed to trust in these 
 questions would be a great and strong lawyer like 
 the late Sir George Jessel, who, as a Jew, would 
 have ' the requisite indifference.' 
 
 ' Influence of Authority in Matters of O;pinion, pp. 34-36 ; cf. 
 Mill's Logic, ii. 286-7, third edition. 
 
460 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 CHAPTBE XI 
 
 ANGLICAN AND KOMAN OEDEES 
 
 When one has a good case it is an error in tactics 
 to stand on the defensive. I propose therefore in 
 this chapter to test very briefly the vaHdity of 
 Eoman Orders by the criterion appHed by Leo XIII. 
 to the vaHdity of AngHcan Orders in the Bull in 
 which he declared their invalidity. In the most 
 weighty, learned, and dignified ' Answer ' of our two 
 Primates to that Bull it is shown conclusively that 
 the argument on which the Pope bases his conclu- 
 sion would invalidate the Orders of every Church in 
 Christendom, and most of all the Orders of the Church 
 of Eome. The retort of * The Cardinal Archbishop 
 and Bishops of the Province of Westminster,' in 
 their * Vindication of the Bull " Apostolicae Curae," ' 
 is one of the weakest specimens of special pleading 
 which it has ever been my lot to read. It is of course 
 natural for Cardinal Vaughan and his colleagues to 
 assume throughout the infallibility of the Pope. To 
 those, who accept that dogma, further argument is 
 obviously superfluous. The Pope has declared that 
 Anglican Orders are invalid, and therefore causa 
 finita est for all infallibilists. But for others Cardinal 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN ORDBES 461 
 
 Vaughan's assumption has no value. It is evident 
 . from the whole of the ' Vindication ' that in the 
 minds of its authors the decisive proof of the 
 invalidity of Anglican Orders is the fact that the 
 Pope has pronounced them invalid. They evidently 
 agree with Cardinal Manning that * the appeal to 
 history is a treason and a heresy ; ' and their own 
 appeal to history is plainly a condescension, a con- 
 troversial device on the part of disputants who 
 take their history from a foregone conclusion, not 
 from the impartial evidence of facts. There is a 
 vast difference between studying history in order to 
 support an imperative dogma already received as a 
 necessary article of faith, and studying history with 
 a loyal intention to follow whithersoever it may lead. 
 The Pope having spoken, Cardinal Vaughan and his 
 colleagues are bound to find history in agreement 
 with the Pope, or to deny the Pope's infallibility. 
 Of course, therefore, they have found history in 
 agreement with the Pope. They try to disguise this 
 aspect of the question from their readers, and argue 
 as if they were free to accept the verdict of history, 
 which manifestly they are not. Indeed they start 
 with an apparently unconscious recognition of this 
 fact when they urge, — 
 
 In short, to deny Leo XIII.'s competency to define 
 the conditions of a valid sacrament is to strike at the 
 very roots of the sacramental system. For if there be no 
 authority on earth capable of deciding so fundamental a 
 point, how can we continue to attach vital importance 
 to the Sacraments, or to regard them as stable rites of 
 
462 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 divine institution on the true observance of which the 
 maintenance of our spiritual Hfe depends ? 
 
 Observe how the quiet assumption that to deny 
 the Pope's * competency to define the conditions of a 
 vaHd sacrament ' is deemed equivalent to an affirma- 
 tion that ' there is no authority on earth capable of 
 deciding so fundamental a point.' Both the Papal 
 Bull and the Cardinal's' Vindication ' prudently pass 
 by the consecrations of Barlow and Parker and the 
 decree of Pope Eugenius IV., ' as not requiring to 
 be examined, since, even apart from them, the in- 
 validity of your [i.e. Anglican] Orders was decisively 
 proved.' The consecrations of Barlow and Parker 
 need not be discussed, for no scholar who has a 
 reputation to lose would now think of relying on the 
 old Roman arguments against them. The decree of 
 Pope Eugenius is a very different matter. It was 
 addressed ' to the Armenians ' in November, 1489, 
 as a rule of faith and practice on the doctrines 
 of the Trinity in Unity, the Incarnation, and the 
 Seven Sacraments. It answers all the tests of an 
 ex cathedra infallible pronouncement. And in 
 addition to this internal evidence of an ex cathedra 
 character, it was issued three months after the 
 Council of Florence, and Eugenius affirms that the 
 decree received the sanction of the Council. If ever 
 a Papal decree fulfilled the conditions of infallibility, 
 this doctrinal utterance by Pope Eugenius IV. did 
 so. Now let us look at its bearing on the validity 
 of Anglican Orders. After describing the Seven 
 
ANGLICAN AND KOMAN OEDEBS 463 
 
 Sacraments, the Pope proceeds to say that all those 
 Sacraments require three conditions for their validity, 
 * namely, things as matter ; words as form ; and the 
 person of a minister conferring the Sacrament with 
 the intention of doing what the Church does : and 
 if any of these is absent, there is no Sacrament. 
 Among these Sacraments there are three — Baptism, 
 Confirmation, Order — which imprint on the soul an 
 indelible character, that is, a certain spiritual mark 
 distinct from others. Consequently they cannot be 
 repeated on the same person. But the remaining 
 four imprint no character and admit of reiteration.' * 
 After giving the usual explanation of the matter 
 and form in Baptism, the Pope goes on to say that 
 the matter of Confirmation is the chrism blessed by 
 the bishop ; and the form, the words — ' I sign thee 
 with the sign of the cross, and confirm thee with 
 the chrism of salvation, in the name of the Father, 
 and Son, and Holy Spirit.' This omits the laying 
 on of hands as part of the matter of Confirmation, 
 and gives, as its form, words which have by no 
 means been universally used. The comment of our 
 two Archbishops is irresistible : ' If therefore the 
 doctrine about a fixed matter and form in the Sacra- 
 ments were to be admitted, the Romans have- 
 
 * See Denzinger's EncMridioji Symbolorum et Definitionum gucB 
 de Rebus Fidei et Morum a Conciliis CF^cumenicis et Summis Ponti- 
 ficibus emanarunt, Wirceburgi, 1874, pp. 172, 176. Denzinger omits 
 the first part of this decree, which expounds the doctrines of the 
 Trinity and Incarnation dogmatically, in order to give colour to his 
 unfounded suggestion that the Pope intended no definition of the 
 doctrine of the Sacraments, but only ' practical instruction.' 
 
464 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 administered Confirmation imperfectly for many 
 centuries, and the Greeks have none.' 
 
 That is a very serious matter for a Church which 
 novi^ regards every ex cathedra utterance of a Pope as 
 infalHble truth. But it is Pope Eugenius's definition 
 of the matter and form in the Sacrament of Order 
 which concerns us in particular. ' The matter here,' 
 says Pope Eugenius, ' is the delivery into the hands 
 of a person ordained to the priesthood of the chalice 
 with wine and the paten with bread ; and the form 
 of conferring the priesthood is : " Eeceive the power 
 of offering sacrifice in the Church for the living and 
 the dead, in the name of the Father, the Son, and 
 the Holy Spirit." ' 
 
 If we are to accept this as infallible truth, 
 Christendom has been without a valid priesthood from 
 the first Christian Pentecost till now ; for the delivery 
 of the paten and chalice containing the Eucharistic 
 elements has never been received by any Church as 
 necessarily of the essence of the matter of sacerdotal 
 ordination, and is not now so considered by the 
 Church of Eome ; while the form prescribed by 
 Eugenius, though now insisted on as essential by 
 the Koman Church, has never been so regarded 
 •by the Church Universal. 
 
 Our own and the Oriental Churches, which have 
 never admitted the infallibility of the Pope, are 
 unaffected by this decree of Pope Eugenius IV. 
 Not so the Church of Eome. The Pope's decree is 
 binding on it, as an article of necessary faith, and 
 consequently it is bound by the logic of its dogmatic 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OKDERS 465 
 
 position to confess itself without priesthood or Sacra- 
 ments. Thus we see that it is not AngHcan Orders 
 which Leo XIII.'s Bull and Cardinal Vaughan's 
 'Vindication' have invalidated, but Eoman Orders. 
 What, again, can be a more glaring example of 
 special pleading than the following ? — 
 
 Your Eeformers no doubt retained the terras ' priest ' 
 and * bishop ' as the distinctive names of the two higher 
 degrees of their clergy — probably because they did not 
 dare to discard terms so long established and so familiar^ 
 But whilst retaining the terms they protested against the 
 meanings attached to them by the Catholics, and, in- 
 sisting on the etymological signification, used them, and 
 desired that in future they should be used, to denote, not 
 ministers empowered to offer sacrifice, but pastors over 
 their flocks, to teach them, to administer to them such 
 Sacraments as they believed in, and generally to tend 
 them spiritually. This meaning they professed to regard 
 as that of Scripture, and of the Primitive Church, which 
 explains the language of the Preface of your Ordinal. 
 
 What Cardinal Vaughan and his coadjutors here 
 cite as proof of a deliberate purpose to make a 
 fundamental change in the doctrine of the Church 
 of England is only an illustration of the tendency, 
 already noticed, of all reformers to dwell chiefly, 
 on the neglected side of important truths, and use 
 some reserve in dwelling on the side that had been 
 pushed to an extreme. Just as St. Paul dwelt on 
 the necessity of faith and seemed to depreciate' 
 works ; and St. James dwelt on the necessity of 
 works to the apparent neglect of faith ; and the 
 
 H H 
 
466 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 early Christian Apologists denied in words the exis- 
 tence of Christian temples and Christian altars — 
 meaning such temples and altars as were used in 
 heathen worship ; so the first Anglican Keformers 
 dwelt more on the communion than on the sacrificial 
 aspect of the Eucharist. And when they seem to 
 deny, like Hooker, that sacrifice is part of the 
 Christian ministry, they mean sacrifices like those 
 of the Mosaic dispensation, and sometimes like the 
 carnal view of the Eucharistic sacrifice taught by 
 many Boman writers, and believed by the multitude. 
 That Cranmer, who had most to do with the compi- 
 lation of the Prayer Book, had no idea of innovating 
 on the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharist, properly 
 so called, is plain from his own language. ' The 
 manner of the Holy Communion,' he says, * which 
 is now set forth within this realm, is agreeable with 
 the institution of Christ, with St. Paul, and with the 
 right faith of the sacrifice of Christ upon the Cross.' ^ 
 And at his trial in 1553 he 'offered to join issue 
 upon this point, that the Order of the Church of 
 England, set out by the authority of the innocent and 
 godly Prince Edward VI. in his High Court of Parlia- 
 ment, is the same that was used in the Church ifteen 
 hundred years past.* ^ 
 
 But even if Cardinal Vaughan were right in 
 thinking that Cranmer' s intention was to change the 
 doctrine of the Church of England, our reply is that 
 Cranmer failed in his intention. For the Ordinal has 
 
 * Defence of the Cath. Doc. of the Sacr. Bk. v. ch. 18. 
 » See Jeremy Taylor's Works, v. 238. Eden's edition. 
 
ANGLICAN AND ROMAN OEDERS 467 
 
 always contained all the essentials of the rite of ordina- 
 tion to the priesthood. It is called ' The Form and 
 Manner of Ordering of Priests.' The first Kubric 
 says: 'When the day appointed by the Bishop is 
 come, after Morning Prayer is ended, there shall be a 
 Sermon or Exhortation, declaring the Duty and Office 
 of such as come to be admitted Priests ; how neces- 
 sary that Order is in the Church of Christ, and also 
 how the people ought to esteem them in their Office.' 
 Then the Archdeacon is to * present unto the Bishop 
 (sitting in his chair near to the Holy Table) all them 
 that shall receive the Order of Priesthood that day,' 
 saying : ' Reverend Father in God, I present unto 
 you these persons present, to be admitted to the 
 Order of Priesthood.' Thereupon the Bishop bids 
 the Archdeacon ' take heed that the persons ' pre- 
 sented are * apt and meet ' by learning and character 
 ' to exercise their ministry duly ' — that is, the ' sacer- 
 dotium,' with all that it implies ; it is the generic 
 term, embracing all the functions of the Priesthood. 
 Then the Bishop addresses the congregation, and 
 invites objections, if there be any, to the qualifications 
 of any of the candidates for 'the holy Office of 
 Priesthood.' Then follows a prayer : ' Almighty God, 
 Giver of all good things, who by Thy Holy Spirit 
 hast appointed divers Orders of Ministers in the 
 Church ; mercifully behold these Thy servants now 
 called to the Office of Priesthood ; and replenish 
 them so with the truth of Thy doctrine, and adorn 
 them with innocency of life, that, both by word and 
 
 H H*2 
 
468 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 good example, they may faithfully serve Thee in 
 this office,' &c. 
 
 After the reading of the Epistle and the Gospel, 
 the Bishop addresses the candidates and reminds 
 them of * how great importance this office is where- 
 unto ye are called,' and exhorts them, ' in the name of 
 our Lord Jesus Christ, that you have in remembrance 
 unto how high a dignity, and to how weighty an 
 office and charge, ye are called.' 
 
 Then the Bishop asks : ' Do you think that you 
 be truly called according to the will of our Lord 
 Jesus Christ and the Order of this Church of England, 
 to the Order and Ministry of Priesthood ? ' ' Will 
 you then give your faithful diligence always so to 
 minister the Doctrine and Sacraments, and the 
 Discipline of Christ, as the Lord hath commanded, 
 and as this Church and Eealm hath received the 
 same, according to the commandments of God,' &c. 
 
 After some more questions and devotions, ' the 
 Bishop with the priests present shall lay their hands 
 severally upon the head of every one that receiveth 
 the Order of Priesthood,' and the Bishop gives his 
 commission as follows : — 
 
 Eeceive the Holy Ghost for the Office and Work of 
 a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto 
 thee by the Imposition of our hands. Whose sins thou 
 dost forgive, they are forgiven ; and whose sins thou dost 
 retain, they are retained. And be thou a faithful 
 Dispenser of the Word of God and of His Holy Sacra- 
 ments ; In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and 
 of the Holy Ghost. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 469 
 
 The candidates having thus received the Sacer- 
 dotimn in the plenitude of all that the word con- 
 notes, the Bishop gives each of them a Bible and 
 bestows jurisdiction by the following words : ' Take 
 thou Authority to preach the Word of God and to 
 minister the Holy Sacraments in the Congregation, 
 where thou shalt be lawfully appointed thereunto.' 
 
 The same distinct designation of office is observed 
 in the consecration of bishops. 
 
 The Pope and Cardinal Vaughan admit that our 
 present * form of ordination, together with the 
 prayer. Almighty God, Giver of all good thmgs . . . 
 behold these Thy servants now called to the Office of 
 Priesthood {or Episcopate), might, apart from the 
 further reason to be given presently, have furnished 
 the necessary degree of definiteness.' * The further 
 reason ' is that the Papal Bull ' very reasonably asks 
 how any of those other prayers can be thought 
 to designate the priesthood and episcopate in the 
 Catholic sense, when it is notorious that this is just 
 the meaning which the compilers ivere studious 
 to exclude from the entire service.' ^ What is 
 
 * notorious ' here is the ignorance of the Pope as to 
 the entire subject on which he was pronouncing an 
 ex cathedra judgment. For the fact is, as I have 
 shown, that the compilers of the Prayer Book, and 
 the whole body of representative Anglican divines, 
 
 * were studious ' to do, and succeeded in doing, 
 precisely the reverse of what the Pope and Cardinal 
 Vaughan impute to them. The Ajiglican divines 
 
 ^ A Vindication, pp. 38, 39. 
 
470 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 have always insisted on the doctrine of the Eucha- 
 ristic Sacrifice ' in the Catholic sense/ and have only 
 repudiated the tincatholic incrustations which grew 
 around it in the writings of Eoman divines and in 
 the abuse of a traffic in private masses. 
 
 The prayer, Almighty God, Giver of all good 
 things, &c., is admitted by Cardinal Yaughan and 
 his colleagues to be *best adapted to supply the 
 needed element of definiteness.' * But it is found 
 in your present Ordinal far removed from the imposi- 
 tion of hands,' and must therefore be regarded as 
 irrelevant. Nothing has brought so much discredit 
 on Roman theology as this hard mechanical view of 
 divine operations. ' The whole ordination service,' 
 as Cardinal John de Lugo (quoted by the two 
 Primates) admits, * is a single action, and it makes 
 no difference if the matter and form are separated 
 from one another (as is the case in the Pontifical), 
 if what intervenes makes up a moral whole.' ^ The 
 assertion that an ordination, otherwise valid, could 
 be invalidated by the interposition of a few moments 
 of time and a page of print between a certain prayer 
 and the laying on of hands is worthy only of 
 Mohamedan casuistry, according to which the 
 smallest deviation from the prescribed formula, in 
 word or action, invalidates the entire rite. And see 
 how it acts. The invocation has dropped out of the 
 Roman Liturgy, in which the words of institution 
 are held in Roman theology to be the consecrating 
 factor. The Easterns, properly and reverently re- 
 
 * Answer of the Archbishops, p. 30. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDERS 471 
 
 fusing to limit the action of the Eternal One by 
 measurements of time, regard the whole Liturgy as 
 a single action, and decline to dogmatise as to the 
 precise moment when the elements become effectual 
 for their purpose. It does not trouble them there- 
 fore that the invocation comes after the effectual words 
 have already been spoken according to the Roman 
 doctrine. Cardinal Vaughan is thus logically bound 
 to impeach the orthodoxy of all the Eastern 
 Liturgies; while the Easterns, on their part — 
 though too charitable to condemn the Eoman rite 
 as null — do accuse it of being mutilated and defec- 
 tive : — 
 
 The one Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church of the 
 seven CEcumenical Councils admitted that the Sacred 
 Elements are sanctified after the prayer of invocation of 
 the Holy Ghost by the blessing of the priest, as witness 
 the ancient formularies (rvTriKo,) of Rome and Gaul. 
 But the Papal Church innovated in this also, having 
 arbitrarily considered the sanctification of the Sacred 
 Elements as taking place with the utterance of the words 
 of the Lord : * Take eat, this is My Body,' and * Drink 
 ye all of it, for this is My Blood.' ^ 
 
 But the doctrine of Leo XIII. 's Bull and Cardi- 
 nal Yaughan's * Vindication ' of it is exposed to stiU 
 
 ' A Patriarchal and Synodical Encyclical Letter unto the most 
 sacred and beloved-of-God Metropolitans and Bishops, our brethren 
 in Christ ; and unto the sacred and pure clergy under them ; and 
 unto the entire pious and orthodox faithful of the Most Holy Apo- 
 stolical and Patriarchal See of Constantinople. A Reply of the Holy 
 Catholic and Apostolical Orthodox Church of the East to the Ency- 
 clical of Pope Leo XIII. on Reunion, p. 6. 
 
472 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 more formidable perils. The question tm-ns in the 
 last analysis on the intention of the compilers of the 
 Prayer Book and of the Anglican clergy as a body 
 from the Reformation downwards. A heterodox 
 intention is gratuitously imputed to them, and all 
 their acts are thus presumed to be tainted by theo- 
 logical pravity. 
 
 There is, of course, a true doctrine of intention. 
 The minister of a Sacrament must intend to do what 
 the Church does. It follows that a minister who is 
 insane, or drunk, or in a fit of somnambulism, or 
 .otherwise mentally incompetent, cannot perform a 
 valid Sacrament. But if he knows what he is about, 
 and intends to discharge with ceremonial exactness 
 the function which the Church has committed to 
 him, then his Sacrament is valid, whatever his own 
 private belief may be. For the real Consecrator in 
 all Sacraments is Christ Himself, and His will is 
 effectual independently of the belief or unbelief of 
 His visible minister. The Church of England 
 insists on this merciful and equitable doctrine in the 
 Twenty-sixth Article. It would indeed be a cruel 
 case if the devout and worthy recipient were 
 defrauded of a divine gift through the will or wicked- 
 ness of the minister. But let us take the doctrine 
 of intention which is now prevalent in the Church 
 of Home, and let us see how that Church will fare 
 under its application. The Catholic Church of 
 Spain under the Moorish domination offers a crucial 
 test. One of the classical works on Moorish Spain 
 is that of Professor Dozy, himself a Eoman Catholic. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OKDEES 473 
 
 'The Church,' he says, 'was subject to a hard and 
 cruel servitude.' The right of convoking councils as 
 well as nominating bishops, which had belonged to 
 the Visigoth Kings, was now claimed and exercised 
 by the Arab Sultans ; * and that fatal right, confided 
 to an enemy of the Christian religion, was for the 
 Church a source of inexhaustible evil, of opprobrium, 
 and of scandal.' Whenever a Moorish Prince wished 
 to squeeze money out of the Christians, or to make 
 use of them in any other way, he put the ecclesias- 
 tical machinery in motion by calling a council. At 
 first the bishops refused to give the sanction of their 
 presence to these synods. But the Sultans had 
 another string to their bow ; the sovereign sent Jews 
 and Musulmans to take the place of the bishops, 
 and do his bidding. This did not work well, and 
 the next device on the part of the Mohamedan 
 rulers was to put pliant tools into each see as the 
 bishop died or was deposed. The bishopric was 
 knocked down to the highest bidder, who often did 
 not go even through the form of making a profession 
 of Christianity. Benegade Christians, professed 
 Jews, and bom Musulmans thus came to occupy 
 the sees of Moorish Spain, many of them unbaptized, 
 but all having gone through the sacrilegious farce of 
 consecration, which was thus entirely null and void. 
 *In this way,' Dozy tells us, 'the Christians saw 
 their dearest and most sacred interests entrusted to 
 heretics ; to libertines, who took part in the orgies 
 of Arab courtesans, even during the solemnities of 
 Church festivals ; to unbelievers who publicly 
 
474 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 denied a future life ; to wretches who, not satisfied 
 with seUing their own souls, sold their flocks into 
 the bargain.' * 
 
 This state of things lasted for centuries. What 
 will Cardinal Vaughan say about the Sacraments, 
 including Orders, administered by men like these? 
 Can he guarantee that any of them was validly 
 ordained, or administered the Sacraments in their 
 turn with the right intention and the right matter 
 and form ? Yet the priesthood of Spain is largely 
 descended from the episcopate of the Moorish 
 domination. Blanco White too makes revelations 
 which, though not quite so damaging, suffice to 
 involve the sacramental system of Spain, at least 
 during the period which he describes, in an atmo- 
 sphere of doubt. He tells us of clergy who were not 
 only immoral, but unbelievers in addition ; unbe- 
 lievers of an aggressive type, who, revolting against 
 the state of things which they saw around them, were 
 animated by an energetic hatred of Christianity. 
 Believing that they were forced by circumstances to 
 take part in a mischievous imposture, would not 
 their temptation be to invalidate deliberately the 
 Sacraments they administered by perpetrating a 
 flaw either in the matter or form ? 
 
 Then there is the case of the ecclesiastics, 
 bishops and priests, who threw off the mask at the 
 French Kevolution, and avowed that they had been 
 acting a farce all the time they were going through 
 the form of conferring and administering Sacra- 
 ' Histovre des Musulmans d^Espagne, par K. Dozy, ii. 47. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDERS 475 
 
 ments. Who will guarantee their good faith and due 
 observance of the essentials of valid Sacraments ? 
 
 Consider also the prevalence of lay baptism 
 administered in Continental and South American 
 countries by ignorant midwives and nurses. There 
 is a story told of a distinguished English Eoman 
 Catholic priest who visited his old nurse on her 
 deathbed. * I am deeply indebted to you,' he said, 
 * for you made me a Christian.' ' Oh, yes, your 
 Riverence,' she said, ' and I made many other 
 Christians also.' ' I suppose you always used the 
 right form of word's ? ' continued the priest. ' Faith, 
 and I did,' was the unexpected reply. * I baptized 
 ye all in the name of Jesus and Mary.' The priest, 
 horror-struck, went and had himself baptized and 
 re-ordained. Such is the story, and even if it be only 
 ben trovato, it ought to warn the Pope and Cardinal 
 Vaughan that in their mode of attack on the validity 
 of Anglican Orders they are indeed playing with 
 edged tools. 
 
 But I must give a more flagrant instance of the 
 way in which the extreme development of the doc- 
 trine of intention in the Church of Rome has under- 
 mined the whole sacramental system of that Church. 
 
 By an arbitrary rule of the Roman Catholic 
 Episcopate of South America no one was eligible for 
 Holy Orders who had a strain of native blood in 
 him down to the fourth generation. But persons 
 thus disqualified often got ordained, and doubt was 
 thrown on the validity of their orders, owing to the 
 negative intentions of the bishops. In the year 
 
476 THE KEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 1865, one of the bishops determined to bring the 
 matter to a test. He announced pubHcly that 
 henceforward, in the event of his unwittingly 
 ordaining any man within the prohibited degree of 
 native blood, the ordination would be null and void, 
 inasmuch as his intention would be absent. Never- 
 theless several men who were descendants of native 
 Indians or Mulattos were ordained by the bishop 
 unwittingly at his next ordination. When the fact 
 came to his knowledge he declared that those 
 ordinations were null and void. There was an appeal 
 to the Holy See, which, after careful consideration, 
 ruled that the ordinations were nullified by the with- 
 drawal of the Episcopal intention. This decision 
 appears to have been arrived at without hesitation. 
 But while the Holy See sustained the decision of 
 the South American bishops, and ordered them to 
 warn the persons thus ordained that their orders were 
 invalid, it ' sharply reproved ' the bishop for having 
 such ' negative intentions,' which were illegal, and 
 must no longer be cherished.^ 
 
 ' Extrait de VAnalecta Juris Pontificii, S'"^ Serie, col. 1681, 
 Eome, 1866 : 
 
 hitention du ministre. — Un 6veque de rAm6rique du Sud publia 
 un edit avant I'ordination, protestant que nul descendant des Indiens 
 jusqu'a la quatrieme generation ne devrait se presenter parce que le 
 pr61at n'aurait pas I'intention de leur conf6rer les ordres. Cette pro- 
 testation fut renouvelee plus expressement au moment de I'ordina- 
 tion, car le pr^lat d^clara qu'il n'aurait aucune intention actuelle ou 
 virtuelle a I'egard de tous ceux qui n'6taient pas espagnols purs. 
 Malgr6 cela, plusieurs descendants d'Indiens ou de mulatres reyurent 
 les ordres et les exercerent. Le Saint- Siege fut consults sur la validity 
 de ces ordinations. 
 
 Quoique le Cardinal Casanatc reconnut la nullit6 des ordinations, 
 
ANGLICAN AND ROMAN ORDERS 477 
 
 This decision throws a cloud of doubt over all the 
 Sacraments of the Koman Church. It is no longer 
 a question of doing what the Church does, or 
 intending what the Church intends. The bishop or 
 priest may at the moment be doing what the Church 
 does, and be intending sincerely what the Church 
 intends ; yet the Sacrament which he thus confers is 
 nullified by the fact that he has a prejudice against 
 a certain class of persons. In the case before us the 
 bishop did all that the Church required of him ; but 
 his negative intention in the abstract nullified his 
 positive intention in the concrete. And Kome 
 sanctions this, while condemning the negative in- 
 tention and abolishing the illegal disability ! But, 
 
 il exprima nettement I'avis que ces intentions negatives 6taient 
 gravement illicites. Voici son votum : 
 
 Ad 1 et 2. Negative.— Qvi'iB, explicita intentio episcopi de non 
 conferendis ordinibus restitit validae collationi, ut ex Sacro Concilio 
 Tridentino, sess. 7, de Sacramentis in genere, can. 11 nota Bonacina 
 (oper. moral, torn. i. disp. 6, q. 3, punct. 2 § .3), Hurtad. de Sacram. 
 (disput, 4, difficult. 6 §. Sed quamvis ; rursus difficult. 7, § 1, 
 pag. 36), P. Diana {in coordinatis, torn. 2, tract. 5, resol. 106, § 1, 
 alias p. 5, tract. 13, Miscell. p. resol. 66 et fuit resp. in Fesulana con- 
 firmat. sub die 8 mensis Augusti 1681. 
 
 Ad 3. — Acriter corrigendum episcopum ut abstineat ab hujus- 
 modi negativis intentionibus de jure illicitis, sed tamen caute inquirat 
 de personis, et insuper monendos invalide promotos, ut curent se 
 iterum ordinari sub conditione, quatenus non sint valide ordinati, ut 
 advertunt iidem auctores specialius Diana ibidem sub § 1. 
 
 La S. Congregation du Concile jugea que I'ordination avait 6te 
 nuUe, et qu'il fallait avertir tons les ev^ques d'Am6rique qu'ils 
 devraient s'abstenir desormais de ces intentions negatives, et qu'ils 
 n'avaient pas le droit d'6carter des Saints Ordres les Indiens et lea 
 n^gres, ni aucun de leurs descendants du cote paternel ou matemel, 
 suppose qu'ils eussent les qualites exigees par les canons^ 
 
478 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 on the other hand, it is laid down in * A Catholic 
 Dictionary ' which bears the imprimatur of Cardinal 
 Manning and the nihil obstat of the * Censor 
 Deputatus,' that a negative intention, which is un- 
 authorised and illegitimate, is invalid, and conse- 
 quently does not nullify a sacrament.^ This is far 
 indeed, as we shall see, from being the only example 
 of Bome speaking with an uncertain voice, notwith- 
 standing its proud boast of being semper eadem. 
 Even on the question of intention a subsequent 
 decree seems hardly consistent with that on the 
 validity of the ordination of quadroons. * A certain 
 Vicar Apostolic ' consulted the Holy See on the 
 following point. * In certain localities some heretics 
 baptize with the right matter and form, but expressly 
 warn the persons to be baptized not to believe that 
 baptism has any effect on the soul ; for they say that 
 it is a mere external sign of adhesion to their sect. 
 And thus they often ridicule the Catholics about 
 their faith in the effect of baptism, which indeed 
 they call a superstition.' The question is therefore 
 put * whether baptism administered by heretics is 
 doubtful on account of a defective intention of doing 
 what the Church does, if it has been expressly 
 declared by the minister, before baptizing, that 
 baptism has no effect on the soul.' The answer — 
 which is the doctrine of the universal Church since 
 the Cyprianic controversy with the Pope — is in the 
 negative, 'because, notwithstanding the error in 
 
 ' Pp. 738, 739. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 479 
 
 regard to the effect of baptism, there is no exclusion 
 of the intention to do what the Chnrch does.' ^ 
 
 But the most conclusive of all replies to the 
 Eoman attack on the validity of Anglican Orders is 
 the terrible uncertainty in which the theory and 
 practice of the Papacy, culminating in the dogma of 
 Infallibility, has involved the Orders of the Church 
 of Eome. The personal infallibility of the Pope, 
 speaking ex cathedra on faith or morals, is now an 
 article of faith in the Church of Eome as imperative 
 and fundamental as the doctrine of the Trinity or 
 Incarnation. It is a learned Eoman Catholic who 
 writes as follows : — 
 
 It [dogma of Papal infallibility] means that although 
 a few months ago grave difficulties, arising from genuine 
 historical documents and from Catholic doctrine, rendered 
 it impossible to lay before Christian people such a dogma 
 as one revealed by God,^ yet, nevertheless, the definition 
 of it is so worded as to avoid them all, or otherwise 
 that in some way or other they have been completely 
 solved. 
 
 It means that we must acknowledge and distinctly 
 assert this new dogma to be no less certainly true than 
 (for example) the mysteries of the Trinity in Unity, or 
 of the Incarnation of the Son of God, or of the resurrec- 
 tion of the body. 
 
 It means that if we do not give to the doctrine the 
 
 * Negative ; quia, non obstante errore quoad effectus baptismi, 
 non excluditur intentio f aciendi quod facit Ecclesia.' — Analecta Juris 
 Pontificii, xx. 193, a.d. 1881. 
 
 2 The author is here quoting and making his own the words of 
 the petition of the Bishops of Germany and Hungary against any 
 definition of infallibility by the Council of the Vatican. 
 
480 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 same interior and absolute assent with our whole mind 
 as we give to all the articles of the Apostles' Creed, wo 
 have no longer any right to be named Christians ; we 
 are to be deprived of the Sacraments; we make ship- 
 wreck of the whole faith, and willingly cast ourselves out 
 of the Church. 
 
 It means that whatever may be the grounds or 
 whatever the authority on which we have been accus- 
 tomed to rely, as evidence and proof of the certainty of 
 those old truths, we must place no less reliance upon the 
 undeniable certainty of the new dogma. All stand or 
 fall together. If the doctrine of the infallibility of the 
 Pope has not been divinely revealed, there never has 
 been any revelation, and there is no divine truth in any 
 one doctrine of the Christian Faith. 
 
 Put it how we may, this is a startling fact ; and we 
 are bound to inquire, ' Why must we so believe?' The 
 answer is, because it has been declared by a hurried 
 decision of the suspended Council of the Vatican, which 
 has been promulgated by the authority — not of the 
 Council, nor as a decree of the Council, but — of the 
 Pope alone, as an Apostolic Constitution, himself as it 
 were giving sentence in his own cause. ^ 
 
 So much as to the place of the dogma of the 
 Pope's infallibility in the creed of the Koman Church 
 since July, 1870. Let us now test the doctrine by 
 the touchstone of history. 
 
 It is an undisputed doctrine of the Church of 
 Christ throughout the world, and in all ages, that 
 nothing can be an article of necessary faith now 
 which was not an article of necessary faith on the- 
 
 ' What is the Meaning of the late Definition of the Infallibility of 
 the Pope? An Inquiry. By William Maskell, M.A. Published in 1871. 
 
ANGLICAN AND KOMAN ORDEES 481 
 
 first Christian Pentecost. That is the authorised 
 doctrine of the Church of Eome, as of the rest of 
 Christendom. In a book pubHshed with the impri- 
 matur of Cardinal Manning, and the 7iihil ohstat 
 of the * Censor Deputatus,' I read : — 
 
 All that we know and believe now, the entire cycle of 
 Christian doctrine in all its circumstances, was known 
 and believed then by the Apostles on the Day of 
 Pentecost before the sun went down.* 
 
 Moreover, the Vatican decree itself declares that 
 the Pope's infallibility ' is a dogma divinely revealed ' 
 *from the beginning.' 
 
 Now let us look at the facts. Keenan's Cate- 
 chism possessed at one time the largest circulation 
 among English-speaking Roman Catholics through- 
 out the world. My copy is the third edition and 
 twelfth thousand, bears the date of 1854, was pub- 
 lished in Edinburgh by Marsh and Beattie, and in 
 London by the well-known Dolman. Prefixed to it 
 are letters of strong recommendation from all the 
 Roman Catholic Bishops of Scotland. ' The rapid 
 and exten'sive sale of the book in this country,' says 
 Bishop Gillis, * besides a third edition printed in 
 America, is evidence sufficient of the favour with 
 which this Catechism has been received by the 
 Catholic public' In his Preface to the second 
 edition the author congratulates himself on 
 
 the approbation of the former edition by many clergy- 
 
 ' The Divine Teacher, p. 20, 6th edition, a.d. 1885, by Father 
 Humphrey, S.J. 
 
 I I 
 
482 THiB EEFOEMATlON SETTLEMENiP 
 
 men in Scotland, and by several in Ireland and England, 
 the fact of its appearing in a very elegant American 
 edition, approved by the Eight Eev. Dr. Hughes (Arch- 
 bishop) of New York, and by the American Catholic 
 clergy and Catholic press. 
 
 In his Preface to the third edition he says : — 
 
 The hard-working clergy and persecuted Catholics 
 of Great Britain have now given the Controversial 
 Catechism a decided approbation. The demand for it 
 in each of the three kingdoms has satisfied its author 
 that his labour has answered some good purpose. 
 
 An edition of the twenty-fourth thousand was pub- 
 lished during the sitting of the Vatican Council by 
 ' the Cathohc Publishing and Bookselling Company, 
 Limited,' New Bond Street, and was strongly recom- 
 mended by the ' Tablet ' newspaper. 
 
 I believe that down to the Vatican Council it 
 was the most universally popular and authoritative 
 Catechism among the English-speaking members of 
 the Eoman Church, not only in Great Britain and 
 Ireland, but in America as well. 
 
 And now I place in parallel columns the Vatican 
 decree on Papal infallibility, and the same doctrine 
 as expounded in the highly accredited and widely 
 circulated ' Controversial Catechism ' of Father 
 Keenan : — 
 
 Keenan's Catechism Vatican Decree 
 
 'Must not Catholics believe 'Therefore, faithfully adher- 
 
 the Pope in himself to be infal- ing to the tradition received 
 
 lible ? That is a Protestant in- from the beginning of the Chris- 
 
 vention ; no decision of his can tian faith, for the glory of God 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OKDBES 
 
 483 
 
 oblige, under pain of heresy, 
 unless it be received and en- 
 forced by the teaching body; 
 that is by the Bishops,' whom 
 the author had previously 
 defined as ' the lawful judges 
 of Christian doctrine, who have 
 been appointed by Christ for 
 that purpose.' 
 
 our Saviour, the exaltation of 
 the Catholic religion, and the 
 salvation of Christian people, 
 with the approval of the Sacred 
 Council, We teach and define 
 that it is a dogma Divinely re- 
 vealed : that the Eoman Pontiff, 
 when he speaks ex cathedrd, that 
 is, when in discharge of his office 
 of pastor and teacher of all 
 Christians, by virtue of his su- 
 preme Apostolic authority, he 
 defines a doctrine regarding faith 
 or morals to be held by the 
 universal Church, is, by the 
 divine assistance promised to 
 him in blessed Peter, possessed 
 of that infallibility with which 
 the Divine Eedeemer willed that 
 His Church should be endowed 
 in defining doctrine regarding 
 faith or morals ; and that, there- 
 fore, such definitions are of them- 
 selves, and not from the consent 
 of the Church, irref ormable. And 
 if amy one presume to contradict 
 this our definition — which God 
 forbid — let him be anathema.' 
 
 The contradiction is absolute and complete, and 
 was felt to be so by the Eoman authorities. For, 
 instead of withdrawing Keenan's Catechism from 
 circulation after the Vatican Council — which would 
 have been a public acknowledgment of the contra- 
 diction — the incriminating leaf was cut out of the 
 existing edition, and another leaf inserted in its 
 place containing the Vatican doctrine, as if it had 
 been there always. 
 
 I I 2 
 
484 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 The Vatican decree, moreover, extinguishes, in 
 the following words, the inherent rights and jurisdic- 
 tion of the entire episcopate : — 
 
 If any shall say that the Eoman Pontiff possesses only 
 an ofi&ce of inspection or direction, but not full and 
 supreme power of jurisdiction over the whole Church, 
 not only in matters which pertain to faith and morals, 
 but also to the discipline and government of the Church 
 dispersed throughout the world ; or that he has only the 
 more excellent parts, but not also the total plenitude of 
 this supreme authority; or that this authority of his 
 is not ordinary and immediate, whether over all and 
 singular Churches or over all and singular pastors and 
 laity — let him be anathema. 
 
 In a work against this dogma, before it was 
 passed, the Bishop of Mayence (Ketteler) said : — 
 
 Will it not seem to all nations that the authority of 
 all Bishops is suppressed and sentenced to death, only 
 in order to erect on su^ch vast and manifold ruins the 
 unlimited authority of the one Eoman Pope ? 
 
 Two days before the dogma of infallibility was 
 proclaimed the minority sent a deputation to the 
 Pope to implore him to agree that the consent of 
 the Church should be laid down as a condition of 
 infallible definitions. The deputation consisted of 
 Simor, Primate of Hungary, Archbishops Ginoulhiac, 
 Darboy, and Sherr (of Munich), Bishops Ketteler 
 (of Mayence), and Eivet of Dijon. The minority 
 offered this concession by way of compromise. But, 
 instead of accepting it, the Pope and the majority 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 485 
 
 explicitly rejected the consent of the Church as an 
 element in the case. It follows logically that if the 
 Pope alone were officially to proclaim as an article of 
 faith something which the Church collectively and 
 unanimously rejected, the Pope would be right and 
 all the rest of Christendom wrong. Cardinal Vaughan 
 may tell me that I am suggesting a contingency 
 which is not likely to happen. But that is not the 
 question. The fact is that the Vatican definition 
 has drawn a line of demarcation between the Pope 
 and the Church, and made him infallible apart from 
 the Church. The Vatican dogma is therefore a flat 
 contradiction of Keenan's Catechism, which teaches 
 that the doctrine of the Vatican dogma * is no article 
 of the Catholic faith,' since 'no decision of his 
 [Pope's] can oblige, under pain of heresy, unless it be 
 received and enforced by the teaching body ; that is, 
 by the Bishops of the Church.' Thus we see that 
 a doctrine, which down to 1870 was denounced by 
 the teaching body of the Church of Kome in the 
 British Isles and in America as ' a Protestant inven- 
 tion,' is now de fide under the sanction of anathema. 
 Well might the martyred Archbishop Darboy of 
 Paris say that Pio Nono had built for himself a throne 
 on the ruin of his brethren, and an unassailable 
 fortress on their annihilation.' 
 
 ' * Les Papes du moyen 4ge avaient sans doute, plus d'une f ois, 
 exag6r6 leurs droits et leurs pretentions, mais cette exag^ration m^me 
 pouvait, a tout prendre, donner comma excuse le bien des peuples 
 qu'on se proposait, ou la gloire de I'Eglise qu'on voulait defendre. 
 Aujourd'hui nous sommes en face de la Papaut6 luttant, non pas 
 
486 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 It may be worth while to elucidate the matter 
 a little further by showing tha,t the doctrine of 
 Keenan's Catechism was the traditional doctrine of 
 Eoman Catholics throughout the British Empire and 
 America until the Vatican dogma superseded and 
 anathematised it. In the year 1825 the Irish 
 Eoman Catholic Bishops were examined before a 
 committee of the House of Lords on the question of 
 the Pope's position in the ecclesiastical hierarchy. 
 I will quote the answers of the two most eminent 
 Bishops with the assent of the rest. Bishop Doyle 
 says : — 
 
 A particular Church, or the canons of a particular 
 Church, might define that the authority of a General 
 Council was superior to that of the Pope ; such canon 
 may be received, for instance, in Ireland or in France, 
 and might not be received in Italy or Spain. 
 
 Bishop Murray was asked : * Is a decree of the 
 
 contre les princes, mais contre l'6piscopat, comme si Pie IX pouvait 
 trouver sur la ruine de ses fibres un trone plus 61ev6, ou, dans leur 
 an^antissement, une forteresse plus inexpugnable. malheur des 
 temps et abus des plus saintes institutions ! on ne veut plus qu'un 
 seul 6veque veritable dans le monde, le Pape, un seul docteur infail- 
 lible et autoris6, le pape 1 Que toute voix se taise, si ce n'est poui 
 dire ce qu'il aura dit, que toute action ne s'exerce plus que sous sa 
 jurisdiction 6piscopale, universelle, immediate, qu'ils renient leurs 
 droits imprescriptibles, ceux qui ont 6t6 6tablis de Dieu pour 
 gouverner, qu'ils d^chirent les pages de I'Evangile ou ces droits sont 
 grav6s ; il ne faut plus qu'une bouche, une main, un monarque 
 absolu, alors, dit-on, alors seulement nous aurons I'ordre universel. 
 Ainsi il y a 40 ans, un ministre parut, k la tribune fran^aise, pour 
 dire : I'ordre r^gne a Varsovie. Oui, mais c'6tait I'ordre que cr6e la 
 mort ; on avait tu6 la Pologne. L'ordre qu'on veut, c'est la mort de 
 I'Eglise.' — La dernUre Heure du Concile, p. 6, 1870. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 487 
 
 Pope valid without the consent of the Council ? ' 
 His answer is : — 
 
 A decree of the Pope in matters oi doctrine is not 
 considered binding on Catholics if it have not the consent 
 of the Church, either dispersed, or assembled by its 
 Bishops in council. 
 
 Archbishop Kenrick, of St. Louis in America, 
 writing from Bome to the Archbishop of Baltimore 
 during the Vatican Council, repudiates point blank 
 the doctrine afterwards proclaimed as an article of 
 Catholic faith, and adds : — 
 
 For if a Papal decree is per se infallible, there is no 
 need of the assent of the Bishops, or of taking votes in 
 the Council, or of subscriptions in their several Sees ; 
 much less is it lawful for any Bishop to resist such 
 decree. 
 
 Archbishop Hughes, of New York, in a disserta- 
 tion on the subject, says : — 
 
 Bellarmine maintained, as a matter of opinion, that 
 the Pope, in his official character, is infallible ; Bossuet, 
 as a matter of opinion, maintained the contrary. 
 
 But- 
 According to the Catholic rule of faith, the doctrines 
 of Christianity are not abstract speculations; they are 
 'positive truths or facts,' unchanged and unchangeable, 
 as they came from the lips of Jesus Christ and His 
 inspired Apostles. But being public truths or facts they 
 were taught by the pastors of the Church and believed 
 by the people in all countries and in every century since 
 the establishment of the Church. Consequently I can 
 
488 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 verify them with the same certainty which I have that 
 such an event as the battle of Waterloo, the decapitation 
 of Charles I., or the Council of Nice took place in the 
 world. In 7ieithercase is a Divine or personal infallibility 
 necessary. . . . The doctrines of the Catholic Church are 
 fixed stars in the firmament of belief, and the transmutation 
 of an opinion into a doctrine would be the raising of a 
 new light, a species of religious reformation which 
 Protestants have taken into their own hands, and for 
 which Catholics have neither the talent, inclination, nor 
 authority} 
 
 Cardinal Wiseman says : — 
 
 But it must not be thought that Catholics believe 
 there is a certain mass of vague and floating opinions 
 which may, at the option of the Pope, or of a General' 
 Council, or of the whole Church, be turned into articles 
 of faith.2 
 
 Again : — 
 
 If the symbolical documents of a Church . . . decide, 
 or seem to decide, a belief, and the great body of its 
 pastors or teachers agree in one interpretation of that 
 definition, and allow none other to be taught, that we 
 hold to be the doctrine of that Church. If it allow two 
 most different, or even contradictory, sentiments to be 
 publicly taught, the holders of neither have a right to 
 call theirs more than opinions in the Church.^ 
 
 In a manual of instruction by the Koman 
 Catholic Bishop Hay I find the following question 
 and answer : — 
 
 Q. — When the head of the Church publishes any 
 decree concerning faith or morals, to which he requires 
 
 » Pp. 49, 91, 92. 2 Lectures, iii. p. 63. 
 
 " Essays, ii. 122. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDERS 489 
 
 submission, to all the faithful, is he himself infallible in 
 what he there teaches ? 
 
 A. — This is not proposed as an article of Divine faith, 
 nor has the Church ever made any decision concerning it.* 
 
 In his 'Letter to Dr. Pusey on his Kecent 
 Eirenicon ' Cardinal Newman includes Dr. Lingard 
 and Dr. Husenbeth among 'the chief (Eoman 
 Catholic) authors of the passing generation in 
 England.' Let us see what those two distinguished 
 divines have to say on the subject before us. . 
 
 I happen to possess a volume of pamphlets which 
 belonged to Dr. Husenbeth. Among them is Car- 
 dinal Manning's 'Vatican Council and its Defini- 
 tions : a Pastoral Letter to the Clergy,' published 
 immediately after the Council. This pamphlet is 
 full of marginal and interleaved notes in Dr. Husen- 
 beth's handwriting, disputing Manning's principal 
 points, and confronting them with the opinions of 
 Eoman Catholic authorities. He quotes as follows 
 from Dr. Lingard's ' Letter to a Clergyman in the 
 Diocese of Durham : ' — ' To your question, where the 
 infallibility of the Catholic Church resides, I answer, 
 in the Episcopal College united to the Pope.' But 
 the Vatican decree says in the Pope, ' without the 
 consent of the Church.' 
 
 Dr. Husenbeth quotes Bishop Baines as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 "When I say that the infallibility of the Pope is not an 
 article of the Catholic faith, I mean that no Catholic is 
 bound to beheve it, but that each one may think of it as 
 ' Sincere Christian, p. 95. 
 
490 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 he pleases, just as much as a Protestant may do. Bellar- 
 mine and some other divines, chiefly Italian, have 
 believed the Pope infallible, when proposing ex cathedrd 
 an article of faith. But in England or Ireland I do not 
 believe that any Catholic maintains the infallibility of the 
 Pope.» 
 
 On page 354 of his Pastoral on the Vatican 
 dogma, Cardinal Manning affirms of the Roman 
 Catholics of England and Ireland that 'what the 
 Council has defined they have alv^ays believed.' On 
 this Dr. Husenbeth makes the follov^ing note : — 
 
 The belief in the Pope's infallibility was by no means 
 so general among English Catholics as Dr. Manning 
 appears to think. For instance, the famous ' Protesta- 
 tion ' in 1788 was signed by all the four Vicars Apostohc, 
 most of the priests with their flocks, and altogether by 
 1,525 Catholics ; and yet it contained these words : — 
 *We acknowledge no infallibility in the Pope.' And 
 though this document was censured on other grounds, 
 that part of it met with no censure. 
 
 So much as to Dr. Husenbeth. It is evident 
 from his annotations on Cardinal Manning's pastoral 
 that he did not accept the Vatican decree ex animo 
 even after its proclamation. 
 
 Soon after the close of the Vatican Council Lord 
 Acton published in German, in the form of a letter to 
 a friend, a pamphlet, w^hich I reviewed in the ' Times ' 
 in the autumn of 1870. Lord Acton was in Rome 
 during the whole sitting of the Council, and was on 
 terms of confidential intimacy with the Bishops of 
 
 * Defence against Dr. Moysey, p. 230. 
 
ANGLICAN AND ROMAN ORDEES 491 
 
 the minority. His account of what happened in the 
 Council may, therefore, be accepted as accurate. 
 Indeed, some of the Bishops of the minority, among 
 them Archbishop Kenrick, pubHshed their speeches 
 afterwards. Here is an extract from Kenrick's : — 
 
 The doctrine is not de fide, and cannot be made so 
 even by the definition of an (Ecumenical Council. We 
 are the guardians of the deposit of faith, not its lords. 
 
 The following are passages quoted by Lord Acton 
 from other speeches delivered in the Vatican 
 Council. One said : * Foreseeing the grievous ruin 
 which threatened souls he would rather die than 
 sanction the synodal clause.' Another said that 
 * the definition of infallibihty would be the ruin of 
 the Church.' Another declared that even 
 
 the faithful, who acknowledged in the Eoman Pontiff 
 a primacy of magistracy and jurisdiction, and whose 
 affection and obedience to the Holy See had never been 
 more manifest, were troubled in heart rather than 
 encouraged, as if now for the first time the foundation of 
 the Church and of the true doctrine were established. 
 On the other hand, the decree would afford food for 
 calumnies and derision of infidels ; and even some among 
 the faithful did not hesitate to say that such a definition 
 would be logically impossible. 
 
 Another 
 
 trembled, foreseeing that very many of the faithful 
 would not be able to endure the great scandal of the new 
 dogma, and would consequently be exposed to the danger 
 of making shipwreck of their faith altogether. 
 
 Another called it * an unheard-of novelty,' imply- 
 
492 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ing that ' the doctrine of the Church had been 
 changed and therefore depraved.' Other Bishops 
 dwelt on the absence of such a doctrine from the 
 catechisms and symboHcal books of the Church. 
 American Bishops declared that it would be almost 
 impossible for them to return to their dioceses with 
 such a doctrine in their pockets. 
 
 These are only samples of a number of passages 
 which Lord Acton culled from the speeches and 
 publications of the minority in the Vatican Council. 
 To quote his own words : — 
 
 This is the picture of the Vatican Council and of its 
 work which we get from men like Schwarzenberg, 
 Rauscher, Haynald, Ketteler, Clifford, Purcell, Conolly, 
 Dupanloup, Darboy, Hefele, Strossmayer, and Kenrick. 
 And so the Council stands self -condemned by the mouths 
 of its ablest members. They represent it as a conspiracy 
 against Divine truth and right. They declare that the 
 new dogmas were neither taught by the Apostles nor 
 believed by the Fathers ; that they are soul-destroying 
 errors, contrary to the true doctrines of the Church, based 
 on deceit, and are a scandal to Catholics. Surely no 
 judgment could be less ambiguous, no language more 
 open, no testimony more sufficient or decisive for the 
 consciences of the faithful. 
 
 These are the words of a loyal member of the 
 Eoman Church, one of the most learned men, too, 
 in her communion ; and he is, in the main, merely 
 reporting the opinions and strong convictions of the 
 most eminent Bishops in his Church for learning, 
 rank, and the importance of their sees. 
 
 I will add to this catena an extract from an 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 493 
 
 interesting volume of letters from Dr. Dollinger 
 published by his niece after his death. The extract 
 is from a letter addressed to Monsignor Euffo Scilla, 
 Papal Nuncio at Muiiich : — 
 
 I refused to change my faith. I refused to believe 
 and teach a new dogma, the contrary of which I had been 
 taught in my youth, and the falsity of which I had learnt 
 by the study and research of fifty-six years. . . . During 
 this long period I always taught the contrary of what 
 was decided by Pius IX. in 1870. 
 
 The Nuncio does not dispute this in his friendly 
 reply ; nor was it disputed, as far as I know, by any 
 Infallibilist who wrote in public against Dr. Dollinger 
 at the time of his excommunication. Cardinal 
 Newman, it is known, while having no difficulty 
 about the dogma himself, strongly disapproved of 
 the manoeuvres by which the decision was obtained, 
 and the hurry with which it was attempted to be 
 forced upon Dr. DolHnger, to whom, according to 
 him, *it was practically a new article of faith.' 
 
 Archbishop Darboy, in a brief analysis of the 
 Bishops of the majority in the Vatican Council, 
 divides them into three groups : (1) the timid, who 
 seek for safety in force and numbers, floating supinely 
 with the stream because they think this less dan- 
 gerous than a struggle against the current which 
 leads to the abyss. (2) Episc-opal clerks — a multi- 
 tude of prelates without dioceses, offspring simply 
 of the Pontifical will, elevated by the Pope alone to 
 their revocable dignities, simple officials, liegemen 
 
494 THE EEFOEMATION, SETTLEMENT 
 
 of the Papacy. (3) Ardent and exaggerating spirits, 
 cherishing the aspirations of another epoch, un- 
 reaHsable desires, illusions, for the most part preju- 
 dices which are impervious to theological reasoning.^ 
 The Bishops of the minority, on the other hand, 
 possessed not only an overwhelming preponderance 
 of intellectual eminence and learning ; they presided, 
 in addition, over the most important sees and cities, 
 and over the most educated populations in the Latin 
 Church. But they were swamped by numbers, 
 many of whom had no flocks. To give these merely 
 titular Bishops an equal voice with the occupants of 
 ancient sees, or any sees, was an encroachment on 
 the constitution of a Council claiming (however 
 illegitimately) to be QEcumenical. For the raison 
 d'etre of an (Ecumenical Council was to gather from 
 each diocese in Christendom its traditional teaching 
 on the question in dispute. The Christian Creed 
 
 * * Cette majority, en effet, se compose surtout d'eveques timides, 
 d'hommes en sous-ordre, d'esprits ardents et exag6r6s. Les premiers 
 aiment a etre avec la force et le grand nombre, afin de ne pas courir 
 de dangers ; ils suivent ais6ment le fleuve qui les emporte et trouvent 
 moins dangereux de descendre toujours que de lutter pour remonter 
 le courant qui m^ne aux abimes. Les seconds sont tous ces prelats 
 sans diocese, issus de la seule volont6 pontificale, relevant du pape 
 et du pape seul, r^vocables ad nutum pour la plupart, simples 
 officiates, comme disent les canonistes romains, ou, si vous I'aimez 
 mieux, dans notre langue franpaise, hommes liges de la Papaut6. 
 Enfin les derniers ne sont ni indiff6rents, ni timides, ni victimes de 
 leur position subalterne, ni flatteurs par temperament, mais, dans 
 une nature bouillante, ils portent des aspirations d'une autre 6poque, 
 des d6sirs irr6alisables, des illusions, le plus souvent des pr6jug6s 
 pieux que les raisonnements th6ologiques n'ont jamais dissip6s. De 
 ces categories, la premiere ne d6sire pas se convertir, la seconde ne 
 peut pas, la troisi^me ne doit pas,' — LadernUre Heure du Concile,-p. 3. 
 
ANGLICAN AND ROMAN OEDERS 495 
 
 being a Divine revelation, it was held to be a question 
 of historical evidence, not of speculation. If the 
 evidence was so much on one side as to amount to 
 moral unanimity, it was held to be conclusive. Yet 
 even then the decree of the Council was not con- 
 sidered de fide, a part, that is, of the creed of 
 Christendom, the deposit of faith once for all com- 
 mitted to the Church. Not till the Church dis- 
 persed throughout the world, its faithful laity as 
 well as clergy, recognised the decree as part of the 
 creed which it had always held, was it considered 
 binding. It is obvious that Bishops without sees 
 had no tradition to deliver, and therefore were not 
 witnesses at all : in other words, were not legitimate 
 members of the Council. What they delivered was 
 but their ovTn private opinions, not the testimony of 
 a diocese traceable back to its origin. It is in this 
 sense that the decision of a truly CEcumenical Council 
 has been recognised as infallible ; not by special 
 inspiration or endowment on the part of the Bishops, 
 but by conclusive historical evidence. The dissent of 
 the eighty-eight Bishops who composed the minority 
 of the Vatican Council, representing moreover, as 
 they did, the vast majority of the educated laity of 
 the Latin Church, destroyed the necessary condition 
 of moral unanimity ; and Cardinal Newman intimates, 
 in his Letter to the Duke of Norfolk, that if the 
 minority had held out the Vatican dogma would 
 not have been binding. But the point to which I 
 wish now to direct special attention is that the com- 
 position of the majority, as Archbishop Darboy and 
 
496 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 others have shown, was such as to vitiate, apart 
 from other reasons, the claim of the Council to be 
 considered (Ecumenical. 
 
 The defenders of the Vatican dogma try to 
 reconcile its novelty with the rule of faith, recognised 
 even by the Roman Church, that there can be no new 
 article of faith since the Day of Pentecost, by com- 
 paring it with the Homoousion of the Nicene Creed. 
 But there is an essential difference. The Homoou- 
 sion is a definition having for its object the protec- 
 tion of a truth always accepted as a part of the 
 Creed of Christendom. The dogma of Infallibility 
 is the creation of a new article of faith, not the 
 definition of an old one. Any Christian who asserted 
 at any time between Pentecost and the Council of 
 Nicsea that Jesus of Nazareth was personally a 
 creature would have been condemned as a heretic. 
 But the fertile ingenuity and dialectical dexterity of 
 Arius succeeded for a time in baffling the Fathers of 
 the Council. He acknowledged Christ's pre-existence 
 before His virgin birth. He admitted that He was 
 the Creator of the world, and had existed before the 
 angels. In short, there was scarcely a title belonging 
 to God which Arius did not concede to Christ. Not 
 until the keen spear of a dialectician more subtle 
 than himself pierced his sophisms by pinning him 
 to the declaration that Christ was * a creature, 
 though the highest of the creatures,' was it made 
 manifest to the minds of all that Arius denied the 
 Divinity of Christ. The Homoousion (of the same 
 substance) was inserted in the Creed to guard a truth 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 497 
 
 already held, namely, that Christ is a Divine Person 
 co-existing eternally with the Father. 
 
 This is altogether different from the dogma of 
 Papal infallibility. It is a matter of historical 
 demonstration that the doctrine therein defined was 
 not so much as even heard of, certainly for the first 
 eight centuries of Christianity. That date will 
 suffice for my purpose, though I might, in matter of 
 fact, bring it much farther down. Until July 18, 
 1870, any member of the Church of Eome might 
 deny, write against, denounce — as in truth many 
 did — not any particular view or definition of Papal 
 infallibility, but Papal infallibility itself in any sense 
 reconcilable with the Vatican dogma. The Church 
 of Home is therefore in this inevitable dilemma. 
 Either the Vatican dogma of Papal infallibility is a 
 fiction and a fraud, an undeniable historical falsehood ; 
 or the Church of Kome has for more than eighteen 
 centuries allowed an article of faith, as binding on 
 the conscience as belief in the existence of Almighty 
 God, to be an open question, the avowed impugners 
 of which were not even liable to censure, still less 
 to the refusal of Sacraments. The upholders of 
 Papal infallibility may make their choice ; but the 
 choice lies between the two horns of the dilemma : 
 there is no third. Semper eadem indeed ! What 
 is there in the history of the Church of England at 
 any period since the Keformation comparable to this 
 theological cataclysm? "What mutual contradic- 
 tions can be produced from Anglican divines that 
 equal those which I have cited from Boman divines ? 
 
 K K 
 
498 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 The truth is that history and the Ultramontane 
 Theory of the Papacy cannot stand together. They 
 are mutually destructive. And this is the view of a 
 distinguished Ultramontane writer. I have before 
 me as I write a revised edition of an elaborate 
 treatise in defence of the supremacy and infallibility 
 of the Pope, printed in Eome in 1875 ' ex Typographia 
 Vaticana,' and dedicated to Pio nono, Pontifici 
 Maximo Doctori et Judici inerranti a Christo Jesu i7i 
 Ecclesia constituto cum potestate in cunctos Epi- 
 scopos. The author's name is Aloisius Vincenzi, and 
 when he wrote the book he held the post of Professor 
 of Hebrew in Eome and the dignity of Prelate. He 
 won his spurs in the arena of controversy as an 
 accredited champion of the Papacy thirty-three 
 years before the publication of the goodly volume 
 from which I am about to quote. One of his 
 works, he tells us in his Prologus (p. viii), was 
 written * at the instance ' beatissimi Papce Pii IX. 
 feliciter regnantis. And he acknowledges ' the debt 
 of gratitude ' which he owes erga clarissimos viros 
 Petrum Ballerini et Joannem Perrone e Soc, Jesu. I 
 was in Eome when the book was published, and 
 learned from Monsignor Nardi, dean of the Eota, 
 who was a great favourite of Pius IX., that the 
 booli was written at the suggestion of the Pope, and 
 dedicated to him by special permission. A book 
 printed at the Vatican press, prompted by and 
 dedicated to the Pope, written by a prelate who was 
 a learned professor, and approved by the most 
 distinguished theologians in Eome, must be admitted 
 
ANGLICAN AND ROMAN OEDERS 499 
 
 to possess the highest authority. The subject of the 
 book is * The Sacred Monarchy of the Hebrews and 
 Christians, and the Infahible Magisterium in each ; ' 
 and the argument is a laboured attempt to prove that 
 as the Hebrew Church had {ex hypothesi) an infahible 
 head, first in Moses, and then in the High Priest, so 
 the Christian Church, its antitype, has its infalHble 
 head in the Pope. 
 
 This thesis Vincenzi estabhshed to his own 
 satisfaction on a pile of impregnable evidence, as he 
 deems it, from the Old Testament and the New, from 
 the history of the Church, and, above all, from the 
 necessity of the case. Just as men of science 
 assume the existence of a luminiferous ether, and 
 find its evidence in phenomena which they cannot 
 otherwise explain, so Vincenzi assumes the existence 
 of a supreme and infallible Papacy, and finds that it 
 fits all the facts except two, which however are 
 rather formidable impediments. I will describe the 
 first in the author's own words, after a careful and 
 minute survey of the first five centuries of the 
 Christian era, in which he finds ample proof of 
 Papal infallibility and universal supremacy : — 
 
 Nevertheless, as is patent from the preceding pages 
 we must not conceal the fact that in the ancient Acts of 
 the Church during the aforesaid period (i.e. the first 
 five centuries of Christianity) there are some four hundred 
 documents entitled Canons — Apostolic Canons, as they 
 are called; Canons of Ancyra, Elvira, Neo-Caesarea, 
 Gangra, Laodicea, Nicsea, Constantinople, Africa, Chal- 
 cedon — most of them written in Greek — where the pre- 
 
 K K 2 
 
500 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 rogatives of the Eoman See are never once set forth ; or if 
 ever mentioned, only mentioned to be disowned. 
 
 * What are we to infer from this silence ? ' our 
 author asks in pathetic bewilderment. A writer who 
 had the faintest perception of the canons of historical 
 evidence would infer that his thesis was an edifice 
 built upon the sand, which collapsed the moment it 
 came in contact with the hard facts of history. 
 But that is an impossible inference to Vincenzi. 
 For him the Pope's infallibility is an axiom of 
 theological science : a dogma to be argued from, not 
 argued about. If history does not agree with the 
 dogma, so much the worse for history. It must be 
 thrown overboard. I am not exaggerating in the 
 least. The Pope's supreme Magisterium and infal- 
 lible authority being assumed as an article of ne- 
 cessary faith, it follows of course that 'the aforesaid 
 canons, erected against the sacred sovereignty of 
 Peter and his successors, must necessarily be repro- 
 bated ' as a gigantic fraud perpetrated by heretical 
 forgers and mutilators ! The heavens may fall, but 
 the personal infallibility of the Pope must stand. 
 And here we get a charming insight into the cal- 
 culus by means of which Ultramontane controver- 
 sialists surmount the facts of history : — 
 
 In fine, whatever is to be thought of the origin and 
 authority of the aforesaid countless Canons, nobody will 
 ever persuade me that Apostles, and Orthodox Fathers 
 of Nicaea, Constantinople, Africa, and Chalcedon, ever 
 sanctioned Canons of this sort ; in which both the Pri- 
 macy of Peter and his successors is discredited and 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 501 
 
 destroyed ; and at the same time the jurisdiction of the 
 Eoman Pontiff over all the Bishops of the Catholic 
 Church is repudiated. 
 
 Vincenzi accordingly undertakes to reconstruct 
 the Canons of the whole Catholic Church in so far 
 as they come into collision with the Papal theory. 
 The following may serve as a specimen. The sixth 
 Canon of Nicaea in its genuine form offers a complete 
 refutation of his theory. Its opening words are : — 
 
 Let the ancient customs be maintained, which are in 
 Egypt and Libya and Pentapolis, according to which the 
 Bishop of Alexandria has authority over all those places. 
 For this is also customary to the Bishop of Eome. In 
 like manner in Antioch and in the other Provinces their 
 privileges are to be preserved to the Churches. 
 
 This restricts the jurisdiction of the Bishop of 
 Bome to the Province of Italy ; and that was the 
 contemporaneous interpretation of the Canon. But 
 it would, of course, be fatal to Vincenzi' s argument. 
 So he calmly concludes that the Canon was garbled 
 by crafty heretics, and he ' restores it to its original 
 form ' as follows : — 
 
 Let the ancient customs be maintained — namely, that 
 the Eoman See should have the primacy of honour in the 
 first rank ; that Alexandria should have the primacy of 
 honour in the second rank ; Antioch in the third rank ; 
 and Csesarea in the fourth rank, with the attributes 
 belonging to these secondary Sees. 
 
 And then Vincenzi adds with charming nai- 
 vete : — 
 
 Although I do not suppose that I have rendered the 
 
502 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 exact words of the Canon, yet I am confident that I havo 
 hit upon their meaning.^ 
 
 And this is the kind of history which is now 
 taught with authority under the shadow of the 
 Vatican ! What is the use of appealing to history 
 against a system of which an authorised champion 
 can manipulate facts ad libitum ? 
 
 A startling confirmation indeed of Cardinal 
 Manning's declaration that ' the appeal to history is 
 a treason and a heresy.' Certainly it is for any 
 loyal believer in the present Papal system. 
 
 The second impediment which history puts in 
 the way of Vincenzi's thesis comes from the New 
 Testament. It consists of St. Paul's declaration 
 that he 'withstood Peter to the face,' on a question 
 of doctrine, 'because he was to be blamed; ' and 
 because St. Paul always refers to St. Peter as an 
 Apostle of coordinate authority with himself. It 
 would be too bold to say that this too is an inter- 
 polation by heretics. But Vincenzi is equal to the 
 occasion. The Pope's personal infallibility and 
 supreme magistracy over the whole episcopate being, 
 in Vincenzi's mind, a revealed truth to be beHeved 
 by all Christians on pain of deadly heresy, all facts 
 to the contrary must be got rid of somehow. He 
 frankly admits that the passages in question cannot 
 be reconciled with Papal supremacy and infallibility, 
 which must be upheld at any cost. So he devotes 
 
 ' De HebrcBorum et Christianorum Sacra Monarchia et de Infal- 
 libili in TJtraque Magisterio, pp. 291-298, 305-371. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 503 
 
 sixty-six large quarto pages to the task of proving 
 that it was not Peter the Apostle to whom St. Paul 
 refers, but an unknown namesake. 
 
 On the whole, was there ever in any controversy 
 so complete an abandonment of the whole field of 
 historical evidence as this treatise in defence of the 
 Papacy ? And one of the most curious features of 
 the whole controversy is the intellectual, blindness 
 which prevents the defenders of Papal infallibility 
 from seeing that the Vatican Council is itself one 
 of the strongest arguments against, its own dogma. 
 For if, as the Vatican decree declares. Papal pro- 
 nouncements ex cathedra ' are infallible of themselves, 
 and not from the consent of the Church,' where was 
 the sense of having a council at all to decide, after 
 months of heated debate, a question which we are 
 told has been an article of faith since Pentecost? 
 Nay, more ; how is it that the Church was so stupid 
 as ever to have any councils at all if the Bishops of 
 Rome have always been infallible ? Why summon 
 all the Bishops of Christendom to one place to 
 deliver their testimony on some disputed question 
 of faith — and that too before the days of railways, 
 and steamers, and telegraphs, when travelling was 
 so slow and often perilous — if the Bishop of Rome 
 could all the while have decided the point infallibly, 
 and communicated his irreformable decision to his de- 
 legates, the Bishops of the whole Christian Church ? 
 The one historical fact of General Councils is alone 
 sufficient to overthrow the imposing structure of the 
 Papacy. Truly ' the appeal to history is a treason 
 
604 THE BEFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and a heresy ' on the part of a believer in an infalHble 
 Papacy. What the late Father Ejiox of the London 
 Oratory says of the dogma of the Immaculate Con- 
 ception of the Virgin is equally true of Papal 
 infallibility and all ex cathedra utterances of the 
 Pope : — 
 
 The moment before Pius IX. spoke these words, 
 interior assent to the doctrine of the Immaculate Con- 
 ception was not obligatory on the faithful. The moment 
 after he had spoken them, none who heard him could 
 doubt interiorly the truth of the dogma without com- 
 mitting a formal sin of heresy and incurring the forfeiture 
 of their salvation.^ 
 
 This is nothing less than a complete subversion 
 of the received doctrine of the whole Christian 
 Church of the General Councils. To afhrm that the 
 mere fiat of the Pope can in a moment change a 
 doubtful or discredited opinion into an eternal truth, 
 instantly demanding unquestioning interior assent 
 on pain of ' heresy incurring the forfeiture of salva- 
 tion,' is not only a monstrous contradiction of the 
 faith of Christendom; it is in addition a deadly 
 blow at truth itself as a fact existing outside and 
 independently of the human mind. Truth thus 
 becomes an opinion instead of an eternal verity, and 
 a vista is opened out of an indefinite expansion of 
 the creed of the Church, the doubtful opinions or 
 proved falsehoods of to-day becoming the divine truths 
 of to-morrow, claiming the instant submission of heart 
 and intellect. 
 
 * Wlien does the Church speak infallibly ? p. 46 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDERS 505 
 
 It is a fallacy to suppose that the qualification of 
 ex cathedra limits the pronouncements of the Pope 
 on questions of faith or morals ; nor, indeed, are his 
 infallible utterances limited even by the area of faith 
 and morals. For Koman Catholic authorities are 
 irreconcilably divided in their explanations of the 
 exact meaning both of ex cathedra and of what con- 
 stitutes faith and morals. Let us take a few 
 examples. 
 
 Cardinal Newman declares that to constitute an 
 ex cathedra utterance there must be a solemn cere- 
 monial. The Pope must be surrounded by his Court 
 and Council, and deliver his infallible decree explicitly 
 to the whole Church with proper pomp and Pontifical 
 formalities, so that there can be no mistake as to 
 the character of the decree. According to this 
 explanation, the number of ex cathedra Pontifical 
 decrees, Newman says, is still under twenty.^ 
 
 On the other hand, Dr. Ward asserts that there 
 is practically no limit to the Pope's infallible utter- 
 ances. According to him the phrase ex cathedra 
 embraces not only the utterances of the Pope at the 
 head of a General Council, but Encyclicals, Allo- 
 cutions, Apostolic Letters, * and various letters to 
 this or that individual pastor,' or even to laymen, 
 such as Pius IX.'s * letter to that spiritual rebel, 
 the ICing of Sardinia,' or Gregory XVI. 's * confi- 
 dential communication ' to Lamennais. Nay, 
 whenever it shall please the Pope to order the 
 publication of a decree put forth by any of the 
 
 * Historical Sketches, p. 340. 
 
506 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Pontifical congregations, that decree at once 'be- 
 comes absolutely infallible.' The most distinguished 
 Ultramontane writers are in fact at sixes and sevens 
 among themselves as to what constitutes an ex 
 cathedra decree. * It is necessary,' says Dom Gue- 
 ranger, ' that the terms of the decree should indicate 
 the intention of imposing an obligation.' ' For our- 
 selves, on the contrary,' says Dr. Ward, ' we regard 
 a different doctrine as absolutely certain ; and 
 indeed, as one which cannot be denied without most 
 serious results.' Take, by way of example. Pope 
 Nicholas Third's ' Exiit qui seminat.' * As to this 
 Bull,' says Dr. Ward, ' Ultramontane controversial- 
 ists have hitherto almost universally denied that it 
 was ex cathedra' But Dr. Ward, in his 'Brief 
 Summary,' takes the opposite side ; and Dr. Ward 
 turns out to be infallibly right, for a reason which I 
 shall presently mention. Again, says Dr. Ward, 
 ' many Pontifical pronouncements which Dom 
 Gueranger admits to be ex cathedra do not neverthe- 
 less express, either indirectly or equivalently, the 
 obligation of interior assent which the respective 
 Popes have by them intended to impose.' And he 
 cites as an instance ' St. Leo's letter to St. Flavian.' 
 * This letter is not only accounted ex cathedra by 
 every individual Ultramontane theologian, with the 
 singular exception of Bellarmine, but is ordinarily 
 used by Ultramontane controversialists as the one 
 typical instance of an ex cathedra pronouncement. 
 Yet this letter contains no syllable implying ever so 
 distantly that St. Leo was intending to oblige the 
 
ANGLICAN AND ROMAN ORDEES 507 
 
 whole Church to accept its teaching. But, in truth, 
 among the various ex cathedra acts recited by Dom 
 Gueranger, there are several others which entirely 
 fail to fulfil his conditions.' ^ 
 
 It comes to this therefore : The Pope is infallible 
 only when he speaks ex cathedra ; but ' Ultramon- 
 tane controversialists ' may be for centuries ' almost 
 universally ' in error as to the ex cathedra character 
 of any Papal pronouncement in particular. Ages 
 after the pronouncement was uttered by the organ 
 of infallibility Dom Gueranger discovers that it was 
 an ex cathedra decision. Dr. Ward agrees with 
 Dom Gueranger as to this particular case, but 
 dissents at the same time from the doctrine laid 
 down by that eminent theologian as to the tests by 
 which the ex cathedra character of any Papal utter- 
 ance may be known, and ' regards a different doctrine 
 as absolutely certain.' 
 
 Again, a certain Papal 'letter is not only ac- 
 counted ex cathedra by every individual Ultramon- 
 tane,' with one ' singular exception,' ' but is ordi- 
 narily used by Ultramontane controversialists as the 
 one typical instance of an ex cathedra pronounce- 
 ment ; ' the * singular exception ' being Bellarmine, 
 the greatest of Ultramontane controversialists. 
 
 Both Dr. Ward and Dom Gueranger assert that 
 the insertion of any Papal utterance, even of * letters 
 to individuals,' in the ' Corpus Juris,' impresses an 
 ex cathedra character on such utterances, * their in- 
 sertion in that official collection ' being ' equivalent 
 
 ' See Dublin Review, New Series, No. XXIX., pp. 204-206. 
 
508 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 to a complete promulgation.' Nor is even this 
 formality always necessary. * Dom Gueranger,' says 
 Dr. Ward, ' lays very great and deserved weight on 
 the formula prescribed by Pope S. Hormisdas to the 
 Eastern Church. But this formula recognises as 
 ex cathedra ' all the letters of Pope Leo which he 
 wrote concerning the Christian religion.' But no 
 one will maintain that all these letters express, 
 either directly or equivalently, an intention of 
 obliging the universal Church.' 
 
 It is a complete fallacy, therefore, to suppose that 
 Papal infallibility is restricted to formal decisions. 
 On the contrary, it would be the grossest presump- 
 tion for any Koman Catholic to deny infallibility to 
 any single one of the numerous sayings of Pius IX. 
 during his long Pontificate. * Some Catholics,' says 
 Dr. Ward, ' really seem to speak as though he (Pius 
 IX.) had never defined ex cathedra any verity 
 except the Immaculate Conception.' ^ On the con- 
 trary, he expressly declares that he has ^ never 
 ceased' {jiunquam intermissus) from condemning 
 ex cathedra ' perverse doctrines,' and he has made 
 a similar declaration in the ' Quanta Cura.' 'If for 
 more than twenty-three years,' adds Dr. Ward, 
 naively, * he has never ceased from such condemna- 
 tions, the number of his ex cathedra Acts must by 
 this time be considerable.' 
 
 I have quoted Dr. Ward in preference to any 
 other exponent of Papal infallibility because the 
 Pope has expressly sanctioned his doctrine on the 
 
 ' This was written before the Vatican Council. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 509 
 
 subject in an Apostolic Letter which was published 
 at the time in the ' Dublin Keview.* To doubt the 
 soundness of Dr. Ward's doctrine is, therefore, to 
 impugn the dogma of Papal infallibility itself. It is 
 consequently useless to quote any Eoman authorities 
 on the other side, since their difference from Dr. 
 Ward must be the measure of their error. Now the 
 upshot of Dr. Ward's teaching is that it is practically 
 impossible to put any limits on the Pope's infalli- 
 bility. With remorseless logic he has demolished 
 every attempt to do so, and the Pope himself has 
 covered Dr. Ward's irresistible logic with the awful 
 authority of his infallible shield.^ 
 
 Nor is the restriction of the Pope's infallibility 
 to questions of faith and morals of the smallest 
 practical utility. All recent Ultramontane writers 
 teach that the object of the Pope's infallibility is 
 practically unlimited, since there is no branch of 
 human knowledge which does not, directly or in- 
 directly, impinge on faith or morals. Even ques- 
 tions of fact, which Ultramontanes themselves 
 formerly excluded from the sphere of Papal infalli- 
 bility, are now declared by Dr. Ward to be embraced 
 within its scope. The five propositions attributed 
 to Jansenius, he argues, are not only heretical, but* 
 are actually to be found in the ' Augustinus.' 
 
 This is now infallibly certain because the Church 
 decrees those to be implicated in the Jansenistic heresy 
 
 * See Dr. Ward's Authority of Doctrinal Decisions, pp. 52, 55, 
 75, 76 ; and the Dublin Review of July, 1870, p. 206. 
 
610 THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 who were wrong on the question of fact no less than 
 those who were wrong on the question of doctrine.^ 
 
 Pather Knox teaches the same doctrine as fol- 
 lows : — 
 
 In compelling the Bishops and clergy to swear that 
 they sincerely beheved the five condemned propositions 
 to be contained in the * Augustinus/ the Church showed 
 most clearly that she had not the slightest doabt about 
 her power to determine infalhbly this fact, and that her 
 children had no right in conscience to doubt her power. 
 For if a doubt had been admissible, she could not lawfully 
 have exacted the oath, since she would have exposed the 
 Bishops and clergy to the danger of perjuring themselves 
 by swearing that they were absolutely certain of a fact 
 for which they had no sufficient ground of certainty 
 except her (on the hypothesis) falhble authority. But 
 she knew, and with good reason, that though she had no 
 direct power to judge this fact, in so far as it was a 
 purely human one, indirectly she had power to decide 
 concerning it because of its close connection with re- 
 vealed dogma.^ 
 
 Almost any fact relating to human conduct, or 
 having any bearing on religion, may thus be brought 
 under the denomination of faith and morals. So that 
 the sphere of the Pope's infallibility is in reaHty un- 
 limited, and the ex cathedra limitation is no limita- 
 tion at all. It is almost enough to make one despair 
 of the triumph of truth over error to find that the pro- 
 position which the keen wit and remorseless logic of 
 Pascal laughed out of the court of reason should 
 
 ' Authority of Doctrinal Decisions, p. 38. 
 
 '^ When does the Church speak infallibly ? p. 61. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 611 
 
 appear again under the shield of an ecclesiastical 
 authority which claims to be infallible even in the 
 domain of facts. If the Pope is to be believed 
 implicitly when he affirms that a certain book con- 
 tains five propositions which no human being has 
 ever been able to find there, it is obvious that he 
 wields an infallible sceptre over the whole realm 
 of human life and thought. 
 
 There is another fatal flaw in the Papal theory. 
 It is not only disproved by history ; it is in addition 
 an entire inversion of the original idea of the Church. 
 According to that idea the clergy were elected from 
 below, but ordained from above. As a rule, the 
 faithful laity chose their chief pastors ; but these 
 received their commission from a superior officer. 
 First the Apostles, then the Episcopate, exercised 
 the power of ordination.^ The unit of the Church 
 was in the Bishop. Its whole potentiality was 
 summed up in him, and thus the gates of hell could 
 not prevail against it except by the destruction of 
 the entire Episcopate, and thereby of the power of 
 reproduction. But according to the Papal theory 
 the Church becomes a corpse on the decease of the 
 
 * It is irrelevant to my present point whether the unit of the 
 Church was in the Episcopate or the Presbyterate. Episcopalians 
 and Presbyterians both believe that Orders are conferred by a power 
 superior to the persons to be ordained. And that is the point under 
 consideration. Baronius believed that the See of Eome was vacant 
 for three years before the election of Leo VII. ; in other words, that 
 the whole Christian Church was headless for three years. See the 
 anomalies in which the Church of Eome is involved by its assump- 
 tion — alone among Churches — that the Church on earth has one 
 visible head. 
 
512 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Pope, for he is its solitary head. A body deprived 
 of its head is dead. 
 
 Again, the Papal Bull against the validity of 
 Anglican Orders goes on the orthodox assumption 
 that the gift of Orders is from above — bestowed by a 
 higher grade on a lower. But what about the Pope, 
 from whom, according to the Papal theory, the whole 
 life of the Church flows? How is he ordained? 
 Originally the Bishop of Eome was elected by the 
 Cardinal Archdeacons of Eome and the suburbicarian 
 districts, and was then consecrated to the episcopal 
 office in the same way as other Bishops. All that is 
 changed. The original system has been revolutionised. 
 The College of Cardinals ceased long ago to represent 
 the Roman clergy and laity. Most of them are 
 Bishops ; but they need not be. The Cardinalate is 
 open to deacons, and even to subdeacons and laymen. 
 This becomes a matter of capital importance when 
 we consider in what the essence of making a Pope 
 consists. Its essence is in election by ballot. Qui 
 eligitur Bom. Pontifex, says Bellarmine, eo ipso fit 
 Pontifex Summus EcclesicB totius etsi forte non ex- 
 primant elector es.^ ' Moroni, who enters at length 
 upon the question, and must be considered the 
 organ of the Court of Rome, declares that a Pope 
 must necesarily be in possession of all his powers 
 from the instant of election, although he admits that 
 this opinion has prevailed in the Church only since 
 the days of Adrian V., who died a layman.' ^ 
 
 ' De Rom. Pontifice, lib. ii. cap. 22. 
 
 * Cartwright, On Papal Conclaves, p. 168. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN OEDEES 513 
 
 The case of Pope Adrian V. is one of the multi- 
 tude of mediaeval irregularities which touch the 
 essence of the Eoman claims. There is nothing in 
 canon law to limit the choice of a Pope to the 
 College of Cardinals, and as a matter of fact Popes 
 have been elected from outside the Sacred College — 
 John XIX. for example, who was a layman, as was 
 also Adrian V., who died a layman a month after 
 his election, but exercised the full prerogatives of his 
 office in the interval, abolishing inter alia the im- 
 portant Bull of his predecessor, Gregory X. This 
 changed fundamentally the constitution which regu- 
 lated elections to the Papacy, and was in force during 
 six subsequent elections, when Clementine V. restored 
 Gregory's constitution. Leo VIII. was also elected 
 as a layman. By Baronius he was considered as a 
 usurper, but by Pleury and others as a legitimate 
 Pontiff. How trivial the pettifogging objections of 
 the Papal Bull against the validity of Anglican Orders 
 appear when compared with these serious flaws 
 which affect the very core of the Papacy ! If the 
 essence of the validity of the Papacy lies in the act 
 of election, independently of the previous status of the 
 person elected, as eminent Koman authorities affirm, 
 and the crucial instance of Adrian V. illustrates, it is 
 patent that the original constitution of the Christian 
 Church has been abrogated throughout the Roman 
 Obedience. Matter and form are alike concentrated 
 in a two-thirds majority of votes by ballot, 
 
 And when our Eoman friends taunt us with the 
 
 L L 
 
514 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 conge d'elire ^ in the election of our bishops, they 
 forget that it existed when the Pope's supremacy 
 was acknowledged in England, and existed also 
 in its essence, and still exists, in some foreign 
 countries, where the sovereign has enjoyed a right 
 of veto on Papal nominations to the episcopate. 
 But a still more formidable retort on our Koman 
 assailants is the veto on Papal elections possessed 
 by France, Austria, and Spain, and never disputed by 
 the Holy See. Nor is this veto an obsolete privilege. 
 It is in full force still, and has been exercised more 
 than once in recent times ; the last time in 1831 by 
 Spain, which vetoed the election of Cardinal Giusti- 
 niani after he had secured the requisite majority. 
 Giustiniani had been Nuncio in Madrid, and had made 
 himself unpopular at Court. And it was by an 
 accident that Cardinal Mastai-Ferretti (Pius IX.) 
 was not excluded from the Papal throne. Austria, 
 disturbed by the liberal aspirations imputed to him, 
 instructed its agent to lodge the formal veto in the 
 name of the Emperor. Private information of the 
 Imperial intention reached the Conclave ; the election 
 was hurried forward, and the Austrian veto arrived 
 the day after the election, when it was of no avail. 
 
 ' I have never been able to see the ' farce ' of the cong4 d'4lire. 
 The civil power cannot impose a bishop on the Church without the 
 Church's own consent. The chapter can reject the nominee of the 
 Government, and the Episcopate can checkmate any attempt at 
 coercion by refusing consecration, without which the rejected 
 nominee cannot take possession of his See. The congd^ d'Hire is 
 thus a valuable check on the nomination of unworthy persons. 
 Prsemunire may make martyrs, but cannot force the will. 
 
ANGLICAN AND KOMAN OEDEES 515 
 
 It is true that the unworthiness of the minister 
 does not affect the vaHdity of his official acts ; but 
 there are scandals in the history of the Papacy so 
 shocking as to suggest considerable scepticism if we 
 are to adopt — I will not say the hypercriticism of 
 the Papal Bull against Ajiglican Orders, but — the 
 sober rules of historical criticism. Take the case of 
 Pope John XII., who was raised to the Papal throne 
 at the uncanonical age of eighteen. This youth made 
 the Papal Court so infamous by his licentiousness 
 that the citizens of Kome at last appealed to the 
 German Emperor to rid them of the scandal. Otho 
 arrived in Eome and summoned a council of twenty 
 cardinals, and all the principal members of the 
 Eoman clergy, to investigate the charges against the 
 Pope. The conclusion arrived at by the Council 
 was summed up by the Emperor in a letter to the 
 Pope, of which the purport may be gathered from 
 the following extract : — 
 
 Having arrived in Eome for the service of God, we 
 demanded of the bishops and cardinals what was the 
 cause of your absence, and they asserted against you 
 things so disgraceful as to be unworthy of comedians. 
 All, as well clerics as laics, have accused you of 
 homicide, perjury, sacrilege, of incest with your relatives 
 and with two sisters, of having drunk wine to the honour 
 of the devil, and having invoked in gambling Jupiter, 
 Venus, and other Demons. We therefore request you to 
 return immediately in order to justify yourself from these 
 charges ; and if you fear the insolence of the people, we 
 promise to you upon our oath that nothing shall be done 
 contrary to the canons. 
 
 L L 2 
 
516 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 A learned Eoman Catholic, writing of this episode, 
 
 says : — 
 
 In that extraordinary Council voices had been raised, 
 from ecclesiastics and laics, with strange protests against 
 John XII. ' The very Iberians, Babylonians, and Indians 
 have heard of the monstrous crimes of the Pope ! * 
 Cardinals deposed that he had been seen to celebrate 
 Mass without communicating; that he had consecrated 
 a bishop in a stable ; had bestowed the bishopric of Todi 
 on a boy ten years old ! It was stated also, in reply to 
 Otho's demand for specific charges, that he had caused 
 ecclesiastics to be blinded and . . . with cruelty fatal to 
 life. The reply made by John to the prelates sent with 
 the Emperor's letter was laconical : ' We have heard it 
 said that you intend to make another Pope. If you do, 
 I will excommunicate you in the name of the Omnipotent 
 God, so that you shall be no more able to confer Holy 
 Orders or to celebrate Mass.' ^ 
 
 So that in addition to his scandalous life this Pope 
 was so ignorant as to believe that the Sacrament was 
 complete without the communion of the priest. How 
 will Eome's modern doctrine of intention bear that 
 test ? Well might Dollinger say to me, as he did in 
 1874, that 'if one chose to be critical, Anglican Orders, 
 the validity of which he had carefully examined, were 
 much safer than Roman Orders.' John XII. was 
 deposed, after an infamous Pontificate of eight years, 
 and the layman Leo VIII. was chosen in his stead. 
 All Churches, alas ! have scandals to deplore, and 
 must trust to the Divine mercy to make good, for 
 the sake of the innocent people, any defect caused by 
 
 * MedicBval Christianity and Sacred Art by C. J. Hemans, p. 21. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN ORDEES 617 
 
 sins of commission or omission on the part of their 
 rulers ; but no Church is in such sore need of the 
 mercy of God and the charity of man as the Church 
 of Kome. Boccaccio has illustrated by a humorous 
 story the impression made on thinking men at the 
 time by the scandals of the Papacy. A Jew in 
 France, who had for a long time resisted all the 
 arguments and solicitations of a Catholic friend to 
 become a Christian, said one day, * I'll tell you what 
 I will do — I will go to Eome and be guided by what 
 I see at the fountain-head of your religion.' The 
 Christian tried to dissuade him. For he too had 
 been in Eome, and believed it to be the last place in 
 the world to incline a man to Christianity. But the 
 Jew went, and called on his friend on his return, 
 after an absence of some months, with the news that 
 he had become a Christian. * God be praised,' 
 exclaimed his friend, ' but what did you see in Eome 
 to make a Christian of you ? ' * I saw iniquity and 
 immorality prevailing everywhere in the Church,' 
 he replied, ' from the Pope downwards. So I reflected 
 and came to the conclusion that a religion which has 
 survived all that for centuries must be indeed divine, 
 and I became a Christian.' 
 
 I do not mean to impugn the validity of Eoman 
 Orders on account of the confusions, irregularities, 
 and scandals which disfigured much of the history of 
 the Papacy during the Middle Ages ; but I venture 
 to question the prudence of Eoman Catholic contro- 
 versialists in provoking English Churchmen to 
 retaliate in self-defence. No one can read dispassio- 
 
518 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 nately the history of the early years of Elizabeth's 
 reign without being forced to the conclusion that, 
 if the Queen had only acknowledged the Pope's 
 Supremacy, nothing would ever have been heard 
 against the validity of Anglican Orders. Bonner, 
 who knew the facts better than either Leo XIII. or 
 Cardinal Vaughan, questioned the legal authority of 
 Edward's Ordinal because of its lack of Parliamentary 
 and Convocational authority ; but he made no ob- 
 jection to it on the ground of defect in matter or 
 form : a proof that he recognised no such defect.^ 
 
 And how is the Pope's invitation to the Eliza- 
 bethan Bishops to the Council of Trent to be recon- 
 ciled with the view that he held them to be no 
 bishops at all ? I prefer to quote the fact from the 
 treatise on ' The Anglican Schism ' by a bitter Eoman 
 Catholic contemporary, Sanders. In 1560, he teUs 
 us, the Pope ' sent a Nuncio ' to England, who was 
 to say on behalf of the Pope that * if on account of 
 her doubtful birth Elizabeth was afraid that her 
 title to the throne might, on the part of the Church 
 or the Pope, be questioned, the matter could be 
 easily settled, for the Apostolic See is indulgent.' 
 But, so far from being conciliated by those blandish- 
 ments, ' the Queen would neither listen to the Nuncio 
 nor allow him even to land.' ' Some time afterwards 
 (1561-2), the Pontiff, to leave no means untried, 
 sent another legate to persuade the Queen to allow 
 some, at least, of her own bishops to attend the 
 Council [of Trent], and to enter into conference 
 
 » Collier, vi. 428, 431. 
 
ANGLICAN AND EOMAN ORDBES 519 
 
 with the Cathohcs, promising them Hberty of speech 
 and the safety of their persons.' The legate was the 
 Abbot Martinengo.^ 
 
 In fine, if it be a question of the vaHdity of 
 Boman Orders as against Anghcan, certainly the 
 Church of England has no reason to ' be ashamed 
 to speak with her enemies in the gate.' 
 
 * Sanders's Anglican Schism, pp. 290-1. 
 
520 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 CHAPTEK XII 
 
 THE PETSONEE OF THE VATICAN : A CHAPTEE OF 
 SECEET HISTOEY 
 
 Aftee the death of Pius IX., the more long-headed 
 among the Vatican ecclesiastics felt that if un- 
 exampled misfortune was to be averted from the 
 Papacy and the Koman Catholic Church, a complete 
 break must be made with the policy of the late Pope. 
 It was true indeed that Pius had provided his suc- 
 cessor, in the event of his death, with a political 
 testament which pledged him to an irreconcilable 
 attitude towards Italy, but nevertheless the party of 
 reconciliation worked hard to push their candidate 
 forward ' in the Conclave. This candidate was 
 Cardinal Pecci, who had been banished, through 
 Antonelli's jealousy, since 1846 to the unimportant 
 diocese of Perugia. At the head of the party of 
 reconciliation stood Cardinal Franchi, and his best 
 adjutant was Monsignor Galimberti, afterwards 
 Nuncio in Vienna. Galimberti succeeded in 
 convincing his distinguished patron that Pecci's 
 only hope of election lay in winning the foreign 
 Cardinals. This again was only possible through 
 the friendly co-operation of the foreign Powers ; and 
 
THE PRISONEE OF THE VATICAN 521 
 
 in order to accomplish this the action of the Press was 
 necessary. It all turned on representing Pecci to 
 the governments, with which Pius IX. had embroiled 
 himself, as the opponent of his policy. Already 
 before 1878 the quiet campaign of the Press had 
 begun, Louis Teste having written a book on the 
 next Conclave in which he extolled the qualifications 
 of Cardinal Pecci, and recommended him as the 
 future Pope. On the day of Pius IX. 's death, the 
 campaign of the Press, Italian and foreign, in favour 
 of a conciliating Pope began, and with such success 
 that all the twenty-four Cardinals who took part in 
 the Conclave voted for Cardinal Pecci. 
 
 Leo, as Pope, did not disappoint the hopes which 
 the party of reconciliation had placed in him, for 
 he at once nominated their leader, Cardinal Franchi, 
 as Secretary of State, though he knew how displeas- 
 ing this would be to the supporters of the policy of 
 his predecessor. He was indeed, as a diplomatist 
 and opportunist, much too cautious to issue at once 
 a Frcniunziamento on the lines of Franchi and 
 Galimberti ; for the party of the Intransigeants was 
 still too powerful at the Vatican, and it was neces- 
 sary to gain time and, meanwhile, prepare the right 
 milieu. Only in one point did the new Pope break 
 at once with the tradition of Pius IX. As the 
 late Pope had quarrelled with almost every foreign 
 Sovereign, so Leo sought to reconcile himself with 
 all the crowned heads, and he therefore made use of 
 the announcement of his succession to the Throne 
 to begin friendly relations with the monarchs and 
 
522 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 governments. That he wrote even to the Protestant 
 Kaiser, Wilhelm I., roused the anger of the Intran- 
 sigeants to the highest degree, and silent opposition 
 was not wanting. Leo XIII., with his Secretary of 
 State, had hardly taken the first steps towards 
 reconciliation with Germany when the latter died 
 suddenly, on June 30, 1878, only four months after 
 his appointment. The circumstances were peculiar 
 and dramatic, and public opinion in Kome spoke of 
 poisoning, which the Komans ever since the days 
 of the Kenaissance have been quick to suggest when 
 a man in high position has died suddenly ; but the 
 sinister suggestion must be dismissed as idle gossip. 
 The deceased Cardinal's relatives suspected no foul 
 play, in spite of the Cardinal's body turning black im- 
 mediately after death, although they did not forget that 
 Franchi's death could only be welcome to the Intran- 
 sigeant party. We may add parenthetically that Zola • 
 has preserved the legend of the Vatican poisoning 
 casein his novel 'Eome,' which is strongly anti-papal. 
 Leo XIII., who had just founded two journals on 
 Franchi's principles, 'Le Journal de Rome,' edited 
 by Monsignor Galimberti, and ' L' Aurora,' edited by 
 Monsignor Schiaffino, a Benedictine, both of whom 
 afterwards became Cardinals, was thrown into great 
 embarrassment by the sudden death of his prime 
 minister. His difficulties were increased when he 
 learnt that, contrary to all precedent, the Intran- 
 sigeant Cardinals had called a meeting in the house 
 of Cardinal Monaco della Valetta, for the purpose of 
 forcing their candidate on the Pope as the new 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 523 
 
 Secretary of State. Again the Pope showed his 
 independence by appointing a * Eeconciliationist ' in 
 the place of Franchi, the leader of that party, in the 
 person of Cardinal Nina. 
 
 Immediately the Intransigeant storm, was directed 
 against him, and this was all the easier as Nina dis- 
 dained to defend himself against his enemies. The 
 Cabal next tried to destroy their adversary socially. 
 The Neri — i.e. the clerical aristocracy — received 
 orders to boycott Nina, not only outside the walls of 
 the Vatican, but also in the very presence of the Pope. 
 WTien that didnot succeed his recreations were twisted 
 into a scandal, into the details of which it is un- 
 necessary to enter. He went straight to the Pope and 
 offered his resignation, and at the same time cleared 
 his character so completely that the Pope refused to 
 accept his resignation. But the honest man was so 
 sick of the intrigues directed against him, that he 
 insisted on being released from office. His successor 
 was Jacobini, then Nuncio at Vienna, and but lately 
 a recipient of the purple. He belonged to neither 
 party, but was a wise man who knew how to get on 
 with both, being possessed of an elastic conscience 
 which enabled him to please every one. Being all 
 things to all men, he succeeded for a time in lulling 
 the suspicions of the Intransigeants, whom Tosti's 
 pamphlet in favour of a reconciliation with the Vati- 
 can had enraged. Padre Tosti was abbot of Monte 
 Casino, the famous Benedictine Monastery, which 
 the traveller between Rome and Naples sees perched 
 against the sky. The traditions of the Benedictines 
 
524 THE KEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 have been liberal, and Monte Casino has afforded an 
 asylum and encouragement to those who laboured, 
 and often jeoparded their lives, for the regeneration 
 and freedom of Italy. To this, and also partly to 
 the intercession of Mr. Gladstone, it is due that the 
 monastery of Monte Casino was spared when most 
 of the other religious houses were suppressed. 
 
 Ever since the accession of Leo XIII. to the 
 Papal throne the Benedictines of Monte Casino, and 
 Padre Tosti in particular, laboured for a reconcilia- 
 tion between the Vatican and Quirinal. The Jesuits, 
 on the other hand, conducted the campaign of the 
 Intransigeants, though seldom showing their hand 
 openly. And they won at last. Jacobini's ambi- 
 dextrous tactics did not suit them, and he died 
 suddenly at the age of forty-five. Insinuations of 
 poisoning again floated in Eoman society, doubtless 
 with as little foundation in fact as in the case of 
 Franchi. The Pope, wearied out with the machi- 
 nations of the Jesuits to get an Intransigeant 
 appointed Secretary of State, yielded on that point, 
 and, to the surprise of the uninitiated, appointed the 
 Nuncio at Madrid, a young Sicilian : a man of ability ; 
 adroit, scheming, ardent, and of strong will. He is not 
 a Jesuit. That society was far too astute to get a 
 professed member of their order appointed. But 
 Eampolla was under their influence, and is still. 
 Eampolla and his patrons were too prudent to show 
 their hands at once. They kept a vigilant watch 
 over the development of events, determined to nip in 
 the bud any scheme for promoting a modus vivendi 
 
THE PEISONEK OF THE VATICAN 525 
 
 between the Papacy and the Monarchy. The party 
 in favour of reconcihation was still strongly repre- 
 sented at the Vatican. The Pope was at the head 
 of it, though not ostensibly ; and Cardinal Schiaffino 
 and Padre Tosti, together with Galimberti, who were 
 all in the Pope's confidence, worked energetically 
 for the cause which they had so much at heart. 
 
 A few weeks after Rampolla's appointment, 
 Crispi was again Minister of the Interior, and he 
 was more than ready to meet Tosti halfway in any 
 practical arrangement for putting an end to the 
 quarrel betwen Church and State. The relations 
 between the Italian Government and the Vatican 
 became more friendly, and it really looked as if a 
 reconciliation was at last in sight. The inter- 
 mediary in these negotiations was Tosti, who threw 
 himself heart and soul into the business. An 
 idealist and an ardent patriot, the eventful '48 found 
 him. in the front line of the liberal movement, with 
 Gioberti, Rosmini, and Ventura ; priests all, and all 
 labouring in their several ways to realise the national 
 idea, then represented by Pius IX., in whom the 
 hopes of Young Italy were centred, and who eclipsed, 
 during his short-lived enthusiasm for Italian unity, 
 the fame and influence of Mazzini, Balbo, Gioberti, 
 and other leaders of the national movement. Tosti 
 was at that time the poet of the movement. He 
 wrote, among other things, * The Soldier's Psalter ' 
 and 'The Lombard League,' two martial hymns in 
 praise of the liberation of Italy. * The Lombard 
 League ' he dedicated to Pius IX. in a fine lyrical 
 
526 THE RBFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 poem. He was then in his thirty-eighth year, 
 and had already made his mark in the repubKc of 
 letters with his * History of Monte Casino.' But 
 he sacrificed his brilliant worldly prospects to his 
 patriotism. Indeed, he ran no small risk when the 
 reaction set in and he saw some of his intimate 
 friends, leaders in the movement, exiled or cast into 
 prison. Eegarding the cause as lost, he found a 
 warm friend and admirer in Don Pedro, the accom- 
 plished Emperor of Brazil, who offered him an 
 asylum at his court. While waiting for the vessel 
 that was to carry him across the ocean, he found a 
 safe retreat in Naples under the protection of the 
 British Consul. But the fear of the sea overcame 
 that of a Neapolitan dungeon, and he determined to 
 remain in Italy. An influential personage persuaded 
 the King (Bomba) to allow Tosti to return to 
 Monte Casino after a severe warning from the Com- 
 missary of Police. There he gave himself up to 
 literature, and published a ' Life of Abelard ' and 
 other works. 
 
 In 1860 Tosti reappeared in the world of politics 
 with an eloquent brochure : * San Benedetto al 
 Parlamento Italiano.' It is a forcible appeal on 
 behalf of his famous monastery. Pepoli and Valerio 
 had suppressed the rehgious orders in Umbria and 
 the Marches, and Tosti feared, with good reason, the 
 Hke fate for Monte Casino. His story of Monte Casino 
 records, with persuasive eloquence, the services which 
 the monastery had rendered to Italy in the civil as 
 well as in the religious sphere, and he declared with 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 527 
 
 prophetic insight, that the rehgious orders, suppressed 
 with such undiscriminating ruthlessness, would 
 flourish again in a few years, and avenge themselves 
 on their persecutors. How slow politicians are to 
 learn the impotence of physical force and parlia- 
 mentary decrees against spiritual ideas ! ' We shall 
 not go to Canossa,' exclaimed Bismarck when he 
 was passing his ' Falk Laws ' with overwhelming 
 majorities. In a few years he went to Canossa, and 
 was fain to court the party whom he had persecuted. 
 Jules Ferry, heedless of the warning, banished a 
 crowd of religious orders, suppressed the teaching 
 and the symbols of Christianity in the schools, and 
 passed an army of seminarists through the barracks 
 of France, hoping thus to annihilate clericalism. 
 To-day France is paying the penalty of Jules Ferry's 
 folly. Clericalism, instead of being destroyed by the 
 conscription, has converted the army, and crime has 
 so increased meanwhile that there is a reaction in 
 favour of restoring religious teaching in the schools. 
 
 The same thing happened in Italy. Many of 
 the monks in the various orders were liberals ; and 
 a wise policy might have enlisted them into the ser- 
 vice of the monarchy, and disarmed, to a large extent, 
 the hostility of the remainder. Instead of this they 
 were driven out into the world in a state of beggary, 
 and thus needlessly forced into the camp of the 
 enemies of Italian unity. 
 
 Tosti foresaw this. But his defence of his con- 
 vent seemed to make no impression on the Govern- 
 ment. Yet it prevailed. Mr. Gladstone interested 
 
528 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 himself in Monte Casino, and used his great influence 
 with Itahan statesmen to save the doomed monastery. 
 He found powerful auxiliaries among patriotic 
 Italians, Count Gabrio Casati in particular. But it 
 was Tosti's powerful appeal that enabled the friends 
 of Monte Casino to make out an irresistible case.^ 
 
 The liberation and unity of Italy, with Church 
 and State reconciled, was the dream and passion of 
 Tosti's life. But he was doomed to a rude awaken- 
 ing. Such was the charm of the man that, in spite 
 of his political heresies, he kept on good terms to the 
 
 ' The music of Tosti's style cannot be translated ; but the ear 
 may catch something of it, as of a beautiful song, even without 
 following the sense. His volume concludes with the following 
 pathetic appeal : — 
 
 'Lasciateci monaci, se ci volete cittadini benefici. II tristo 
 monaco nel mondo d una contraddizione in veste grottesca ; e questi 
 non son tempi da ridere. Tutto vi lasciamo alle soglie delle nostra 
 badie ; fin la polvere delle passate ricchezze ci scrolliamo dal sajo : 
 tutto prendete, ma non toccate al sagramento della nostra fede 
 monastica. E troppo cara ai nostri cuori ; ^ troppo cara alia 
 nostra Italia. Questa d cattolica e non protestante ; nella via che 
 essa viaggia per la citta di Dio, vuol trovare uomini che parlino con 
 Dio ; la solitudine le farebbe paura. Questa patria di Dante e di 
 Kaffaello, innamorata di Dio, che discese per la via delle sensibili 
 bellezze del firmamento, della terra, e della mare,a creare 1' uomo, per 
 questa via vuole ascendere a lui ; vuole 1' arte della religione ; vuole 
 il culto. Lasciate un rifugio all' Italia, vedovata, per carcere, per 
 esigli, per guerre, di tanti figli ; lasciatele posare il capo nel seno delle 
 nostre salmodie. Con questi canti 'noi la cullammo fanciulla. 
 L' uomo d' armi, 1' uomo del lavoro, 1' uomo dei negozi, tutti hanno 
 cittadinanza nella vostra compagnia ;.possibile, che solo il uomo 
 della preghiera sia f orestiero nella terra dei cattolici ? Lasciateci 
 salmeggiare, perch^ la preghiera e il vincolo del nostro sodalizio e 
 della nostra fatica : e il nostro mestiere. Per lei siamo monaci, per 
 lei saremo sempre con voi, per lei san Benedetto vuole starsene con 
 la sua Italia.' — See De Cesari's II Padre Tosti nella Politica, p. 9. 
 
THE PRISONER OF THE VATICAN 529 
 
 last with Pius IX. From his successor he had great 
 hopes. He had made the acquaintance of Monsignor 
 Gioacchino Pecci forty years before, when Pecci 
 visited Monte Casino on his way to Benevento as 
 ApostoHc delegate. The young monk and the young 
 prelate felt each other's attraction and became friends. 
 Tosti rejoiced when the choice of the Conclave fell 
 on Cardinal Pecci, whom he welcomed as an ideal 
 Pope, marked out by Providence for reconciling the 
 Monarchy and the Papacy. Leo XIII., on his part, 
 hastened to honour the Abbot of Monte Casino.* 
 
 Tosti's antecedents, politics, and intimacy with 
 the Pope qualified him in an eminent degree to act 
 the part of intermediary between the Pope and 
 Crispi, who was, like Tosti, an idealist, and apt to 
 dream dreams and see visions. The jubilee of the 
 Pope's priesthood was to be celebrated on Decem- 
 ber 31, 1887, and this was considered an auspicious 
 moment for proclaiming the reconciliation of the 
 Quirinal and the Vatican. To prepare the public 
 mind for the advent of peace Tosti published in May 
 of that year a pamphlet, which was approved and 
 revised — some say inspired — by the Pope,. It is in 
 the form of a dialogue between a simple priest, Don 
 Pacifico by name, and his bishop. Don Pacifico is 
 Tosti himself, who expounds under this thin veil his 
 
 • The Abbot of Monte Casino was in former days the first baron of 
 the Kingdom of Naples, and ruled over a vast diocese, which reached 
 the dimensions of a considerable State. In modern times this feudal 
 abbacy was merged in a triumvirate of three abbots, one of whom is 
 • President of the Congregation.' Tosti was one of the triumvirate 
 when Leo XIII. became Pope. 
 
 M M 
 
530 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 own and the Pope's views on the situation. After a 
 passing reference to the events of 1848 and the fair 
 promise of Pio Nono's outburst of hberahsm, Tosti 
 says : ' But times are changed ; and in the mind of 
 the Monsignore there sprouted a new dogma — 
 the identification of the throne and the altar.' ^ 
 Tosti opposes this pohcy vigorously, and the pamphlet 
 assumes, all through, the acquiescence of the Pope 
 in Tosti's views. The bishop's mild objections act as a 
 foil to Tosti's argument. For example, Tosti says : — 
 
 The breach at Porta Pia was an ugly affair, through 
 which Eome, the Pope's patrimony, was forcibly seized 
 by other hands. The breach was made by a definite 
 number of soldiers, commanded by a definite number of 
 men called the Government. But the Power which really 
 took possession of Eome was a moral, a universal in- 
 dividual, a nation — in a word, Italy. 
 
 Say rather, Don Pacifico, that it was the Eevolution— 
 that is to say, a minority of sectaries with a few Catho- 
 lics led astray by the idea of a united and powerful Italy. 
 
 True, Monsignore ; it was a minority ; nor do I say that 
 all the thirty millions of Italians conspired with Cavour and 
 fired the cannon with Cadorna at Porta Pia. But when 
 a minority, approved or tolerated through failure to 
 oppose it, becomes a Government de facto and administers 
 social justice, it becomes a majority, not merely by reason 
 of its numerical superiority, but through the principle of 
 authority which it represents. Our most holy religion 
 started from a minority of a do^en fishermen. . . . When 
 people lived under an absolute monarchy, princes reigned 
 
 ' La Conciliazione, p. 6 : * . . . e nella mente di Monsignore 
 rampoll6 un nuovo dogma : la identificazione del trono e dell' altare.* 
 Evidently an oblique reference to the reactionary Eampolla in the 
 play on the word ravipoUd. 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 631 
 
 and governed at the same time, and if there was any 
 encroachment on the property or rights of the Church 
 the Popes knew where to look for restitution. But to- 
 day princes reign and do not govern. The depositary of 
 the laws is the multitude, and the Government is the 
 nation ; so that if there has been any usurpation, the 
 Pope may grieve over the usurper, but he cannot turn to 
 the Prince for restitution. It follows that the King of 
 Italy cannot restore Eome to the Pope, since it is not his. 
 It would be necessary to restore it with force to the 
 Pope, to wrest it away by the hands of the nation, and 
 to accompany this with the sword of the parricide and of 
 the foreigner. What slaughter ! what rapine ! what 
 shipwreck of authority in a period of universal rebellion ! 
 The non possumus of the Pope and of the Prince thus 
 finds its equilibrium in the balance of divine justice.^ 
 
 Leo was encouraged to hope great things and had 
 Crispi sounded, through Tosti, as to whether the State 
 would be willing to make over to the Vatican the 
 administration of the wealthy Basilica of San Paolo 
 fuori le mura. Tosti went most days to Crispi's 
 house in the Via Gregoriana, and the Prime 
 Minister showed himself amenable to the wishes of 
 the Pope. Tosti assured the Minister that the Pope 
 would, on the first opportunity, make an announce- 
 ment in favour of a rapprochement with Italy, and 
 in fact the celebrated Allocution of May 23, 1887, at 
 least made no points against Italy. Both sides 
 cherished great illusions. Leo XIII., influenced by 
 the Eeconcilables, specially by Galimberti and his 
 intimate friend Monsignor Bocali, entertained the 
 
 ' La Conciliazione, pp. 16-17. 
 
 H u 2 
 
532 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 most extravagant hopes. He perhaps beHeved the 
 ItaHans would, even if they did not leave Eome 
 altogether, at least find a modus vivendi whereby 
 the Eternal City could enclose both Sovereigns 
 within its walls. But, being an experienced diplo- 
 matist, the Pope was careful to take no hasty step, 
 for he had still to reckon with EampoUa and the 
 Intransigeants who were watching his dealings with 
 Crispi. Tosti's pamphlet gave them their opportu- 
 nity. It made a great sensation, and passed rapidly 
 through three editions. Eampolla immediately 
 struck his blow. A letter from the Pope to the 
 Cardinal appeared in the Osservatore Bomano (the 
 official organ of Rampolla) which put a summary end 
 to the Tosti-Crispi negotiations. It was then the 
 policy of France to cultivate friendly relations with 
 the Jesuit party, and to prevent a friendly under- 
 standing between the King of Italy and the Pope. 
 The French ambassador accordingly made common 
 cause with the Intransigeants. Thus reinforced, the 
 Intra7isigeants were not satisfied with the rupture 
 of the negotiations ; they determined to ruin Tosti. 
 Under pressure the Pope asked Tosti to retract the 
 sentiments expressed in his Conciliazione. To 
 oblige the Pope, but very reluctantly, he wrote a 
 letter which, after revision by the Pope himself, was 
 published in the newspapers. But the retractation 
 was not humiliating enough for the Intransigeants, 
 and they demanded a more complete expiation. The 
 Pope seemed to be ashamed of the part which he 
 was made to play, and instead of this time appealing 
 
THE PEISONER OF THE VATICAN 533 
 
 to Tosti in a personal interview, he sent for Don 
 Michele Morcaldi, one of the abbatial triumvirate, 
 and, as President of the Congregation of Monte 
 Casino, Tosti's superior, and begged him to obtain 
 Tosti's retractation. Tosti refused to make a second 
 retractation. But the Pope, anticipating this, author- 
 ised Morcaldi to assure Tosti, on the Pope's official 
 and private v^ord of honour, that the retractation would 
 be kept strictly secret, and was only asked for by the 
 Pope as a weapon of defence against the fury of 
 Eampolla's party. Thus reassured, and in full 
 reliance on the Papal promise, Tosti wrote his 
 second retractation without measuring his words or 
 calculating the consequences, wishing only to oblige 
 the Pope and get him out of a difficulty. 
 
 On July 27, a fortnight after it was written, 
 Tosti's second retractation appeared in large type in 
 the Osservatore Bomano. On the following morning 
 he read it at Monte Casino. The blow was terrible, 
 and his emotion was for some time uncontrollable ; 
 not so much by reason of the humiliation inflicted 
 on himself as on account of the Pope's violation of 
 his pledged word. On recovering from his fit of 
 nervous agitation, Tosti wrote a touching and 
 dignified letter to Monsignor Angeli, recapitulating 
 the facts given above, and complaining of the Papal 
 breach of faith.^ * Nothing remains to me ' — so he 
 
 ' To prevent any mistake I give the letter literally in the 
 original : — 
 
 'Keverendo Monsignore, — Ai primi giorni di questo mese il 
 nostro P. Abate, presidente, mi communico V ordine del S. Padre di 
 umiliajgli una seconda lettera di sottomissione, piu esplicita dell' 
 
534 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 concludes, 'but to bow my head humbly to the 
 supreme desire of his Holiness, and to say from my 
 heart : Thy will he done.' 
 
 He wrote at the same time to the Abbot Morcaldi, 
 demanding an explanation. Morcaldi assured him, 
 in reply, that he was charged categorically by the 
 Pope to assure Tosti that his retractation would be 
 guarded by the formal seal of the Papal secret.^ 
 
 Receiving no answer from Monsignor Angeli, 
 Tosti wrote to the Pope direct, on August 1, a letter 
 full of dignity, but also of the bitterness of a man 
 betrayed by a friend, who was, moreover, the Chief 
 Pastor of his Church. In that letter, after reminding 
 his Holiness that his retractation was asked for 
 merely as a means of stopping the truculent rage of 
 his enemies {ad arcendam truculentam rabiemdei suoi 
 nemici), he resigned his posts of Vicearchivist of the 
 Holy See and Superintendent of the sacred monu- 
 
 altra, gia publicata nell' Osservatore Botnano, a cagione del mio 
 opuscolo : La Conciliazione. Mi diceva che questo documento 
 resterebbe nelle mani di S. Santita, sotto segreto papale. Subito mi 
 affrettai a compiere ciecamente la volonta dell' Augusto Pontefice, che 
 per mezzo dello stesso P. Abate, presidente, si degno manifestarmi 
 il suo benplacito, dicendomi che il S. Padre era contento della mia 
 docilita, che fossi stato tranquillo e che mi benediceva, vietando che 
 piu si parlasse del mio opuscolo. Posso attestare coram Deo di non 
 avere io in alcun modo violato il segreto papale, che mi fu imposto 
 dal P. Abate, presidente, per ordine del S. Padre. Ora mia lettera ^ 
 di publica ragione, ed a me non rimane che chinare umilmente il 
 capo ai supremi voleri di S. Santita, e dire col cuore : Fiat voluntas 
 tmi ! ' 
 
 ' 'Fu categorico il precetto datomi dal Papa, ed a voi da 
 ingiunto, del segreto papale, in cui doveva rimanere involta la vostra 
 lettera.' 
 
THE PKISONEE OF THE VATICAN 535 
 
 ments under the State, and stopped at the same 
 time the pubhcation of the ' Eegesta Pontificum,' a 
 valuable work which he had edited for years, and 
 had brought down to Clement V. The letter con- 
 cludes : * Take all from me, and leave me only the 
 habit of my Saint Benedict in which he lived so well, 
 and died so excellently.' The Pope made no reply, 
 and Tosti never again entered the Vatican. He 
 returned to his studies, beginning with a translation 
 of Sallust into Italian. 
 
 But the victory of the Intransigeants was not yet 
 complete. Tosti was suppressed, but the Pope still 
 cherished the hope of celebrating his sacerdotal 
 jubilee with a message of reconciliation and peace 
 to Italy ; and the Intransigeants encouraged his 
 aspirations in order the more completely to frustrate 
 them. The negotiations with Crispi were resumed, 
 this time under the auspices of the librarian of the 
 Vatican, Monsignor Carini, a son of Garibaldi's 
 General of that name. He had been an officer in 
 the Koyal army, and while quartered at Perugia had 
 become intimate with the Cardinal Archbishop, 
 afterwards Leo XIII. The negotiations went on 
 prosperously for a time. Friendly messages were 
 exchanged between King Umberto and Leo XIII. 
 The former offered to present the Pope with a hand- 
 some golden chalice as a jubilee gift. The gift was 
 graciously accepted, provided a slight change were 
 made in the proposed inscription, namely, that it 
 should be a gift from * Umberto, Prince of Savoy,' 
 not from ' Umberto, King of Italy.' It was a 
 
536 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 masterstroke of diplomacy on the part of Kampolla 
 and the Jesuits. The breach between Crispi and 
 the Pope was now even more complete than that 
 between the Pope and Tosti. The Sindaco of Kome 
 too, the royalist Prince Torlonia, was involved in 
 the quarrel. Hoping to help on the negotiations, 
 he went, without consulting Crispi, to the Cardinal 
 Vicar, Parochi, and conveyed to him the congratula- 
 tions of the city of Eome. For this indiscretion he 
 was promptly dismissed from office. 
 
 Crispi, recognising at last the hopelessness of 
 negotiating with a Pope who was evidently not his 
 own master, determined to strike a blow from his 
 side. He patronised the Giordano Bruno memorial 
 and ostentatiously encouraged its development into 
 an anti-papal demonstration. The breach with the 
 Vatican was now complete, and Eampolla's star was 
 in the ascendant. The fates were singularly unkind 
 to Leo Xin. Cardinal Schiaf&no died in 1889, and 
 Cardinal Galimberti in 1896 ; both with startling 
 suddenness. Galimberti was the last of the Beconcil- 
 ables; and his death was important on another 
 ground, for he held the influential office of Teller at 
 the next Papal Conclave. 
 
 Deprived of all his supporters in the Sacred 
 College, the venerable and well-meaning Leo seems 
 to have given up the struggle and abandoned the 
 field to the manoeuvres of Cardinal Eampolla. 
 
 I am forcibly reminded by this episode in the 
 annals of the Vatican of a conversation which I 
 had with Dr. Dollinger at Munich during the sitting 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 537 
 
 of the Vatican Council. I suggested that Pio 
 Nono's successor, if a man of strong will and 
 liberal ideas, might — on the abolition of the Tem- 
 poral Power which seemed then impending — avail 
 himself of the new prerogative of infallibility to 
 reform the Papacy, and restore the Bishop of Eome 
 to his legitimate position in the hierarchy of the 
 Church. DoUinger shook his head. ' My friend,' 
 he said, ' the Papacy is the growth of centuries, and 
 it will take generations, if not centuries, to reduce 
 it to its proper proportions. It makes very little 
 difference how able and well-disposed a new Pope 
 may be. Once elected, he becomes powerless. He 
 will find himself inside a system, wheel within wheel, 
 fetter upon fetter ; and struggle as he may, he must 
 eventually succumb.' The history of Leo XIII.'s 
 pontificate is a striking confirmation of Dollinger's 
 forecast. Truly, the Pope is ' the prisoner of the 
 Vatican.' But his jailers are those of his own 
 household. In matters which do not encroach on 
 the traditional policy of the Vatican or the domina- 
 tion of the Jesuits the Pope has a free hand. Out- 
 side those limits he is not a free agent : he is but 
 the organ of a system and a party which have with 
 marvellous skill, begotten of ages of experience, 
 bound the Koman Church in fetters as impossible 
 to break as the withes with which Delilah bound 
 Samson when the locks of his strength were shorn. 
 I never cherished the faintest illusion as to the 
 verdict of the Vatican on the validity of Anglican 
 Orders. To have admitted that they were valid, or 
 
538 THE KEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 even doubtful, would have broken the tradition of 
 Eome since the excommunication of Queen Eliza- 
 beth, and would have made the ecclesiastical position 
 of Cardinal Vaughan and his colleagues awkward 
 if not untenable. The decision was a foregone con- 
 clusion, and no amount of evidence would have 
 made the slightest difference. This is not to say 
 that the majority of the Pope's experts did not act 
 in good faith. I have no doubt that they acted as 
 conscientiously as the members of the Judicial 
 Committee are wont to act when they sit in judg- 
 ment on a Eitualist. Their minds were simply 
 impervious to the force of any evidence that told in 
 favour of Anglican Orders. The most learned of 
 the Pope's Commissioners, the Abbe Duchesne, had 
 no doubt of the validity of Anglican Orders; and 
 although he hardly ventured to expect that the 
 Pope would admit their validity, he believed, as he 
 told Mr. Gladstone in my presence, that the evi- 
 dence was too strong for the Pope to do more, at 
 the worst, than to leave the question undecided. I 
 did not share his conviction. I never doubted that 
 Anglican Orders would be condemned on grounds of 
 policy quite irrespective of the merits of the question. 
 That the Pope himself was as sincere, as he was 
 in initiating negotiations with Crispi and encoura- 
 ging Tosti's plea for ' Conciliation,' I do not ques- 
 tion. Mr. Gladstone's * Soliloquium ' was written on 
 a private intimation from the Vatican that his 
 intervention would help the Pope to take up a 
 benevolent attitude ; and Mr. Gladstone showed me 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 539 
 
 a letter from Tosti (who was a friend of his) ex- 
 pressing his admiration of the ' Soliloquium ' which, 
 he said, the Pope had sent him, through a friend, 
 with expressions of great gratification and hopeful- 
 ness. All in vain ! ' The prisoner of the Vatican' 
 cannot emancipate himself from the traditional 
 policy of the Eoman Curia. While that endures 
 Eome will seek, not union, but domination. 
 
 For myself, I am inclined to think that the Bull 
 against Anglican Orders was a blessing in disguise, 
 and will eventually make for the reunion of 
 Christendom by banishing all illusions. It is now 
 manifest to all that what Kome seeks is not union, 
 but unconditional submission. This, I believe, will 
 prove a salutary lesson for any Romanisers among 
 ns, and will hinder instead of promoting the 
 harvest of secessions which Cardinal Vaughan hoped 
 to reap from the Papal Bull. 
 
 English Churchmen will now turn their faces in 
 another direction. They will strive for union 
 among themselves in the first place. I am per- 
 suaded that the main differences between the great 
 bulk of the Evangelical party and the High Church 
 party, including even the extreme wings, are chiefly 
 due to misunderstandings, and are more on the 
 surface than in the essence of our controversies. The 
 great body of orthodox Nonconformists, too, are 
 surely much nearer the Church of England than 
 they were forty years ago, and have a much truer 
 conception of the Christian Church than the Puritan 
 clergy of Elizabeth's day had. The Catechism 
 
5d0 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 lately adopted by the various Nonconformist bodies 
 is a remarkable proof of this. The Church is there 
 recognised as a divine institution, and the figment 
 of an invisible church is discarded. The Presby- 
 terianism of Scotland affords a still more striking 
 illustration of approximation towards the Church of 
 England. The predjudice against prelacy, as such, 
 is dead; and if Presbyterians hesitate to adopt 
 Episcopacy it is not because they think that form of 
 government unlawful, but because they do not doubt 
 the lawfulness of Presbyterian ism, and have a 
 patriotic pride in the services — which I, for one, 
 freely acknowledge — that it has rendered to Scotland. 
 Its doctrines as to the Church and Sacraments are 
 distinctly high ; and its standard of public worship 
 is being gradually brought into harmony with its 
 standard of doctrine. I witnessed lately, on the 
 occasion of my receiving an honorary degree from 
 the University of Edinburgh, a sight strange to my 
 experience of Presbyterianism in my boyhood. After 
 receiving our degrees, a throng of graduates, under- 
 graduates, and spectators, went in procession, arrayed 
 in a variety of gorgeous vestments, from the 
 McEwan Hall — a splendid gift from a citizen and 
 parliamentary representative of Edinburgh — to St. 
 Giles's Cathedral, to listen to an address delivered by 
 a distinguished minister. The address was preceded 
 by a short devotional service, more in accordance 
 with an Anglican service than with the Presby- 
 terianism of my youth. And the congregation con- 
 sisted of Presbyterians, Established and Free, and 
 
THE PRISONEE OF THE VATICAN 541 
 
 also of Anglican Churchmen and Scottish Episco- 
 palians, High and Broad. It was enough to make 
 Jeanie Geddes turn in her grave. 
 
 To this must be added the remarkable Patri- 
 archal and Synodical Encyclical Letter, already 
 mentioned, in which the Eastern Church has replied 
 to the Pope's invitation to submission. The Eastern 
 bishops have in this document placed themselves in 
 line with our own Church, as evidenced by our 
 representative divines and by the two Primates in 
 their recent ' Answer ' to the Pope's Bull. The Eastern 
 bishops reject the Pope's Supremacy and Infallibility, 
 the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the 
 Virgin, the Komish doctrines of Purgatory, In- 
 dulgences, Transubstantiation, and also Commu- 
 nion in one kind. Repudiating the idea of any 
 human head of the Church, the Eastern bishops 
 declare that * the only everlasting Chief and immortal 
 Head of the Church is our Lord Jesus Christ,' and 
 that ' the divine Fathers . . . had, and could have 
 had, no idea of an absolutist supremacy in the Apostle 
 Peter, or in the bishops of Eome. . . . They could 
 not invent, arbitrarily and of their own w'U, a novel 
 dogma, erecting upon a pretended succession from 
 Peter an overbearing supremacy of the Roman 
 bishop.' And they make the pertinent observation 
 that *the Church of Rome was founded, not by 
 Peter, of whose Apostolic work at Rome history 
 knows nothing, but mainly through the disciples of 
 the heaven-soaring Apostle of the Gentiles, Paul, 
 whose Apostolic ministry in Rome is clear to all 
 
542 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 men.' It is indeed inconceivable that Peter should 
 have been Bishop of Eome, yet that there should be 
 no allusion to him in the Acts of the Apostles or in 
 St. Paul's Epistle to the Eomans, or letters written 
 by him in Rome, considering St. Paul's punctilious 
 deference to St. James as Bishop of Jerusalem. The 
 fact is, diocesan episcopacy, in the modern sense of 
 the word, did not exist during St. Peter's life — at 
 least outside Jerusalem — and the story of Peter's 
 Roman Episcopate is an invention of the Pseudo- 
 Clementines. 
 
 This common ground of opposition to Roman 
 pretensions on the part of the Anglican and Oriental 
 Churches, and their general rapprochement towards 
 each other, have naturally alarmed Cardinal Vaughan, 
 and he has privately sent to the Holy Governing 
 Synod of the Russian Church, on behalf of himself 
 and his brethren, an elaborate impeachment of the 
 Church of England. The Intransigeants of the 
 Church Association are his best alhes. The con- 
 tinuity of the English Church up to the beginning 
 of Christianity in this kingdom is the only effectual 
 argument against Rome. I deprecate, therefore, 
 any ruling, by whatever authority, which would 
 have the effect of suggesting a visible break between 
 the Church of England before and after the Refor- 
 mation. Just as the vestments of our judges and 
 the ritual of our Court and Parliament take us back 
 to the reigns of our Edwards, Richards, and Henrys, 
 so the vestments and ritual sanctioned by the Or- 
 naments Rubric— the Judicial Committee notwith- 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 543 
 
 standing — take us back to the dawn of Christianity 
 in these isles. I repudiate the idea of a Eoman 
 Church in this land which was abolished at the 
 Keformation. What was abolished was a system of 
 usurpations on the part of the Bishop of Eome, and 
 with that system a number of corruptions which 
 had gradually grown up in parts of the doctrine and 
 worship of the Church. * Where was your Church 
 before Henry VIII. ? ' asked a Eoman Catholic of 
 Dr. Hook of Leeds. * Where was your face before 
 it was washed ? ' answered the old vicar. The retort 
 may have been a bit rough, but it was as just as 
 it was witty. 
 
 Let the two Aj-chbishops admit in principle this 
 unbroken continuity of the English Church in its 
 ritual as well as in its doctrine, and I believe that 
 the mass of Churchmen, lay and clerical, will support 
 them in checking illegitimate developments, and 
 even the forcing of legitimate ceremonial on unwilling 
 congregations. I believe also that they will have 
 the support of public opinion. Gorgeous vestments, 
 incense, and the ceremonial commonly objected to, 
 will appear innocent, if not attractive, when disso- 
 ciated from disloyalty to the Church of England. 
 No one objects to that ritual in the churches of that 
 admirable body of Christians who call themselves 
 * the Catholic and Apostolic Church.' Ajid this 
 tolerance is not due to their not being an established 
 religion, but to the absence of suspicion as to their 
 loyalty to their engagements. Convince the British 
 public that the ritual which rouses the hostility of 
 
544 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 some persons is part of the legal heritage of the 
 Church of England, and is no more Popish than 
 shoes and stockings are Popish, and all prejudice will 
 vanish as speedily as the prejudice against chanting 
 the Psalms and preaching in the surplice. 
 
 And there is another consideration which the 
 opponents of Eitualism would do well to bear in 
 mind. It is much to the credit of the working 
 classes of this country that they have never shown 
 any disposition to combine in their own interest 
 against the owners of property and privilege. 
 Who can doubt that this is largely due to their being 
 still under the influence, ideals, and sentiments of 
 Christianity, even when they sit loosely towards the 
 Christian Creed? The influence of the Church 
 extends far beyond the formal acknowledgment of 
 her Creed. But let the masses lose hold of their 
 instinctive belief in a future world where the destiny 
 of man is dependent on his conduct here, why should 
 they, in that case, acquiesce in social and political 
 systems from which many of them seem to them- 
 selves to derive but little benefit ? Let them lose 
 their faith in a heaven beyond the grave, and the 
 temptation will be irresistible to seek their heaven 
 here. And they are the majority and have a potent 
 voice in the making of our laws. Let them be 
 convinced that there is no heaven, and they will 
 claim the earth. This is so well put by a powerful 
 writer that I am tempted to quote him : — 
 
 What will be the result, what the possible catastrophe, 
 when this doctrine [of a future life] is no longer ac- 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 545 
 
 credited ; — when it is discarded as a delusion — when it 
 is resented as a convenient deception and instrument of 
 oppression ; — when the poor man is convinced that there 
 is no wealth of gold and jewels awaiting him in the 
 spiritual kingdom — that if he is wretched here he is 
 wretched altogether — that what he lacks now will never 
 hereafter be made good to him — that the promises and 
 hopes dangled before him to keep him quiet have been 
 mere moonshine, and that in very truth the bank in 
 which he had insured his fortune, in which he had in- 
 vested all his savings, to have a provision in which he 
 had toiled with indefatigable industry and endured with 
 exemplary patience, is a fraudulent insolvent ; — when, in 
 fine, he wakes up with a start to the bewildering con- 
 viction that if he is to rest, to be happy, to enjoy his fair 
 share of the sunshine and the warmth of life, he mtist do 
 it now, here, at once, without a day's delay ? Will there 
 not come upon him that sort of feverish haste to be in 
 luxury and at peace, to immediatize all that earth can 
 yield him, to sink the uncertain future in the passing 
 present, which has been depicted in such vivid colours as 
 pervading and maddening the daily thought and talk of 
 the Socialists and Communists of the French metro- 
 poHs ? ' 
 
 The salutary and restraining influences thus 
 vividly depicted by Mr. Greg are rapidly on the v^ane, 
 he tells us, among the working classes of this 
 country. * Among working men it is for the most 
 part absolute atheism, and is complicated by a 
 marked feeling of antagonism towards the teachers 
 of Religion, a kind of resentment growing out of the 
 conviction that they have been systematically 
 deluded by those who ought to have enlightened 
 them.' And then he adds in a note, ' I am assured, 
 
 N N 
 
546 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 however, that this can scarcely be stated as broadly 
 as a few years Sbgo— considerably oioing to the 
 Bitualists.' * 
 
 Is it prudent to wage war against a reHgious 
 movement which won this acknowledgment, a 
 quarter of a century ago, from a very able public 
 writer who had, as a Unitarian, no sympathy with 
 Ritualism ? The influence of the Eitualists among 
 the masses is much greater now than it was when 
 Mr. Greg bore this testimony. The severest censors 
 of the Ritualists generally admit their self-denial and 
 labours of love among the poor, but add that this is 
 not the question. I submit that it is very largely 
 the question. The very purpose of Religion is to 
 elevate humanity ; to make human beings better 
 parents, better children, better servants and masters, 
 better wives and husbands — in a word, better 
 citizens ; and I venture to suggest that it would be 
 as stupid as it would be criminal to suppress any 
 mode of worship which bears so good a fruit. 
 
 And let it further be considered whether the 
 kind of worship which goes under the name of 
 Ritualism does not minister -to some craving in the 
 nature of man, and bear witness at the same time to 
 some aspect of the character of Almighty God which 
 it would be well for us to realise. Believers in the 
 Bible must admit that when God condescended to 
 ordain a style of worship it was of a kind that 
 appealed to the whole of man — his understanding, 
 his imagination, his bodily senses. 
 
 ' Bocks Ahead, pp. 131, 141-143. 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 547 
 
 Now if it be true, as Dean Lyall has said,^ that 
 * when God created this lower world, He created it 
 according to the pattern of the world above,' we see 
 at once why all the ritual arrangements of His 
 worship should be designed 'for glory and for 
 beauty.' He is emphatically ' the King in His beauty,' 
 and this earth, though the trail of the Serpent be 
 over it all, and strewn though it be with moral 
 ruins, still bears manifold witness to His love for all 
 that delights the eye and charms the ear. To my 
 mind the wealth of beauty expended on the plumage 
 of a humming-bird, or on the gauzy wings of some 
 ephemeral insects, is almost more wonderful than 
 the creation of an archangel. Ransack the whole 
 kingdom of nature and you will find no organic 
 existence, from the minutest to the most stupendous, 
 which does not give evidence of a love of beauty for 
 its own sake. The tiniest atom of organised matter, 
 insects which can only be seen under the microscope, 
 are each and all formed on a distinct type, and 
 fashioned after some pattern of exquisite beauty. 
 This proves that beauty of form and colour was not 
 created merely in order that men might see and 
 admire it. Grod's love of beauty for its own sake is 
 written on the imperishable rocks and on the ever- 
 lasting hills. Long before man was created the 
 world was full of beauties which gladdened no 
 human eye, though they have left their records on 
 the rocks. And even now man sees but a small 
 portion of the beauties of nature. Look at the 
 
 ' Propcedia Frophctica, p. 264. 
 
 M K 2 
 
548 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ocean alone, and think of the world of wonders, 
 buried in its bosom, which eye of man has never 
 seen. There is not a shell in all its depths or along 
 its innumerable shores which does not bear witness 
 to a love of beauty on the part of Him who made it. 
 And to this love of beauty, which is inherent in 
 the nature of God, the soul of man instinctively 
 responds. Why does the uncultivated savage carve 
 the handle of his war club and the prow of his canoe 
 on lines of artistic beauty ? Why do the untutored 
 women of the South Sea Islands make pottery in 
 forms of exquisite beauty, with no other materials 
 than mud, and sunshine, and their own bare hands ? 
 Why do the poor in the slums of our towns love to 
 have a few bright flowers in their windows, and a 
 singing bird to cheer with its music the dull monotony 
 of their lives ? Is it not because the love of beauty 
 is so natural to man that it shows itself in the most 
 unexpected ways and under the most discouraging 
 conditions ? And is it not because men have 
 recognised this double aspect of beauty — its origin 
 in the divine nature, and its reflection in the nature 
 of man — that they have in all ages worshipped Him, 
 when circumstances permitted, in splendid temples 
 and with stately ceremonial? God needs no 
 splendour of worship, and He accepts the homage 
 of the heart without any ceremonial when circum- 
 stances make it impossible or unadvisable. He 
 heard the cries of the oppressed Israelites in the 
 house of bondage. But when they departed laden 
 with the spoils of Egypt, He would accept nothing 
 
THE PEISONEE OF THE VATICAN 549 
 
 short of their costliest gifts. And when He appeared 
 in human form in Judea, He rebuked the false 
 disciple, who, with hypocritical solicitude for the 
 poor, would forbid the ' woman who was a sinner ' 
 to poar out her costly spikenard on her Saviour. 
 He loves to be worshipped ' in the beauty of holiness,' 
 where that is possible, because He is a lover of 
 beauty, but chiefly because such worship, when the 
 expression of the heart's devotion, is a proof of the 
 gratitude and love of the worshippers. 
 
 But it is sometimes said that splendour and 
 stateliness of worship were abolished when the 
 Gospel superseded the law. Yet our Lord has told 
 us that He * came not to destroy the law, but to ful- 
 fil it.' And He attended the gorgeous worship of 
 the Temple without dropping a hint that it was 
 displeasing to Him. Euskin, in one of the most 
 eloquent passages in the English language, has ex- 
 posed the fallacy of the objection.^ It is too long for 
 quotation, but the following extract will indicate 
 his argument : 
 
 It is a most secure truth that although the particular 
 ordinances divinely appointed for special purposes at any 
 given period of man's history may be by the same au- 
 thority abrogated at another, it is impossible that any 
 character of God, appealed to or described in any 
 ordinance past or present, can ever be changed. God is 
 one and the same, and is pleased or displeased at the 
 same things for ever, although one part of His pleasure 
 may be expressed at one time rather than another, and 
 
 » • The Lamp of Sacrifice,' in The Seven Lamps of Architecture, 
 
550 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 although the mode in which His pleasure is to be con- 
 sulted may be by Him graciously modified to the circum- 
 stances of men. 
 
 Equally pertinent is his answer to the cry of 
 superstition, idolatry, and Komanism : 
 
 The probability, in our times, of fellowship with 
 the feelings of the idolatrous Eomanist is absolutel^^ as 
 nothing compared with the danger to the Israelite of a 
 sympathy with the idolatrous Egyptian ; no speculation, 
 no unproved danger ; but proved fatally by their fall 
 during a month's abandonment to their own will ; a fall 
 into the most servile idolatry; yet marked by such 
 offerings to their idol as their leader was, in the close 
 sequel, instructed to bid them offer to God. 
 
 And now I appeal to history, to reason, to Holy 
 Scripture, and to common sense against a repetition 
 of the folly which drove from the English Church, 
 to her great loss, men like Wesley, and Newman, 
 and others, yet without checking the movements of 
 which they were leaders. The movement against 
 which the present agitation is directed may be dis- 
 figured — like most movements inspired by enthu- 
 siasm and zeal — by extravagances and eccentricities ; 
 but it appeals at bottom to instincts in our nature 
 which cannot be forcibly suppressed with impunity. 
 The extravagances will drop off under skilful treat- 
 ment, and all that is good in the movement will 
 remain as a solid gain to the Church. Let us 
 tolerate each other. Let us have no Procrustean 
 system of worship which shall reduce all things to a 
 dull monotony of uniformity. Tastes and feelings 
 
THE PEISONEK OF THE VATICAN 551 
 
 differ even in matters of public worship, and all 
 tastes should have scope, within reasonable limits, 
 in a national Church. Let therefore a wide latitude 
 be conceded where clergy and congregations are of 
 one mind. Above all, let us have charity; let us 
 mutually seek points of agreement rather than of 
 difference ; let us try to understand one another's 
 meaning and aims, and let us cease to call each 
 other names and impute dishonourable motives. 
 And then, perhaps, we may see, even on the near 
 horizon, the foregleams of the day when •' Ephraim 
 shall not envy Judah, and Judah shall not vex 
 Ephraim.' For indeed I believe that there is far 
 more real unity among us than appears on the sur- 
 face ; that under varying phraseology we often mean 
 the same thing. A terrible responsibility lies on 
 any who deliberately or heedlessly help to widen 
 instead of closing the breach. It seems to me im- 
 possible to follow carefully the history of the Church 
 of England through all its vicissitudes without 
 recognising the hand of a guiding Providence lead- 
 ing it by devious ways towards a predestined end. 
 The striking passage in which the Ultramontane De 
 Maistre gave expression to that feeling has often been 
 quoted. ' If Christians,' he said, ' are ever to be 
 drawn towards each other, it seems that the initia- 
 tive must come from the Church of England. 
 Presbyterianism was French in its origin, and was 
 consequently marked by exaggeration,' and lacking 
 in adaptability. ' But the Anglican Church touches 
 us with one hand, and with the other touches 
 
552 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 those whom we cannot reach/ And therefore this 
 uncompromising PapaHst saw, and had the candour 
 to avow, that the Church of England 'is very 
 precious ' as a mediator in the reunion of Christen- 
 dom ; and he compares her to ' one of those chemical 
 intermediaries capable of uniting elements which 
 are mutually repellent.' ^ 
 
 Let us beware then of putting obstacles in the 
 way of God's purposes. Little as they know it, 
 those who would sever the Church of England of 
 our day from the Church which, with all its faults 
 and shortcomings, has played so great a part in the 
 development of our nation from its origin till now, 
 are doing their best to defeat that destiny which an 
 alien and opponent discerned among the omens of 
 her future. ' The English language and the Anglo- 
 Saxon race are overrunning the world,' says Cardinal 
 Newman in one of his charming Essays. Let us 
 then be patient meanwhile and try to ' bear one 
 another's burdens.' ' He that believeth shall not 
 make haste,' Sparta?^ nactus es, limic exorna. 
 
 * Considerations sur la France, ch. ii. 
 
553 
 
 CHAPTEE XIII 
 
 THE LAMBETH DECISIONS' 
 
 The high personal character and ability of each of 
 our Primates, not less than their exalted position, 
 claim for their recent decisions the most filial and 
 dutiful consideration on the part of their clergy. 
 Those immediately affected by the decisions are 
 only the few who pleaded before their Graces at 
 Lambeth, and in a secondary degree those who 
 practise the usages which their Graces have pro- 
 nounced illegal. But the whole Church is affected 
 by the reasons on which the Archbishops have 
 based their decisions. Out of various courses which 
 were open to them it seems to me — if I may 
 presume to say so — that they have chosen the one 
 which makes the duty of obedience unnecessarily 
 hard. If, declining the task of legal and historical 
 criticism, they had entreated the clergy, in view of 
 the present distress and for the sake of peace and 
 the welfare of the Church, to discontinue the 
 liturgical use of incense,^ till a more propitious 
 
 ' I use the word ' decisions ' here and elsewhere in the popular, 
 not technical, sense. The Lambeth decisions have not, and do not 
 profess to have, any legal value. 
 
 - 1 say nothing about lights in processions, which stand on quite a 
 different basis from incense and reservation. 
 
554 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 season, and left the diocesan in each case to regulate 
 the practice of reservation for the communion of the 
 sick, it is probable that such an appeal would have 
 secured universal submission. Obedience might 
 have been unpalatable and painful to some, but it 
 would have presented no difficulty to conscience, nor 
 raised any question of principle or conflicting duties. 
 As it is, the Archbishops have entangled them- 
 selves unnecessarily in the meshes of an argument 
 which is entire] y historical and legal, and entitled 
 on that ground to no more authority than belongs 
 to its intrinsic value. The appeal which they make 
 to the clergy is addressed less to the conscience than 
 to the understanding, and thus claims the assent of 
 the intellect to the validity of an historical conclusion 
 rather than the submission of the will to a godly 
 admonition from those who are entitled to give it. 
 To obey a godly admonition is one thing ; to admit 
 the accuracy of an historical conclusion is quite 
 another. Submission may be a duty in the one 
 case, and a betrayal of duty in the other. It is 
 of course the duty of the clergy to receive with all 
 deference and dutifulness the appeal which the 
 Archbishops have made to them at the close of their 
 historico-legal arguments ; but those arguments 
 challenge the honest criticism of all loyal Churchmen, 
 for they make assumptions and lay down principles 
 and canons of interpretation which go far beyond 
 the usages in debate, and may, if we silently 
 acquiesce in them, seriously damage the historical 
 position and Providential mission of the Church of 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 555 
 
 England. I propose, therefore, to examine, with all 
 respect and reverence, the grounds on which their 
 Graces have based their decisions. And I begin 
 with some preliminary observations. 
 
 1. The Archbishops have not condemned the 
 liturgical use of incense or reservation of the 
 Sacrament for the communion of the sick as things 
 evil in themselves ; on the contrary, they commend 
 both usages in the following words : — 
 
 We are far from saying that incense in itself is an 
 unsuitable or undesirable accompaniment to Divine 
 worship. The injunction for its use by Divine authority 
 in the Jewish Church would alone forbid such a conclu- 
 sion.^ 
 
 Similarly as to the question of reservation. The 
 Primate, after admitting that the practice had the 
 full sanction of the Primitive Church, says : — 
 
 This shows that such a practice was quite consistent 
 with the Christian faith, and there was nothing in it that 
 was wrong in itself. In addition to this the Canon of 
 Nicaea is quoted which requires that care should be 
 taken that the dying shall not be deprived of the Com- 
 munion before death. And it may justly be said that 
 this puts an emphasis on the importance of a practice 
 which facilitates the communion of the sick.^ 
 
 The Primate indeed thinks that there were, and 
 are, ' other modes by which the canon could be 
 observed,' which of course is true in general, but 
 does not invalidate his Grace's admission that the 
 
 ' The Archbishops on the Liturgical Use of Incense, p. 13. 
 ^ The Primate on Keservation, Times report, May 2. 
 
556 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 practice itself is primitive and in harmony with the 
 Christian faith. Are we then to resign ourselves to 
 the melancholy belief that the Church of England 
 is so tied and bound by a Procrustean system of 
 Eubrics and Canons and Acts of Uniformity — some 
 centuries old — that when her dying children cry for 
 the Bread of Life her clergy dare not give it them with- 
 out going through a series of formalities which are 
 in no way necessary to the validity of the Sacrament, 
 but which, if strictly enforced, may drive the parish 
 priest to the alternative of profaning the Sacrament, 
 or refusing it to a hungry soul for whom Christ 
 died ? That is an alternative which the clergy are 
 often obliged to face under the law laid down by the 
 Archbishops. Before he consents to administer the 
 Communion at all to the sick person the parish 
 priest must have * timely notice,' ' signif5dng also 
 how many there are to communicate with him 
 (which shall be three, or two at the least).' The 
 priest must next ascertain whether there is *a 
 convenient place in the sick man's house, with all 
 things necessary so prepared, that the curate may 
 reverently minister.' Having observed all these 
 preliminaries, *he shall celebrate the Holy Com- 
 munion ' according to the prescribed form. Obviously 
 this rubric does not contemplate a case of emergency 
 at all. It supposes leisure, a decent home, an 
 invalid with relatives or servants who, having 
 provided the proper number of communicants, and 
 the ' convenient place with all things necessary ' for 
 a reverent celebration, then sends ' timely notice to 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 557 
 
 the curate.' The rubric does sanction the absence 
 of assistant communicants in the case of a contagious 
 epidemic, but apparently in no other case. Is it not 
 plain that this does not apply at all to modern life 
 and large towns ? I have more than once been 
 called upon to administer the Holy Communion 
 when there was no time to provide any fit person to 
 communicate with the sick man, and I was thus 
 reduced to the alternative of allowing the man to 
 die without the Sacrament for which he longed, 
 or inviting a relative or neighbour (whom I knew to 
 be unfit) to profane the Sacrament and injure his 
 own soul by an unworthy communion. In such an 
 emergency I have never hesitated to dispense with 
 the rubrical communicants. Perish the rubric ! 
 sooner than that Christ's Sacrament of love should 
 either be denied to any of His flock who desire it, 
 or profaned by being forced on those who do not 
 desire it, or are unworthy to receive it. Like the 
 Sabbath, which our Lord observed better than His 
 censors, while seeming to break it, the rubric was 
 made for man, not man for the rubric. And I refuse 
 to believe that the Church of which I am an un- 
 worthy minister is so bound by old rubrical directions, 
 intended for other circumstances, that neither the 
 clergy, nor even her chief pastors, are at liberty to 
 go beyond any of those directions in the minutest 
 details. The right of administering the Sacrament 
 to the sick is inherent in the Christian priesthood, 
 and it would require a very explicit prohibition indeed 
 to convince me that the Church of England ever 
 
.558 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 intended to deprive its clergy of that right. There 
 were rubrical directions in pre-Eeformation Service 
 Books ; but the bishop of the diocese always 
 possessed, and sometimes exercised, the power to 
 modify those directions as occasion required. There 
 is no evidence to show that our episcopate has ever 
 surrendered or been deprived of that power since 
 the .Keformation. It is necessary to insist on this 
 because if once we admit that things which are in 
 themselves good and edifying, and Scriptural and 
 primitive, are forbidden in our Church by reason of 
 some phrase in an old canon, or rubric, or Act of 
 Parliament, that is an admission that the Church 
 of England is no longer a living organism, but a 
 petrified institution, which has lost the power of 
 adapting herself to fresh needs as they arise. 
 
 The Archbishops advise those who are dissatisfied 
 with that state of things to strive for a change in the 
 law. That is, in fact, though probably not in their 
 Graces' intention, a recommendation to agitate in 
 favour of disestablishment, for in no other way is 
 there any reasonable hope of getting the law altered. 
 But what is needed is not a change in the law, but a 
 recognition on the part of our bishops that they have 
 ceitain powers which the law did not give them, 
 and which no law can take away. And this, indeed, 
 the Archbishops recognise when they apply their 
 minds to the interpretation of the rubrics in the 
 light of reason and common sense pure and simple. 
 * But there are no doubt cases,' says the Primate, ' in 
 which the sick person is fully conscious, and is able 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 559 
 
 to follow a short service not exceeding a few minutes, 
 and to make an act of faith, and yet is not really fit 
 for more. In dealing with such cases the minister 
 may plead necessitas non habet leges . . . and shorten 
 the service ... by using what is essential to having 
 any communion at all — i.e. the Prayer of Consecra- 
 tion and the words of administration.' ' 
 
 I believe, and shall presently endeavour to show, 
 that the communion of the sick by the reserved 
 Sacrament is perfectly legal. Now the opponents of 
 the usage must at least admit that it is arguable ; 
 and the Archbishops have in fact admitted this both 
 by inviting argument upon it and by arguing it out 
 in their * Opinions.' But the legality of what they 
 recommend is not arguable. It is a distinct violation 
 of the rubric, which draws the line explicitly at what 
 is to be omitted and what retained. And the Arch- 
 bishops allow the illegality of their recommendation 
 by pleading necessitas non habet leges. Now I ask 
 in all humility and with all filial deference, where is 
 the reason or equity of forbidding a practice which 
 is confessedly ' quite consistent- with the Christian 
 faith,' is sanctioned by the unanimous voice of 
 Christian antiquity, meets an undoubted need, and is 
 not demonstrably illegal, while sanctioning -a prac- 
 tice which is admittedly illegal ? They condemn 
 
 * Is there not a slip here ? The words of administration are not 
 * eseential.' The communion is quite valid without them, and to a 
 railful of deaf persons they would be as unreal as the Sacrament 
 itself to a ' half-conscious communicant.' The Primate does not seem 
 to be aware that what he calls ' a charm ' was forbidden in Pre- 
 R'eformation canons, e.g. iElfric's Can. 3. (Wilkins, i. 251.) ' 
 
560 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 reservation on the ground of illegality alone, and 
 then propose to put in its place what themselves allov^ 
 to be a greater illegality. Is not this a concession, 
 however unconsciously, to popular clamour rather 
 than to the letter of a rubric or the spirit of law? 
 I am all for Jiecessitas non habet leges, but I do not 
 understand their Graces' application of the aphorism. 
 It is a comfort, however, in the midst of much that 
 is uncomfortable, that the two Primates claim for 
 the Church a living power not only to interpret, but 
 to adapt, within reasonable limits, rubrics and canons 
 where these come in conflict with modern needs. 
 And our bishops have always, as a rule, adopted this 
 view of rubrical obligation, as one or two examples 
 out of many will show. The following rubric pre- 
 cedes the service for adult baptism : — 
 
 When any such persons, as are of riper years, are to be 
 baptised, timely notice shall be given to the bishop, or whom 
 he shall appoint for that purpose, a week before at the 
 least, by the parents, or some other discreet persons ; that 
 so due care may be taken for their examination, whether 
 they be sufficiently instructed in the principles of the 
 Christian religion ; and that they may be exhorted to 
 prepare themselves with prayers and fasting for the 
 receiving of this Holy Sacrament. 
 
 I have baptised several adults and witnessed the 
 baptism of others, but never once have I known this 
 rubric obeyed, and I doubt if any bishop or priest in 
 England has knowledge of a single case. Yet the 
 rubric is perfectly plain and unambiguous. Will it 
 be said that it applies to a state of things which has 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 5G1 
 
 passed away ? that there are sundry parishes now in 
 England more populous than some dioceses in the 
 seventeenth century, and that the required ' timely 
 notice to the bishop ' would in some cases be im- 
 practicable ? I admit the plea, but it applies with 
 much greater force to the requirements of the rubric 
 for private communion. 
 
 Again. In all the editions of the Prayer Book, 
 from the first to the present, the officiating minister 
 is ordered by the rubric to ' dip ' the child ' in the 
 water discreetly and warily,' unless the godparents 
 * certify that the child is weak,' in which case 'it 
 shall suffice to pour water upon it.' Yet, says 
 Waterland, — 
 
 Churchmen have sprinkled in Baptism now a hundred 
 years, or it may be more, without ever inquiring whether 
 the child be weak, and the rubric in that case is obso- 
 lete : does it follow from thence that sprinkling without 
 necessity is according to the sense and judgment of the 
 Church of England ? The like may be said of the clerk's 
 placing bread and wine on the Communion table, and 
 perhaps of reading the Communion Service in the desk ; 
 all practised by public allowance, and yet nowhere 
 warranted by the public acts or voice of the Church.^ 
 
 Then there is the deliberate omission of the 
 Athanasian Creed, of the daily service of the Church, 
 of the observance of saints' days, of the Office for 
 the Visitation of the Sick, &c. Now if illegality is 
 
 * Works, vol. X. p. 188. The rule in Elizabeth's reign was to dip. 
 See a letter from Bishop Horn to Bullinger, Zurich Lett. Second 
 Series, vol. i. p. 356, 
 
 O O 
 
562 THE EEFOEMATTON SETTLEMENT 
 
 the crying sin which needs suppressing, is it not a 
 greater offence to violate openly and deliberately a 
 law, which prescribes the discharge of important 
 duties and obligations towards the laity, than to carry 
 out, in an emergency, the spirit of the law by trans- 
 gression (if it be a transgression) of its letter ? Is it 
 not more venial to administer the Holy Communion 
 even irregularly to a sick parishioner now and then 
 than to withhold it from all parishioners for weeks, 
 and in some parishes for months, together? The 
 more one looks at it the plainer it appears, that to 
 give the communion to the sick by means of reserva- 
 tion is a trivial offence, if an offence at all, as com- 
 pared with the flagrant violations of rubrics which 
 are week by week perpetrated without rebuke by 
 multitudes of our clergy, and sometimes even by 
 certain of our bishops. It will never do to insist on 
 the letter of a doubtful law against an unpopular 
 party while condoning on the other hand the breach 
 of an undoubted law on the plea that necessitas non 
 habet leges. To enforce the law rigidly against 
 usages which are admitted to be not only innocent 
 but Scriptural, and edifying in addition, and to relax 
 it in favour of clergy who refuse to their people the 
 privileges which the Church provides for them, 
 would be an injustice which I am sure our revered 
 Primates would not sanction. 
 
 2. It must be frankly admitted, however, that 
 some of our clergy, though I believe only a few, have 
 given just cause of offence, partly through well- 
 intentioned indiscretion, and partly (I fear) through 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 563 
 
 real though unconscious disloyalty to the Church 
 of England. I have in the previous editions of this 
 book ventured to deprecate the introduction, espe- 
 cially without episcopal permission, of ceremonies 
 and devotions which are fairly outside the frontier 
 of the Ornaments Rubric ; and, still more, cere- 
 monies which may have a local history and signi- 
 ficance that make them edifying in the place of 
 their birth, but meaningless, or even ridiculous, 
 elsewhere. An amusing instance came to my know- 
 ledge not long ago. A gentleman on his holiday 
 chanced to make his Sunday communion in a church 
 where he observed a strange ceremony. After the 
 Consecration Prayer the celebrant went to the 
 credence table and finished the rest of the service 
 there. The visitor's curiosity impelled him to go 
 into the vestry after service and ask for an explana- 
 tion. He was told that it was * a beautiful piece of 
 symbolism ' ; but what the symbolism meant he 
 could not learn. He did learn, however, that the 
 ceremony was practised in a certain church in 
 Strasburg, and finding himself in that town not long 
 afterwards he called on the cure and received the 
 following explanation. During the siege of Strasburg 
 in the Franco-German war a cannon ball came 
 through the window while the cure was saying 
 Mass, and nearly took off his head. He immediately 
 moved to the credence table and finished the rest of 
 the service there. And to keep alive the memory of 
 his providential escape he repeated the ceremony on 
 each recurring anniversary of it. For that priest 
 
 o o 2 
 
664 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and parish, therefore, it was truly a beautiful piece of 
 symbolism. But transplanted to England, it became 
 what the Preface to our Prayer Book calls a ' dark 
 and dumb ceremony.' There has been far too much 
 of this fancy ritual. 
 
 I fear also that the accusation of * Romanising,' 
 made against some of our clergy cannot be refuted. 
 There are clergy who hold and privately inculcate 
 the Eoman doctrines of the immaculate conception 
 of the Blessed Virgin ; ^ of Purgatory ; of the Papal 
 claims as defined by the Vatican Council : doctrines 
 which are repudiated not only by the Church of 
 England, but by the whole Eastern Church. I have 
 observed also in some quarters a slavish and senseless 
 imitation of Roman worship for no other reason 
 apparently than that it is Roman. There is some 
 sense, for example, in a Roman priest saying Mass 
 inaudibly. If there are any hearers, he says it in a 
 tongue unknown to them, and they may be more 
 profitably engaged in their own private devotions 
 than in listening to sounds which convey no 
 meaning to their ears. But the Anglican priest 
 is under a solemn obligation to consecrate the 
 Eucharist in English and in the hearing of the con- 
 gregation, and if he says any part of the service 
 secretly he is not only acting disloyally ; he is per- 
 petrating a piece of folly in addition, being without 
 the excuse which the Roman priest may plead. 
 
 Another illegitimate development is the imitation 
 of the Roman Office of Benediction. It is, I grant, 
 
 ' For the full import of that doctrine see ante, p. 504. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 565 
 
 an attractive Office, possibly helpful to devotion, 
 and certainly popular in the Koman Communion. 
 But for an Anglican there are fatal objections to it. 
 By no possibility can it be brought within the area 
 of devotions permissible to an Anglican clergyman in 
 public worship, even if were harmless and desirable 
 in itself. It cannot in any sense be called a Catholic 
 devotion. It was unknown to the Primitive Church. 
 It is unknown to the Eastern Church, and is a 
 modern development even in the Roman. It is 
 therefore, apart from its intrinsic character, one of 
 those devotions which a national Church may adopt 
 or reject. Our Church certainly has not adopted it, 
 and none of her clergy can do so without a breach 
 of duty. This would be true if the adoption of 
 Benediction by our Church were in itself desir- 
 able. But is it ? The essence of the devotion is 
 the adoration of and benediction by the reserved 
 Sacrament apart from communion. The Article is 
 right which says that ' the Sacrament of the Lord's 
 Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved ' foi 
 that purpose. It was reserved for the communion 
 of the unavoidably absent, and for no other purpose, 
 and to divert so great a Sacrament from its primary 
 and only declared intention is surely a perilous thing. 
 It was instituted in order to be the nutriment of our 
 spiritual nature and to act as the nexus between 
 our regenerate humanity and the sinless Humanity 
 of our Incarnate Lord, placing us thus en rapport 
 with His sustaining Life and atoning Sacrifice. 
 Doubtless adoration is due to Him in the Sacrament, 
 
566 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 as all our great divines teach, and even the Judicial 
 Committee allow. But all this is quite different 
 from reservation of the Sacrament for the mere 
 purpose of adoration. Even in the Church of Eome 
 the Office of Benediction and solitary Masses are 
 allowed rather than dogmatically enjoined. Indeed 
 the Council of Trent expressed its disapproval of 
 Masses without communicants. 
 
 3. Those who feel aggrieved by the Lambeth 
 Opinions ought therefore in fairness to remember 
 that there was an urgent cause for intervention on 
 the part of our ecclesiastical authorities. The pity 
 is that these did not condemn what is truly censur- 
 able and unlawful instead of usages which are 
 confessedly primitive, edifying, * consistent with the 
 Christian faith,' and co-extensive if not coeval with 
 Christendom. It would indeed be lamentable if any 
 rite or ceremony of which all this can truly be said 
 were placed under ban of the Church of England. 
 It would, moreover, be a direct contradiction of the 
 general principle affirmed by herself in her defence 
 of the use of the sign of the cross in Baptism, 
 namely, that the abuse of a thing in itself good is 
 no sufficient reason for abolishing its right use ; and 
 that she had not departed from any of the Churches 
 of Christendom except in things in which they had 
 departed from the undivided Church of Catholic 
 antiquity. Now this is, I submit, an objection to 
 the Lambeth ' Hearing ' which vitiates the whole 
 proceedings. When the Archbishops announced 
 their intention to invite opposing parties to plead 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 567 
 
 before them it was generally understood that they 
 would eschew the region of dry law, and decide as 
 Fathers in God what was expedient in particular 
 cases and localities, not what was legally and 
 inflexibly binding everywhere. The Primates en- 
 couraged this inference by repudiating all legal 
 pretensions and disclaiming the character of a court 
 for what purported to be only a ' Hearing.' In con- 
 sequence of this explanation there was no disposition 
 to scan closely the credentials of the eminent and 
 Most Reverend prelates who offered their aid in an 
 extra-judicial capacity in the interest of peace. The 
 surprise was great when the Ai'chiepiscopal decision 
 on the use of Incense was found to rest exclusively 
 on a legal basis of the narrowest and most technical 
 character. The decision on Eeservation is of the 
 same kind. The Fathers in God have thus disap- 
 peared, and in their place we have amateurs in law 
 delivering legal judgments. This is serious. For, 
 whatever confidence we may have in the orthodoxy 
 and judicial impartiality of our present Primates, 
 we have no sort of security for the qualifications of 
 their successors. So that the doctrine and cere- 
 monial of our Church may be gradually undermined 
 and eventually overthrown before the Church has 
 fully realised the peril. Or there may be a periodical 
 revision and reversal of ceremonial and ritual law at 
 each recurring change in the occupancy of the 
 Primatial Sees. Two Primates of Bishop Prince 
 Lee's opinions would fifty years ago have pronounced 
 the use of the surplice in the pulpit illegal. So 
 
568 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 illegal indeed did that able and scholarly prelate 
 consider the surplice in preaching that he gave 
 public notice that he would not license any curate 
 in his diocese who did not give a formal promise 
 never to use the surplice in the pulpit. Surely it is 
 incredible that our Church should have endowed our 
 two Archbishops with such plenary powers. And 
 yet that is the view which most of our bishops 
 appear to have taken. On the strictest legal ground 
 the Lambeth decisions affected those clergy only 
 who pleaded before the Archbishops. Yet many of 
 our bishops hastened to enforce the decision on 
 Incense as if it were an infallible Pontifical decree 
 binding the whole Church. The high character 
 and conspicuous piety of our Archbishops naturally 
 tend to conceal the seeds of future mischief which 
 lurk in their recent proceedings. But the mistakes 
 of good and able men are far more dangerous than 
 those of other men, and therefore need more careful 
 watching. 
 
 The Archbishops sat at Lambeth under the 
 sa,nction of the following provision in the chapter 
 in the Preface to the Prayer Book ' Concerning the 
 Service of the Church ' : — 
 
 And forasmuch as nothing can be so plainly set forth 
 but doubts may arise in the use and practice of the same ; 
 to appease all such diversity (if any arise) and for the 
 resolution of all doubts concerning the manner how 
 to understand, do, and execute, the things ordained in 
 this Book ; the parties that so doubt, or diversly take 
 any thing, shall alway resort to the Bishop of the diocese, 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 569 
 
 who by his discretion shall take order for the quieting 
 and appeasing of the same ; so that the same order be 
 not contrary to any thing contained in this Book. And if 
 the Bishop of the diocese be in doubt, then he may send 
 for the resolution thereof to the Archbishop. 
 
 Any one who reads this passage with its context 
 can hardly help seeing that it refers to Matins and 
 Evensong alone, and to no other service in the Book 
 of Common Prayer. It now forms part of the 
 Preface to the Prayer Book. It formed the sole 
 Preface to the Prayer Book of 1549. Matins and 
 Evensong in that book superseded the Breviary, 
 which had practically ceased to provide congrega- 
 tional worship ; not merely because it was in the 
 Latin tongue, but also because a special training 
 was needed to follow its puzzling directions. It was 
 no exaggeration to say that ' the number and 
 hardness of the rules called the Fie, and the 
 manifold changes of the service, was the cause that 
 to turn the book only was so hard and intricate a 
 matter, that many times there was more business to 
 find out what should be read than to read it when it 
 was found out.' To remedy all these inconveniences 
 the Order for Morning and Evening Prayer was 
 compiled out of the old services. 
 
 So that here you have an Order for Prayer, and for the 
 reading of the Holy Scripture, much agreeable to the mind 
 and purpose of the old Fathers, and a great deal more 
 profitable and commodious than that which of late was 
 used. 
 
570 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 In a later paragraph the meaning of the 1549 
 Preface is placed beyond a doubt : — 
 
 And if any would judge this way more painful because 
 that all things must be read upon the Book, whereas 
 before, by the reason of so often repetition, they could say 
 many things by heart : if those men will weigh their 
 labour, with the profit in knowledge which daily they 
 shall obtain by reading upon the Book, they will not 
 refuse the pain in consideration of the great profit that 
 shall ensue thereof. 
 
 This sentence obviously and unmistakably refers 
 to daily Matins and Evensong exclusively. It was 
 omitted in the revision of 1661-2, doubtless because 
 the reference to the old Breviary Offices no longer 
 appealed to living memories. 
 
 It appears evident therefore that the Archbishops 
 have made a serious mistake in their interpretation 
 of the passage under the authority of which they 
 invited an appeal on matters liturgical — i.e. per- 
 taining to the celebration of the Eucharist. Of such 
 matters the passage on which they relied takes no 
 cognisance and sanctions no appeal to bishop or 
 archbishop. The Lambeth * Hearing ' thus derives 
 no authority at all from the Prayer Book, and the 
 decisions based upon it are, as the Primate himself 
 has declared, no more than the private * opinions * 
 of two Most Eeverend and distinguished prelates. 
 
 4. Nor is this all. It is plain that the passage 
 under consideration, besides referring to Matins and 
 Evensong exclusively, does not contemplate the 
 meddling or intervention of an outsider at all. It 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 571 
 
 evidently has in view doubts among the clergy them- 
 selves ; not necessarily between differing clergy, but 
 arising in the minds of individual clergy ' in the use 
 and practice of ' the new Book. Such doubts were 
 to be referred to the diocesan, and if he failed to 
 solve them he was to refer the matter to the arch- 
 bishop. Some doubts were very likely to arise 
 immediately after the supplanting of the old ' Uses ' 
 by the Book of Common Prayer. There is but little 
 occasion for them now within the meaning of the 
 chapter ' Concerning the Service of the Church.' 
 That chapter might cover doubts as to the use of the 
 black gown ; or as to the choice of Proper Lessons 
 on concurrence of a Sunday and Saints' days ; or 
 concerning the omission of the Litany at Matins. 
 But the liturgical use of incense and the reservation 
 of the Sacrament for the sick are altogether beyond 
 its purview. That my interpretation of the import 
 of the reference to the bishop and archbishop for 
 the resolution of doubts is correct is proved conclu- 
 sively by the translation of the passage in Elizabeth's 
 Latin Book : — 
 
 Quia vero nulla ordinatio tarn perspicue proponi 
 potest de quo non oriantur interdum disputationes in 
 quotidiano usu, constitutum est, ut quoties dubia occurrunt 
 aut incidunt inter ministros, deferatur res ad Episcopum 
 Dioeceseos, cujus judicio in hac re acquiescent, modo nihil 
 constituat quod palam cum hac ordinatione pugnet. 
 
 The words ' inter ministros ' clearly limit the 
 reference to doubts among the clergy themselves ; 
 and that is undoubtedly the meaning of the English 
 
572 THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 version, although it is not quite so plainly expressed. 
 It is not a matter of controversy that is contemplated, 
 but scruples on the part of some of the clergy. A 
 clergyman v^ho has any doubts is bidden to consult 
 his bishop, and if the bishop doubts he must resort 
 to the archbishop. The question of legality does not 
 come in at all. So far from it, bishops are v^arned 
 av^ay from confusing fatherly counsel or direction 
 v^ith a legal decision. This confusion, I respectfully 
 submit, pervades the Lambeth decisions. The Arch- 
 bishops speak of them variously as ' decisions,' * judg- 
 ments,' 'opinions.' Decisions or judgments they 
 certainly are not in any legal sense. They lack all 
 the attributes of judicial prcnouncements. They 
 issue from no legal tribunal, for the '' Hearing ' v^as 
 emphatically declared by the Primate to be ' not a 
 court.' The Archbishops appeared in a private 
 capacity without any of the formalities or insignia 
 of official responsibility ; and one of them v^as out- 
 side his own province, and had not even a colourable 
 locus standi. Nevertheless, such was the desire for 
 emancipation from the dry bones of legal controversy, 
 and so deep the respect for the office and character of 
 the Primates, that if, avoiding legal discussion, they 
 had claimed to control and regulate the use of incense 
 and reservation, almost any direction which they 
 might have given would have been obeyed, however 
 painful the sacrifice might have been, and however 
 anomalous and ultra vires the whole proceeding might 
 have appeared from a legal point of view. 
 
 5. Such was the mental attitude, and such were 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 573 
 
 the hopes with which the whole High Church party, 
 and I beheve the Eituahst party also, awaited the 
 deliverances of the Archbishops on the questions 
 submitted to them. When their Graces, abdicating 
 for the nonce their spiritual office and their fatherly 
 relations to the clergy, delivered quasi-judicial 
 decisions in the character of legal experts, it is not 
 too much to say that the feeling of those who had 
 hoped so much was one of profound dismay. The 
 Archbishops said in effect : — 
 
 There is nothing wrong in these things. They are 
 consistent with the Christian faith and with the practice 
 of undivided Christendom long before the rise of ' Popery.' 
 But there is that cast-iron Act of Uniformity, with its 
 'none other or otherwise,' and we are powerless; our 
 hands are tied ; and our sole business, when any of the 
 clergy resort to us to resolve their doubts, is to remand 
 them to the Act of Unformity and bid them govern them- 
 selves accordingly. Nor is this Erastianism, for the Church, 
 in 1661-2, adopted the Uniformity Act of 1559 as an inte- 
 gral part of the Prayer Book. If therefore you wish to 
 practise the things which are called in question you must 
 get the law altered. We have no power to give you permis- 
 sion. 
 
 But -the compilers of Edward's First Prayer Book, 
 and presumably the revisers of 1661, did not intend 
 to send clergy who had doubts 'in the use and 
 practice ' of some detail in a rubric to the bishop or 
 archbishop for a legal decision, but for instruction 
 and direction. Doubts about the use and practice 
 of a rite or ceremony are a confession of ignorance, 
 implying a desire to learn from those w^ho have 
 
574 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 authority to teach, and is altogether inapplicable to 
 persons who have no doubts. And the bishop is to 
 ' take order ' outside the sphere of law, with which 
 he is forbidden to meddle. It is most important to 
 bear this in mind, and in the interest of the Church 
 to resist a precedent which might enable some future 
 Primates, of a different stamp from those who now 
 adorn the Primatial Sees, to revolutionise the doc- 
 trine and ritual of our Church. The Archbishop of 
 Canterbury indeed claims 'for the Sovereign with 
 the advice of the Primate ' the right to change ad 
 libitum the Church's mode of worship.* There is, 
 I believe, no doubt that the power, granted to the 
 Sovereign by the Act of 1559, perished with Eliza- 
 beth. But that the claim should now be made in 
 all good faith and with the best intention proves the 
 need of narrowly scrutinising the initial stages of 
 unintended usurpations. The Papacy itself grew as 
 much out of well-meaning errors as out of deliberate 
 calculation or intentional fraud. I repeat that we 
 are bound to have in view, not the present Primates, 
 but their successors in perpetuity ; and we place the 
 doctrine and worship of the Church of England in 
 jeopardy if we surrender them to the manipulation 
 of all future Primates sitting in an informal tribunal 
 unknown alike to the Church and Constitution. 
 This objection would be equally valid if the Lambeth 
 decisions were sound expositions of the law. I now 
 proceed in all humility to show cause why they 
 cannot be so regarded. 
 
 * The Archbishops on the TAtnrgical Use of Incense dx. p. 12. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS ^ 575 
 
 The key of the position in this controversy is the 
 right interpretation of the Ornaments Eubric, which 
 is itself a repetition, in a shghtly altered form, of a 
 clause in the Act of Uniformity of 1559. As that 
 clause is known to have been insisted on by Elizabeth 
 as a condition of her assent to the revised Prayer 
 Book of 1552,^ her opinions and her political environ- 
 ment at the time are of capital importance in the 
 legal construction of the rubric. Mr. Errington, 
 one of Mr. Dibdin's coadjutors at the Lambeth 
 ' Hearing,' said : — 
 
 Elizabeth had to fight a long diplomatic battle against 
 Spain, and in that battle she used every weapon she could 
 dispose of. Her chapel did not at all represent her own 
 religious convictions, but merely her political necessities.^ 
 
 Mr. Errington offers no evidence, and I believe 
 him to be altogether in error. But he errs in some 
 good company. Professor Maitland of Cambridge 
 has expressed a similar opinion, and also without 
 
 ^ ' First, I said, as her Highness talked with me once or twice on 
 that point, and signified that there was one proviso in the Act of the 
 Uniformity of Common Prayer, that by law is granted unto her, 
 that if there be any contempt or irreverence used in the ceremonies 
 or rites of the Church by the misusing of the orders appointed in the 
 Book, the Queen's Majesty may, by the advice of her Commissioners, 
 or Metropolitan, ordain and publish such further ceremonies, or rites, 
 as may be most for the reverence of Christ's holy mysteries and 
 sacraments, and but for which law her Highness would not have 
 agreed to divers orders of the Book. And by virtue of which law 
 she published further order in her Injunctions both for the Com- 
 munion bread, and for the placing of the Tables within the quire.' 
 (Archbishop Parker to Sir William Cecil. Correspondence of Arch- 
 bisJwp Parker, p. 375.) - TJie Case against Incense, p. 124. 
 
676 THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 offering any other evidence than the Queen's pro- 
 hibition of the elevation of the Host in her presence 
 on Christmas Day after her accession.^ That is no 
 evidence at all. Elevation is of comparatively 
 modern date in the Church of Eome, and has never 
 been practised in the Eastern Church. It was 
 forbidden in Edward's ' Order of the Communion ' 
 (A.D. 1548) and in the Prayer Book of 1549, which 
 was an expansion of it. Elizabeth was at that 
 time set on restoring the first Liturgy of Edward, 
 and she naturally forbade the only ceremony of the 
 Mass which was forbidden in both the abridged and 
 full edition of that Liturgy. An accusation of 
 religious hypocrisy is a serious thing, and ought not 
 to be made against any one without clear proof, and 
 least of all against a Sovereign to whom, with all 
 her faults, the Church of England owes so much. 
 Her prohibition of elevation is not the only indica- 
 tion we have of * her own religious convictions.' 
 As to theology, she accepted the doctrine of the 
 Keal Presence rn the fullest sense, apart from the 
 gross superstitions that clustered round the dogma 
 of transubstantiation. Barring the elevation of the 
 Host, she had no objection to the ceremonies of the 
 Mass as it was ritually rendered in Edward's Eirst 
 Liturgy. A few references to authorities will make 
 this plain. ColHer writes : — 
 
 She was of opinion the service of God in her brother's 
 reign wanted something of beauty and magnificence to 
 recommend it. In short, her aim was to settle both 
 
 ' Article in Fortnightly Review of December 1899, p. 935. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS. 577 
 
 ceremonies and doctrine upon a temper that there might 
 be a due latitude for general approbation and belief. 
 This she apprehended the best expedient to unite the 
 natioQ and preserve a great part of her subjects from going 
 off to the Church of Eome.^ 
 
 In a letter to Peter Martyr dated April 1, 1560, 
 Bishop Sandys writes : — 
 
 The Queen's Majesty considered it not contrary to the 
 Word of God, nay, rather for the advantage of the Church, 
 that the image of Christ crucified, together with Mary and 
 John, should be placed, as heretofore, in some conspicuous 
 part of the church, where they might more easily be 
 seen by all the people.^ 
 
 The Simancas documents throw^ much light both 
 on the religious and political opinions of Elizabeth. 
 To find out the exact truth on this point Philip of 
 Spain sent a very astute agent to London, Don 
 Alvaro de la Cuadra, v^ith secret instructions to get 
 at the Queen's real opinions and intentions. Before 
 this the Queen had refused Philip's proposal of 
 marriage, and she gave her reasons confidentially to 
 his emissary, v^ho duly reported them to his master. 
 Those which weighed with her most were, first, that 
 ' being a heretic (siendo heretica),' in his opinion, 
 ' she could not marry him • ' secondly, ' that she was 
 resolved to restore religion precisely as it had been left 
 by her father ; that although she would not assume 
 the title of Head of the Church, she would not con- 
 sent that money should be withdrawn for Eome, and 
 that she would have the Act of Parliament sworn to 
 
 ' Hist. vi. 300. - Zurich Lett. a.d. 1558-9, p. 74. 
 
 P P 
 
678 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 (on the Supremacy) by all who held public employ- 
 ments, although they might be ecclesiastics, and by 
 the graduates of the universities. To this all the 
 Members of Parhament, except the Earl of Shrews- 
 bury, Lord Montague, the Bishops, and the Abbot of 
 Westminster, agreed.' ^ 
 
 This is important for more reasons than one. It 
 shows, in the first place, that Elizabeth indulged in 
 no diplomatic fencing with Philip about ' her own 
 religious convictions ' and political intentions. She 
 made a clean breast of them to his agent with a 
 frankness which left nothing to be desired, and 
 
 ' Documents from Simancas relating to Elizabeth (1558-68), 
 edited by Spencer Hall, p. 55. 
 
 Sanders, in his De Schismate Anglicano, says that ' when all was 
 done,' the Act of Supremacy ' was carried in the House of Lords but 
 by three voices.' This is denounced by Fuller as ' a loud untruth ; 
 for the Act, having easily passed the House of Commons, found none 
 of the temporal nobility in the House of Lords to oppose it save 
 only the Earl of Shrewsbury and Anthony Brown, Viscount 
 Mountacute. ... As for the Bishops, there were but fourteen, and 
 the Abbot of Westminster, alive ; of whom, four being absent 
 (whether voluntarily or out of sickness, uncertain), the rest could not 
 make any considerable opposition.' Hist. ii. 443. 
 
 According to D'Ewes (p. 28) the dissentients in the division on 
 the third reading of the Act of Uniformity were the Archbishop 
 of York, the Marquis of Winchester, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the 
 Viscount Montague ; the Bishops of London, Ely, Worcester, Llandatf , 
 Coventry, Exeter, and Chester ; the Lords Morley, Stafford, Dudley, 
 Wharton, Rich, and North. Camden says that the Act of Supre- 
 macy ' was vigorously opposed in the House of Lords by nine 
 bishops (who were all that of the Marian bishops then living were 
 present), viz. Heath (Archbishop of York) ; Brown (London) ; Pate 
 (Worcester) ; Anthony (Llandaff) ; Bryan (Coventry) ; Turbeville 
 (Exeter) ; Scot (Chester) ; Oglethorpe (Carlisle) ; and by the Abbot 
 of Westminster (Feckenham).' Camden's Elizabeth, p. 372. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 579 
 
 which must have destroyed all illusions at the 
 Spanish Court. It is important to note, in the 
 second place, that De la Cuadra's despatch was 
 written just after the Supremacy Act had secured 
 the assent of Parliament and while the Act of Uni- 
 formity was still in debate. "We have thus Eliza- 
 beth's own authentic interpretation of the Ornaments 
 clause in that Act. Its purpose was * to restore 
 religion precisely as it had been left by her father ' 
 — that is, minus the Headship and the elevation of 
 the Host. It is plain from this that Elizabeth con- 
 templated no breach with the ceremonial of 1547, 
 ' and was resolved ' to engraft it on the English 
 Prayer Book. Here then is the meaning of the 
 ' other Order ' which she had in view, the ' further 
 ceremonies ' which she obtained Parliamentary au- 
 thority to prescribe as occasion might arise, with 
 a view to invest *the service of God' with the 
 ' beauty and magnificence ' which it ' wanted in her 
 brother's reign ' — not in law, but in practice, under 
 the regime of rapacious courtiers. Sandys therefore 
 knew what he was saying when he interpreted the 
 Act of 1559 as legalising the ceremonial of 'the 
 first and second year of King Edward.' But with 
 her usual astuteness the Queen made her brother 
 instead of her father the figurehead of her reli- 
 gious restoration. Henry VIII. had left unpleasant 
 memories as a religious reformer. His truculent 
 Six Articles, popularly nicknamed * The Whip with 
 Six Thongs,' were an odious exhibition of persecu- 
 tion. Edward VI., on the other hand, was the darlinof 
 
 p p 2 
 
580 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of the Puritans, whom they canonised in popular 
 parlance as 'the young Josiah.' Elizabeth there- 
 fore fixed on the ceremonial of Edward's second 
 regnal year as the goal of her reformation. In point 
 of fact this was precisely what she told, in other 
 phrase, to the Spanish confidential envoy. The 
 Eucharistic ceremonial of Edward's second year was 
 the same as that of Henry VIII. 's last year, with the 
 absence of the elevation. Edward's First Book, as 
 I shall prove later, was not a legal document in 
 Edward's second regnal year. The authorised 
 Eucharistic Service was the old Sarum Use sup- 
 plemented by the English * Order of the Com- 
 munion,' which forbade elevation, but 'without 
 the varying of any other rite or ceremony in the 
 Mass.' 
 
 This might suffice to show the baselessness of 
 Professor Maitland's suggestion and Mr. Erring- 
 ton's positive allegation. But it may be well to 
 accumulate proof, as the controversy in which we 
 are engaged revolves round Elizabeth and her Eubric 
 and Act of Uniformity. 
 
 Count de Eeria, the accredited Spanish Ambas- 
 sador, finding himself practically superseded by the 
 confidential envoy, begged to be recalled. Philip 
 agreed, and accredited De la Cuadra in De Eeria's 
 place. By command of Philip the retiring ambas- 
 sador * obtained a long and private conference ' with 
 the Queen ' at his audience of leave, . . . and coun- 
 selled her on the part of Phifip to leave religion as it 
 was settled at the death of Mary.' A vain advice. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 581 
 
 for her mind was plainly made up. The standard 
 of worship in Edward's second year, not in Mary's 
 last, was her deliberate choice. Here is De Feria's 
 report of what she said to him privately : — 
 
 She said that she desired to establish in her kingdom 
 the Augustine Confession of Faith, or another but similar 
 form [il otracosacomo aquella]. That she, in fact, differed 
 but little from us, because she believed Christ [Dios] was 
 present in the Sacrifice of the Eucharist : and that in the 
 Mass she disapproved of only two or three parts [cosas]. 
 That for herself, she thought to be saved quite as much as 
 the Bishop of Eome.-*^ 
 
 On Easter Tuesday, 1565— more than six years 
 after her accession, and at the period of the Advertise- 
 ments by means of which she was supposed by the 
 now discredited Judicial Committee of the Privy 
 Council to be meditating the ' clean sweeping away ' 
 of all high ceremonial — Elizabeth furnished by 
 anticipation the following practical refutation of 
 that theory : — 
 
 On Easter Tuesday [1565] Elizabeth herself in stiff 
 black velvet and with all solemnity and devotion publicly 
 washed the feet of a poor woman ; and the washing over, 
 with slow deliberation, she had a large crucifix brought to 
 her, which she piously kissed.^ 
 
 The concessions which in matters of ceremonial 
 she made to the Puritans were obtained from her 
 
 ' Doc. from Simancas, p. 59. Cf . Froude, Hist. vii. 82, and Strype, 
 Ann. vol. i. pt. i. 3. Strype gives a wrong date here. 
 
 "^ Froude, Hist. iii. 140 (quoting from De Silva in the Simancas 
 MS.). 
 
582 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 .reluctantly by the importunities of rapacious cour- 
 tiers and politicians who were more intent on 
 ecclesiastical loot than on religious reforms. This 
 she acknowledged in a conversation with De Feria : — 
 
 Elizabeth now [October 3, 1559] ordered the cross and 
 candles to be replaced in her chapel as before. This 
 caused some disagreement with her Council. She said 
 they had caused her to adopt measures which met with 
 general disapprobation, and that the order to burn all 
 statues and pictures had created great discontent, especially 
 in Wales and the North. ^ 
 
 In the autumn of 15G4 De Silva in a private 
 interview * assured her the adherents of the old 
 faith were more dutifully inclined towards her than 
 those of the new. This she admitted, and gave 
 orders to mitigate the confinement of the Bishop of 
 London [Bonner], and assured De Silva she did 
 not read libros Alemanes [the works of the Ee- 
 formers], but St. Jerome and St. Augustine.' She 
 also told him that * she had been compelled to 
 temporise at the beginning of her reign upon many 
 points repugnant to her, but that God only knew 
 her heart, and that she thought of restoring the 
 crucifixes to the churches.' ^ 
 
 So much for the confident assertion in ' The Case 
 against Incense,' that 'her chapel did not at all 
 represent her religious convictions, but merely her 
 political necessities.' Words could not express a 
 more direct contradiction of the facts as furnished 
 
 * Doc. from Simancas, p. 64. 
 2 Ibid. p. 92. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 583 
 
 by her own testimony. ' Her own religious con- 
 victions ' prompted her to make the ceremonial of 
 her own chapel a standard and model for all other 
 churches, and she confessed, after some years' 
 experience, that she had made a mistake in re- 
 luctantly allowing her advisers to persuade her that 
 * her pohtical necessities * pointed in an opposite 
 direction. Nor are we entirely dependent on the 
 Queen's own testimony. The Puritan Neale says of 
 the divines employed in reviewing the Prayer Book 
 in 1558-9 :— 
 
 Their instructions were to strike out all offensive 
 passages against the Pope, and to make people easy about 
 the belief of the corporal Presence of Christ in the Sacra- 
 ment ; but not a word in favour of the stricter Protestants. 
 Her Majesty was afraid of reforming too far ; she was 
 desirous to retain images in churches, crucifixes and 
 crosses, vocal and instrumental music, with all the old 
 Popish garments. It is not therefore to be wondered at 
 that in reviewing the Liturgy of King Edward no altera- 
 tions were made in favour of those who now began to be 
 called Puritans, from their attempting a purer form of 
 worship and discipline than had yet been established. 
 The Queen was more concerned for the Papists, and 
 therefore, in the Litany, this passage : From the tyranny of 
 the Bishop of Borne, and all his detestable enormities, good 
 Lord deliver us, was omitted. The Eubric that declared 
 that by kneeling at the Sacrament no adoration was in- 
 tended to any corporal presence of Christ wa>sexi^unged. . . . 
 In short, the service performed in the Queen's chapel, 
 and in sundry cathedrals, was so splendid and showy that 
 foreigners could not distinguish it from the Eoman, except 
 that it was performed in the English tongue. By this 
 
584 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 method the Popish laity were deceived into conformity, 
 and came regularly to church for nine or ten years, till 
 the Pope, being out of all hopes, forbid them, by excom- 
 municating the Queen and laying the whole kingdom 
 under an interdict.^ 
 
 Mr. Dibdin and his learned coadjutors might 
 have escaped their blunder about Elizabeth's 're- 
 ligious convictions ' if they had consulted even so 
 accessible an authority as the cynical Hume, who 
 writes, under the date of 1568 : — 
 
 But the Princess herself, so far from being willing to 
 despoil religion of the few ornaments and ceremonies 
 which remained to it, was rather inclined to bring the 
 public worship nearer the Eomish ritual ; and she thought 
 that the Preformation had already gone too far in shaking 
 off those forms and observances which, without distracting 
 men of more refined apprehensions, tend in a very innocent 
 manner to allure and amuse the vulgar. She took care 
 to have a law for uniformity strictly enacted, wherein she 
 was empowered by the Parliament to add any new 
 ceremonies which she thought proper.^ 
 
 At Elizabeth's coronation ' the Bishop sang . . . 
 the Mass from a missal which had been carried in 
 procession before the Queen.' She kissed the pax.^ 
 She received the Eucharist, but only in one kind. 
 
 ' Hist, of the Puritans, vol. i. pp. 129, 144. 
 
 2 Hist. vol. V. p. 12. 
 
 •■' The pax was a piece of wood or metal, having a representation 
 of our Lord's Passion or some other sacred emblem painted or 
 embossed upon it, with a handle at the back. When the ancient 
 kiss of peace fell into desuetude this was kissed as a substitute during 
 Mass by the priest at the words Pax vobiscum, and afterwards 
 handed round to be kissed by the congregation. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 585 
 
 And when the champion delivered the traditional 
 challenge it was addressed to all who should contest 
 her title as * Queen of England, France, Ireland, 
 Defender of the true ancient and Catholic faith, 
 most worthy Empress from the Orcades isles to the 
 mountains of Pyrenee.' ^ 
 
 In a letter to Cardinal Loraine on November 3, 
 1559, M. de Noailles, the French Ambassador, 
 writes : — 
 
 Yesterday this Queen celebrated the festival of All 
 Saints [a mistake in the date, unless he meant All Souls] 
 in her great chapel at Westminster with much solemnity. 
 She had the wax tapers lighted during the services on the 
 high altar, which she has made them replace against the 
 wall where it formerly stood, with the cross and crucifix 
 of silver thereon.^ 
 
 Froude sums up the situation pretty fairly when 
 he says : — 
 
 She would have been well contented with a tolerant 
 orthodoxy, which would have left to Catholics their 
 ritual, deprived of its extravagances, and to the more 
 moderate of their opponents would have allowed scope 
 to feel their way towards a larger creed. ^ 
 
 And speaking of the Puritans he says : — 
 
 At the heart of the matter it was they who were giving 
 importance to what is of no importance. . . . They would 
 have erected with all their hearts a despotism as hard, 
 as remorseless, as blighting, as the Eomanist. 
 
 ^ Miss Strickland's Lives of the Queens of England, iv. 151. 
 2 Ibid. 153. 3 Hist. v. 23, 80. 
 
586 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Farther on he describes the reign of lawlessness, 
 desolation, and irreverence which the fanaticism 
 of Puritanism produced, more than justifying the 
 misgivings and fears of Elizabeth in its initial 
 stages.^ Those who wish to see further evidence of 
 Elizabeth's views on Eucharistic doctrine and ritual 
 may turn back to chapter x. and to pp. 104, 435, 
 for confirmation of Froude's gloomy description of 
 the policy which won the day and ended in the 
 suppression of the Prayer Book and the overthrow 
 of the Church and monarchy. 
 
 This may suffice then as to Elizabeth's ' religious 
 convictions.' Let us now glance at the political situa- 
 tion which she had to face when she came to the 
 throne. It was a situation of extreme peril. Spain, 
 the most formidable military and naval power in 
 Europe, was under the rule of an able and autocratic 
 monarch, possessing in the Netherlands a base of 
 operations close to our shores if he resolved on 
 hostilities against us. He kept so considerable a 
 fleet there that when he returned to Spain, leaving 
 the Duchess of Parma as Vicegerent in Flanders, he 
 was escorted by a powerful squadron of ninety vessels, 
 which caused no small anxiety in England.^ The 
 German Princes bore England no good will, and 
 Denmark was doubtful. But the immediate and 
 pressing danger was from France, and the nature of 
 it may be gathered from the subjoined extract from 
 
 i Hist. viii. 133-40. 
 
 2 Calendar of State Papers, Nos. 1174, 1175, 1258. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 587 
 
 Nares's * Memoirs of Lord Burleigh,' written after 
 careful examination of all the Burleigh papers : — 
 
 But the actual degree of danger may be best understood, 
 as well as the means of providing against it, from a paper 
 drawn up by Secretary Cecil, after his accustomed manner, 
 as a guide to the Council, upon a pretty general belief and 
 opinion that France contemplated no less than the con- 
 quest of England this very year [1559] . * First,' he argues, 
 * they would not defer it because of the doubt oi the Queen 
 [of Scots'] life. Secondly, they had now got an occasion to 
 conquer Scotland, and had already men of war there, and 
 prepared a great army both out of France and Almane 
 [Germany]. Their captains were appointed ; their victuals 
 provided ; their ships in rigging. Thirdly, they reckoned 
 within a month to have their wills in Scotland. Fourthly, 
 that done, it seemed most likely they would prosecute 
 their pretence against England; which had no fort but 
 Berwick to stay them, and that was imperfect, and would 
 be these two years' day. Fifthly, if they offered battle 
 with Almains, there was great doubt how England 
 would be able to sustain it, both for lack of good generals 
 and great captains ; and principally for lack of people, con- 
 sidering the waste that had lately been by sickness and 
 death these three last years ; again, if it were defended 
 with strangers, the entertainment would be so chargeable 
 in respect of money, and so hurtful to the realm, as it 
 could not be borne.' These questions were then pro- 
 pounded : First, what to do ; next, whether it were better 
 to impeach the enemy in Scotland, now in the beginning, 
 before their army were come, and so to take away their 
 landing places ; or to prevent them therein, and to provide 
 for the defence of the realm. ^ 
 
 » Memoirs of Lord Burleigh, ii. 26-7. 
 
588 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Cecil's alarmist paper shows the deep depression 
 and gloom which had settled on the nation, of which 
 we learn from other sources also. Constant wars 
 with France and Scotland had depleted the ex- 
 chequer and impoverished the nation almost beyond 
 endurance ; and all this was aggravated by a pro- 
 longed plague and famine which had depopulated 
 whole districts. And to fill the cup of misery the 
 national honour was sorely wounded by the loss of 
 Calais, which was too fresh to be recognised as a 
 blessing in disguise. 
 
 Such was the prospect which confronted Eliza- 
 beth on her accession. And behind it was a peril 
 even more formidable, because more widespread and 
 less tangible and manageable — the peril of a religious 
 crusade from abroad combined with an insurrection 
 among her own subjects. The Papacy then wielded 
 an immense political power in Europe, and that 
 power would be arrayed against Elizabeth in all 
 its vast and ubiquitous ramifications if she set it 
 at defiance. Providentially the mutual rivalry of 
 France and Spain prevented them from contract- 
 ing an alliance for the invasion of England, which, 
 humanly speaking, would at that time have been suc- 
 cessful. It behoved her therefore to walk wisely and 
 warily. What did she do ? It says much for her 
 courage and patriotism, and also for her political 
 sagacity, that she at once set about the restoration 
 of her father's legislation against the illegitimate 
 usurpations of Eome. She knew she could carry her 
 people in the mass with her there. But to interfere 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 589 
 
 with the articles of their creed, or with the formal 
 drapery of rite and ceremony in which their creed 
 was shrouded and symbolised, was another matter. 
 She would prune public worship of unwholesome 
 and superstitious excrescences, but was otherwise, as 
 we have seen, ' resolved to restore religion precisely 
 as it had been left by her father.' And for this 
 resolution she had good reason. Koughly speaking, 
 the religious elements of the nation at that time 
 may be described as follows. At the antipodes were 
 a small minority of extreme Papists manipulated by 
 the Jesuits and the Vatican,^ and at the other ex- 
 treme a fanatical band of Puritans — revolutionists in 
 religion and republicans in politics — whose descend- 
 ants realised their ideal of both under the Common- 
 wealth. Between these two extremes were the great 
 body of the nation, who would have quietly acquiesced 
 in the English Liturgy of Edward VI. with the 
 ceremonial of Edward's second year — the old cere- 
 monial, that is, as fixed in Henry's and Edward's 
 reign. De Eeria says that ' the Catholics were 
 [March, 1559] two-thirds of the realm,' and another 
 contemporary writer, quoted by Eroude, says that they 
 * were in a majority in every county in England except 
 Middlesex and Kent.' ^ At that time the Puritans^ 
 that is, the fanatical irreconcilables now represented 
 by the Church Association — were numerically insig- 
 nificant, and would probably have soon vanished 
 but for the patronage of powerful men at Court, who 
 
 ' See cliapter iii. 
 2 Froucle, vii. 20, G8. 
 
590 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 used them to enrich themselves out of the spoils of 
 the Church. The leaders of the Puritans discovered, 
 when too late, that they had foolishly played the 
 part of the horse in the fable, which invited the man 
 to help him to fight the stag, and then found that he 
 could not get rid of his rider. But my point is 
 that the Puritan party in England on Elizabeth's 
 accession, the party which made all the noise, was 
 politically a negligible quantity, apart from the 
 interested patronage bestowed on it by a few in- 
 fluential men about Court. They described them- 
 selves as a ' tiny flock ' {pusillus grex) . ' Meanwhile,' 
 says one of them, ' we, that little flock, who for 
 these last five years, by the blessing of God, have 
 been hidden among you in Germany, are thundering 
 forth in our pulpits, and especially before our Queen 
 Elizabeth, that the Eoman pontiff is truly antichrist, 
 and that traditions are for the most part blasphemies.' 
 With the sanguine temper of fanaticism, he claims 
 considerable success among the nobility and people ; 
 * but of the clergy,' he adds, * not one.' ^ 
 
 Such then was the problem which Elizabeth had 
 to solve when she came to consider the settlement of 
 the religious question on her sister's death. Her 
 own convictions and proclivities were avowedly in 
 favour of a return to the settlement of 1547-8, with 
 such modifications as the supersession of the Latin 
 Mass and Breviaries by the English Prayer Book 
 required. And policy coincided with her personal 
 inclination. The great majority of the nation 
 
 ' Zurich Lett. No. xi. Second Series. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 591 
 
 would have gradually accepted the compromise. But 
 to have suddenly changed the outv^ard aspect of 
 public worship throughout the realm would have 
 spread consternation and anger from Land's End to 
 the Tweed, and given the foreign promoters of a cru- 
 sading invasion the opportunity which they needed — 
 a widespread insurrection to welcome the invaders. 
 We know how the comparatively insignificant altera- 
 tions made in pubHc worship in the beginning of 
 Edward VI. 's reign bred a dangerous insurrection in 
 Devonshire. With that warning before her Eliza- 
 beth was far too wise to offer her people a wanton 
 provocation. Eeluctantly accepting the Prayer 
 Book of 1552, with important alterations, she insisted 
 on giving statutory authority to the ceremonial in 
 authorised use in Edward's second year; that is, 
 some months before Edward's First Prayer Book had 
 come into use, or was even a legal document. The 
 anticipated result followed. Of all the priests then 
 in England, probably 10,000, including the un- 
 beneficed, only some two hundred refused to 
 conform. The rest, with their congregations, 
 acquiesced more or less cheerfully or resignedly. It 
 is not from them that we hear loud cries and 
 lamentations, but from the ' pusillus grex,' the re- 
 turned exiles, when they found that Popery, as they 
 deemed it, was made legal and could not be upset, 
 as they admitted, except by another Act of Parlia- 
 ment. They devoted their energies therefore to the 
 task of obtaining some relaxation for themselves. 
 And they succeeded. The Advertisements, as I have 
 
592 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 shown in a previous chapter, let the Puritans off 
 with a minimum of ritual observances, while leaving 
 the authorised ceremonial untouched. 
 
 Now I put it to any unprejudiced man whether 
 these facts can be harmonised with the Lambeth 
 decisions. Is it conceivable that the ten thousand 
 clergy (in round numbers) who accepted in silence 
 the new order of things would have done so if the 
 hypothesis of the Archbishops were a fact ? If 
 incense, and reservation, and everything not prescribed 
 in black and white in the Prayer Book had been all 
 abolished in one day throughout the realm, would 
 there have been no opposition, or protest, or 
 murmur, while the 'pusillus grex,' on the other 
 hand, were making the welkin ring with their 
 dolorous wail ? The cry is w^here the shoe pinches, 
 and the presumption is that where there is no cry 
 there is no pinch. What we do observe is a general 
 disposition on the part of the vast majority to 
 acquiesce in Elizabeth's policy till the emissaries of 
 the Vatican arrived to stir up disaffection and strife, 
 culminating in the Queen's excommunication and a 
 formal schism, with its deplorable consequences, of 
 which the Armada was by no means the worst.' 
 
 • ' As well those restrained, as generally all the Papists in this king- 
 dom, not any of them did refuse to come to our Church and yield their 
 formal obedience to the laws established. And thus they all con- 
 tinued, not any of them refusing to come to our churches during the 
 first ten years of her Majesty's Government. And in the beginning 
 of the eleventh year of her reign Cornwallis, Bedingfield, and 
 Selgarde were the first recusants ; they absolutely refusing to come 
 to our Churches.' Coke's Charge at Norwich, London, 1607, fol. 12. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 593 
 
 On a fair consideration of all the circumstances, 
 then, it is indisputable that the dictates of common 
 prudence would suggest to Elizabeth, on her acces- 
 sion, the policy of so managing the religious question 
 as not to alienate the good will of the vast majority 
 of her subjects, to whom the old ceremonial was 
 familiar and dear. We must remember that the 
 innovations of our day were the customs of hers, and 
 that the unpopular innovations then would have 
 been the abolition of such usages as ecclesiastical 
 vestments, altar lights, incense, reservation of the 
 Sacrament. To order the sudden cessation of all 
 these on a given day would indeed have been a 
 portentous innovation from which even so courageous 
 a woman as Elizabeth might well have recoiled, 
 considering especially how such a revolution in that 
 department of religion which appeals to the eyes 
 and intelligence of the multitude would have played 
 into the hands of her powerful and crafty foes. It 
 is true that a religious fanatic might have been 
 prompted to run even so desperate a risk for con- 
 science' sake. But Elizabeth was no fanatic, and 
 her own sympathy, as we have seen, was in favour 
 of the old ritual and ceremonial. The inevitable 
 inference is that she would have made as little 
 
 Elizabeth affirmed the same thing in a letter to Sir F. Walsingham, 
 then her Ambassador in Paris, and also declared that the Pope 
 offered to sanction the English Prayer Book provided his supremacy 
 was allowed. No doubt some of those who conformed were crypto- 
 Papists, as Sanders affirmed. Yet matters would probably have 
 settled down peacefully but for the Puritan faction on the one hand 
 and the Jesuit conspiracies on the other. 
 
 QQ 
 
594 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 change as possible in the scenic part of pubHc 
 worship. ' All through her reign/ says our Primate, 
 of Elizabeth, ' she showed herself steadily determined 
 to have her people with her.' ^ Quite true ; but she 
 certainly would not ' have had her people with her ' 
 in the legislation with which his Grace credits her. 
 * To the law and to the testimony,' then. Let us 
 examine that legislation in the light of plain facts. 
 
 The controversy on this subject turns upon the 
 proper construction of the Ornaments Bubric and of 
 the 13th (25th in the unre vised statute) clause of 
 Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity. The former runs : — 
 
 And here is to be noted that such ornaments of the 
 Church and of the ministers thereof, at all times of their 
 ministration, shall be retained and be in use as were in 
 this Church of England by the authority of Parliament, 
 in the second year of the reign of King Edward the 
 Sixth. 
 
 The Act says : — 
 
 Provided always, and be it enacted, that such orna- 
 ments of the Church and of the ministers thereof shall 
 be retained and be in use as was [the contemporary 
 translation in Elizabeth's authorised Latin version says, 
 quemadmodum mos erat] in this Church of England by 
 authority of Parliament in the second year of the reign 
 of King Edward the VI., &c. 
 
 The Elizabethan Rubric has an important 
 difference : — 
 
 And here is to be noted that the minister at the time 
 of the Communion and at all other times in his minis- 
 
 ' The Lambeth Decision on Incense, p. 9. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 595 
 
 tration shall use such ornaments in the Church as were 
 in use by authority of Parliament in the second year of 
 the reign of King Edward the VI. according to the Act of 
 Parliament set in the beginning of this book. 
 
 The question in debate is whether ' by auth ority 
 of Parliament ' covers the ceremonial usage of 
 Edward's second regnal year, or only the usage 
 prescribed by the Prayer Book of 1549, which did 
 not come into legal use till the sixth month of 
 Edward's third year. 
 
 Now I submit that whatever ambiguity con- 
 troversialists may find in the Ornaments clause of 
 the Act of 1559, there is no manner of ambiguity 
 in Elizabeth's Kubric. It prescribes, in language 
 which, admits of only one meaning, the use, in all 
 ministrations, of such ornaments, appropriate to 
 each, 'as were in use by authority of Parliament 
 in the second year of King Edward the VI.' The 
 crucial words here are * as were in use.' They 
 govern the date. It is the usage of Edward's 
 second year that is enjoined, not the usage ordered 
 by a book, which, whenever passed, was not to 
 come into use till the sixth month of Edward's 
 third year. The use of Edward's second year 
 cannot possibly mean the use of his third year. 
 Law and grammar alike forbid it, and the authorities 
 are all against it. Those who urge the meaning 
 which I am combating rely on our present Rubric, and 
 prudently avoid the Elizabethan Eubric. But the 
 two Rubrics and the Ornaments clause in the Act of 
 1559 ' all obviously mean the same thing,' namely, 
 
 Q Q 2 
 
596 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 that all the ornaments used in Edward's second 
 year ' may still be used.' That was the decision of 
 the Ju.dicial Committee of the Privy Council in 
 1857 ; and it is the decision of common sense as 
 well as of law and grammar. Cosin says : — 
 
 Among other ornaments of the Church also then in use 
 in the second year of Edward VI. there were two lights 
 appointed by his Injunctions (which Parliament had au- 
 thorised him to make. . . . These lights were by virtue 
 of this present [i.e. 1559] Eubric, referring to what was in 
 use in the second year of Edward VI.) afterwards con- 
 tinued in all the Queen's chapels during her whole reign ; 
 and so are they in the King's, and in many cathedral 
 churches, besides the chapels of divers noblemen, bishops, 
 and colleges, to this day.^ 
 
 In the revision of 1662 Cosin took the leading 
 part, and made or suggested most of the alterations 
 then made, and we may safely assume therefore 
 that the present form of the Eubric was not intended 
 to modify in any way the reference to the usage of 
 Edward's second year in the Eubric of 1559. 
 
 But it is said that the Eubric of 1559 had no 
 Parliamentary authority. I bow with all deference 
 to the learned men who hold that view, but I ask 
 for proof. I have never seen any evidence to show 
 that the Ornaments Eubric was added after the Act 
 of Uniformity was passed. Certainly no printed copy 
 has ever been seen without it. Only two copies of 
 the first edition are known to exist, and both possess 
 the Ornaments Eubric. But even if the Ornaments 
 
 ' Works, \.U0. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 597 
 
 Kubric was not in the Book when the Act of 
 Uniformity was passed, that would not invalidate 
 its authority, for it would come under the protection 
 of the clause which empowered the Queen, 'with 
 the advice of her Commissioners,' * or of the Metro- 
 politan of the Kealm,' to ' ordain and publish such 
 farther ceremonies or rites as may be most for the 
 advancement of God's Glory, the edifying of His 
 Church, and the due reverence of Christ's holy 
 mysteries and Sacraments.' That she had the 
 assent of the Metropolitan is certain, for Parker 
 quotes the Ornaments Kubric as a legal and authori- 
 tative regulation. And, as a matter of fact, she made 
 several alterations and additions in the Prayer Book 
 after the Parliamentary sanction of it. The ob- 
 jection to the Bubric of 1559 therefore on the 
 ground of deficient authority must be dismissed as 
 untenable. It claims in so many words to rest on 
 * the Act of Parliament set in the beginning of this 
 Book ' ; and the claim was never disputed. I might 
 therefore close my case here, for Elizabeth's Bubric 
 is an authoritative explanation of the Act of 
 Uniformity and establishes the legality of the 
 ceremonial usages of Edward's second year, which 
 unquestionably embraced reservation and the litur- 
 gical use of incense. But it is better to follow the 
 argument on the other side, and show that it fails 
 completely in every one of its own chosen positions. 
 The following facts are undisputed : — (1) Edward's 
 second year ended on January 27, 1548-9. (2) The 
 Act of Uniformity was read a third time in the 
 
598 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Lords on January 15, and came back to the Lords 
 from the Commons on January 22, i.e. five days 
 before the end of Edward's second year. (3) The 
 Session came to an end on March 14 following, and 
 Parliament was prorogued by the King in person. 
 (4) Then follows in the Journals of the House 
 of Lords a list of sixty Bills passed during the 
 Session, and the hst is headed by the Act of 
 Uniformity. The presumption is that all those 
 Bills received the Eoyal Assent at the same time. 
 But Mr. Dibdin (followed by the Lambeth decision) 
 rejects this presumption for the following reasons : 
 (1) Till the year 1792 the operation of Acts of 
 Parliament was dated from the first day of the 
 Session in which they were passed. This rule, 
 however, applied only to ' every act of Parliament 
 in which the commencement thereof is not directed 
 to be from a specific time.' ^ Is the Act of Unifor- 
 mity one of the exceptions ? No, says Mr. Dibdin,^ 
 for no date is fixed for the commencement of its 
 operation. (2) Moreover, the usus loquendi at that 
 time proves that Acts were said to be 'made by 
 authority of Parliament ' after, and sometimes even 
 before, passing the Parliamentary stage, but before 
 receiving the Royal Assent. And Mr. Dibdin, after 
 diligent research, is able to produce, as he thinks, 
 two instances. The first is Edward's second Act of 
 
 * Statutes Revised, vol. iii. p. 338. 
 
 2 The Archbishops have based their decisions on Mr. Dibdin's 
 arguments. In dealing with Mr. Dibdin, therefore, I am dealing with 
 the very foundation of the Lambeth decisions. If I destroy that 
 foundation, those decisions will be proved to have no legal basis. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 599 
 
 Uniformity, which speaks of Edward's first Act as 
 having been ' made in the second year ' of the King. 
 (Mr. Dibdin follows herein the Judicial Committee 
 of the Privy Council in Wester ton v. Liddell.) His 
 second case is an Act passed in 1554 for the repeal 
 of a statute * uniting the parishes of Onger and 
 Grenestede in the Countie of Essex.' In this Act 
 of Mary, says Mr. Dibdin, ' the Legislature referred 
 to ' the statute which it was repealing as * having 
 been made by authority of Parliament in the second 
 year of Edward VL,' although, in matter of fact, 
 that Act did not pass its final stage till the second 
 day of Edward's third year. (3) Moreover, the 
 Judicial Committee, in Westerton v. Liddell, said 
 that there was an ' urgent ' reason why Edward's first 
 Act of Uniformity should be passed before the end 
 of the Session. ' The Lords of the Privy Council,' 
 says Mr. Dibdin, ' were absolutely accurate.' So he 
 affirms that the Act of Uniformity must therefore 
 have received the Koyal Assent by Commission in 
 the second year of Edward. (4) But, it is objected, 
 there was a rule that the Eoyal Assent, ipso facto, 
 put an end to the Session of Parliament in which it 
 was given. And we know that 2 & 3 Edward VL 
 did not end till March 14 in his third year. There 
 was no such rule, says Mr. Dibdin, confidently : ' it 
 was an old superstition.' And he gives reasons 
 which entitle him, he thinks, to say somewhat airily, 
 ' So that that superstition is disposed of.' 
 
 This is, I think, an accurate summary of Mr. 
 Dibdin's points against those who argue that 
 
600 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity and Ornaments Eubric 
 legalise the ceremonial usage of Edward's second 
 year, and not merely the ornaments and ceremonies 
 prescribed by the Prayer Book of 1549. I traverse 
 them all, and I proceed to give my reasons, point by 
 point. 
 
 1. Mr. Dibdin gives two reasons for his decided 
 opinion that no date is given for the commencement 
 of Edward's first Act of Uniformity. 
 
 The point here is whether Edward's first Act 
 of Uniformity belongs to the category of Acts of 
 Parliament ' in which the commencement thereof ' is 
 to be ' from a specific time.' Prima facie it does, 
 and that has been the general opinion hitherto. 
 Mr. Dibdin — followed by the Archbishops — thinks 
 that it does not ; and he gives his reasons. But 
 before I examine them, let us look at the language 
 of the Act. It ordains that all persons concerned 
 ' shall from and after the Feast of Pentecost next 
 coming be bounden to say and use the Matins and 
 Evensong, celebration of the Lord's Supper, com- 
 monly called the Mass, and administration of each 
 of the Sacraments, and all their common and open 
 prayer,' ' in such order and form as is mentioned in 
 this book, and none other or otherwise.' It goes on 
 to prescribe penalties for all violations of this order, 
 'after the said Feast of Pentecost next coming.' 
 In the next section it prescribes penalties against 
 all who, 'after the said Feast of Pentecost next 
 coming,' shall say or do, or incite others to say or 
 do, 'anything in the derogation, depraving, or 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 601 
 
 despising of the same book or anything therein 
 contained.' Another section orders that copies of 
 the book shall be obtained ' at the cost and charges 
 of the parishioners of every parish and Cathedral 
 church ' before the ' Feast of Pentecost next follow- 
 ing or before.' 
 
 An advocate must indeed be in extremis in 
 materials for his case who, in the face of this plain 
 language, denies that the Uniformity Act of 1549 
 specifies a given date ' for the commencement 
 thereof.' But that is what Mr. Dibdin does. Let 
 us look at his reasons, which are two. 
 
 Here is the first : * The Prayer Book was to be 
 used on Whitsunday, or, if it could be procured 
 earlier, within three weeks of its being procured.' 
 Therefore, argues Mr. Dibdin, if the Act specifies 
 any date at all, it ' gives any number of dates .... 
 according to what happened to occur in a particular 
 parish,' which would, in his opinion, be an absurdity. 
 That is not obvious. The London Government Act, 
 for example, ordains [' Section 3 (1) '] that * the first 
 elections of all borough Councillors under this Act ' 
 shall ' be held on the first day of November, one 
 thousand nine hundred, or on such later day as may 
 be practicable throughout, as may be fixed by the 
 Lord President of the Council, who shall also fix a 
 corresponding date for the first election of Mayors 
 and Aldermen.' Even Mr. Dibdin would not argue 
 from this that there is no date specified for the com- 
 mencement of the London Government Act. But 
 his argument against ' a specific time ' for the coming 
 
602 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 into force of the Act of Uniformity of 1549 is even 
 less tenable. There is nothing in it. An Act of Par- 
 liament comes legally into force on the date after 
 which it is penal to transgress it. Any violation of 
 the London Government Act becomes penal after 
 either of the alternative dates provided for by the 
 Act itself. Transgression of Edward's first Act of 
 Uniformity became penal on and after Pentecost in 
 his third regnal year. The whole tenour of the Act 
 proves this. Parliament prays, in the preamble of 
 the Act, that all the clergy within his Majesty's 
 dominions * shall from and after the Feast of Pente- 
 cost next coming be bounden to say and use the 
 Matins, Evensong, celebration of the Lord's Supper, 
 commonly called the Mass, and administration of 
 each of the Sacraments, and all their common and 
 open prayer, in such order and form as is sanctioned 
 in the said book, and none other or otherwise.' And 
 the Act proceeds to grant the prayer by the sanction 
 of penalties for transgression after a specific date. 
 
 But there is no penalty affixed to non-user of the 
 Act before ' the Feast of Pentecost next coming,' 
 although the use of the book is ordered in parishes 
 where copies can be obtained previously to that date. 
 I submit, therefore, that the legal operation of the 
 Act is undoubtedly 'directed to be from a specific 
 time,' namely, Whitsunday in Edward's third year. 
 It may therefore be regarded as certain that Edward's 
 first Act of Uniformity is dated from the year in 
 which it received the Eoyal Assent, not from the 
 beginning of the Parliamentary Session in which it 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 603 
 
 was passed. It came into legal force undoubtedly on 
 Whitsunday in Edward's third year (June 9, 1549).* 
 But Mr. Dibdin believes that he has here a 
 second string to his bow in the following petition 
 from Parliament to the King contained in the 
 preamble of the Act : — 
 
 That all and singular person and persons that have 
 offended concerning the premises, other than such person 
 and persons as now be and remain in ward in the Tower of 
 London, or in the Fleet, may be pardoned thereof. 
 
 ' Do my learned friends suggest/ asks Mr. Dibdin, 
 ' that the pardon waited till Whitsunday ; and if they 
 do, why ? Of course it came into operation when 
 the Act was passed.' ^ I do not know what Mr. 
 Dibdin's learned friends would answer, but I accept 
 his conclusion that the pardon synchronised with the 
 date of the Kpyal Assent to the Act. But when was 
 that? There is a singular hiatus in Mr. Dibdin's 
 argument. Parliament prays that a general pardon 
 * may be ordained and enacted by his Majesty, with 
 the assent of the Lords and Commons.' How did 
 
 ' * At Easter some began to officiate by it [Edward's First Prayer 
 Book] ; followed by others as soon as books could be provided. But 
 on Whitsunday, being the day appointed by Act of Parliament, it 
 was solemnly executed in the Cathedral Church of St. Paul, by the 
 command of Dr. May [Dean], for an example unto all the rest of the 
 churches in London, and consequently of aU the kingdom.' — Heylin's 
 Hist, of the Ref. vol. i. p. 154. The meaning of the Act is perfectly 
 plain. The use of the Book was permissible before Whitsunday. It 
 was compulsory from that day in all public places of worship. Mr. 
 Dibdin has produced no authority in support of his view, for there 
 is none to produce. 
 
 '^ The Case against Incense, pp. 13, 14. 
 
604 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 it happen to escape Mr. Dibdin's penetration that 
 there is no enactment of the kind in the Act of Uni- 
 formity — that is, when the context to his quotation 
 is supphed, and the original punctuation is restored ? 
 The prisoners were released, * of course,' he says, 
 ' when the Act was passed.' I agree ; but what Act ? 
 The prisoners flit across the stage in the preamble 
 of the Act of Uniformity, and then they pass away, 
 and that Act refers to them no more. The prayer of 
 Parliament is not answered in the Act, and the 
 prison doors remained closed for any remedy provided 
 thereby. But if Mr. Dibdin had pursued his re- 
 searches he would have found an answer to the 
 prayer of Parliament, and, at the same time, a 
 decisive confutation of his whole argument. The 
 prisoners were released, but not formally, though 
 undoubtedly instrument ally, by the Act of Uni- 
 formity. If Mr. Dibdin will examine the Journals 
 of the House of Lords (pp. 850-352), he will find on 
 March 8, 1549, the first reading ; on March 9, 
 the second reading ; and on March 13, the third 
 reading of a Bill, which is thus described : ' Eodem 
 die lecta est Billa of the King's Majesty's general 
 pardon, que commimi omnium procerum assensu 
 conclusa est.' And if he will look at p. 10 of the 
 House of Commons Journals, under date of March 4, 
 he will find ' L. [lecta] 3. The King's general 
 pardon. Jud'm.' The Bill passed its three readings 
 in the Commons on the 14th, and received theEoyal 
 Assent the same day, in a batch of sixty Acts, of 
 which the Act of Uniformity was one. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 605 
 
 The list is entitled : ' Acts passed in the Session 
 of Parliament, holden at Westminster, the 24th day 
 of November, anno Begis Edwardi Sexti secuiido, 
 and continued until 14th day of March, a^ino dicti 
 Begis Edwardi Sexti tertio.' This plainly implies 
 that all the sixty Bills received the Eoyal Assent at 
 the same time. The General Pardons Bill v^as 
 passed in hot haste. It managed to scrape through 
 just in time for the Eoyal Assent. Why this haste ? 
 I suggest the follov^ing explanation : The prayer of 
 the Lords and Commons had been overlooked till 
 the list of Bills waiting for the Eoyal Assent were 
 being sorted a fortnight before the end of the Session. 
 On coming to the Bill of Uniformity it was dis- 
 covered that no provision had been made for a General 
 Pardon ; so a Bill was hurriedly prepared and passed 
 in the nick of time. Mr. Dibdin is therefore right 
 in thinking that ' of course ' the General Pardon 
 * came into operation when the Act was passed ' ; 
 but that was on March 14, in Edward's third year. 
 The General Pardon Act was virtually, if not in fact, 
 a schedule of the Act of Uniformity, and received 
 the Eoyal Assent on the same day.^ Mr. Dibdin 
 thinks that it was ' urgent ' to pardon the prisoners 
 before the end of the Session, and that, consequently, 
 the Eoyal Assent was given to the Uniformity Act 
 by Commission before the end of Edward's second 
 
 ' ' Parliament [2 & 3 Edward VI.] ended with a general pardon, 
 in which were excepted the prisoners in the Tower and those who 
 had absented themselves from the kingdom.' — Eapin's Hist, of 
 England, ii. 154, folio ed. of 1784. 
 
606 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 year. Only four days, or five at the most, were left 
 for the purpose, for the Bill did not return from the 
 Commons till January 22, and the second year 
 ended on the 27th. On the other hand, Eoyal Assent 
 by Commission was a ceremony which could not be 
 despatched in a hurry. It required the King's 
 * Letters Patent under his Great Seal, and signed 
 with his hand, and declared and notified in his 
 absence to the Lords spiritual and temporal, and to 
 the Commons, assembled together in the High 
 House.' ^ Why should there be such desperate hurry 
 to let the prisoners out before the end of the King's 
 second year ? We know that there was no such 
 hurry, for the prisoners were not released till 
 March'14. And there was absolutely nothing else to 
 cause 'urgency,' for the Prayer Book was not to 
 come into general use till Whitsunday — that is, three 
 months afterwards. But what is quite inconceiv- 
 able is that the Act of Uniformity should have been 
 passed with abnormal haste for no reason what- 
 ever, and the liberation of the prisoners — the only 
 reason for expedition — postponed for more than two 
 months.^ The theory is too preposterous to need 
 
 » 33 Henry VIII. c. 21. 
 
 '^ ' The only rag of evidence,' to quote his own words, which 
 Mr. Dibdin could offer in support of his argument of ' urgency ' for 
 the Koyal Assent in Edward's second year is the fact that ' against 
 the third reading of the first Act of Uniformity are the letters " exped.," 
 which, judging from other entries,' he adds, ' I have no doubt meant 
 "expedited "... the matter was urgent, and it is probable that the 
 Assent was given immediately after the third reading, and it may be 
 that these letters " exped." point to something of the kind.' I have 
 examined files of Bills * as they were sent up to the House of Lords 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 607 
 
 refutation once the facts are known. It sinks 
 beneath the weight of its own ineptitude. 
 
 2. We now come to the usus loquendi argument, 
 which is one of the strongholds of the case against 
 the hturgical use of incense. Edward's Second Act 
 of Uniformity refers to the first Act of Uniformity 
 as ' the Act of Parhament made in the second year 
 of the King's Majesty's reign.' That proves, in the 
 opinion of Mr. Dibdin and his cHents — and they have 
 the Judicial Committee in Westerton v. Liddell at 
 their back — that Edward's first Act of Uniformity 
 received the Koyal Assent in Edward's second regnal 
 year. I respectfully submit, the Judicial Committee 
 notwithstanding, that it proves nothing of the kind. 
 The Court on that occasion was undoubtedly a strong 
 one, and its judgment is far superior in point of 
 knowledge to any decision subsequently delivered by 
 the same tribunal. Yet even it made some egregious 
 blunders : for example, that the Prayer of Consecra- 
 tion was left out in the Eucharistic Office of 
 
 from the House of Commons.' Some are marked 'exped.' and 
 sometimes ' expedit. ' ; and some are marked ' rejected ' or ' refused.' 
 The word clearly means ' passed,' not ' expedited,' and has nothing to 
 do with ' urgency.' If Mr. Dibdin had continued his researches 
 he would have found the word, which gave him some vague hope of 
 support, put against Bills which could not conceivably require 
 urgency. Some of them are quite trivial, and one of them would have 
 rejoiced Father Black's heart if he had lived in those days. It is a 
 Bill against the marriage of divorced persons. Does Mr. Dibdin 
 think there was such an epidemic of such persons — it was in the 
 reign of James I. — that urgency was required for a Bill to stop them ? 
 On his view the Koyal Assent by Commission must have been given 
 several times in the same Session. There are sometimes as many 
 as a dozen Bills marked ' exped.' in the same Session. 
 
608 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Edward's Second Prayer Book. Authority is very 
 well in its place ; but this matter belongs mainly to 
 the sphere of historical criticism — a sphere in which 
 the Judicial Committee has never been at home, 
 especially when the criticism has to do with eccle- 
 siastical history or ecclesiastical law. The fact is 
 that statutes are said, in Parliamentary parlance, 
 to be ' made ' before they receive the Eoyal Assent* 
 and * passed ' after the Eoyal Assent. I do not say 
 that there is no exception, for ' made ' is used very 
 loosely. But I have examined the Lords' Journals 
 from Henry VIII. to the end of James L, and I do 
 not remember any exception. Sometimes, but not 
 as an invariable rule, a list is given, after the Eoyal 
 Assent at the end of the Session, of all the Acts 
 during that Session. There is such a list, I think, at 
 the end of every Session in the reign of Edward VI. 
 The list is headed in every case but one, ' Acts 
 passed in the Parliament holden,' &c. In addition 
 to this heading there is in every case, without 
 exception, this marginal note in the left top corner 
 of the list : ' Calendar of Acts passed this Session.' 
 In 2 & 3 Edward VI. it is ^this Sessions.' In 7 
 Edward VI. the heading is ' Acts made,' &c. ; but the 
 marginal note has ' passed.' 
 
 I do not wish to attach much importance to this 
 distinction,. for in common speech we speak of a Bill 
 * passing ' its first, second, or third reading, and even 
 of having * passed ' through Parliament prior to the 
 Eoyal Assent. But I find that in the authorised 
 edition of the Statutes ' passed ' is in general applied 
 
THE Lx\MBETH DECISIONS 609 
 
 to Bills that have become Acts in virtue of the 
 Koyal Assent, while ' made ' is used so loosely 
 that no significance can be attached to it. Take, 
 by V7ay of example, Mr. Dibdin's extract from King 
 Edward's journal under the heading of the second 
 year, near its close : — 
 
 A Parliament was called when the uniform order of 
 prayer was institute, before made by a number of bishops 
 and learned men gathered together in Windsor. 
 
 * No doubt that is the first Prayer Book,' says Mr. 
 Dibdin ; and of course there is no doubt. And Mr. 
 Dibdin's inference is : ' There, again, it seems to me 
 that that is valuable evidence that at any rate it was 
 considered to be in the second year.' What was 
 considered ? Undoubtedly the King meant that the 
 Prayer Book passed the Houses of Parliament in the 
 second year, which nobody questions. The sentence 
 quoted by Mr. Dibdin is followed immediately by the 
 entry : ' There was granted a subsidy, and there was 
 a notable disputation of the Sacrament in the 
 Parliament-house.'^ I agree that the extract ' is 
 valuable evidence,' but against Mr. Dibdin and his 
 clients. For it proves two things : first, the loose use 
 of the participle * made.' Because the Second Act 
 of Uniformity says that the first Act was ' made ' in 
 Edward's second year, Mr. Dibdin argues that it 
 received the Royal Assent in that year. But here 
 the King says that the Prayer Book was ' made by a 
 number of bishops and learned men.' The word 
 
 ' Burnet, v. 7 (Pocock's edition^ 
 
 E R 
 
610 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 clearly means in both cases ' drawn up,' ' composed,' 
 * compiled.' As the King did not wish to repeat 
 the word ' made ' in the same sentence, he describes 
 the action of Parliament by the word * institute ' — a 
 perfectly correct rendering of ' conclusa est,' the 
 phrase used in the Lords' Journals for the third, 
 reading of a Bill. 
 
 But, in the next place, it is hardly credible 
 that if — as Mr. Dibdin supposes — the King had just 
 given his Eoyal Assent to the Act by the unusual, 
 and in his case unique, pomp and ceremony of a 
 Commission authorised by Letters Patent under the 
 Great Seal, and in presence of the two Houses of 
 Parliament, he would have omitted all mention of 
 so striking a fact from his journal. The passage 
 must have been written within four days of the close 
 of the second year. He could find time to note the 
 theological debate on the Uniformity Act, and the 
 granting of a subsidy, and the condemnation and 
 execution of Lord Sudely, and of Sir Thomas 
 Sharington ' for making false coin, which he himself 
 confessed,' and of * divers put in the Tower ' — all in 
 the last week of his second year ; but not a word 
 about the most remarkable event of that week, or 
 even of that year, if such an event really took place. 
 The thing is incredible. 
 
 And now I come to 1 Mary, 3, cc. 9, 10, the ' Act 
 for the Eepeal of a Statute made for the uniting of 
 the parish churches of Onger and Grenestede in the 
 Countie of Essex.' ^ Mr. Dibdin's argument is : 
 
 ' statutes of the Realm, p. 234. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 611 
 
 Mary's Statute refers to the Act which it repeals as 
 * made by authority of Padiament • in the second 
 year ' of Edward VI. But we know that the Act in 
 question passed its third reading in the Lords on 
 January 29, that is, on the second day of the third 
 year. This shows that the phrase ' by authority of 
 ParHament,' in the Ornaments Eubric, and in the Act 
 of Uniformity of 1559, may mean the third year, 
 although it actually says the second year, just as 
 1 Mary, 3, cc. 9, 10, means the third year although 
 it says the second. 
 
 That is the argument. Now I might say that, 
 since printers are known to be fallible, and January 
 27 and January 29 were in such close chronological 
 contiguity, the printer, or even draughtsman, might 
 have made a slip between the second and third years 
 of Edward. But I have a better answer than that. 
 The fact is, Mr. Dibdin has made the same mistake 
 about Mary's Act which he made about the petition 
 for a General Pardon in Edward's Act. He is quite 
 inaccurate in saying that ' the Legislature ' which 
 passed Mary's Act referred to Edward's Act 'as 
 having been made by authority of Parliament in the 
 second year of Edward VI.' in spite of its having 
 passed its third reading on the second day of the 
 King's third year. The phrase on which Mr. 
 Dibdin relies, and which he considers an unimpeach- 
 able piece of evidence on his side, was not used by 
 the Legislature, and does not belong to the enacting 
 part of the Statute. The Act is prefaced by the 
 following petition * — 
 
 RB 2 
 
612 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Lamentably complaining shewen unto yo^': Highness 
 yo"^. obedient & faithful Subjects thinhabitauntes & 
 Parishioners of the Townes & Villages of Chipping Onger 
 otherwise called Castell Onger & Grenestede within yo'*. 
 Graces Countye of Essexe ; That where by the Sinister 
 Labour & Procurement of one Willyam Moys Esquyer, 
 yo'". Graces late Servant deceased, sometime Patrone of 
 the Parishe Churche of Onger aforesayd, & one of the 
 Burgesses of the Parliament holden at Westminster in 
 the second year of the late King of worthye memorye, 
 Edward the Sixth your Highnes Brother, inordinately 
 seeking his private lucre and profitt, an Acte was made & 
 ordeined, by authoritee of P'liament in the same second 
 year for a Consolidation & Union to be hadd and made 
 of the Parish Churches. 
 
 The poor people go on to describe the hardship 
 which the union of the two parishes entailed upon 
 them, hindering — among other things — their going 
 to church in rainy weather on account of a swollen 
 brook that separated them from the church of the 
 parish to which they had been, without their consent, 
 united * by the sinister labour and procurement ' of 
 the patron of the living, their Parliamentary repre- 
 sentative. They beg, therefore, that the Act which 
 inflicted these evils upon them may be repealed. 
 The document is an illiterate petition to the Queen, 
 probably drawn up by the village schoolmaster or 
 scribe, who might be excused for being a little astray 
 in Parliamentary terminology and dates. The 
 petition is prefixed to the repealing Act as its 
 explanation and justification. And this, forsooth, 
 is the Act of Parliament which entitles Mr. Dibdin 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 613 
 
 to say that the Legislature of that period was 
 accustomed to put down to the credit of one year 
 Acts of ParHament which were passed in another ! 
 The argument evidently made a great impression on 
 the Primates, and had doubtless much influence on 
 their decision. But it rests on a blunder, and is 
 absolutely worthless. 
 
 So much for the usics loquendi argument. 
 
 3. I have already so completely disposed of this 
 argument — namely, the * urgency ' of passing the 
 Uniformity Act of 1549 in Edward's second year — 
 that I need not say anything more about it. The 
 only rag of a reason for the plea of urgency is the 
 release of prisoners between January 22 and 27, 
 who, in matter of fact, were not released till the 
 middle of the following March. I shall therefore 
 pass on to the last legal argument relied on by 
 Mr. Dibdin. 
 
 4. He dismisses as ' an old superstition ' ^ the 
 notion that the Royal Assent terminated the Session 
 of Parliament in which it was given. Here again I 
 join issue. A great authority says : * The idea that 
 a Session was concluded by the Royal Assent being 
 signified to a Bill ceased to exist more than two 
 centuries ago.' ^ That is, according to the eminent 
 author's wont, somewhat of an understatement of 
 the fact. Anyhow, Mr. Dibdin's ' old superstition ' 
 was a living constitutional doctrine down to ' more 
 
 ' The Case against Inceyise, p. 11. 
 
 2 Parliamentary Practice, p. 481, by Sir T. Erskine May (Lord 
 Farnborough). 
 
614 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 than two centuries ago,' and that is enough for my 
 purpose. Let us begin, then, by examining the 
 facts in the light of Mr. Dibdin's examples. His 
 first statement is : — 
 
 In the first place, it is not the fact that the King 
 giving his consent to a Bill during the Session did 
 terminate the Session, or was supposed to do so. It is 
 quite true there was an idea of that kind, but, oddly 
 enough, the very question came before the House of 
 Commons in 1554, which was not very long after this 
 date — within five years. And this is the entry in the 
 House of Commons: *Mr. Treasurer declared that the 
 King and Queen will give [will be to-morrow in the 
 Parliament House to give]^ their assent to that Bill. 
 Upon a question asked in the House if upon the Eoyal 
 Assent the Parliament may proceed without any proroga- 
 tion, it is agreed by votes [voices] that it may.' So that 
 that superstition is disposed of. 
 
 We shall see. The quotation is not quite 
 accurate, and I have put the original within brackets 
 when it differs from Mr. Dibdin's version. The 
 question is not disposed of as easily as Mr. Dibdin 
 fancies. The facts show that what he calls * an old 
 superstition ' was at that time the received constitu- 
 tional doctrine. Parliament could not have proceeded 
 to business after the Eoyal Assent without passing 
 a Kesolution to that effect. The question did not 
 arise on the passing of Edward's first Uniformity 
 Act for the simple reason that the Eoyal Assent was 
 
 * Commons Journals, Nov. 21, 1554, p. 38. This Bill did 
 require urgency. It was for the purpose of legalising the position of 
 Cardinal Pole. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 615 
 
 not given till the end of the Session. Either House 
 of Parliament may, of course, suspend or alter its 
 own rules at its discretion. Besides, the Journah 
 of both Houses are so meagre and incomplete that 
 when the Eoyal Assent was given on the morrow 
 special provision may have been made for the con- 
 tinuation of the Session, though we have no record 
 of it. In any case, the incident makes against 
 Mr. Dibdin rather than for him,, as will appear 
 presently. 
 
 Mr. Dibdin's next argument is the Eoyal Assent 
 given by Commission to the Bills for the attainder 
 of Catherine Howard and others. Yes, but Mr. 
 Dibdin forgot some important facts. A special Act 
 of Parliament was necessary (83 Henry VIII. c. 21) 
 to effect the King's purpose. The Act says : — 
 
 * Be it enacted by the authority of this present Parlia- 
 ment, that the King's Eoyal Assent by his Letters Patent 
 under his Great Seal, and signed with his hand, and 
 declared and notified in his absence to the Lords Spiritual 
 and Temporal, and to the Commons, assembled in the 
 High House, is and ever was of as good strength and 
 force as though the King's person had been then 
 personally present, and had assented openly and publicly 
 to the same.' And this, * any custom or use to the con- 
 trary notwithstanding.' 
 
 The concluding words, and the whole statute, 
 show that this was an innovation on an established 
 custom, which could not have been managed without 
 special legislation. A special Act of Parliament 
 was not needed to remove ' an old superstition ' out 
 
616 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of the way, and Henry VIII. was not the man to 
 have recourse to exceptional legislation without dire 
 necessity. 
 
 ' But,' proceeds Mr. Dibdin, ' so far from that 
 [Koyal Assent] putting an end to the Session, that 
 was done on the Saturday, and the Session went on 
 again on Tuesday.' A special Act of Parliament 
 may, of course, do anything. Moreover, Mr. Dibdin's 
 statement of the case is not strictly accurate. After 
 the Eoyal Assent was given the Lord Chancellor 
 (February 11, 1541) prorogued the House till the 
 following Tuesday (February 13). But although it 
 is recorded that the House met on that Tuesday? 
 there is no record of what took place, and there is a 
 total blank till the following Tuesday (February 20).^ 
 Evidently there was a hitch which prevented busi- 
 ness till the impasse was removed. It seems to me 
 probable that a difficulty had arisen owing to the 
 Royal Assent having been given, without provision 
 being distinctly made for the progress of business 
 notwithstanding ; and it required a week to get the 
 difficulty out of the way. 
 
 Now, does Mr. Dibdin mean seriously to suggest 
 that between January 22 and 27, 1549, Edward VI. 
 went through all the formalities which Henry VIII. 
 found necessary before he could validly give his 
 Koyal Assent by Commission, without any trace 
 being left of the fact in the King's Journal or else- 
 where ? Impossible. And if Mr. Dibdin's engage- 
 ments had permitted him to continue his researches 
 
 ' Lords Journals^ p. 176. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 617 
 
 in the intricacies of constitutional law he would 
 have found ample evidence of the untenableness of 
 his position. I will now supply him with a few" 
 instances. 
 
 After the Eoyal Assent was given to 1 Car. I. c. 7, 
 we read as follows : — 
 
 This Session of Parliament (by reason of the increase 
 of sickness and other inconveniences of the season, re- 
 quiring a speedy adjournment) nevertheless shall not 
 determine by his Majesty's Eoyal Assent to this and some 
 other Acts.^ 
 
 Here we have the Parliamentary doctrine, which 
 Mr. Dibdin stigmatises as ' an old superstition,' so 
 firmly established as late as the reign of Charles I., 
 that, on the Royal Assent being given, the Session 
 came to an end automatically unless special provision 
 were made to prevent it. 
 
 At the opening of the first Parliament after the 
 Restoration an Act was passed to undo the Parlia- 
 mentary irregularities of the Commonwealth. The 
 Royal Assent was necessary at once, and it was given 
 with the following proviso : — 
 
 Provided always, and it is hereby enacted, that his 
 Majesty's Royal Assent to this Bill shall not determine 
 this present Session of Parliament.^ 
 
 Again, if Mr. Dibdin will look at 22 & 28 
 Car. 11. c. 1, he will find that the Royal Assent was 
 given in the beginning of the Session to * an Act to 
 
 ' Statutes at Large, iii. 120. 
 
 2 12 Car. II. e. 1 {Statutes at Large, iii. 143). 
 
618 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 prevent malicious maiming and wounding ; ' and to 
 prevent the Session from being closed thereby there 
 follows the proviso : — 
 
 Provided always, and it is hereby declared and enacted, 
 that his Majesty's Eoyal Assent to this Bill shall not 
 determine this Session of Parliament.^ 
 
 It is not necessary to pursue the subject farther. 
 1 have thus proved, beyond the reach of doubt, 
 that the ' old superstition,' which Mr. Dibdin waved 
 aside with such magisterial contempt, was in fact an 
 invariable rule of Parliament down at least to 1671. 
 
 I have now gone through the whole of Mr. Dib- 
 din's legal arguments in support of the view that 
 the first Uniformity Act of Edward VI., sanctioning 
 the First Prayer Book, received the Eoyal Assent in 
 Edward's second regnal year ; and I claim, with all 
 humility and modesty, but with perfect confidence, 
 to have completely disposed of them. I pay my 
 homage to Mr. Dibdin's diligence, ability, and acute- 
 ness, and I venture to suggest that where he has 
 failed no one else is likely to succeed. 
 
 Equally untenable, though equally successful at 
 the moment, was Mr. Dibdin's appeal to the pro- 
 visions of 3 & 4 Edward VI. c. 10, which ordered 
 the confiscation and destruction of all the old Service 
 Books. *I say,' argued Mr. Dibdin, 'that that is 
 exceedingly important and exceedingly strong.' And 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury ejaculated, ' Yes.' 
 Now I venture to say, with all submission and 
 
 ' Statutes at Large, iii. 327. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 619 
 
 respect, that it has legally no importance at all. We 
 have, in this matter, no more to do with 3 & 4 
 Edward VI. c. 10 than with the laws of the Twelve 
 Tables, and its importation into the discussion was 
 a glaring violation of the established legal canon, 
 that where the language of a statute is clear, it is 
 illegitimate to go outside its four corners for its 
 meaning. "What we have to do with are 1 Elizabeth 
 i. c. 2, and 14 Charles II. i. c. 4 (authorising the 
 Ornaments Kubric), and no other statute or docu- 
 ment .whatever. The Statute of Elizabeth and the 
 statutory rubric of 1662 refer us to the second year 
 of Edward's reign, not to the third and fourth. The 
 destruction of all the old Service Books and books 
 of devotion, some of them, in print, binding, and 
 illumination, beautiful examples of art, was an out- 
 break of ruthless and fanatical barbarism. Painted 
 windows (even in private houses), monumental tombs, 
 priceless carvings in wood and ivory, perished in the 
 iconoclastic maelstrom of that period. Even in the 
 year 1548, when there was no doubt at all of the use 
 by Parliamentary authority of all the ornaments and 
 corresponding ceremonies now in dispute, I find 
 authentic facts like the following : — 
 
 Dec. 1548. — Certificates of the churchwardens within 
 the City of London, and the several deaneries in Essex 
 and Hertfordshire, in the diocese of London, of the sale 
 of all the church plate, ornaments, jewels, bells, vest- 
 ments, &c., lately belonging to their respective parishes, 
 and of the appropriation of the proceeds.' 
 
 ' Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, a.d. 1559-80, p. 2. 
 
620 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 That was under the authority of Bishop Kidley, 
 and it was sheer lawless and sordid spoliation. The 
 early death of Edward VI. was a happy deliverance 
 not only for the rehgion but for the art and chivalry 
 of England. His ' dearest uncle,' whom he after- 
 wards slew, pulled down churches ad libitum for the 
 purpose of appropriating their revenues or using their 
 stones and timber in building palaces for himself. 
 Several churches went to the building of Somerset 
 House, and the sacrilegious spoiler even dared to lay 
 hands on Westminster Abbey, and was only pre- 
 vented from using it as a quarry for the erection of 
 another palace by a large bribe of Abbey land from 
 the Abbot, reinforced by the muttered indignation of 
 an indignant public. Nor did the Protector's death 
 mend matters. Other courtiers, equally greedy and 
 unscrupulous, made zeal for reHgion a cloak for the 
 plunder of ecclesiastical property, from broad acres 
 to candlesticks, chalices, and crucifixes. In the year 
 1553, St. George's Chapel, Windsor, was saved by 
 the King's death from the ruin which Somerset 
 intended for Westminster Abbey. That atrocious 
 act of vandalism ' had undoubtedly been done, and 
 all the lands thereof converted to some powerful 
 courtiers, under pretence of laying them to the crown, 
 if the King's death, which happened within four 
 months after, had not prevented the design and 
 thereby respited that ruin which was then intended.' ^ 
 The Bishopric of Durham, with its grand traditions 
 and princely revenues, was actually suppressed to en- 
 
 ' Heylin, Hist, of Bef. i. 287. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 621 
 
 rich the sanctimonious flatterers of the boy-king, its 
 aged saintly Bishop having been committed to the 
 Tower, on a frivolous pretext, because he would not 
 help the plunderers with a religious cloak for their 
 booty. But Mary ascended the throne in time to 
 prevent the sacrilege and restore the bishopric and 
 its worthy Prince-bishop. The same combination 
 of sordid greed and religious fanaticism reappeared 
 on the death of Mary, and baffled to a ruinous 
 extent even the Tudor will of Elizabeth. The 
 Puritan bishops and Ecclesiastical Commissioners of 
 Edward's and Elizabeth's reigns were the ringleaders 
 and abettors of disorder and anarchy, till their own 
 pockets and dignity began to suffer. Then they 
 turned upon their erstwhile confederates and de- 
 nounced them. Episcopal visitations, too, to which 
 Mr. Dibdin appeals, are entirely valueless as evidence. 
 The Bishops of the first decade of Elizabeth's reign, 
 with a few exceptions, paid no heed whatever to any 
 laws which they disliked, unless obedience was 
 enforced upon them. Grindal, for example — whose 
 obdurate lawlessness caused at last his suspension 
 from office — found the See of York, when he was 
 translated to it in 1570, ' another church,' as he 
 expressed it, ' rather than a member of the rest ' of 
 the churches with which he was familiar in his old 
 diocese, Puritan-ridden London. Not only the 
 minster, but parish churches also, had ceremonies 
 and ornaments which he considered Popish. Ac- 
 cordingly he issued injunctions abolishing rood- 
 screens, albs, tunicles, censers, crosses, candlesticks, 
 
622 THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 altars ; the crucifix also, which was to be displaced 
 in favour of the Koyal arms, 'or some other con- 
 venient crest.' This was outrageous lawlessness, 
 even under the law of the Judicial Committee. But 
 let it be observed that Grindal abolished censers and 
 crucifixes, as well as crosses, candlesticks, albs, and 
 tunicles, which were undoubtedly legal and in use. 
 The presumption is that censers and crucifixes were 
 also in use, and that presumption is borne out by 
 Grindal's letter. The crucifix was certainly a legal 
 ornament under Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity. The 
 evidence for that is abundant. Let two or three ex- 
 amples suffice. 
 
 In 1560 Bishop Cox, in a letter to Peter Martyr, 
 says of himself and his fellow- Puritans, that they 
 were ' constrained, to our great distress of mind, to 
 tolerate in our churches ' — not in the Koyal Chapels 
 or Cathedrals only — ' the image of the cross and 
 Him who was crucified.' ^ 
 
 Even the able and masterful Jewel is obliged to 
 make the following confession to Peter Martyr in a 
 letter dated Feb. 4, 1560 :— ^ 
 
 This controversy about the crucifix is now at its 
 height. ... A disputation on this subject will take 
 place to-morrow. The arbiters will be certain persons 
 selected by the Council. The disputants on the one side 
 are the Archbishop of Canterbury and Cox [who evidently 
 changed his mind, or his policy] ; and on the other 
 Grindal, the Bishop of London, and myself. . r , As far 
 as I can conjecture I shall not write again as bishop. 
 For matters are come to that pass that either the silver or 
 
 ' Zurich Lett. Second Series, vol. i. p. 65. * Ibid. p. 68. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 623 
 
 tin crosses, which we have everywhere broken in pieces, 
 must be restored or our bishoprics relinquished. 
 
 Bishop Sandys, one of the divines appointed to 
 revise the Prayer Book in 1559, writes to Peter 
 Martyr under date of April 1, 1560 : — ^ 
 
 The Queen's Majesty considered it not contrary to the 
 Word of God, nay, rather for the advantage of the Church, 
 that the image of Christ crucified, together with those of 
 Mary and John, should be placed, as heretofore, in some con- 
 spicuous part of the church, where they might more easily 
 be seen by all the people. Some of us [bishops] thought far 
 otherwise, and more especially as all images of every kind 
 were at our last visitation not only taken down, but also 
 burnt, and that too by public authority ; and because 
 the ignorant and superstitious multitude are in the habit 
 of paying adoration to this idol above all others. As to 
 myself, because I was rather vehement in this matter, 
 and could by no means consent that an occasion of 
 stumbling should be afforded to the Church of Christ, I 
 was very near being deposed from my office, and incur- 
 ring the displeasure of the Queen. 
 
 These quotations are exceedingly important, for 
 they prove three things. First, that the crucifix 
 was held to be a legal ornament in all churches ; 
 so plainly legal that bishops of the eminence of 
 Jewel and Archbishop Sandys made themselves 
 liable to deprivation for removing crucifixes and 
 crosses. They do not dispute the legality of the 
 crucifix ; they merely set up their private judgment 
 against the law of the land. Secondly, we have 
 here the Puritan explanation of ' public authority.' 
 
 * Zurich Lett. Second Series, vol. i. p. 
 
624 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 They meant the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, or 
 some of them. These were .appointed to enforce the 
 law. What they did was to endow their own 
 prejudices with the attributes of law, and then pro- 
 ceeded to break the law in the name of ' public 
 authority ' — that is, their own private judgment.^ 
 Thirdly, we have an instructive commentary on the 
 value of the episcopal visitations of Edward's and 
 Ehzabeth's reigns. They are exhibitions of rampant 
 lawlessness, and to appeal to them as evidence of 
 what the law then either ordered or forbade is, in 
 plain language, ridiculous, betraying great ignorance 
 of the ecclesiastical history of that period. Down 
 to the Great Kebellion the crucifix was not un- 
 common in churches which were not completely 
 under the control of the Puritan party. In Canter- 
 bury Cathedral, for instance, ' The Ordinance of 
 Parliament for demolishing idolatrous superstitions, 
 Images, Pictures, and Monuments, was then put in 
 execution,' on December 18-23, 1648. The ruthless 
 havoc of painted windows, statues, and sculpture of 
 various sorts, then perpetrated, is fully described in 
 this Parliamentarian document, and among the 
 things * thundered in pieces' were 'many crucifixes.'^ 
 But the crucifix was, according to the Lambeth 
 decisions, an illegal ornament under Elizabeth's Act of 
 Uniformity, because it is not expressly ordered, and 
 there is no ceremony prescribed in connexion with it. 
 
 ' So outrageous became the lawlessness of this ' public authority,' 
 that the Queen ordered the Commissioners for Canterbury and York 
 to suspend their proceedings {State Papers, Doin., December, 1559, 
 p. 145). 
 
 - Mertoun's Collection of Historical Pamphlets, No. 29, p. 3S-> 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 625 
 
 It is sometimes said that the usages of Eliza- 
 beth's chapel prove nothing as to the legality of 
 those usages. But we have seen that those usages 
 were by no means confined to the Royal Chapels, and 
 that the Queen and her Council and the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury insisted on them to the point of 
 threatening with deprivation such bishops as took 
 an active part against them. It is absurd to sup- 
 pose that this would have been done in the case of 
 ornaments and practices which were illegal. More- 
 over, Jewel, Sandys, and the rest, never venture to 
 question the legality, in the Chapels Eoyal or else- 
 where, of the ornaments and vestures which they 
 denounce ; on the contrary, they bear testimony to 
 the Queen's scrupulous respect for the law\ In a 
 letter to Gualter, dated February 12, 1571, Bishop 
 Cox repels by anticipation the allegation that the 
 ritual of the Queen's chapels was not sanctioned by 
 the law. His words are : — 
 
 But this is not only false, but injurious both to the 
 Queen and the ministers of the Word, to wit, that we 
 humour her Eoyal Highness, and make her more decided 
 in ordering everything according to her own pleasure. 
 But far be any one from suspecting anything of the kind 
 ill so godly and religious a personage {heroina), who has 
 always been so exceedingly scrupulous in deviating even 
 in the slightest degree from the laws prescribed {cui 
 summa semper religio est a prcescriptis legihus vel tantil- 
 lum quidem deflectere)} 
 
 This testimony is all the more valuable from the 
 fact that Cox boldly refused to celebrate the Holy 
 
 ' Zurich Lett. Second Series, i. 236. 
 
 S S 
 
626 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Communion in the Queen's chapel because he 
 would not practically sanction ceremonies, orna- 
 ments, and vestments, which he condemned as 
 Popish, while frankly acknowledging their legality 
 under the Act of Uniformity. Jewel bears similar 
 testimony. He says that on ascending the throne 
 the Queen set her face against any changes in public 
 worship ' without the sanction of the law,' and he 
 repeats that testimony seven years afterwards.^ 
 
 So much then in general as to the lawfulness of 
 Incense in the public worship of the Church of 
 England. Beyond all reasonable doubt its legality 
 is covered by the Ornaments Rubric and by Eliza- 
 beth's Act of Uniformity. For I claim to have 
 now proved that both Act and Rubric refer legall}^ 
 historically, and grammatically to the ceremonial 
 in use before Edward's Book received the Royal 
 Assent — that is, before it became a legal document. 
 And even after it became a legal document its 
 rubrics could not have been lawfully enforced before 
 June 9, 1549. 
 
 • Zurich Lett. Second Series, pp. 18, 149. In the former of these 
 passages Jewel, writing on April 14, 1559, says that Elizabeth refused 
 to ' banish ' the Mass ' from her private chapel.' ' She has, however,* 
 he says, ' so regulated this Mass of hers, that, although many things 
 are done therein which are scarcely to be endured, it may yet be heard 
 without any great danger.' He refers probably to ' The Order of the 
 Communion ' with such portions of the Mass in English as were so 
 ordered under Henry VHI. This was five months after the Queen's 
 accession — a pretty clear indication of her own predilections. Jewel's 
 wish is evidently father to his thought in thinking that she retained 
 the old service of the Mass so long * only from the circumstances of 
 the times.' 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 627 
 
 This being the state of facts, it is for those who 
 think the liturgical use of Incense illegal to produce 
 positive evidence in favour of their view. For 
 nothing short of clear categorical evidence will avail ; 
 and by clear categorical evidence I mean here a 
 statutory prohibition of the use of Incense. Nothing 
 but a statutory prohibition can abrogate a statutory 
 obligation. A diocesan may conceivably be justified 
 in relaxing a statutory obligation or in dispensing 
 with it under given circumstances. He has no 
 power at all to forbid it. Let us remember that 
 this is a question of strict legal construction. We 
 have nothing to do with the intention of the Legis- 
 lature either in 1559 or 1662, or with desuetude 
 however long. If it could be proved that on either 
 or both occasions the Legislature intended to legalise 
 only the ornaments prescribed by Edward's First 
 Prayer Book, that would be nothing" to the purpose. 
 I believe I have shown conclusively that the domi- 
 nant force in the matter, Elizabeth, deliberately 
 intended to legalise — what, indeed, the Act and 
 Rubric say — the ornaments actually in use in 
 Edward's second year. But that is a pure irrelevancy. 
 It has been laid down by the Courts, with peremptory 
 unanimity, that the words of a statute must be in- 
 terpreted by the language of the statute, without 
 regard to any exterior consideration or possible con- 
 sequences. If the intention of the framers of the 
 statute be defeated by the language of the statute, 
 or if the consequences of the literal interpretation be 
 dangerous or pernicious, it is the duty of the Legis- 
 
 s s 2 
 
628 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 lature, not of the Judicature, to supply the remedy 
 by correcting its own blunder. ' In such cases,' says 
 the Judgment in EdricFs Case (5 Co. 118), 'a Verbis 
 legis no?i est recedendiim.' ' The fittest in all cases, 
 where the intention of the Legislature is brought 
 into question, is to adhere to the words of the 
 statute, construing them according to their nature 
 and import in the order in which they stand in the 
 Act of Parliament.' ^ In 1 Edward VL c. 12, for 
 example, it was enacted that persons convicted of 
 stealing horses should not have benefit of clergy. 
 The Courts ruled that this could not apply to the 
 stealer of one horse, and therefore a new Act to 
 rectify the error was passed the following year, 
 namely, 2 & 3 Edward VI. c. 33. 
 
 In strictness of logic I might stop here, for I 
 have proved that the legal usage of the Church of 
 England in the matter of ceremonial is the ceremonial 
 in legal use in Edward's second year : quemadmo- 
 dum mos erat in hac Ecclesia Anglicana ex authori- 
 tate Parliamenti in anno secundo Begni Edivardi 
 Sexti, as the contemporary Latin version of the 
 Uniformity Act of 1559 renders it. But people are 
 not v/holly, perhaps not generally, governed by 
 lo^ic. Let us therefore consider a few corroborative 
 proofs. 
 
 The first Lambeth decision has the following : — 
 
 And thirdly and lastly, they [the compilers of the 
 Prayer Book] had the less hesitation in omitting incense 
 because it was certainly not in use in the Church for at least 
 
 ' Rex V. Inhabitants of Bamsgate (6 B. & C. 712). 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 629 
 
 three hundred years from the Apostolic times. To get 
 back to the earUer and purer days of Christianity, to 
 make "the primitive Church the model for the Church of 
 England, was certainly part of the purpose which our 
 Keformers cherished. 
 
 To limit ' the primitive Church,' to which the 
 Church of England appeals as her model, to ' three 
 hundred years from the Apostolic times ' is arbitrary, 
 and is moreover in conflict with recognised authori- 
 ties. One of the Homilies appeals to the first six 
 General Councils ; and 1 Eliz. c. i. § xxxvi. names 
 
 * the first four General Councils, or some other 
 General Council ' as the period of appeal. The 
 statute (1 Edw. VL d. i.) against irreverence towards 
 the Blessed Sacrament, which sanctions communion 
 in both kinds, defines the primitive Church chrono- 
 logically as occupying ' five hundred years and more 
 after Christ's Ascension.' But there is nothing that 
 can properly be called evidence to show that incense 
 
 * was certainly not in use in the Church for at least 
 three hundred years from the Apostolic times.' The 
 argument from silence is a most dangerous one. 
 The assailants of the Canon of Holy Scripture have- 
 used it in a manner which should make Christians 
 wary in resorting to it. Moreover, if the assertion 
 of the Lambeth decisions were true, it would be 
 irrelevant. It would be as unreasonable to expect 
 the Church to develop her full ritual while she wor- 
 shipped in caves and catacombs as it would be to 
 look for the ritual of the Tabernacle among the 
 brick-kilns of the enslaved Israelites in Egypt. 
 
630 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Besides, the language of early writers on this and 
 other matters is liable to be misunderstood, as I have 
 shown in a previous chapter.^ jVuthorities whom 
 the Primates themselves would be the first to recog- 
 nise as far superior to themselves in a matter of this 
 sort are dead against them. Eenaudot, a writer of 
 world-wide reputation as a liturgical scholar, affirms 
 that the use of incense has always existed in the 
 Eastern Churches, and that nothing but extreme 
 necessity would excuse its absence in liturgical 
 worship.^ 
 
 Maskell: - 
 
 The use of incense in the public service of the Church 
 is of the most remote antiquity. Incense was among 
 the few offerings which were allowed to be made at the 
 altar to be there consumed, as appears from the second of 
 the Apostolical Canons. The object of burning incense 
 seems to be well expressed in the prayer which is found 
 in the Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom, according to the 
 translation in Gear's collection : * Incensum tibi offerimus, 
 Christe Deus, in odorem suavitatis spiritualis, quern 
 suscipe, Domine, in sanctum et supercoeleste ac intellec- 
 tuale tuum altare, et repende nobis abundantes tuas 
 miserationes, et illas largire nobis servis tuis.' ^ 
 
 ' See pp. 122-3. 
 
 2 Under the heading ' Oratio Thuris ' he writes : — 
 
 'Ejus usus in Ecclesiis Orientalibus perpetuus, et prope quoti- 
 dianus : nee enim absque thure Liturgiam celebrant, nisi summa 
 necessitas premat : illud adhibent in Officiis SacramentaUbus 
 omnibus, in precibus nocturnis diurnisque, nihil ut possit esse 
 frequentius.' — Liturgiarum Orientalhim, torn. i. p. 183, Frankfort 
 edition, 1847. 
 
 '^ Ancient Ritual of Church of England, p. 26, third edition. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 631 
 
 ' From the earliest times,' says Pellicia, another 
 eminent authority, ' incense has been offered in 
 the Liturgy, and has been used by the Church in 
 her sacred mysteries.' ^ Guericke, a distinguished 
 Lutheran archaeologist, says : ' Pellicia's is the first 
 and almost only work that has embraced the whole 
 of archaeology in its full extent, not confining it, as 
 hitherto done, to the ancient Church alone.' Car- 
 dinal Bona, another great authority, argues for the 
 Apostolic origin of the use of incense in Christian 
 worship.^ And our own Archbishop Theodore has a 
 passage which, if written by a post-Keformation 
 Anglican divine, would have been quoted at the 
 Lambeth ' Hearing ' as evidence that in Theodore's 
 time the use of incense was only for purposes of 
 fumigation : — 
 
 Incense must be burnt on Saints' days because, like 
 lilies, they send forth an odour of sweetness, and perfume 
 the Church of God as a church is perfumed with incense 
 round the altar at first — i.e. at its dedication."^ 
 
 This obligation to burn incense on Saints' days 
 does not prove that it was not burnt on other days, 
 for we know the contrary. Yet that is a kind of 
 inference which pervades the Archiepiscopal argument 
 against the legality of incense since the Eeformation. 
 In truth, much of the reasoning on which the 
 Lambeth decisions are based, if applied to pre- 
 Eeformation worship, would have made a sad jumble 
 
 ^ Polity of the Christian Chmxh, B. II. § i. c. 7. 
 
 2 Migne, torn. Ixxxix. col. 25. 
 
 ^ See Bridgett's Hist, of the Holy Euch. p. 185, 
 
632 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of it. In the old Service Books a good deal is 
 implied and taken for granted without any formal 
 direction. For instance : — 
 
 The psalm ' Dirigatur,' &c., which accompanies the 
 act of censing in the modern Eoman Missal, is indicated 
 for use in the Sfcowe Missal, but there are no rubrical 
 directions there for the use of incense.' 
 
 I do not know how the Archbishops would 
 reconcile their prohibition of incense as unknown 
 for three hundred years after the Apostles with the 
 third of the Apostolical Canons, which says : ' Neither 
 is it allowed to bring anything to the altar at the 
 time of the holy oblation excepting oil for the lamps 
 and incense.' I am aware of the controversy about 
 the date of the Apostolical Canons. I believe that 
 the soundest criticism now places them, in their 
 collected form, within the period named by the 
 Archbishops, which implies an earher date for their 
 origin. They are mentioned in terms of the highest 
 reverence and authority by St. John Damascene, the 
 Emperors Constantine, Theodosius, and Justinian, 
 and by the (Ecumenical Council of Ephesus, which 
 appeals to them deferentially as ' the Canons of the 
 Fa,thers.' But I am not concerned here with their 
 authority : I am concerned with their antiquity 
 only. The third Canon, which admittedly belongs 
 to the earlier group, mentions incense as an ordinary 
 ceremony in Eucharistic worship in the end of the 
 second or the beginning of the third century. 
 
 ' The Liturgy and Ritual of the Celtic Church, by the Rev. 
 E. Warren, B.D., p. 128. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 633 
 
 Let us now look at thepost-Eeformation evidence. 
 Elizabeth had the old service of the Mass (with a 
 few modifications) celebrated in her Chapel from her 
 accession in November 1558 to June 24, 1559, when 
 the English Prayer Book came into public use. 
 It seems clear from the complaints of the Puritans 
 that she then combined the old ceremonial with the 
 new Service Book, and that she acted within the 
 law in doing so. Neale says expressly, in a passage 
 already quoted, that a stranger visiting the Royal 
 Chapel and some of the Cathedrals would see no 
 difference from the Roman worship except that the 
 service was in English. Now we happen to possess 
 some indirect evidence of the use of incense in Eliza- 
 beth's Chapel. In that olla podrida of antiquarian 
 lore, Leland's *De Rebus Britannicis Collectanea,' 
 there is an account (' from a manuscript ' late in the 
 possession of John Anstis, Esq., Garter, and now of 
 Jo. Edmonson, Esq., Mowbray Herald ') ' of the 
 Manner of the Christening of the Child of the Lady 
 Cicele, wife to John Erie of Este Frieseland, called 
 the Marques of Bawden, and Sister to Eryke King of 
 Sweden, which Christening was done at the Queene's 
 Majesties Palleyes of Westminster, where her Grace 
 then lay on Sunday the 30th of Sept., Anno 1565, in 
 Maner following.' ^ The paper contains a list of the 
 furniture of the Chapel and the rich ornaments for 
 public worship. Among the latter are ' a Shipe or 
 Arke garnished with stones ; ' ' two Shippes of 
 Mother of Pearle ; ' ' another Shipe of Mother of 
 
 ' Leland, vol. i. pt. ii. p. 291. 
 
634 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Pearle.' These ships or arks were of course for 
 incense. 
 
 Mr. Dibdin dismisses cavalierly the evidence 
 based on the retention of censers and incense boats 
 in the inventories of Church Ornaments since the 
 Reformation ; also parish bills for the purchase of 
 incense ; and inclusion of censers and incense boats 
 among vessels to be consecrate'd at the dedication 
 of churches. I submit that this method of get- 
 ting rid of important evidence is illegitimate. His 
 attempt to dispose of the Bodmin inventory (see 
 ante, p. 421) is one of the most extraordinary speci- 
 mens of special pleading which I have ever come 
 across. The two churchwardens of the parish of 
 Bodmin gave a voucher for having, in 1567, ' received 
 into their hands and keeping, of the Mayor, and of all 
 the parish aforesaid, to be used and occupied to the 
 honour of God, in the same church ... all such 
 goods and ornaments as foUoweth.' This list in- 
 cludes several sets of chasubles, albs, and copes, 
 and also a censer. After trying to explain away in an 
 impossible manner the import of the phrase ' to be 
 used and occupied,' Mr. Dibdin rests his case on the 
 date, ' which seems to me,' he says, ' of vital impor- 
 tance.' Why? Because of Mr. Peacock's list of 
 Church Ornaments destroyed and purloined— most 
 of them without any sanction of law. I have 
 already shown the utter lawlessness of those pro- 
 ceedings. But Mr. Dibdin overlooks a fact which 
 is of * more vital importance ' than the date of what 
 he most inaccurately calls ' the Bodmin deed ' (it 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 635 
 
 was simply an inventory of Church ' ornaments ^ 
 handed over to new churchwardens on taking office) . 
 In Mr. Peacock's Hst of goods plundered as ' super- 
 stitious ' are candlesticks, chalices, altar cloths, as 
 well as censers. The list, moreover, dates from the 
 reign of Edward, is confined to the diocese of 
 Lincoln, has nothing to do with Elizabeth's Com- 
 missioners, and, in short, has no bearing on the 
 question before us. Does Mr. Dibdin think that 
 all these things were illegal ? If he does not, his 
 appeal to Mr. Peacock's book is entirely irrelevant, 
 and his solitary argument " against the conclusive 
 evidence of the Bodmin inventory vanishes. The 
 passage just quoted from Leland proves that Eliza- 
 beth, so far from ordering the destruction or con- 
 fiscation of censers, had some costly ones among the 
 altar ornaments of her own Chapel. 
 
 Ab U710 disce ovwies. I need not pursue Mr. 
 Dibdin's argument against the evidence for the use 
 of incense in other cases. He forgets all through 
 that it is his business to prove (1) that the liturgical 
 use of incense has ever been legally forbidden ; (2) 
 that the fact of incense being used sometimes for 
 fumigating purposes is any proof that it was never 
 used for religious purposes. 
 
 I will now come to the evidence of Forms of 
 Service for Consecration of Churches, &c. These 
 were dismissed at the Lambeth ' Hearing ' as mere 
 literary curiosities, devoid of authority and lacking 
 proof of having been used, at least with rubrical 
 exactness. There are many such forms, differing 
 
636 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 in details, but belonging to a common type. In 
 some, censers and candlesticks are among the orna- 
 ments to be consecrated. I possess one which was 
 published in London in 1703. It was compiled by 
 the Bev. R. Tisdale, chaplain to Bishop Lloyd of 
 Worcester, and is dedicated * To the Most Beverend 
 Fathers in God, my Lords the Arch-Bishops, and to 
 the Bight Beverend Fathers in God, my Lords the 
 Bishops.' In this dedication Mr. Tisdale hopes that 
 * by having these offices put into their hands,' ill- 
 instructed lay people may be ' better informed of 
 the sacredness of Christian Churches and the holy 
 utensils used in the Service of God their Saviour.' 
 The catalogue of the sale at which I bought my 
 copy had a note certifying that it was Bishop 
 Lloyd's own copy. There is also this manuscript 
 note in ink inside the cover of the volume : * With 
 MS. alterations by Lloyd, Bishop of Worcester, 1704.' 
 The book is elaborately rubricated in red ink, and 
 sometimes in shorthand, directing omissions, altera- 
 tions, and additions. Having been so fortunate as 
 to obtain the address of a descendant of Bishop 
 Lloyd, Mr. Lloyd Baker, of Hardwicke Court, 
 Gloucester, who owns Bishop Lloyd's papers and 
 a number of his books, I wrote to him. In his 
 courteous reply he said that * the Bishop covered all 
 the margin of his books with notes in a very small 
 hand ; sometimes shorthand.' The notes in my 
 book are nearly all in a large hand, doubtless for 
 facility of reading during service. I sent the book 
 to Mr. Lloyd Baker for the purpose of comparison. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 637 
 
 and received it back with a note certifying that 
 the MS. memorandum in front of the title-page 
 is in the handwriting of a clerical grandson of the 
 Bishop, while ' the notes and shorthand are by 
 Bishop Lloyd.' The importance of this will be 
 seen as I proceed. 
 
 My copy is evidently one specially printed for 
 the Bishop's own use, with wide margins enclosed 
 within red lines for the purpose of annotations. 
 On the first page there is a marginal note, partly 
 in shorthand. But the following is very legible : 
 * . . . used . . . Marston's chapell and Yardley 
 parish, 1704, May 25. . . .' The notes and marks 
 show that the Bishop made considerable alterations 
 and omissions, and a few additions. 
 
 Besides the consecration of a church there is in 
 the same volume a Form (also rubricated by Bishop 
 Lloyd) of consecrating a churchyard, and ' the Form 
 of Consecration of New Communion Plate ' ; ' The 
 Act ' of the consecration of altar ornaments is given 
 in Latin. The Bishop is to stand ad altare in 
 habitu pontificali, and on a small table {mensulce 
 cuidam) below and in front of him 
 stabant decent! ordine vasa quaedam (Patina nimirum, 
 duo Calices, Lagena et Pelvis, &c., qualibus in sacris 
 utimur) argentea omnia et bis deaurata, ad usum Eccl. 
 Paroch. de . . . in Agro , . . Diceceseos autem . . . sump- 
 tibus . . . prseparata.' The pious donor 'humiliterpetiit 
 k Domino Episcopo antedicto, ut vasa supradicta omnia, 
 tam pi6 designata, formata tarn eleganter, et jam rit6 
 oblata Deo Servatori sisteret et praesentaret, suoq; 
 Pastoral! Officio, et Ministerio solenniter consecraret 
 
638 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Divino cultui in dicta Eccl. . . . in perpetuum deservitura. 
 Cui tarn sancto desiderio toties-dictus Episcopus luben- 
 ter annuens, et se promptum et paratum exhibens, Vasa 
 ilia omnia (Patinam & Calices, Lagenam et Pelvim, 
 &c.) e manibus prsefati . . . ante Sacrum Altare provoluti, 
 sigillatim recipiens, et super Altare, magnSjCum Eeverentia, 
 reponens ; fusis ad Deum precibus, ab omni profano usu 
 separavit, Deoque Servatori, et ejus Divino cultui, juxta 
 morem et ritus in Eccl. Angl. pie usitatos, solenniter in 
 perpetuum consecravit ; et eisdem Vasis ita consecratis, 
 eisq; solis, mox usus est in Consecratione S. Eucharistise 
 loco et tempore suprascriptis. 
 
 The vessels named in this act of consecration are 
 a paten, two chalices, a flagon, and a basin. But 
 there were others represented by ' &c.' "What were 
 they? Candlesticks and a censer. 'While the 
 Bishop receiveth them [candlesticks] and placeth 
 them upon the Altar,' the chaplains are directed to 
 say :— 
 
 Thy word is a lantern unto my feet : and a light unto 
 my paths. 
 
 For in Thee is the fountain of light : and in Thy light 
 shall we see light. 
 
 Then follows this rubric : — 
 
 So likewise when a censer is presented and 
 received they [chaplains] say : — 
 
 While the King sitteth at his Table : my spikenard 
 sendeth forth the smell thereof. 
 
 Let my prayer be set forth before Thee as the 
 incense : and let the lifting up of my hands be as the 
 Evening Sacrifice. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 639 
 
 Here then we have this fact. In a volume 
 published in the beginning of last century by a 
 bishop's chaplain — probably under the direction of 
 the bishop — and dedicated to the Archbishops and 
 Bishops, we have Forms of the consecration of 
 churches, churchyards, and plate for the service of 
 the altar; and among the ornaments thus conse- 
 crated is a censer. And these ornaments are all 
 dedicated to God for liturgical purposes, and are 
 therefore of costly material and artistic workmanship. 
 They are ' separated from all profane use,' and 
 reserved ' for Divine worship according to the custom 
 and rites piously used in the Church of England.' 
 
 The Bishop, moreover, whose chaplain compiled 
 this book, rubricates it copiously with his own hand, 
 omitting some things, altering others, and making 
 occasional additions. And he notes on the first page 
 the day, the occasion, and the parish in which he 
 first used it, apparently on the first opportunity after 
 publication. Whatever is not changed in any of 
 these Forms, or marked for omission, was sanctioned 
 for use. There is nothing changed in the blessing 
 of the censer. 
 
 How is this evidence to be got over ? Will any 
 one seriously contend that a silver censer of artistic 
 design, and solemnly dedicated in the way here 
 described, was merely intended to be used occa- 
 sionally to dissipate bad smells ? 
 
 Henry Burton was one of the leading and most 
 aggressive Puritans in the reign of Charles I. In 
 1636 he published a pamphlet entitled ' For God 
 
640 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and the King,' which is a fierce indictment of the 
 Anghcan worship of his day for its Popery, as he 
 deemed it. He declares that the Sarum Use — he 
 means of course in ceremonial — is ' in life to this 
 very day ' in our Cathedrals : also ' copes, crucifixes, 
 images, superstitious gestures and postures ' ' with 
 their hundreds of tapers and candles.' And then he 
 asks : — 
 
 What prescription can that Cathedral Church at 
 Wolverhampton in Staffordshire plead for her goodly 
 costly new altar, with the dedication thereof within these 
 two or three years last past, in which dedication all the 
 Eoman rites were observed, as censings, washings, bow- 
 ings, copes (though borrowed from Lichfield) ? ^ 
 
 I add the following for what it may be worth : 
 Desmaizeux, in his ' Life of WilHam Chillingworth ' 
 (c. xix. p. 343 of Tegg's edition), quotes as follows 
 from the ' Chillingworthi Novissima ' of Cheynell 
 the Puritan : — 
 
 The men of a cathedral spirit thought it fit that 
 Mr. Chillingworth, being a member of a cathedral, should 
 be buried in the cathedral ; and being Cancellarius,^ it was 
 conceived that he should be buried intra cancellos, and 
 not under the altar, near the pot of incense, that the 
 constant perfume of the incense might excuse the thrift of 
 his executrix.-^ Ossa inodora dedit. Persii Sat. vi. 34. 
 
 This is contemporary evidence, and seems to 
 show the use of incense at the altar service. I 
 suppose ' the fumigatory use ' of incense will be 
 
 • p. 58. '^ Chancellor of Sarum Cathedral. 
 
 3 ChJllingworth's sister. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 641 
 
 suggested. But Cheynell does not say that the 
 incense was put there on account of Chillingworth's 
 body, but that the body was possibly put there that 
 it might be perfumed by the odour of the incense 
 used at the altar. To prove that incense was some- 
 times used for fumigating purposes is not to dis- 
 prove its use for liturgical purposes. The censer 
 and incense-boat were often made of precious metal 
 and exquisite workmanship, not likely to have been 
 wasted on mere fumigating utensils. 
 
 I cannot pass away from the subject of Incense 
 without calling attention to a singular argument 
 urged against it by one of theexperts and adopted by 
 Mr. Dibdin. The Venetian Ambassador, describing 
 in a Keport to his Government the changes made 
 under Edward VI., writes, according to Mr. Kawdon 
 Brown's translation : — 
 
 They use bells and organs, but neither altars, nor 
 images, nor water, nor incense (71011 acqiie, non fuoco), nor 
 other Eoman ceremonies. 
 
 This is a far from accurate description of the 
 changes at the time of the First Prayer Book , but 
 Mr. Brown's translation makes confusion worse 
 confounded. Professor Collins, however, adopted it, 
 and founded on it what he regarded as a decisive 
 proof that incense was abolished under Edward's 
 First Liturgy.' The authorised report of his speech 
 in ' The Case against Incense ' has the following foot- 
 note : ' Since the " Hearing," Mr. Horatio Brown 
 
 ' The Case against Incense, pp. 136-7. • 
 
 T T 
 
642 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 has looked at the original of Daniele Barbarous 
 " Eelazione," and finds that the true text is " non 
 acque, noji fuochi." In the opinion of Professor 
 Collins this does not affect his argument.' He 
 insists that fuoco undoubtedly means incense. 
 
 * Incense is nothing whatever but a fire ; a censer is 
 merely a moveable fireplace ; it is a fire of charcoal 
 in a moveable receptacle of some kind or another ; 
 and at certain points in the service incense is 
 sprinkled on it.' It happens that I have spent a 
 good deal of time in Italy. I have studied at an 
 Italian university, spending a full year there on one 
 occasion, six months on another, and visits of some 
 months on a stretch at different times. I have in- 
 terested myself in Italian literature and ecclesiology, 
 and I am certain that I have never heard or seen 
 the word fuoco used for incense. I do not believe 
 that a single case of such use can be produced. 
 
 * Incense nothing whatever but a fire ' ! I am 
 surprised that so able and learned a man as 
 Professor Collins should have overlooked the obvious 
 fact that things usually take their names from their 
 characteristic attributes or use. The characteristic 
 attribute of fire is warmth. The characteristic 
 attribute of incense is perfume. Which of these 
 two attributes is predominant in the liturgical use 
 of incense? The perfume of course. The fire 
 is subordinate and subservient to the incense. Its 
 sole purpose is to enable the incense to give out 
 its perfume. Professor Collins makes the incense 
 entirely subservient to the fire. To suppose that 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS G43 
 
 the Venetian Ambassador's Government wonld at 
 once understand fuoco to mean incense is prepos- 
 terous. Fire bears the same relation to incense that 
 bellows bear to organs. Suppose the Venetian 
 Ambassador, instead of saying, ' They use bells and 
 organs,' had written, ' They use bells and bellows,' 
 would he have been understood to mean * bells and 
 organs ' ? 
 
 But, impossible as Professor Collins's sugges- 
 tion is with regard to acqua and fuoco, it becomes 
 absurd in its application to acque and fuochi 
 ( ' waters ' and ' fires ' — i.e. ' incenses ' ). What does 
 the Professor make of acque? He offers no ex- 
 planation. But there is an explanation, and a 
 very simple one, of non acque, non fuochi. Among 
 the furniture of pre-Reformation churches was the 
 lapis ignitus, otherwise petra cum calibe, i.e. the 
 flint and steel kept in the vestry to light the new 
 fire upon Easter Eve, all the light of the former 
 year having been extinguished with holy water. ^ 
 The cessation of those fires and waters (acque) 
 would strike a Venetian ecclesiastic at once, as the 
 cessation of the Easter fire in the Holy Sepulchre 
 would strike a traveller to Jerusalem now. The 
 Ambassador writes, according to the reckoning of 
 the time, under the date of 1548, and one of 
 Cranmer's Visitation articles under the same date 
 inquires ' whether they, upon Easter Even last past, 
 hallowed the font [for holy water], fire, or paschal, 
 
 ' Du Cange, Item Durand, lib. vi. c. 80, s. 2. 
 
 T T 2 
 
644 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 or had any paschal set up or burning in their 
 churches?' Beyond all question, the acque and 
 fuochi of the Venetian Ambassador mean the 
 Paschal fires and holy water fonts used for ex- 
 tinguishing the last year's fires before lighting the 
 new, to which Cranmer refers. Fuoco is never 
 used for incense even in the singular, and it would 
 be absurd in the plural. 
 
 The remaining points in the Lambeth decision 
 on Incense need not detain us long. Apart from the 
 legal interpretation of the rubric, the Archbishops 
 rely on the following argument. They affirm that 
 it is an error to suppose that * the order to use the 
 Ornaments was per se an order to use the appro- 
 priate ceremonies.' This mterpretation they reject 
 for three reasons : — 
 
 1. It makes the Act of Elizabeth oontradict itself by 
 ordering a strict adherence to the form of ceremonial 
 prescribed in the Book, and at the same time ordering the 
 revival of a number of ceremonies of which the Book says 
 nothing. 
 
 On this I observe that their Graces' dictum 
 • is irreconcilable with certain established facts and 
 customs, such as bowmg at the Holy Name ; turning 
 to the East at the Creed, and also at the Gloria 
 Fain, &c., a custom prevalent in the sixteenth 
 century, as Jeremy Taylor testifies ; bowing towards 
 the Altar; signing with the sign of the Cross. in 
 Confirmation as well as in Baptism, as customary in 
 the sixteenth century, according to the testimony of 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 645 
 
 Bishop Montagu,* who gives other instances in a 
 quotation, and adds ; ' Hoc de nobis verissiine vir 
 doctissimus, testis scribebat oculatus.' 
 
 2. It inverts the relation between a ceremony and an 
 ornament by making the ceremony subordinate to the 
 ornament instead of the ornament being subordinate to 
 the ceremony. The very meaning of an ornament is that 
 it is a thing to be used for the fitting performance of a 
 ceremony, and if no ceremony be prescribed the so-called 
 ornament has no place. 
 
 Very good. But the Prayer Book, apart from 
 the Ornaments Rubric, prescribes no vestments at 
 all for Divine Service; and, even in the Ordinal, 
 priests and deacons are merely ordered to be ' decently 
 vested,' without any particulars. Moreover, it is a 
 universal custom in our Church that when a layman 
 is ordained deacon he puts on, immediately after, a 
 stole over one shoulder ; and when a deacon is or- 
 dained priest, he puts the stole over both shoulders. 
 
 These are ceremonies about which the Prayer 
 Book says not a word How are they consistent 
 with their Graces' stringent interpretation of * none 
 other or otherwise ' ? By the Lambeth decision they 
 
 ' * Hoc de usu et praxi Anglicanae Ecclesise, secundum antiquis- 
 simas traditiones, verbo innixas revelato : cum et illis olim temporibus 
 apud veteres et nostris diebus apud nos ipsos frequentetur, in Nomine 
 Domini Jesu Christi, Crucia Signaculum adhibere ; cum public^ in 
 Baptismo, de mandate • turn in Confirmatione Cateciiizatorum, et 
 caeteris Ecclesiee Sacramentis ; turn etiam in Vita et conversatione 
 communi, dum surgunt, vel ad aliquod novum attoniti expallescunt.' 
 ' QeaudpooiriKou, seu de Vitd Jesu Christi Domini nostri Originum 
 Ecclesiasticar2i7n, Tomi Prions pars posterior.' (Edition of 
 1640, p. 79.) 
 
616 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 are just as illegal as the liturgical use of incense. 
 The candidates are ordered to be decently vested 
 before the service, and there is no provision whatever 
 for the ceremonial use of the stole in the middle of 
 the service. In the preface to the Ordinal in 
 Edward's First Book the bishop is ordered to have 
 ' his pastoral staff in his hand, or else borne or 
 holden by his chaplain.' That rubric was omitted 
 in the Second Book, and has never been revived. 
 Yet some of our bishops, including the Primates, I 
 believe, use the pastoral staff in the accustomed way. 
 How does this square with their rigid interpretation 
 of ' none other or otherwise ' ? 
 
 3. To order a ceremony not directly, but by ordering 
 the use of an ornament connected with it, is without pre- 
 cedent in the history of the Church. 
 
 That might be a valid objection in the case of a 
 perfectly new directory of public worship. 
 
 But their Graces forget, if I may presume to say 
 so, that our Book of Common Prayer is not, like the 
 Book of Leviticus, an entirely new directory of 
 public worship, giving rules for the first time to a 
 clergy who had no previous knowledge of the subject. 
 It is, on the contrary, a compilation from old Service 
 Books for the use of clergy who were perfectly 
 familiar with ail the details of a long-established 
 ceremonial. Naturally, therefore, it takes a great 
 deal for granted. When it orders that the orna- 
 ments of a certain clearly defined period ' shall be 
 retamed and be in use,' it necessarily follows that it 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 647 
 
 orders the ceremonies customarily connected with 
 those ornaments. That censers are among such 
 ornaments is undisputed. When therefore censers 
 are statutably ordered to ' be retained and be in use,' 
 what possible inference can we draw but that they 
 are to be used in the customary way — i.e. liturgi- 
 cally? 
 
 4. This interpretation makes the words ' at all times of 
 their ministrations ' ^ not merely unmeaning but misleading. 
 
 This objection implies that all the prescribed 
 ornaments are to be used at all the Services. But 
 that would be in conflict even with Privy Council 
 law, which decides that the cope is to be used at 
 some, but not ' at all, times of their ministration.' 
 The obvious meaning is that * at all times of their 
 ministration ' — i.e. during Divine Service — thecJergy 
 are to use the ornaments proper to each ministration. 
 This will be seen more plainly by placing the Kubric 
 of Edward's Second Book in juxtaposition with that 
 which superseded it. The former says : — • 
 
 And here is to be noted that the minister at the time 
 of the Communion, and at all other times in his ministra- 
 tion, shall use neither Alb, Vestment, nor Cope : but being 
 archbishop, or bishop, he shall have and wear a rochet ; 
 
 > The word in all three Rubrics is ' ministration.' The change 
 of the singular into the plural — of course a slip on the part of their 
 Graces — changes the meaning of the Rubric. ' At all times of their 
 ministration ' is equivalent to ' whenever they officiate.' This slip 
 is one of many indications of the ease with which really able men 
 are apt to err in construing language in a field of study in which 
 they are not at home. 
 
648 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and being a priest or deacon, he shall have and wear a 
 surplice only. 
 
 Elizabeth's Eubric says :— 
 
 And here is to be noted that the minister at the time 
 of the Communion, and at all other times in his ministra- 
 tion, shall use such ornaments in the Church as were in 
 use by authority of Parliament in the second year of the 
 reign of King Edward the VI. according to the Act of Par- 
 liament set in the beginning of this Book. 
 
 It is plain that Elizabeth's Eubric was simply a 
 reversal of Edw^ard's, and restored the ceremonial of 
 Edv^ard's second year at every ministration. That 
 does not mean — as the Judicial Committee declared 
 and the Primates have echoed — that the same orna- 
 ments and the same ceremonies were to be used at 
 all ministrations ; but that the practice of Edward's 
 second year should be followed in all ministrations. 
 If we are to follow Privy Council law the Primates' 
 decision would make the use of the cope on high 
 festivals compulsory at all ministrations in cathedrals 
 and collegiate churches. The argument based on 
 the words ' at all times of their ministration ' is thus 
 seen to crumble to pieces on close inspection. 
 
 We have now reached this point. The cere- 
 monial prescribed by the Ornaments Eubric cannot 
 mean anything ordered by Edward's First Prayer 
 Book: first, because that Book certainly did not 
 receive the Eoyai Assent, in other words did not 
 become a legal document, till three months after the 
 statutory date named in the Eubric ; and therefore. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 649 
 
 anything ordered by it coidd not be described legally 
 — and this is strictly a legal matter — as ordered ' by 
 the authority of Parliament ' in Edward's second 
 year; secondly, because the contemporary Eliza- 
 bethan Kubric, which claims expressly the authority 
 of the Act of 1559, connects ' by authority of Parlia- 
 ment' with the usage of Edward's second year, 
 not with any legislation in that year, thus excluding 
 Edward's First Prayer Book entirely from its pur- 
 view; thirdly, because the contemporary Latin version 
 of the Act of 1559 in Elizabeth's Latin Prayer Book 
 ■prescribes such ceremonial * quemadmodum moserat 
 in hac Ecclesia Anglicana ex authoritate Parliamenti 
 in anno secundo Kegni Kegis Edwardi Sexti.' 
 
 To what authoritative standard then does the 
 Ornaments Eubric refer ? Undoubtedly to the old 
 ceremonial as pruned and modified first toward the 
 end of Henry VIII. 's reign, and still further in the 
 beginning of the reign of Edward VI. by means of 
 his * Injunctions ' and * the Order of the Communion ' 
 — a Eucharistic Office in the vernacular which, minus 
 the Consecration Prayer, was substantially the same 
 as Edward's first Liturgy, including communion in 
 both kinds. All the usages now in debate undoubtedly 
 existed ' by authority of Parliament ' in Edward's 
 second year, and this in a double sense. 1 Eliz. 
 c. i. revives 25 Henry VIII. c. xix., which Mary had 
 repealed. But that revived statute, which is still in 
 force, contains the following : — 
 
 Provided also that such canons, constitutions, ordi- 
 nances, and synodals provincial being already made 
 
650 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 which be not contrariant nor repugnant to the laws, 
 statutes, and customs of this realm, nor to the damage 
 or hurt of the King's prerogative Eoyal, shall now stj|l 
 be used and executed as they were afore the making 
 of this Act, till such time as they be viewed, searched, or 
 otherwise ordered and determined by the said two-and- 
 thirty parsons, or the more part of them, according to the 
 tenor, form, and effect, of this present Act. 
 
 The revievv^ of the Canon law here contemplated 
 by Henry VIII. has never been made. This statu- 
 tory enactment is consequently lav^ at the present 
 moment, and its revival by Elizabeth gives statutory 
 authority to the ceremonial of Edv^ard's second year 
 even apart from her Act of Uniformity. It is 
 important to observe that this is the unqualified 
 opinion of Bishop Cosin, the leading and most 
 influential divine among the revisers of the Prayer 
 Book in 1662. After referring ' to the second year 
 of that king [Edv^ard VI.], v^hen his Service Book 
 and Injunctions were in force by authority of 
 Parliament,' he goes on : — 
 
 And in those books many other ornaments are ap- 
 pointed ; as, two lights to be set upon the altar or com- 
 munion table ; a cope or vestment for the priest and for 
 the bishop, besides their albs, surplices, and rochets, and 
 bishop's crosier-staff to be holden by him at his ministra- 
 tion and ordinations ; and those ornaments of the Church 
 which by former laws, not then abrogated, w^ere in use, 
 by virtue of the statute 25 Henry VIII. ; and for them the 
 provincial constitutions are to be consulted, such as have 
 not been repealed, standing then in the second year of 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 651 
 
 King Edward VI., and being still in force by virtue of this 
 Eubric and Act of Parliament.^ 
 
 There is thus, quite independently of the Parlia- 
 mentary status of ' the Order of the Communion,' 
 undoubted Parliamentary authority for the cere- 
 monial of Edward's second year. But I now 
 proceed to give my reasons for believing that ' The 
 Order of the Communion ' rests on ' the authority of 
 Parliament ; ' and ' The Order of the Communion,' 
 let us remember, was in legal force during the first 
 six months of Edward's third year. 
 
 On November 5, 1547, the Lower House of 
 Convocation unanimously passed a declaration sent 
 down from the Upper House, in favour of adminis- 
 tering the Holy Communion in both kinds. '^ ' The 
 Order of the Communion ' was compiled by a joint 
 Committee of both Provinces. The Committee 
 which was a large one, included the names Cranmer, 
 Bonner, Thirlby, Heath, of the Southern Province ; 
 and Holgate, Tunstall, and Aldrich, of the Northern 
 Province. Of the Lower House of the Southern 
 Province there were the Deans of St. Paul's, 
 Christ Church, Exeter, Lincoln, the Master of 
 Trinity (Cambridge), and Archdeacon Kobinson of 
 Leicester.^ 
 
 The Declaration of Convocation was embodied in 
 a Bill, which Cranmer brought into the House of 
 
 ' Cosin's Works, vol. v. pp. 438-9. 
 
 2 Collier, v. 220 ; Burnet, pt. ii. bk. i. p. 41. 
 
 ■ Joyce's Acts of the Church, pp. 104-9. 
 
652 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Lords on December 3, 1547, and which passed in 
 the form of 1 Edward VI. c. i., decreeing penalties 
 against revilers of ' the Sacrament of the Altar,' and 
 enjoining communion in both kinds. It is incredible 
 that each parish priest should be allowed to extem- 
 porise an ' Order of Communion ' for himself, Sunday 
 after Sunday, and at the very time, too, when the 
 authorities in Church and State were contemplating 
 the abolition of separate diocesan Uses in favour of 
 one uniform Use. The Act of Parliament plainly 
 assumes that the communion in both species, in the 
 vernacular, was to be accompanied by some litur- 
 gical form, and it suggests the kind of exhortation 
 which was afterwards expanded in ' The Order of 
 the Communion.' Canon Dixon, a most accurate 
 historian, writes : — 
 
 At the beginning of this year [1548, immediately after 
 the passing of the Act], in the month of January, a com- 
 mission of bishops and doctors had been nominated by 
 the Council, on the implied authority of the late Act 
 [1 Edward VI. c. i.] for the administration of the Eucharist 
 in both hinds, to compose an Order of Conimmmion in the 
 English tongue. 
 
 The words which I have put in itaHcs prove the.t 
 Canon Dixon believed that ' The Order of the Com- 
 munion ' rested on the Act. The book bears the 
 following imprimatur i 
 
 Imprinted at London the viii. day of March, in the 
 second year of the reign of our Sovereign Lord King 
 Edward the Sixth ; by Eichard Grafton, printer to nis 
 most Eoyal Majesty In the year of our Lord M.D.xlviii. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 653 
 
 It was issued under the sanction of a Boyal 
 Proclamation, which claimed expressly the authority 
 of the Act of Parliament, and referred to ' The Order 
 of the Communion ' as * such form and manner as 
 hereafter, by our authority, with the advice before 
 mentioned, is set forth and declared.' 
 
 In addition to this Proclamation, enjoining the 
 general use of ' The Order of the Communion,' the 
 Privy Council sent to every bishop, together with 
 the copies of the book, a circular letter enforcing its 
 use. The purport of this letter may be gathered 
 from the following extracts : — 
 
 After our most hearty commendations unto your Lord- 
 ships, where, in the Parliament late holden at West- 
 minster, it was, amongst other things, most godly esta- 
 blished that, according to the first institution and use of the 
 primitive Church, the most holy Sacrament of the Body 
 and Blood of our Saviour Jesus Christ should be distri- 
 buted to the people under the kinds of bread and wine ; 
 according to the effect tvhereof the King's Majesty minding, 
 with the advice and consent of the Lord Protector's 
 grace, and the rest of the Council, to have the said statute 
 well executed in such sort, as like as it is agreeable to the 
 Word of God, so the same may also he faithfully a7id 
 reverejitly received of his most loving subjects, to their 
 comfort and wealths, hath caused sundry of his Majesty's 
 'most grave and learned prelates and others, learned men in 
 the Scriptures, to assemble themselves for this matter, wJw, 
 after long conference together, have, with deliberate advice, 
 finally agreed upon such an Order, to be used in all places 
 of the King's Majesty's dominions, in the distribution of 
 the said most blessed sacrament as may appear unto you by 
 the Book thereof, which we send herewith unto you. 
 
654 THE KEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 The bishops accordingly are — 
 
 to cause these books to be delivered to every Parson, Vicar, 
 and Curate loithin your Diocese, with such diligence as 
 they may have sufficient time well to instruct and advise 
 themselves, for the distribution of the most holy Communion, 
 according to the order of this book, before this Easter time, 
 and that they may by your good means, be well directed to 
 use such good, gentle and charitable instruction of their 
 simple and unlearned parishioners as may be all to their 
 good satisfaction as 7nuch as may be, praying you to con- 
 sider that this Order is set forth to the intent there should 
 be in all parts of the Bealm, and among all men, one 
 uniform manner quietly used. The execution whereof, like 
 as it shall stand very much in the diligence of you and 
 others of your vocation ; so do ive eftsoons require you to 
 have a diligent respect thereunto, as ye tender the King's 
 Majesty's pleasure, and ivill answer to the contrary. 
 
 Surely it follows incontestably from the King's 
 Proclamation and the circular letter of his Council, 
 that statutory authority was claimed from the very 
 first for ' The Order of the Communion.' In a recent 
 controversy with me on this subject in the ' Guar- 
 dian,' my friend and late tutor (to whom T owe much), 
 the Kegius Professor of Ecclesiastical History in the 
 University of Oxford, peremptorily denied that ' The 
 Order of the Communion ' had either Koyal or 
 Parliamentary authority. I am bewildered. Dr. 
 Bright cannot have read, or must have forgotten, 
 the Council's circular letter, which bears the signa- 
 tures, among others, of Cranmer and the Lord 
 Chancellor. They claim in so many words the 
 authority of the statute for * The Order of the 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 655 
 
 Communion,' and the Primate and Lord Chancellor 
 must have known the relation of the two documents 
 to each other. Surely Dr. Bright will revise his 
 opinion in the light of these facts. I say this the 
 more confidently because all the authorities whom I 
 have consulted are on my side. Let me quote a 
 few. 
 
 Foxe, who gives the Council's circular letter 
 entire, says : — 
 
 By means as well of this letter, and the godly order 
 of the learned, as also of the statute and Act of Parlia- 
 ment before mentioned [1 Edward VI. c. i.] made for the 
 establishing thereof, all private blasphemous masses were 
 now by just authority fully abolished throughout the 
 Eealm of England.^ 
 
 To Foxe's mind * The Order of the Communion ' 
 was a most important fact in the history of the 
 Reformation. 
 
 The learned editor of Hayward's ' Life and Reign 
 of Edward VI.' says explicitly that ' The Order of 
 the Communion ' ' was pursuant to the Act An. i. 
 Edw. VI. for the Administration of the Sacrament 
 in both kinds.' ^ 
 
 Heylin writes :^ 
 
 So far the Parhament enacted, in relation to the thing 
 itself, as the subject-matter, that the Communion should 
 be delivered in both kinds to all the good people of the 
 kingdoms. But for the form in which it was to be 
 
 ' Foxe's Acts and Mon. p. 660, folio edition of 1641. The italics 
 in the quotations are mine. 
 P. 290, fol, ed. 
 
G56 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 administered, that was left wholly to the King, and by the 
 King committed to the care of the Bishops (of which 
 more hereafter) ; the Parliament declaring only, * That a 
 godly exhortation should be made by the ministers, therein 
 expressing the great benefit and comfort promised to 
 them which worthily receive the same, and the great 
 danger threatened by God to all such persons as should 
 unworthily receive it.' 
 
 Heylin then gives the names of the Joint Com- 
 mittee of Convocation (already described) who com- 
 piled ' The Order of the Commmiion,' and adds : — 
 
 Who being thus convened together, and taking into 
 consideration as well the right rule of the Scripture as the 
 usage of the primitive Church, agreed on such a form 
 and order as might comply with the intention of the King 
 and the Act of Parliament, without any just offence to the 
 Eomish party. ^ 
 
 Fuller writes : — 
 
 The First Edition of the Liturgy or Common 
 Prayer. — In the first year of King Edward VI. it was 
 recommended to the care of the most grave bishops, and 
 others, assembled by the King at his castle at Windsor ; 
 and, when by them completed, set forth in print, 1548, 
 with a proclamation in the King's name, to give authority 
 thereunto ; being also recommended unto every bishop by 
 special letters from the Lords of the Council to see the same 
 put in execution. And in the next year a penalty was 
 imposed by Act of Parliament on such who should de- 
 prave or neglect the use thereof.^ 
 
 Heylin, in his stringent criticism of Fuller's 
 
 » Hist, of Ref. i. 100. 119. " Ch. Hist. ii. 312. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 657 
 
 History, remarks on the last sentence of the above 
 quotation : — 
 
 Our author here mistakes himself and confounds the 
 business; making no difference between the whole first 
 Liturgy [i.e. the whole Prayer Book] of King Edward the 
 Sixth and a particular form of administration, &c. 
 
 Strictly speaking, of course, Heylin is right. 
 Yet there is something in Fuller's rejoinder : — 
 
 I wish that the nice distinction between the Liturgy 
 and tbe form of administration may be informative unto 
 him more tban it is to me.^ 
 
 Clearly Fuller regarded the Communion Office of 
 Edward's First Book as substantially the same as 
 * The Order of the Communion.' And so indeed it 
 is, except that in the former the Canon was in 
 Latin. 
 
 I think I may now claim to have proved to 
 demonstration that * The Order of the Communion ' 
 was in use ' in this Church of England by authority 
 of Parliament in the second year of the reign of 
 King Edward the VI., ' and was, combined with the 
 old service, the only Liturgy which was then in use 
 by authority of Parliament. Now among the rubrics 
 in the ' Order of the Communion ' is one forbidding 
 elevation, and another which says that there is to be 
 no * varying of any other rite or ceremony in the 
 Mass.' It is to the law, the strict hard letter of the 
 law, that the Primates, and such of their suffragans 
 
 * Appeal of Injured Innocence, p. 486. 
 
 U U 
 
658 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 as have adopted their ' Opinions,' have appealed. It 
 is to the lav^ that they call upon all the clergy to 
 conform in the matter of Incense and of Keservation. 
 Very v^^ell; but the strict letter of the law makes 
 the liturgical use of incense and the practice of 
 reservation for the communion of the sick part of 
 the customary law of the Church of England under 
 statutory authority. The ornaments belonging to 
 each were certainly ' in this Church of England by 
 authority of Parliament in the second year of the 
 reign of Kin^ Edward the VI.' That there should 
 be any controversy at all on the subject, in view of 
 the facts, is a signal proof of the power of pre- 
 judice to cloud the reason. Take the Parliamentary 
 sanction of ' The Order of the Communion,' for 
 instance. The reader has now seen, I think, that 
 the chief authorities in Church and State at the 
 time claimed statutory authority for it in the plainest 
 terms. And this fact is all the more striking because 
 ' The Order of the Communion ' might have claimed 
 statutory authority even apart from 1 Edward VI. c. i. 
 In a recent work of much interest a learned barrister 
 says that in the reigns of Henry VIII. and Edward VI. 
 •' binding force was allowed to the decrees of picked 
 committees of bishops and divines, made with the 
 confirmation of the King, upon matters of religion 
 and the rites and ceremonies thereof.' ^ The author 
 refers to 32 Henry VIII. c, xxvi., and certainly that 
 statute, which was not repealed, I believe, till the 
 
 * The Primacy of England, p. 188. By Samuel F. Hulton, of 
 the Middle Temple, Barrister-at-Law. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 659 
 
 present reign, seems to bear out his allegation. I 
 subjoin the passage, so that the reader may judge 
 for himself : — 
 
 Whereas the King's Majesty . . . hath appointed 
 . . . the archbishops and sundry bishops of both pro- 
 vinces . . . and also a great number of the most learned 
 honestest and most virtuous sort of the Doctors of 
 Divinity men of discretion judgment and good disposi- 
 tion of the realm, to the intent that . . . they should 
 declare by writing and publish as well the principal 
 articles and points of our faith and belief with the declara- 
 tion true understanding and observation of all such other 
 expedient points as by them, with his Grace's advice 
 counsel and consent, shall be thought needful and expe- 
 dient, and also for the lawful rites ceremonies and obser- 
 vations of God's service within his Grace's realm. . . . 
 Be it therefore enacted . . . that all and every 
 determinations declarations decrees definitions resolu- 
 tions and ordinances, as, according to God's Word and 
 Christ's Gospel, by his Majesty's advice and confirmation 
 by his letters patent, shall at any time hereafter be made 
 set forth declared defined resolved and ordained by the 
 said archbishops bishops and doctors now appointed, or 
 by otJier persons hereafter to be appointed by his Majesty 
 or else by the whole clergy of England, in or upon the 
 matters of Christ's religion and Christian faith and the 
 lawful rites ceremonies and observations of the same, 
 shall be in all and every point Hmitation and circumstance 
 thereof, by all his Grace's subjects and other residents 
 and inhabitants within the realm . . . fully believed 
 obeyed observed and performed ... as if the said deter- 
 minations declarations . . . had been by express words 
 terms and sentences plainly set out and contained in the 
 present Act. Provided that nothing be done ordained. . . . 
 
 uu 2 
 
660 THE EEPORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 by authority of this Act which shall be repugnant or con- 
 trariant to the laws and statutes of this realm.^ 
 
 That Edward VI. and his Council (which, be it 
 remembered, included the Primate) should have 
 made no reference to this statute, but claimed directly 
 the authority of the statute just passed, is proof posi- 
 tive that there was then no question at all that ' The 
 Order of the Communion ' was the direct offspring 
 of 1 Edward VI. c. i. It follows of course from the 
 Ornaments Eubric that whatever was lawful under 
 that ' Order ' is lawful still. Nothing short of the 
 repeal of the Statute of Elizabeth and the Ornaments 
 Eubric (which also is statute law) in favour of a 
 statutory prohibition can make the liturgical use of 
 incense and reservation for the communion of the 
 sick illegal. The fact is, the Archbishops, if I may 
 presume to say so, have proceeded on an erroneous 
 assumption as regaxds the Keformation. They have 
 assumed that the Reformation was a fresh start, 
 
 ^ 32 Henry VIII. c. xxvi. {Statutes of the Realm, printed by com- 
 mand, from Original Kecords and Authentic MS. 1817). Mr. Hulton's 
 interpretation of this statute is indirectly confirmed by the following 
 incident. Dr. Weston, ' Prolocutor of the Convocation in the first of 
 Queen Mary,' objected ' that the said Catechism [of 1552-53] was not 
 set forth by the agreement of that House.' Philpot, Archdeacon of 
 Winchester, answered that ' the said House had granted the authority 
 to make ecclesiastical laws unto certain persons to be appointed by 
 the King's Majesty, and therefore whatsoever ecclesiastical laws 
 they or the most part of them did set forth {according to the 
 statutes in that behalf provided), might be well said to be done in the 
 Synod in London.'— Heylin, Hist, of Ref. i. 258. Note the words 
 which I have put in italics, and see how * The Order of the Com- 
 munion ' thus rests on a twofold statutory basis : (1) 1 Ed. c. i. ; 
 (2) 32 Hen. VIII. xxvi. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 661 
 
 leaving a great gulf fixed between the Eeformation 
 Church and the preceding Church. They have 
 assumed in their reasoning, though probably not 
 consciously, that what took place was not so much a 
 reformation as a revolution. That is the real meaning 
 of the idea to which they sometimes give expression, 
 and which underlies the whole of their argument — 
 namely, that whatever is not expressly ordered is 
 tacitly forbidden. The Uniformity Act of 1559 is thus 
 the charter of a new dispensation, from the litera 
 scriptaoi which there must be no variation. Hence- 
 forth the ritual and ceremonial of the Church of Eng- 
 land must be ' none other or otherwise ' than the letter 
 of that Act prescribes — that is, not merely compliance 
 with the rubrics of the Prayer Book, but abstention 
 from anything whatever not expressly ordered thereby . 
 This view places the English Church of the sixteenth 
 century in much the same relation towards the 
 English Church of the preceding centuries as the 
 thirteen States of America towards the Mother 
 Country at the close of the War of Independence : 
 I mean in all matters of judicature and customary 
 law. But that view is a complete reversal of the 
 doctrine of our great divines and ecclesiastical law- 
 yers. The doctrine of our great divines will not be 
 disputed, and I have dealt with it in a measure in a 
 previous chapter. The doctrine of our ecclesiastical 
 lawyers agrees with that of our divines in insisting 
 on the identity of the Church of England before and 
 since the Reformation ; that event being not a fresh 
 start, but a return to primitive customs ; a restora- 
 
662 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 tion, not a revolution. From this followed the 
 general principle that what was not forbidden was 
 allowed. A catena of authorities might be cited in 
 confirmation of that assertion ; but it may suffice to 
 appeal to two eminent judges in this century. In 
 a case as to Lay Baptism (in 1810) Sir John Nichol, 
 Dean of the Arches, laid down the true doctrine with 
 axiomatic precision : — 
 
 In construing all laws it is proper to inquire how 
 the law previously stood, for it will require more express 
 and distinct terms to abrogate or change an old-established 
 law than to provide for new cases in which the formula 
 has been silent. 
 
 Then as to the sources of our ecclesiastical 
 law: — 
 
 The law of the Church of England would be deduced 
 from the ancient Canon law, and from particular constitu- 
 tions made in this country to regulate the English Church ; 
 from our own Canons ; from the Eubrics ; and from any 
 Act of Parliament which may have passed on the subject ; 
 and the whole may be illustrated by the writings of 
 eminent persons.^ 
 
 This indicates the sources from which the law 
 may be ascertained and illustrated, but leaves 
 untouched the previous rule, that ' express and 
 distinct terms ' are necessary ' to abrogate or change 
 an old-established law * about which there is no 
 question. That covers precisely the cases of Incense 
 and Eeservation. The law, as expounded by this 
 
 * PhilUmore^s Reports, 286 {Kemp v. Wickes). 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 663 
 
 eminent authority, is not to be taken merely from 
 the letter of statutes or rubrics, but from the ' old- 
 established law ' of the Church in so far as it has 
 not been expressly repealed. Traditional authority 
 was to be followed when not abolished by direct 
 legislation. 
 
 A generation later another Dean of Arches laid 
 down the same doctrine — Sir Herbert Jenner, in 
 Breehs v. Woolfrey. The question was the legality 
 of Prayers for the Dead, and the judgment, which is 
 a comprehensive and luminous one, is based on the 
 principle that at the Keformation all the old Catholic 
 doctrine was to be retained where it was not for- 
 bidden. One of the Articles condemns the * Eomish * 
 doctrine of Purgatory, but does not pronounce 
 Prayers for the Dead unlawful ; and not being 
 declared unlawful, they must be admitted to be law- 
 ful. Thus again you have the traditional doctrine 
 asserted that ' an old-established law ' of the Church 
 is valid unless invalidated by express legislation. 
 The Lambeth decisions lay down the opposite doc- 
 trine — namely, that the omission of an old practice 
 or ceremony means its prohibition together with 
 the prohibition of the doctrine which it symbolises. 
 And curiously enough one of the test illustrations is 
 another Lay Baptism case — namely, the case of 
 Mastin v. Escott. The advocates of Keservation 
 quoted the judgment in that case as upsetting the 
 main argument against Beservation. The Arch- 
 bishops, on the other hand, dismissed the judgment 
 as entirely irrelevant. 
 
664 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 I quote the Primate's exact words, because they 
 show that his Grace entirely missed the point of the 
 argument : — 
 
 The case of Mas tin v. Escott is quoted as showing 
 that our Courts of Law have held that an ancient practice 
 of the Church cannot be discontinued simply by mention 
 of it being excluded. The question before the Courts in 
 that case was whether a child that had been baptised by 
 a layman was really baptised at all. The question was 
 not whether such a baptism was regular or irregular, but 
 whether it was valid. And though the question of the 
 regularity of the baptism was frequently introduced by 
 counsel, and is mentioned by the Courts, yet there are no 
 words in the judgment of either Court which expressly 
 deal with this point. On the question of the validity of 
 the baptism the decision is perfectly clear and full. In 
 the present case no question is raised on the validity of 
 the sacrament when administered by means of consecrated 
 elements that have been reserved. It is not contended 
 that the communicant does not thereby obtain the great 
 gift which it is the purpose of the sacrament to give. Nor 
 have I to decide that point. The question for me to 
 decide is whether the priest is or is not forbidden to 
 administer the sacrament in that way, and on this point 
 the case of Mastin v. Escott decides nothing.^ 
 
 The piece de resistance in the controversy on the 
 validity of Lay Baptism is Waterland's famous 
 Letters. His argument against the validity of Lay 
 Baptism is a masterly piece of reasoning, which he 
 condenses in the following dilemma : — 
 
 It is very certain that the Church of England forbids 
 Baptism Lay ; in all ordinary cases directly, and in extra- 
 * Times report. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 665 
 
 ordinary cases iroplicitly ; having made no provision 
 for cases of necessity ; which yet she ought to have done, 
 and very probably would have done, had she thought Lay- 
 baptism valid, since the salvation of many infants may be 
 nearly concerned in it.^ 
 
 If the grounds on which the Archbishops con- 
 demn Reservation * in any form ' is sound, Water- 
 land's argument is unansv^erable. The two Prayer 
 Books of Edward and the Prayer Book of Elizabeth 
 allowed Lay Baptism. In 1604 a rubric was inserted 
 requiring the officiant to be * the lawful minister,' 
 and that injunction has remained ever since. The 
 term ' lawful minister ' excludes prima facie the 
 ministry of a layman. So thought and argued 
 Mr. Escott, a parish priest, who was prosecuted for 
 refusing to bury a child who had only received Lay 
 Baptism. His defence was that the child had died 
 unbaptised, having received only Lay Baptism. If 
 the 28th Article and Post Communion rubric forbid 
 Reservation * in any form,' much more is Lay Baptism 
 in any form forbidden by the omission of the rubric 
 which sanctioned it and the substitution of a rubric 
 restricting the administration of the rite to the 
 ' minister of the parish, or any other lawful minister 
 that can be procured.' 
 
 So Mr. Escott argued. Yet the Court of Arches 
 decided against him in a learned judgment, and sus- 
 pended him for three months for acting on the rea- 
 soning of the Lambeth decisions before his time. 
 He appealed to the Judicial Committee, and fared 
 
 • Works, vol. X. p. 190. 
 
666 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 even worse there. For that august tribunal not only 
 confirmed the judgment of the Court of Arches, but 
 did so with an affluence of legal knowledge and 
 illustration which tore Mr. Escott's case to tatters. 
 These two judgments are so important both in their 
 general bearing on the governing principle of inter- 
 pretation applicable to our Bubrics, Canons, and 
 Articles, and in their bearing in particular on the 
 Lambeth decisions, that it may be useful to give 
 their main points. They both proceed on a line of 
 interpretation directly the reverse of the Lambeth 
 decisions. The * none other or otherwise ' argument 
 is not so much as noticed. Its application to Canons, 
 Eubrics, or Articles did not occur to either tribunal 
 as a bare possibility. They do not * regard it, and 
 pass on ; ' they pass on without regarding it, laying 
 down doctrines and principles which are simply fatal 
 to it. A few extracts will make this clear. The 
 Dean of Arches, Sir Herbert Jenner Fust, goes 
 back to ' the practice of the primitive Church ' in the 
 matter of Lay Baptism : and what he meant by the 
 primitive Church is very different from the definition 
 laid down in the Lambeth decision on Incense : — 
 
 The existence of the practice [of Lay Baptism] at this 
 very early period, during the first four or five centuries — 
 the best and purest ages of the Church — shows that the 
 practice does not owe its origin to the corruptions of Eome 
 [as was contended by Mr. Escott]. That many supersti- 
 tions were grafted upon this practice is true, but that will 
 not affect the present question. And the evidence of 
 Tertullian, St. Austin, and St. Jerome is sufficient to 
 establish the fact, that the practice existed at the time. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 667 
 
 See how this learned judge — a man well versed 
 in the principles and rules of ecclesiastical law — 
 brushes aside with something like scorn the argu- 
 ment that a usage, not wrong in itself and sanc- 
 tioned by the practice of the primitive Church 
 'during the first four or five centaries,' had, on 
 account of Roman corruptions, ceased to be lawful 
 in the Church of England in virtue of a rubric 
 which seems by implication to condemn it — an im- 
 plication far stronger than anything which can be 
 alleged against Incense and Eeservation. Nor did 
 the Dean of the Arches rest his case solely on the 
 usage of the primitive Church. He was far too 
 sound a lawyer to make such a mistake. So he goes 
 on : — 
 
 After the time of St. Austin the ancient Canons bear 
 ample testimony to the universal adoption of it [Lay 
 Baptism] as the rule and order of the Church. ... 
 
 It is sufficient to state that the validity of Lay Baptism 
 was recognised not only by the general Canon Law of 
 Europe, and throughout the Eastern and Western Churches, 
 but also by the law of England and of the English Church 
 before the Eeformation. 
 
 And he refers, as does the judgment of the 
 Judicial Committee, to an authority somewhat con- 
 tenmed in this controversy : I mean Lyndwood. 
 Now if this argument is sufficient to establish the 
 validity of Lay Baptism, it is a fortiori valid to 
 establish the liturgical use of incense and the practice 
 of reserving the Sacrament for the communion of 
 the sick : for the rubric which seems to forbid Lay 
 
668 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Baptism is far more precise than anything that can 
 be quoted against Incense or Beservation. If, on 
 the other hand, the post-Communion rubric or 28th 
 Article suffice to prove the illegality of Incense and 
 Eeservation, it follows irresistibly that the Court of 
 Arches and the Judicial Committee were wrong in 
 pronouncing Lay Baptism legal. There is no possible 
 escape from that dilemma. 
 
 Let us now turn to the affirmation of the judg- 
 ment of the Dean of the Arches by the Judicial 
 Committee. The Court consisted of Lord Wynford, 
 Lord Brougham, Mr. Justice Erskine, and Dr. 
 Lushington. The judgment was delivered, and no 
 doubt written, by Lord Brougham — a man of genius, 
 who had a fine grasp of the general principles of law 
 in all its departments and correlations, whatever 
 defects may be imputed to him in other respects. 
 
 The Court, in order to make its argument plain, 
 proceeds ' to consider what the law was at the date ' 
 when the change in the rubric in the Baptismal 
 Office was made. 
 
 Without distinctly ascertaining this we cannot satis- 
 factorily determine what change the rubric of 1661, adopted 
 into the 13 and 14 Charles II. c. 4, made, and in what 
 state it left the law on this head; because it is very 
 possible that the same enactment in a Statute, or the same 
 direction in a Kubric, bearing one meaning, may receive 
 one construction when it deals for the first time with a 
 given subject-matter, and have another meaning and con- 
 struction when it deals with a matter that has already 
 been made the subject of enactment or direction ; and this 
 is most specially the case where the posterior enactment 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 669 
 
 or direction deals with the matter without making any 
 reference to the prior enactment or direction. Still more 
 is it necessary to note the original state of the law when 
 it is the Common Law that comes in question as well as 
 the Statute. . . . We are therefore to see what the rubric 
 prescribes at and prior to 1603 — this being, the statutory 
 provision then in force, and adopting the Common Law 
 prevailing for 1,400 years over Christian Europe. 
 
 After some observations on the Burial Service, 
 the judgment goes on : — 
 
 But, secondly, and what is much more material to our 
 present inquiry, it is clear that the rubric and conse- 
 quently the statute down to 1603, and indeed to 1662, the 
 date of the Uniformity Act, authorised Lay Baptism, and 
 placed it on the same footing with clerical baptism in 
 point of efficacy. . . . The same doctrine was held 
 and practice formed upon it in the Eoman Catholic 
 Church from a very early period. ... It had become 
 universally accepted by both (East and West) in the time 
 of St. Austin. . . . The Constitutions of Archbishop 
 Peckham in Lyndwood's Collection (bearing date 1281), 
 though severely denouncing a layman who shall intrude 
 himself into the office without necessity, yet declare the 
 baptism valid which is celebrated by laymen, and state 
 that it is not to be repeated. 
 
 The position therefore being undeniable that previous 
 to 1603 . . . Lay Baptism, though discountenanced and 
 even forbidden unless in case of necessity, was yet valid, 
 and this being the common law ^ ... we are to see if any 
 change was made in that law as it thus stood. - - - 
 
 ' The judgment here parenthetically defines ' the Common Law ' 
 as 'not the law made by Statute and Eubric, but the law by 
 Statute and Eubric recognised.' 
 
670 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 The rubric of 1603, instead of directing * those present ' 
 in the case of private baptism, as the former rubrics had 
 done, directs the * lawful minister ' to say the prayer if 
 time permit, and to dip or sprinkle the child and repeat 
 the words. The rubric of 1661 explains what shall be 
 intended by 'lawful minister,' substituting for that 
 expression the words ' minister of the parish, or, in his 
 absence, other lawful minister that can be procured.' It 
 there prescribes a prayer to be used by the minister, which 
 prayer is not to be found either in the Liturgies of Edward VI. 
 and Elizabeth, or in that of 1603. We may pass over 
 the rubric of 1603 (1604) . . . because until 1662 there 
 was no statutory authority for any change of the law 
 which had been established at the date of 1603 (or 1604) 
 . . . But as in 1662 the present Uniformity Act of 13 
 and 14 Charles II. c. 4 was passed, and gave force and 
 effect to that date, it becomes necessary to see whether or 
 not that Eubric changed the former ones, those of Edward 
 and Elizabeth. 
 
 The Court decided that it did not, and it founded 
 its conclusion on the following broad general prin- 
 ciple : — 
 
 Generally speaking, when anything is established by 
 statutory provisions the enactment of a new provision 
 must clearly indicate an intention to abrogate the old ; 
 else both will be understood to stand together, if they 
 may. But more especially where the Common Law 
 is to be changed, and most especially the Common 
 Law which a statutory provision had recognised and 
 enforced, the intention of any new enactment to 
 abrogate it must be plain to exclude a construction by 
 which both may stand together. This principle, which 
 is plainly founded on reason and common sense, has 
 been largely sanctioned by authority. [After some re- 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 671 
 
 marks on Coke] But the rule which is laid down in 2 
 Inst. 200 has been adopted by all the authorities, that * a 
 statute made in the affirmative, without any negative 
 expressed or implied, doth not take away the common 
 law.' , . . Here the [new law] . . . must be taken as an 
 addition to and not a substitution for the former, unless 
 the intention plainly appear to make it substitutionary 
 and not cumulative. The proof is on those who would 
 make it substitutionary and not cumulative. . . . 
 
 The clear and unqualified opinion upon the point, and 
 post litem motam of the two Metropolitans and fourteen 
 other prelates, has also been properly referred to, and is 
 no doubt of great weight. But the question is not to be 
 decided by a reference to the opinions, however respectable, 
 of individuals, eminent for their learning, or distinguished 
 by their stations in the Church ; and these authorities are 
 chiefly valuable as bearing testimony to the fact that the 
 construction of the Eubrics of 1603 and 1661 was acted 
 upon, which construction assumed no change to have 
 taken place in the former law, the common law of 
 all Christendom, before the Eeformation of the Anglican 
 Church, and, both before and after that happy event, the law 
 of the same Church up to the date of the Canons of 1603 : 
 a law which was recognised by the statutes of Edward and 
 Elizabeth, and which, as nothing but express enactment 
 could abrogate, so we might the rather expect to find 
 contemporaneous usage confirm, when no abrogation had 
 been effected. 
 
 Now if the reader will turn back to the extract 
 which I have quoted (p. 664) from the Primate's 
 * Opinion ' on the question of Keservation, he will 
 see that his Grace misapprehended altogether the 
 reference to the case of Mastin v. Escott. The point 
 is not the matter of that judgment — that is quite 
 
672 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 irrelevant to the issue — but the ratio dicendi of the 
 judgment — the general rule, that is, of interpretation 
 which led the Court to its conclusion. That general 
 rule is this : that in the interpretation of Rubrics, 
 Canons, and Articles the judge must have regard to 
 the Common Law of Christendom as well as to the 
 particular local or national law ; that the omission 
 of any part of this Common Law, and its apparent 
 supersession by a new law, must not be regarded as 
 the abrogation of the old law that has been omitted 
 but not formally repealed; and that consequently 
 the old law and the new may stand together, unless 
 the contrary is expressly provided for. Nothing 
 can be plainer than the language of the Court, that 
 
 * where anything is established by statutory pro- 
 visions, the enactment of a new provision must 
 clearly indicate an intention to abrogate the old ; 
 else both will be understood to stand together if 
 they may.' Therefore Lay Baptism was still legal 
 although the rubric which sanctioned it had been 
 withdrawn in favour of a rubric which requires a 
 
 * lawful minister ' for the administration of the 
 Sacrament, since neither the new rubric itself, nor 
 the subsequent statute which sanctioned it, expresses 
 any intention to abrogate the Common Law of 
 Christendom in this respect. 
 
 It would be impossible to produce a more exact 
 counterpart of the question before the Archbishops, 
 with this difference, that the rubric which seems to 
 forbid Lay Baptism is very much clearer and stronger 
 than anything which can be quoted against either 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 673 
 
 Incense or Eeservation. Yet the Archbishops brush 
 aside the judgment in Mastin v. Escott as a pure 
 irrelevancy ! Could we have stronger evidence of 
 their failure — through lack of familiarity with the 
 whole subject — to apply the proper key to the inter- 
 pretation of the documents before them ? And how 
 can a decision based on so fundamental a fallacy be 
 urged on the clergy as a law which they are bound 
 in conscience and by the terms of canonical sub- 
 scription to obey ? 
 
 But I must in justice admit that the Primate 
 was in this matter, as in others, following an illus- 
 trious, but a bad, example. The Judicial Committee, 
 in Westerton v. Liddell, ruled that 'the ornaments 
 of the Church, whether those worn or those other- 
 wise used by the minister, were to be according to 
 the First Prayer Book.' In the Purchas case the 
 same Court, though not the same judges, gave a 
 precisely contrary decision. How did the Court get 
 over this awkward difficulty ? By the transparent 
 sophism that the legality of the vestments of the 
 minister was not before the Court in Westerton v. 
 Liddell. Quite true, and quite irrelevant. But the 
 ratio dicendi of that decision covered the vestments of 
 the minister as well as of the altar. Not less clearly 
 does the ratio dicendi of the judgments of the Court 
 of Arches and of the Judicial Committee in Mastin v. 
 Escott cover the legality of Incense and Beservation. 
 
 The foundation on which the decision against 
 Eeservation rests having been shown to be unsound, 
 the superstructure reared upon it must be rejected 
 
 XX 
 
674 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 as unstable. But it may be well to point out some 
 fallacies of reasoning in detail. 
 
 The Primate relies mainly on the 28th Article. 
 I have dealt with that article in a previous chapter 
 (see pp. 160-71), and, with all humility and defer- 
 ence, I retain my opinion. But his Grace's criticism 
 here strikes me as extraordinary : — 
 
 To say that the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was 
 not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted 
 up, or worshipped, is to say that those who do those 
 things use for one purpose what our Lord ordained for 
 another. 
 
 * Those who do those things ' — i.e. reserve the 
 Sacrament for ceremonial exposition and proces- 
 sions. But no such persons appeared at the 
 Lambeth 'Hearing.' Those who appeared there 
 reserved the Sacrament for the purpose of com- 
 municating the sick ; and how can that be described 
 as ' using for one purpose what our Lord ordained 
 for another ? But his Grace insists that the 
 Article condemns * any external act of devotion, and 
 this is the chief object of prohibition.' Why then 
 did not his Grace order the reserved Sacrament to 
 be kept, according to ancient precedent, locked up 
 in a tabernacle, or in an aumbry in the vestry, with 
 nothing to indicate its presence ? But he has pro- 
 nounced it illegal 'in any form.' Moreover, Lay 
 Baptism was declared legal in spite of the supersti- 
 tions which had clustered round it ; and the sign of 
 the cross in baptism, which does not approach in 
 practical importance the reservation of the Sacra- 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 675 
 
 ment for the sick, is rendered obligatory, although 
 the SOfch Canon admits that ' Popish superstition and 
 error ' were connected with it. But the episcopate 
 of that day laid down the wise rule, that * the abuse 
 of a thing doth not take away the lawful use of it.' 
 
 But the Primate's dictum, I venture most 
 humbly and respectfully to suggest, condemns the 
 doctrine and practice of almost all our great divines. 
 The language of Archbishop Bramhall, which I 
 have quoted in a previous chapter (pp. 144-5), is in 
 harmony with the doctrine of our representative 
 divines. It is therefore a very serious thing indeed 
 to find the Primate— apparently with the con- 
 currence of the Metropolitan of the Northern 
 Province — condemning such language and practice 
 as superstitious and illegal. Ajid it is rendered all 
 the more serious by the fact that the Judicial 
 Committee — reluctantly, but constrained by the 
 irresistible logic of facts — declared the legality of 
 what the Primate has condemned as illegal. Nor 
 does the difficulty end even here. For the Primate 
 has declared that the Church of England has 
 * emphatically repudiated ' ' any external act of 
 devotion ' to the Blessed Sacrament. Yet the 
 Church of England emphatically insisted — against 
 the energetic protest of the Puritans — on the * ex- 
 ternal act of devotion ' signified by kneeling, at the 
 reception of the Sacrament. The rubric on kneeling 
 in Edward's Second Book might give some colour to 
 the Primate's view; but is not that view irrecon- 
 cilable with our present rubric? We know, as a 
 
 XX 2 
 
676 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 fact, that the rubric was amended in 1661-2 for the 
 very purpose of excluding the meaning . which his 
 Grace's words seem to imply. And I wonder it did 
 not occur to his Grace that he was passing a severe 
 censure on the American Church and on the Scottish 
 Episcopal Church, both of which practise reservation 
 for the sick, and find nothing illegal in it even 
 under the English Prayer Book. 
 
 I have already remarked on the Primate's denun- 
 ciation of the communion of the half-conscious sick 
 as ' a magical charm,' in apparent forgetfulness that 
 such communions have always been condemned, and 
 are advocated by none. But when he adds : ' The 
 Church long ago gave up the practice of administering 
 it to infants,' I am puzzled. Fdr, in matter of fact, 
 the Eastern Church in all its branches has retained 
 the practice of infant communion to this day. Burke 
 avowed his inability ' to bring an indictment against 
 a whole nation.' Is it not harder still to bring an 
 indictment against a whole Church enjoying the 
 allegiance of many nations ? And does not the 
 indictment recoil on our own Church — indeed, on 
 the whole Catholic Church throughout the world ? 
 not simply because infant communion was at one 
 time the practice of the Church universal,' but 
 because his Grace's argument would make the 
 baptism of infants *a magical charm'? The com- 
 
 - ' It is beyond dispute that as she baptised infants and gave them 
 the unction of chrism, with imposition of hands, so she [the primitive 
 Church] admitted them to a participation of the Eucharist as soon as 
 they were baptised, and ever after . . . for at least eight centuries.' — ■ 
 Bingham, v. 174. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 677 
 
 munion of infants is declared to be * a magical charm ' 
 since faith is required for the reception of it. Yes, 
 but faith is required for the reception of baptism 
 also. How then shall we meet the objection of the 
 Baptist ? Do not our Lord's teaching and example 
 illustrate the efficacy of vicarious faith ? Was it the 
 faith of the Syrophoenician woman's daughter, or of 
 the nobleman's son, or of the epileptic demoniac 
 boy, or of the dead child of Jairus, that wrought 
 the cure in each case ? Was it not, on the contrary, 
 the faith of those who acted the part of mediators ? 
 Who has a right to say that even infants may not 
 receive benefit from a Sacrament administered on the 
 faith of others ? We know too little of these things 
 to be in a position to dogmatise, especially with the 
 example of our Lord and the practice of His Church 
 before us. 
 
 The Archbishop of York insists on * the declara- 
 tion made ' by an incumbent ' at the time of his 
 admission to his benefice,' as forbidding Eeservation. 
 He ' quotes only the portion referring to the question 
 before us,' which is as follows : — 
 
 In public prayer and the ^ administration of the 
 Sacraments I will use the form prescribed in the said 
 Book, and none other, except so far as shall be ordered by 
 lawful authority. 
 
 ' The article is of course an inadvertent interpolation which has, 
 I think, misled the Archbishop's mind a little as to the meaning of 
 the passage. Without the article the adjective ' public ' qualifies 
 ' administration of the Sacraments ' as well as * prayer,' and con- 
 sequently excludes private ministrations from the terms of the 
 Declaration. 
 
678 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 His Grace asks : * Is the ministration of the 
 reserved Sacrament, and therefore Keservation it- 
 self, any part of the form prescribed in the said 
 Book ? ' I am not sure that I understand the argu- 
 ment impHed in this question. The ministration of 
 the reserved Sacrament, as I understand the matter, 
 is in strict accord with * the form prescribed in the 
 said Book.' The fact of carrying it to the sick 
 man's chamber no more infringes the prescribed 
 form than the fact of carrying it to an invaHd in a 
 pew in the church or in an invalid's chair in the 
 porch, as I have seen. I really cannot understand 
 what the Archbishop means. I cannot see the 
 smallest violation of the Declaration which his 
 Grace has quoted. Does he really hold that all 
 through the period during which the First Prayer 
 Book of Edward was in use the whole English clergy 
 were in a state of chronic violation of the law ? For 
 the famous ' none other or otherwise ' is taken from 
 the Uniformity Act which authorised that Book 
 with its sanction of the reserved Sacrament. But 
 there was no fresh form, for the general confession, 
 absolution, and the * comfortable words,' cannot in 
 any accurate liturgical sense be called another 
 form. 
 
 I have already (pp 163-167) discussed the post- 
 Communion rubric — * but if any remain ' &c. — and 
 shown, as I believe, that it does not touch the 
 question of Reservation at all. The Archbishop of 
 York, adopting Dr. Bright 's argument, makes the 
 following answer : — 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 679 
 
 It was argued that the rubric requiring the reverent 
 consumption of the remainder of the consecrated bread 
 and wine which had not -been required for the Communion 
 did not forbid the reservation of a certain quantity set 
 aside for this purpose in' the course of the service, and 
 that this portion was therefore not included in what 
 remained after the Communion. But it is evident that 
 the whole force of this contention disappears unless it can 
 be shown that there was authority or permission for 
 making such reservation ; and this most important link 
 in the argument is altogether wanting. But, apart from 
 there being no evidence to this effect, it would seem 
 reasonable to expect that a point so important should 
 have been made clear by the simple insertion of the 
 words, 'except such portion as has been reserved for 
 private administration.' There being no hint of such an 
 exception, the only alternative is to understand the rubric 
 in the plain meaning which appears on the surface — that 
 all that had been consecrated and not then used should 
 be reverently consumed immediately after the close of the 
 service. 
 
 But this argument proves too much, for it would 
 make Keservation illegal in the Church of England 
 before the Keformation. Our rubric in its present 
 form is due to the suggestion of Cosin, and it is 
 probably his composition.^ Cosin, like most bishops 
 in those days, was learned in the Canon Law ; and 
 the rubric under consideration is in substance an old 
 pre-Eeformation direction. Here it is : — 
 
 Tribus gradibus commissa sunt Sacramenta Divinorum 
 Secretorum, id est, Presbytero, Diacono, et ministro : qui 
 cum timore, et tremore clericorum reliquias fragmentorum 
 
 * Cosin's Worksy v. 519. 
 
680 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Dominici custodire debent. Tanta in altari certe hdlo- 
 causta offerantur, quanta populo sufficere debeant. Quod 
 si remanserint [nimirum ex holocaustis et elementis con- 
 secratis] in crastinum non reserventur ; sed cum timore, et 
 tremore, clericorum diligentid consumantur} 
 
 Lyndwood anticipated the Archbishop's objection, 
 and gave an explanation of the above rubric v^hich 
 is equally applicable to ours : — 
 
 Presbyter semper habebit Eucharistiam paratam 
 propter infirmantes, nee obstat co. d. c. tribus, ubi 
 prohibetur Hostias plures in Altari dimissas reservare, 
 quia verum est quod non debent reservari ad opus 
 consecrantium, sed opus morientium.'^ 
 
 In commenting on the rubric (* , . if any of 
 the bread and wine remain ' &c.) Cosin quotes from 
 the Corpus Juris Canonici the above direction to 
 consume what remains. So that in transferring it to 
 our Prayer Book he evidently adopted it with its 
 ancient meaning, and most certainly with no idea 
 that he was thereby supplying a future Archbishop 
 of York with a constructive case against the legality 
 of Reservation. Here are the words with which 
 Cosin prefaces his quotation of the old Canon Law 
 rubric about what remains of the consecrated ele- 
 ments after Communion : — 
 
 There was order taken for it [the unconsumed 
 remainder] of old, which were well to be observed still, 
 
 * Corpus Juris Canonici, Decret. iii., Pars da Consecratione Dist. 
 ii. c. xxiii. 
 
 "^ Provinciale. lib. iii. tit. 2G. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 681 
 
 that no more should be brought, at least consecrated upon 
 the altar, than would suffice to communicate the people, 
 and if any remained, that the priests should reverently 
 receive it.* 
 
 It is no answer to say that this Latin rule, 
 adopted into the Corpus, is an extract from a spurious 
 epistle of St. Clement. Its adoption by the mediaeval 
 canonists bears w^itness to the custom of the time. 
 
 The Archbishop of York relies also on ' the 
 published utterances of clergy and others during the 
 period which followed upon the accession of Queen 
 Elizabeth,' as ' showing very clearly that the custom 
 had been suppressed and was almost entirely aban- 
 doned.' Now I must say very respectfully that I 
 attach no importance whatever to those published 
 utterances. Mr. Dibdin's catena consists mostly of 
 Puritans, and I have already shown that they exalted 
 their own prejudices into law and set the law of the 
 land at defiance whenever and wherever they could — 
 even men so eminent as Bishop Jewel and Archbishop 
 Sandys. It would be just as easy to prove the il- 
 legality of crosses, candlesticks, daily service, weekly 
 Communion, cope, choral services, by the published 
 utterances of such men. It was at them that the 
 Advertisements were aimed in the hope of pulling 
 them up to a minimum of decent submission to the 
 law. No doubt they abolished Keservation as they 
 abolished many other legal usages. Why indeed 
 should they reserve ? Here is one of ' the published 
 
 ' Cosin's Works, v. 131. 
 
682 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 utterances ' which Mr. Dibdin has culled from the 
 writings of one of these men against Eeservation : — 
 
 But we discern the Lord's Body, as the Apostle here 
 hath taught us, ' Let a man therefore examine himself,' &c. 
 Not by making superstitious provisions for the bread and 
 wine which remaineth after Communion ; whereof there is 
 no greater account to be made than of the water after 
 baptism, for the consecration extendeth to no more bread 
 and wine than is bestowed according to Christ's institu- 
 tion. . . . And the Church of England . . . hath ap- 
 pointed, for avoiding of superstition, and all other in- 
 conveniences, that the Minister shall have the bread and 
 wine to his private use.^ 
 
 A fine witness truly to prove the illegality of 
 Reservation ! His evidence is just as good against 
 the reverent consumption of what remains, as pre- 
 scribed by our present Rubric . 
 
 I observe, further, that some of 'the published 
 utterances ' on which the Archbishop of York relies, 
 prove a good deal too much. For instance. Bishop 
 Hooper is quoted by Mr. Dibdin as follows : — 
 
 No man, for a good intention, beside the Word of God, 
 should add anything to the doing of this Supper, or take 
 anything from it. We read not that they celebrated the 
 Supper in any private house for any sick person. 
 
 It shall not be prejudicial, nor nothing derogate the 
 honour of the Blessed Sacrament, though it never be 
 celebrated in a private house; nor he that abstaineth 
 from the receiving of it out of the congregation, nothing 
 the worse Christian man. In time past it was suJ05cient 
 
 ' Reservation of the Sacrament, p. 46 (Mr. Dibdin's Speech at 
 the Lambeth * Hearing '). 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 683 
 
 for the people to celebrate openly this Holy Supper, and 
 was not used to be brought unto the sick.^ 
 
 This is quite as much against private com- 
 munion of any kind as against Reservation. And 
 as a matter of fact the Puritans disliked the Office 
 for the Private Communion of the Sick more than 
 they did Reservation for the sick. Their objection 
 to both was that private communion in any form 
 was a superstition, inasmuch as it implied some 
 mysterious sacredness in the Sacrament. In the eyes 
 of Hooper and the rest the Eucharist was nothing 
 more than a solemn meal calculated to remind the 
 recipients of the death of Christ, and thus excite 
 lively emotions of pious gratitude. Their ideal was 
 a long table at which the communicants sat, and 
 partook of bread and wine blessed by one of the 
 company, who might have been a layman. Now, 
 seriously, are we to take * the public utterances ' of 
 these men as valid evidence against Reservation? And 
 if we are, why not against the private communion 
 of the sick also ? Have the Archbishops carefully 
 considered what manner of men crowds of those 
 Puritan clergy were ? In a letter from Archbishop 
 Parker to Grindal (then Bishop of London) in 
 August 1560, the Primate says : — 
 
 We and you both . . : have heretofore admitted into 
 the ministry sundry artificers and others not traded 
 and brought up in learning, and, as it happened in a 
 multitude, some that were of base occupations : forasmuch 
 as now by experience it is seen that such manner of men, 
 
 ^ Beservation of the Sacrament, pp. 102-3. 
 
684 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 partly by reason of their former profane arts, partly by 
 their light behaviour otherwise and trade of life, are very 
 offensive unto the people ; yea, and to the wise of this 
 realm are thought to do great deal more hurt than good, 
 the Gospel thereby sustaining slander.^ 
 
 In the following November, Parker writes again 
 to Grindal about the state of his diocese, and among 
 other questions which he asks about the London 
 clergy is this : * How many of them, as well of your 
 Cathedral Church, as of others beneficed in your 
 diocese, be neither priests nor deacons ? ' ^ Would 
 beneficed laymen, some of them ignorant tradesmen 
 of ' light behaviour,' be likely to attach any import- 
 ance to the Eucharist at all, whether administered 
 by Eeservation or otherwise ? To my mind one of 
 the strongest proofs of the Divine Providence which 
 has watched over the Church of England is the fact 
 of her having escaped alive out of the hands of the 
 host of plunderers, fanatics, and ignorant bigots who 
 were admitted in Elizabeth's reign into her ministry, 
 sometimes by episcopal ordination, and sometimes 
 without. The quarrel of the Puritans was with the 
 whole sytem of worship and Church government 
 recognised in the Prayer Book, and when they got 
 the upper hand they abolished both. And are we, 
 forsooth, to take our theology and law of ritual from 
 such men ? We see the natural i^esult of their policy 
 in Burleigh's terrible description of the irreligious 
 condition of England in the year 1572.^ 
 
 ' Correspondence of Archbishop Parker, p. 120. 
 ■^ Ibid. p. 128. =* See ante, p. 104. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 685 
 
 But some of Mr. Dibdin's quotations are ir- 
 relevant. For instance, Cranmer says : — 
 
 Innocent III., about 1,215 years after Christ, did ordain 
 that this Sacrament and Chrism should be kept under 
 lock and key. But yet no mention is made of hanging 
 the Sacrament on the High Altar, nor of the worshipping 
 of it. 
 
 This passage shows that Cranmer's objection 
 was to the Eeservation of the Sacrament for hanging 
 up for worship instead of for communicating the 
 sick, and is a good illustration of the intention of 
 the 28th Article. A great many of the quotations 
 selected by Mr. Dibdin and others against Eeserva- 
 tion and the liturgical use of Incense are of this 
 irrelevant sort, and may be aptly illustrated from the 
 51st Psalm : — 
 
 For Thou desirest no sacrifice, else would I give it 
 Thee ; but Thou delightest not in burnt-offerings. The 
 sacrifice of God is a troubled spirit : a broken and 
 contrite heart, O God, shalt Thou not despise. 
 
 Take that passage by itself, and you prove that 
 the Psalmist condemned the whole sacrificial worship 
 of the Temple. But read on and you will find that 
 you have made a mistake in taking a part for the 
 whole. Let sacrifice be offered in the right spirit, 
 and — 
 
 Then shalt Thou be pleased with the sacrifice of 
 righteousness, with the burnt-offerings and oblations : 
 then shall they offer young bullocks upon Thine altar. 
 
686 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Truth is a frequent sufferer from partial quota- 
 tion. I have seen quotations from the Fathers in 
 favour of the hturgical use of incense explained 
 away v^ith as much justice as the condemnation of 
 sacrificial v^orship by the 51st Psalm. 
 
 Archbishop Parker and Burleigh were both 
 * named " great Papists " * by the Puritans of that 
 day. Yet Parker says of himself that he did not 
 ' care either for cap, tippet, surplice, or wafer-bread, 
 or any such, but for the laws so established,' of 
 which the Puritans refused to obey the decent 
 minimum which he names.^ A scholar, an archaeo- 
 logist, and a man of taste himself, he yielded so far 
 to the stupid fanaticism of the Puritans, in the hope 
 of conciliating them, as to aid them in destroying 
 priceless works of art — chalices, patens, alms-dishes, 
 candlesticks, vestments, illuminated missals and 
 books of devotion — that had been condemned as 
 polluted by contact with ' idolatry ' — i.e. with the 
 Latin Service of the Mass. There is a curious in- 
 stance of this iconoclasm, and one which bears 
 on the question of Eeservation, given in Gutch's 
 ' Collectanea Curiosa.' Some Puritans complained 
 to Parker that the "Warden and Fellows of All Souls', 
 Oxford, had some * monuments of superstition ' in 
 their possession, and demanded that they should be 
 destroyed. Parker complied ; but in the hope of re- 
 conciling the Warden and Fellows to this ruthless 
 vandalism he allowed them to keep the plate after 
 defacing it. ' For the avoiding of all suspicion of 
 * Correspondence, p. 478. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 687 
 
 superstition ' he ordered * that the said pJate should 
 be defaced, put into some mass for your house, 
 whereof it may have need hereafter, and so safely to 
 be conserved in your treasury.' The Fellows did 
 not yield a ready obedience, and five of them, pre- 
 sumably representing the rest, were summoned 
 before the Ecclesiastical Commissioners, and were 
 sent back to the College with stringent orders to call 
 a meeting of the Fellows, ' and upon the common 
 consent of all, or the greater part of the said Fellow- 
 ship, so gathered, shall cause to be defaced and 
 broken such church-plate as is in their College or 
 custody, appertaining to the use of the church or 
 chapel, except six silver basons, with their ewers or 
 crewets, one tabeenacle gilt ivith two leaves set 
 with stones and pearls, two silver howls, a silver rod 
 and three processionals' ^ The books and manu- 
 scripts were to be sent to the Commissioners. The 
 words which I have put in italics have a direct 
 bearing on the question of Eeservation. For among 
 the church plate ' appertaining to the use of the 
 church or chapel ' was a jewelled tabernacle. This 
 was left for the use of the chapel together with some 
 other ornaments. The basons I take to be patens 
 and a bason holding water in which the celebrant 
 washed his fingers before celebrating. The crewets 
 contained the wine and water for the mixed chalice 
 and for the ablutions afterwards. The silver rod 
 
 * Collectanea Curiosa, ii. 275-79. This collection of curious facts 
 and documents was really made by Archbishop Bancroft, and was 
 published from his MSS. 
 
ess THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 was the baton for the conductor of the choir. The 
 * processionals ' were of course processional crosses. 
 In the year 1567, then, we find the Ecclesiastical 
 Commissioners, including Parker, the Primate, who 
 took the lead, leaving a jewelled tabernacle for the 
 use of the chapel of All Souls' College. This one 
 bit of evidence seems to me to outweigh all those 
 ' public utterances ' of lawless ecclesiastics with which 
 Mr. Dibdin seems to have impressed the Archbishops. 
 Indeed, I regard this authorised tabernacle in 1567 
 as decisive in favour of the legality of Eeservation. 
 It is evident that Parker considered Eeservation 
 lawful, else he would not have sanctioned the use of 
 the tabernacle in All Souls' Chapel at the very time 
 that he was insisting on the disuse of other ornaments. 
 The mild, shy Primate had a wholesome dread of the 
 Queen, of whose rough tongue and pen he had had 
 more than one sharp experience. Elizabeth approved 
 of Reservation, and had it restored in the Latin 
 Prayer Book which she published under authority of 
 her Letters Patent on April 6, 1560. The evidence 
 of the Latin Prayer Book in favour of Reservation 
 is so strong that strenuous attempts have been made 
 to discredit its authority. Mr. Dibdin told the 
 Archbishops that ' he entertained a pious doubt 
 whether those Letters Patent were issued.' I respect- 
 fully submit that this method of meeting an awkward 
 piece of evidence is illegitimate and most improper. 
 Does Mr. Dibdin mean to suggest that the following 
 words at the end of the document which is prefixed 
 to every copy of the Latin Book of 1560 are a 
 forgery ? And if he does not, what does he mean ? 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 689 
 
 In praemissorum autem fidem et testimonium, has 
 Literas Nostras fieri fecimus Patentes. Dat. apud 
 Palacium nostrum de Westmonasterio, sexto die Aprilis, 
 anno regni nostri secundo. 
 
 * These Letters Patent do not exist anywhere,' 
 pleads Mr. Dibdin. No more do the Gospels within 
 some centuries of their reputed authorship.- Are we 
 therefore to reject them ? And are these the only 
 Letters Patent which no longer exist ? Moreover, 
 Mr. Dibdin urges, ' they are not in the usual style 
 of Letters Patent.' And the Primate ejaculated : 
 'No, that is true.' But, with all submission, is there 
 a uniform style of Letters Patent ? 
 
 I have before me King James's Letters Patent to 
 Archbishop Whitgift, ' and to the rest of our com- 
 missioners for causes ecclesiastical,' authorising some 
 changes in the Prayer Book. The opening is the 
 same in style as Elizabeth's Letters Patent. There 
 is no difference of form in the body of the Letters. 
 The ending is slightly different in form, but identical 
 in substance. The King's Letters end : — 
 
 And these our Letters Patent, or the enrolment 
 thereof, shall be your sufficient warrant for all and every 
 the premisses contained in them. Witness ourself at 
 Westminster the ninth day of February. Per ipsum 
 regem. 
 
 What is the difference between ' We have caused 
 these our Letters Patent to be the warrant and 
 witness of the premisses,' and, * Our Letters Patent 
 shall be your sufficient warrant for all and every the 
 
 Y y 
 
690 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 premisses contained in them ' ? There is no differ- 
 ence. ' But,' says Mr. Dibdin, ' they ought to end 
 ''Teste me ipso.'" King James's do not end so. 
 What is the difference between * I hereby testify ' 
 and '1 make these Letters my testimony'? The 
 three forms say the same thing in a sHghtly dif- 
 ferent way. There is not the sHghtest founda- 
 tion for Mr. Dibdin's ' pious doubt.' It is a case 
 of ovSsls . . . si fir) OscTLv hia(j)v\dTT(iiv. No one 
 would suggest such a paradox except in support of a 
 foregone conclusion. Not the slightest doubt was 
 cast on Elizabeth's Letters Patent during her life. 
 The Puritans stigmatised the Latin Prayer Book as 
 ' the Pope's Dreggs ; ' but no question was raised as to 
 its authority by any one. Parker, who was well versed 
 in the legal value of ecclesiastical documents, made 
 no demur to the authority of the Latin Prayer Book. 
 Some months after its publication Elizabeth wrote 
 an official letter to him and to the other Ecclesiastical 
 Commissioners in virtue of the power to make 
 additions to ritual observances conferred upon her 
 by the Act of Uniformity. Her language is ex- 
 plicit : — 
 
 Letting you to understand that when it is provided by 
 Act of Parliament holden in the first year of our reign, 
 that whensoever we shall see cause to take further 
 order in any rite or ceremony appointed in the Book of 
 Common Prayer, and our pleasure known therein, either 
 to our Commissioners for causes ecclesiastical, or to the 
 Metropolitan, that then eftsoons consideration should be 
 had therein. 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 691 
 
 After sundry orders in matters ecclesiastical, 
 including the care and adorning of churches and 
 alterations in the Lessons to be read in Divine 
 Service, she proceeds : — 
 
 And further, we will that where we have caused our 
 Book of ComrQon Service to be translated into the Latin 
 tongue for the use and exercise of such students and 
 other learned in the Latin tongue, we will also that by 
 your wisdoms and discretions ye prescribe some good 
 order to the Collegiate Churches to which we have 
 permitted the use of the Divine Service and Prayer in the 
 Latin tongue, in such sort as ye shall consider to be most 
 meet to be used, in respect of their companies, or of 
 resort of our lay subjects to the said churches, so that 
 our good purpose in the said translation be not frustrated, 
 nor be corruptly abused, contrary to the effect of our 
 meaning. . . . And these our Letters shall be your 
 sufficient warrant in this behalf. Given under our signet 
 at our Palace of Westminster, the two and twentieth of 
 January, the third year of our reign. ^ 
 
 The Queen does not give the name of Letters 
 Patent to this document as she does to the Letters 
 Patent authorising the Latin Prayer Book, and the 
 document has in general far less of the form and 
 style of Letters Patent than the one which Mr. 
 Dibdin has sought so gratuitously to discredit. And 
 yet this missive to Parker and the other Com- 
 missioners was in reality Letters Patent. Parker 
 acted on it promptly, and in his official commu- 
 nication of it to his suffragans he refers to the 
 Queen's instructions as given ' per literas suas regias 
 
 ' Parker Correspofidence, p. 133. 
 
 Y Y 2 
 
692 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 patentes magno sigillo Anglise sigillatas.' ^ Surely a 
 case that needs such 'pious doubts ' as Mr. Dibdin's 
 to sustain it must rest on a shaky foundation. In 
 matter of fact, not only was Elizabeth's Latin 
 Prayer Book free from any legal flaw, but the 
 Queen, moreover, claims power under the Act of 
 Uniformity to make provision for the use of the 
 Book, ' so that our good purpose in the said transla- 
 tion be not frustrated.' Nor did she intend to 
 confine the use of it to the chapels of the Universities 
 and principal public schools. On the contrary, she 
 * exhorts all other ministers of our Anglican Church ' 
 to use it when they say the daily service at home.^ 
 
 It is not necessary to follow Mr. Dibdin in his 
 minute criticism on the Latin Book. The Queen in 
 her Letters Patent sanctions a service ' quem nos per 
 nostrum Typographum edi curavimus in hoc prae- 
 sente volumine, convenientem cum Anglicano nos- 
 tro Publicarum Precum libro jam per universum 
 nostrum regnum recepto et usitato.' Mr. Dibdin 
 suggests that this is untrue, for the Latin Book 
 does not agree with the English Book of Common 
 Prayer. But, in the first place, what does that 
 matter to our argument ? The question is whether 
 a Book sanctioning Reservation was issued by public 
 
 ' Parker Correspondence, i. 135. 
 
 ' ' Eadem etiam formula Latina precandi privatim uti hortamur 
 omnes reliquos Ecclesiee nostrae AnglicaneB ministros, cujuscunque 
 gradus fuerint, iis diebus quibus aut non solent, aut non tenentur paro- 
 chianis suis, ad ssdem sacram pro more accedentibus, publice preces 
 vernacula lingua, secundum formam dicti Statuti, recitare.' (Letters 
 Patent prefixed to the Latin Prayer Book.) 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 693 
 
 authority, ecclesiastical and civil, for use in the 
 chapels of the Universities and public schools. 
 Whether the Letters Patent are accurate in de- 
 scribing it as ' agreeing ' with the English Book is 
 irrelevant to this discussion. But, in the next place, 
 the Queen intended, no doubt, to convey by * con- 
 venientem ' no more than agreement . in doctrine, 
 not in detail and verbal accuracy. And this is im- 
 portant, for it proves that the Queen considered 
 Eeservation to be ' convenientem cum Ajiglicano 
 nostro Publicarum Precum libro.' It was doubtless 
 by her ' command,' as Clay suggests, that the pre- 
 scription of Eeservation was restored, and she dis- 
 tinctly claims such right, as I have already shown, 
 in her Letters Patent to Parker and his fellow- 
 Commissioners ; and they allowed the claim. There- 
 fore causa finita est as regards that point. 
 
 I pass by the rest of Mr. Dibdin's criticisms on the 
 Latin Book, though not agreeing with them, because 
 they do not concern the point at issue, and tend to 
 confuse the argument. The points are these. Ten 
 months after the English Prayer Book came into 
 legal use a Latin version of it was published, under 
 the authority of Royal Letters Patent, for use in the 
 chapels of the Universities and principal public 
 schools, and by ' all the rest of the clergy ' at home 
 when prevented from attending the public services 
 of the Church. ^ Some months later, under the 
 authority of other Letters Patent addressed under the 
 Great Seal to the Primate and other ecclesiastical 
 Commissioners, the Queen commands the Primate to 
 
694 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 take order for the use of the Latin Prayer Book, ' so 
 that our good purpose in the said translation be not 
 frustrated.' And she claims herein — and her claim 
 is allowed by the Metropolitan and Commissioners — 
 to be exercising the power conferred upon her by the 
 Act of Uniformity. Seven years afterwards, when 
 the Primate- and Ecclesiastical Commissioners con- 
 fiscated and defaced a quantity of church plate, 
 . ' appertaining to the use of the church or chapel ' of 
 All Souls' College, they left, together with other 
 Eucharistic ornaments, a jewelled tabernacle, of 
 which the only use could be the Keservation of the 
 Sacrament. This was four years after the publica- 
 tion of the 28th Article, which the clergy were obliged 
 to subscribe. Is it conceivable that the Warden and 
 Fellows of All Souls' would have been permitted by 
 public authority to practise Keservation, as the Latin 
 Prayer Book certainly permitted them, after having 
 publicly subcribed an Article of Eeligion against it ? 
 It is incredible. The 28th Article evidently censures 
 Keservation for the mere purpose of exposition and 
 ostentatious procession. It does not, any more than, 
 the post-Communion Kubric, touch the question of 
 Keservation for the sick at all. So that, even apart 
 from the Latin Prayer Book, there is no case, no 
 legal evidence, against Keservation. It is covered 
 completely by the 7'atio dicendi of the judgment of 
 the ecclesiastical and secular courts in the case of 
 Escott V. Mastin. It is quite clear that in issuing 
 and taking order for the use of the Latin Book the 
 Queen and the Metropolitan (together with his fellow- 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 695 
 
 Commissioners) must have believed in the legahty of 
 Eeservation, and it follows that the 28th Article 
 could not in intention, as it certainly does not in 
 words, condemn the practice for the purpose of 
 communion. The phrase on which the Archbishops 
 have fastened is found in the 25th Article, and with 
 an explanation of its meaning and intention : 'The 
 Sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed 
 upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly 
 use them.' The plural is significant. None of the 
 Sacraments was ordained for pomp, or display, or 
 whetting an appetite of curiosity, but for use. 
 And therefore, edifying as the Baptismal Service is, 
 it may be dispensed with in case of necessity, the 
 form and matter (water in the name of the several 
 Persons of. the Trinity) being alone of the essence of 
 the Sacrament. Similarly the reserved Sacrament 
 may be given in case of necessity, consecration alone 
 being of its essence. Both usages are equally 
 protected by the ratio dicendi of the Courts of Arches 
 and the Judicial Committee in the case of Lay 
 Baptism, namely, that the Common Law of Chris- 
 tendom prevails against any Kubric or Article which 
 does not in terms forbid it. 
 
 This disposes of an argument which has been 
 used against the authority of the Latin Prayer Book 
 now, even granting its authority during Elizabeth's 
 life ; namely, that the validity of her Letters Patent 
 died with her. But admit the authority of her 
 Latin Book during the Queen's life, and there is an 
 end of the case, for it is impossible that all the clergy 
 
696 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 should be required to subscribe to the condemnation 
 of a usage which some of them were ordered by the 
 Queen and Primate to practise. But where is 
 the evidence that Elizabeth's Letters Patent died 
 with her? There is none. They do not mention 
 her successors. Admitted ; but neither do scores of 
 Letters Patent which nevertheless are valid in suc- 
 ceeding reigns. Nor is this all. The Letters Patent 
 which authorised Parker and the other Commissioners 
 under the Great Seal to take order for the use of 
 the Latin Prayer Book are the same Letters Patent 
 which authorised them to make alterations in the 
 calendar of Lessons to be used in church. No one 
 will maintain that those alterations were invalidated 
 by the Queen's death. The opponents of Keserva- 
 tion are remarkably partial in the application of their 
 premisses. And they forget, in addition, a clause in 
 Elizabeth's Act of Supremacy which meets and 
 destroys their objection. The following extract will 
 show its drift : — 
 
 And that your Highness, your heirs and successors, 
 kings or queens of this realm, shall have full power and 
 authority by virtue of this Act, by Letters Patent under 
 the great seal of England, to assign, name and authorise, 
 when and as often as your Highness, your heirs or suc- 
 cessors, shall think meet and convenient, and for such and 
 so long term as shall pleas 3 your Highness, your heirs or 
 successors, such person or persons being national-born 
 subjects to your Highness, your heirs or successors, as 
 your Majesty, your heirs or successors, shall think meet, 
 to exercise, use, occupy and execute under your Highness, 
 your heirs and successors, all manner of jurisdictions, 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 697 
 
 privileges and pre-eminences, in any wise touching or con- 
 cerning any spiritual or ecclesiastical jurisdiction within 
 these realms of England and Ireland . . . ; and to visit, 
 reform, redress, order, correct, and amend all such errors, 
 schisms, abuses, offences, and enormities whatsoever, &c. 
 
 To these ample powers the Act annexes two 
 stringent conditions : — (1) that nothing is to be con- 
 demned which has not been condemned by 'the 
 authority of the Canonical Scriptures, or by the 
 first four General Councils, or any of them, or by 
 any other General Council ... or by the High 
 Court of Parliament of this realm, with the assent 
 of the clergy in their Convocation.' 
 
 This Act covers in the fullest sense not only the 
 legalit)^ but the Parliamentary authority, of the 
 Latin Prayer Book of 1559-1560, and consequently 
 of Eeservation.^ 
 
 Mr. Dibdin found the authorisation of the Latin 
 Prayer Book in Ireland an awkward obstacle 
 athwart his path, and he surmounted it in his 
 usual manner ; that is, by making conjectures take 
 the place of facts. In August, 1559, the Earl of 
 Essex, Lord Deputy of Ireland, received instruction 
 ' to set up the worship of God as it is in England, 
 and to make such statutes next Parliament as 
 
 ' It is noteworthy that in the last session of the Convocation of 
 1640, a Kesolution proposed by the Primate was passed unani- 
 mously in favour of reprinting the Prayer Book [iit liher piiblicarum 
 precum, in Latinum versus, reimjyrimatur, prout in actu synodico 
 seqtiente continetur, dc). Gibson's Synodus Anglicana, p. 195. 
 This can refer only to Elizabeth's Latin Book, which was the only 
 legal edition. * 
 
698 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 were lately made in England, mutatis mutandis.' 
 Accordingly the Irish Parliament was summoned to 
 meet in January 1560. It met, and early in the 
 Session passed the English Act of Uniformity, with 
 an important exception, namely, — 
 
 That in every such Church or Place, where the 
 Common Minister or Priest hath not the use or know- 
 ledge of the English tongue it shall be lawful for the 
 same Common Minister or Priest to say and use the 
 Matins, Evensong, Celebration of the Lord's Supper, and 
 Administration of each of the Sacraments, and all the 
 Common and Open Prayer in the Latin tongue, in such 
 order and form as they be mentioned and set forth in the 
 said Book established by this according to the tenor of 
 this Act, and none otherwise, nor in other manner ; any- 
 thing before expressed and contained in this Act to the 
 contrary notwithstanding. 
 
 In my friendly controversy with Dr. Bright 
 in the ' Guardian ' six months ago, I referred to 
 this Act, and he put aside my argument with the 
 objection that, inasmuch as Elizabeth's Latin Book 
 bears the date of April 6, 1560, it could not have 
 been referred to by the Irish Parliament in the 
 previous January. I laboured under the disadvantage 
 of conducting my share of the controversy in the 
 country, where I had access to few books. But on 
 my return to London I found that there was no 
 substance in Dr. Bright's objection, as is proved by 
 the following memorandum from Sir John Mason 
 (who had charge of the business) to Sir W. Cecil 
 under date of August 11, 1559 : ' The Book of 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 699 
 
 Common Prayer in Latin is ready to print.' ^ There 
 was thus plenty of time for supplying Ireland with 
 copies of the Book before the new year.^ Dr. Bright's 
 objection therefore need not detain us, and we may 
 proceed to examine Mr. Dibdin's argument. 
 
 He objects that the Queen's Letters Patent say 
 nothing about the use of the Latin Book in Ireland ; 
 and if it had been intended for Ireland, he ' cannot 
 conceive why they should not have gone on to say 
 so.' For the plain reason that the Irish Parliament 
 and Executive authorised an earlier impression of it 
 more than two months before the edition of 1560 
 was issued. The phraseology of the Irish Act 
 seems to show that the Irish Parliament had 
 Elizabeth's Latin Book before it. ' The said Book ' 
 authorised by the Irish Parliament is placed pro 
 tanto in opposition to the English Book previously 
 sanctioned by the EngHsh Act. That, and nothing 
 else, must be the meaning of the words : ' anything 
 before expressed and contained in this Act to the 
 contrary notwithstanding.' The Irish Act adopts the 
 English Act down to the clause sanctioning the use 
 
 ' Calendar of State Papers, Doviestic, 1547-80, p. 136. 
 
 '^ ' Herbert, indeed (Ames, p. 1602) mentions a Latin Prayer Book 
 printed by Wolf in 1559 ' (Clay's Liturgies of Qiieen Elizabeth, 
 preface, p. xxiv). Clay doubts Herbert's statement, yet unconsciously 
 confirms it on the following page, where he shows that there were 
 two editions of the Latin Prayer Book closely succeeding each other, 
 one of them (printed by Wolf) earlier than the well-known 1560 
 edition prefaced by the Queen's Letters Patent. The complete 
 disappearance of this 1559 edition would be accounted for by the 
 transmission of the whole of it to Ireland. Apparently it contained 
 the Act of Uniformity in Latin. 
 
700 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of ' the Latin tongue,' and then it says that ' the 
 said Book ' is to be used, ' and none otherwise, nor in 
 other manner,' notwithstanding the previous part of 
 the Act, which ordered the English Book. Moreover, 
 'none otherwise, nor in other manner,' is not copied 
 from the EngHsh Act, which is ' none other or other- 
 wise,' but is a nearer translation of the Latin version 
 of the Act {nee ulla alia vel alio modo). The last two 
 lines of the Irish Act furnish another piece of evidence 
 that it refers to Elizabeth's Latin Book. In her 
 Letters Patent Elizabeth mentions the additions 
 which she commanded to be made to the English 
 Book, and legalises them as follows : — 
 
 Cui [libro] item peculiaria quaedam . . . adjungi 
 praecipimus, Statute illo praedicto de ritu publicarum 
 precum (cujus supra mentionem /ecimus) anno primo 
 regni nostri promulgate in contrarium non obstante. 
 
 So the Irish Act, in sanctioning ' the said Book ' 
 ' in the Latin tongue,' adds the saving clause in 
 Elizabeth's Letters Patent : ' anything before ex- 
 pressed and contained in this Act to the contrary 
 notwithstanding.' That clearly implies a book 
 differing from the English Book sanctioned by the 
 previous part of the statute ; and there can be little 
 doubt that it was the Latin edition printed by Wolf 
 in 1559 under the Queen's authority as an early 
 impression of the Book of 1560. It explains also 
 the quotation from Trollop's letter to Secretary 
 Walsingham in 1587 : ' When they [the Irish clergy] 
 must of necessity go to church they carry with them 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 701 
 
 a book in Latin of the Common Prayer set forth 
 and allowed by her Majesty.' ^ It is all plain sailing 
 when the facts are taken together. Elizabeth was 
 particular in having the law on her side in matters 
 ecclesiastical. Edward's two Prayer Books had no 
 other authority in Ireland than English Acts of 
 Uniformity furnished. Elizabeth ordered that her 
 Prayer Book should be authorised by an Irish Act 
 of Uniformity. But that had to wait for the Latin 
 edition of the Prayer Book, which was hurried for- 
 ward and was ready for the printers in the beginning 
 of August 1559. It was sent over to Ireland before 
 the end of the year, and was authorised the following 
 January for use in parishes where English was not 
 understood. And it continued to be used, as the 
 letter to Secretary Walsingham in 1587 proves. 
 This Book of 1559 may even have had the Queen's 
 Letters Patent as well as the authority of the Irish 
 Parliament. It evidently bore the imprimatur of 
 her Majesty in some way in order to be described 
 as ' set forth and allowed by her Majesty.' Wolf 
 printed some Occasional Services in 1560 with the 
 Queen's Letters Patent affixed, and there is evidence 
 that these Services had previously been added to the 
 Latin Book, and then separated from it.^ 
 
 ^ State Papers concerning tJie Irish Church, by Dr. Brady, p. 117. 
 
 2 See Clay (p. xxiii), who asks pertinently, 'Had the Book so 
 prepared any connexion with the first Act of Uniformity passed by 
 the Irish Parliament in the previous January, the last clause of 
 which sanctions "the Latin tonge " in places "where the common 
 minister or priest hath not the use or knowledge of the English 
 tongue " ? ' Of course it had. That is the only explanation. 
 
702 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 If therefore Mr. Dibdin's argument, adopted by 
 the Archbishops, is sound, the curious result follows 
 that while Eeservation was forbidden in England and 
 Ireland by the authorities in Church and State, it was 
 sanctioned by both in the chapels of the Universities 
 and public schools and in the majority of parishes in 
 Ireland. Is that credible ? If superstition and 
 belief in transubstanfciation were likely to mingle 
 with the practice in England, were they less hkely 
 to mingle with it in Ireland ? 
 
 It is not necessary to follow Mr. Dibdin in his 
 criticism on the various editions of the Latin 
 Prayer Book. The simple fact is that the duplicate 
 editions (as I take them) of 1559-1560 are the only 
 authoritative editions. But even if Mr. Dibdin were 
 able to prove that subsequent editions legally super- 
 seded that of 1560 he would not better his case, for 
 those editions had the Act of Uniformity in Latin, and 
 the fatal 'quemadmodum mos eratin hac Ecclesia An- 
 glicana ex authoritate Parliamenti in anno secundo 
 regni Kegis Edwardi Sexti ' of that Act would 
 infallibly establish the legality both of Incense and 
 Eeservation. He is in a dilemma, and his choice is 
 limited to impalement on either horn. 
 
 Mr. Dibdin pours scorn on Aless (Alesius) and 
 his translation, and rejoices that in editions of the 
 translation subsequent to 1560 ' all signs of the Ales 
 eccentricity as to Eeservation has gone out of it.' 
 This is hardly respectful language, considering that 
 the rubric sanctioning Eeservation is taken from 
 the Book of 1549, which was sanctioned by Con- 
 
THE LAMBKSHcDBClSIQ^ 703 
 
 vocation and Parliament ; considering also that it 
 was Cranmer who caused the Book of 1549 to be 
 translated into Latin by Aless.^ 
 
 In brief, then, the case of the Latin Prayer 
 Book stands thus. The translation was undertaken 
 by command of the Queen. It was printed before 
 the end of 1559, apparently for the purpose of 
 sending an early impression to Ireland in order to be 
 sanctioned by Parliament at the opening of its 
 session in January 1560, for the use of parish priests 
 who were not masters of the English tongue. It 
 was so sanctioned ; for the facts can bear no other 
 reasonable construction ; and there is indubitable 
 evidence that it was in use as late as 1587. The 
 English impression was published in April 1560, 
 imder the express authority of the Sovereign's Letters 
 Patent, of which the validity is unquestionable. In 
 the following year the Queen issued other Letters 
 Patent, under the Great Seal, to the Primate, 
 authorising him to take order, together with his 
 suffragans, in sundry ecclesiastical matters, includ- 
 ing the use of the Latin Book, ' so that our good 
 purpose in the said translation be not frustrated.' 
 There is not a shred of evidence to prove, or even 
 
 • ' But not long after [the publication of the Book of 1549] there 
 were some persons qui divisionis occasionem arripiehant, saith 
 Alesius, vocabula et pene syllahas expendendo, they tried it by points 
 and syllables, and iveighed every word, and sought occasions to 
 quarrel ; which being observed by Archbishop Cranmer, he caused it 
 [Book of 1549] to be translated into Latin, and sent it to Bucer, 
 requiring his judgment upon it.'— Jeremy Taylor, Works, v. 237. 
 Cf . Strype, Mem. of Cranmer, i. 300. 
 
704 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 suggest, a flaw in the legal validity of the first 
 Letters Patent ; but even if there were, the second 
 Letters would have made good the flaw ; and there 
 is no question as to their legal authority from that 
 day to this. Portions of our present Prayer Book 
 rest upon them still. They claim the authority not 
 only of the Queen's prerogative, but, in addition, of her 
 Act of Uniformity. The Latin Prayer Book rests 
 therefore at this moment on the same legal basis as 
 some parts of our Prayer Book. 
 
 Later editions have no more authority than various 
 editions of the English Prayer Book which varied 
 from the authorised edition. Some of these, though 
 published ' cmn privilegio Begice Majestatis,' made 
 serious omissions, including the Ornaments Rubric. 
 The Latin Prayer Book of 1560 is the only legal one, 
 and its legality has never been withdrawn. Its going 
 and remaining out of print proves nothing at all 
 except the anarchy of that period. Desuetude 
 does not constitute illegality, else daily service an-d 
 weekly Eucharists would be illegal. 
 
 I must, before closing this chapter, remark on the 
 very serious declaration in the Lambeth decision on 
 Incense, that Elizabeth's Act of Uniformity is an 
 integral part of the Prayer Book, operating as a 
 general rubric to forbid the slightest variation from 
 or addition to the rigid letter of the rubrics. A brief 
 consideration of the facts will prove this view to be 
 quite untenable. 
 
 The Book which Convocation presented to Parlia- 
 ment, and which the House of Commons passed with- 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 705 
 
 out any revision whatever, is repeatedly described, 
 in the Act of Uniformity which sanctioned it, in the 
 following terms : — 
 
 The Book of Common Prayer, and Administration of 
 the Sacraments, and other Eites and Ceremonies of the 
 Church, according to the use of the Church of England, 
 together with the Psalter or Psalms of David, pointed as 
 they are to be sung or said in churches ; and the form or 
 manner of making, ordaining, and consecrating of bishops, 
 priests, and deacons. 
 
 The Book which Convocation sanctioned and 
 Parliament authorised in 1661-2 is here divided into 
 its component parts, and Elizabeth's Act of Uni- 
 formity does not fit into any of them. Plainly, 
 therefore, it was not regarded as a part of the Book, 
 though bound up with it. How, then, was it 
 regarded ? A perusal of the debates in Parliament 
 will help us to answer that question. The Commons 
 were so eager to undo the work of the Commonwealth, 
 and to restore the worship of the Church and the 
 status of her clergy, that they read for the third 
 time, on July 9, 1661, an Act of Uniformity, 
 sanctioning the Book of 1604, and sent it up to the 
 Lords, ' with the said Book of Common Prayer so 
 annexed.' But the King had meanwhile entrusted 
 Convocation with the revision of the Prayer Book, 
 and Convocation, rejecting the Book of 1604, which 
 was authorised by Eoyal authority alone, with the 
 consent of the Primate and Episcopal Commissioners, 
 went back to the Book of Elizabeth, which they 
 revised carefully, making 600 alterations in all. This 
 
 z v. 
 
706 THE REFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Book was sent down to the Commons, with a 
 request that it should * be added to the Bill of 
 Uniformity instead of the Book sent up therewith,' 
 and it ' was, in part, read ' on April 14, 1662. But 
 the Lords made ' some alterations, and added some 
 provisos, to which the concurrence of the House of 
 Commons is desired.' 
 
 The next item of importance for my purpose, 
 which the Journals of the House of Commons record, 
 is the following, under date of April 15, 1662 : — 
 
 The question being put, * To agree with the Lords as 
 to the amendment to the compiling of the Book of 
 Common Prayer by the Bishops, and the Act of primo 
 Elizabeth for enjoining it to be used ' — it was resolved in 
 the affirmative. 
 
 Here, then, we have an authoritative explanation 
 of the relation of the Act of 1559 to the Prayer Book 
 of 1661-2. It was no part of the Book, but was 
 annexed to it ' for enjoining it to be used.' The 
 meaning of ' none other or otherwise,' therefore, 
 means simply that the revised Book, and no other 
 book, or altered version of the Book, was permissible. 
 
 Moreover, the phrase 'none other or otherwise,' 
 as I pointed out in an article in the '■ P'ortnightly 
 Keview ' of last October, received a judicial inter- 
 pretation in Bex v. Sparks, where it was held that 
 ' the indictment ought to have alleged that the 
 defendant used other forms aiid prayers instead of 
 those enjoined, which were neglected by him ; for 
 otherwise every parson may be indicted that used 
 prayers before his sermon, other than such as are 
 
THE LAMBETH DECISIONS 707 
 
 required by the Book of Common Prayer.' ' Surely 
 this is the common-sense view of * none other or 
 otherwise ' in both Acts of Uniformity. And there 
 is another fact which seems to me decisive against 
 the Archbishops' opinion that the Uniformity Act of 
 1559 is an integral part of our present Prayer Book, 
 governing every detail of ceremonial. In Elizabeth's 
 Book the Ornaments Eubric ends with the words, 
 ' according to the Act of Parliament set in the 
 beginning of this Book.' These words are omitted 
 
 ' ' To him [Archbishop Whitgift] the Queen . . . gave in charge 
 that, before all things, he should restore the discipline of the Church 
 of England, and the uniformity in the service of God, established by- 
 authority of Parliament, which through the connivance of the 
 prelates, the obstinacy of the Puritans, and the power of certain 
 noblemen, was run out of square, while some of the ministers 
 covertly impugned the Queen's authority in ecclesiastical matters, 
 separated the administration of the Sacraments from the preaching 
 of the Word, usurped new rites and ceremonies at their pleasure in 
 private houses, utterly condemned the Liturgy and the administration 
 of the Sacraments established as contrary to some points in Holy 
 Scriptures.' ' To take away these inconveniences and restore unity, 
 he [Whitgift] propounded these articles to be subscribed unto by the 
 ministers.' — Camden's Annals, B. III. p. 27. 
 
 Among these articles was one which affirmed ' that the Book of 
 Common Prayer, and another Book of ordaining of Bishops and 
 Priests, contained nothing contrary to God's Word, but might lawfully 
 be used ; and that they should use that, and no other form either of 
 prayer or administration of the Sacraments.' Here we see the 
 meaning of ' none other or otherwise,' corresponding with the 
 decision in Rex v. Sparks. 
 
 Camden goes on to describe the outrageous treatment which the 
 Archbishop ' endured at the hands of factitious ministers, and what 
 troubles, yea, and injuries also, at the hands of noblemen who, by 
 promoting unmeet and unworthy men, raised troubles in the Church, 
 or else hoped after the Livings of the Church.' Cf. Memoirs of Sir 
 Christopher Hatton, by Sir Harris Nicolas, G.C.M.G., p. 370. 
 
 z z 2 
 
708 THE REFOBMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 in the Book of 1662, as if to exclude proleptically 
 the view propounded by the two Archbishops. 
 
 I cannot conclude without noticing the following 
 paragraph in the Archbishop of York's decision on 
 Keservation : — 
 
 No medical or other evidence in this matter was pro- 
 duced by the counsel on the other side. But it is well 
 known, not only to the Archbishops, but to the Church 
 at large, that there have been, and are at this moment, a 
 very large number of the clergy whose work lies in such 
 parishes as those referred to, and that such difficulties as 
 have been suggested have never really stood in the way 
 of the reverent administration of the Holy Communion to 
 persons qualified to receive it, however humble and dis- 
 agreeable the surroundings may have been. 
 
 Few have a better right than the Archbishop of 
 York to appeal to experience. For he was himself 
 one of the most devoted and successful parish priests 
 in London. I can only say that he has been in this 
 matter more fortunate than I. My parochial ex- 
 perience has been almost entirely in London, and I 
 have been more than once prevented from communi- 
 cating the sick by sheer impossibility to ' reverently 
 minister ' the Sacrament, and also by the invalid's in- 
 ability to attend to a service which, without violating 
 the law, occupies more than a quarter of an hour. 
 I do not understand his Grace's reference to * medical 
 or other evidence.' Did not more than 700 medical 
 men sign a memorial to the Archbishops declaring, 
 from their experience, the impossibility in some cases, 
 and the danger to the patient in others, of administer- 
 ing the Communion except by means of Reservation ? 
 
709 
 
 CHAPTEK XIV 
 
 AN ANSWEE TO PKOFESSOR MAITLAND 
 
 In the ' Fortnightly Eeview ' of December 1899, 
 Professor Maitland of Cambridge did me the honour 
 of criticising an article of mine in the previous 
 ' Fortnightly, ' and some portions of an earlier 
 chapter of this volume. Hearing of his article, 
 before it was published, when I was on the point of 
 leaving London by Order of my doctor, I asked the 
 Professor, through the editor of the * Keview,' if he 
 would kindly let me see it in proof while I was still 
 among my books. He replied, as he was more than 
 justified in doing, that he would rather I read his 
 article for the first time when it was before the 
 public — that is, when I was at a distance from my 
 books. I awaited with some anxiety the assault of 
 so formidable a critic, and was greatly relieved on 
 reading the article to find myself so little damaged. 
 One thing surprised me. The Professor, with some 
 good-humoured persiflage, acquits me of dishonesty 
 and * unscrupulous partizanship,' but only in order 
 to leave me the alternative of ' indolence ' in not 
 verifying the impressions of my memory. ' We say 
 that the Canon's arm-chair was comfortable, and that 
 the Statute-book and the Journals of Parliament 
 
710 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 stood just beyond his reach.' Now I think that if I 
 had flung such a reproach at a man whom I was 
 criticising I would not have denied him the means 
 of self-defence when he begged for them. ' The 
 Statute-book and the Journals of Parliament ' are 
 not books which one usually carries about in one's 
 portmanteau. On my return to London, I com- 
 bined in one article for the ' Fortnightly Keview ' 
 my answer to Professor Maitland and some criticism 
 on the Lambeth decision on Incense, from a legal 
 point of view. The editor could not afford space for 
 the whole article ; so he chose, with my consent, 
 the part which related to Professor Maitland, but 
 sent the other part by mistake to the printers. The 
 mistake was not discovered till the article was in 
 type, and then it was too late to rectify it. Having 
 meanwhile resolved to review the proceedings at 
 the Lambeth ' Hearing ' as soon as the Archbishops 
 published both their decisions, I reserved my answer 
 to Professor Maitland for one of two additional 
 chapters in this edition of my book. 
 
 Professor Maitland has convicted me of two or 
 three inaccuracies which do not affect the essence 
 of my argument, and which I had already marked 
 for revision. My ' faulty equation ' ^ as to the 
 episcopal votes against the third reading of the 
 Act of Uniformity in 1559 was caused by my in- 
 advertently forgetting for the moment that one of 
 the spiritual peers of Parliament was the Abbot of 
 Westminster. But it was a slip, and Professor Mait- 
 
 ' See ante, p. 347. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOR MAITLAND 711 
 
 land is entitled to his good-natured gibe. He is also 
 right in pointing out that two of the absent bishops 
 were absent because they were in prison ; although 
 it ought to be added that two of them (Watson and 
 White) were in prison for treasonable conduct against 
 the Queen. ^ ' St. Asaph [Goldwell] had received no 
 writ, and had mildly complained that he ought to 
 have been summoned.' ^ That is true ; but it is 
 only half the truth ; nor is it the only instance of 
 half-truths doing duty for whole truths in Professor 
 Maitland's article — not designedly, I am sure. But 
 it seems that I am not the only person of whom it 
 may be said that his ' arm-chair was comfortable^ 
 and that the Statute-book and the Journals of 
 Parliament stood just beyond his reach.' Professor 
 Maitland gives no reference for his assertion about 
 the Bishop of St. Asaph. But while I was writing 
 the passage which the Professor criticises with 
 cavalier severity, the following quotation from a 
 State Paper lay before me : — 
 
 Tho. [Goldwell] Bishop of St. Asaph, to Cecil. 
 Desires to be absent from Parliament, but thinks it 
 strange the Queen's writ has not been sent to him, as he 
 considers himself still Bishop of St. Asaph.^ 
 
 ' ' White preached sedition, and that in his Romish Pontifical 
 Vestments, for which he was committed to prison, but on acknow- 
 ledgement of his misdemeanours was set at liberty ' (Strype, Ann. 
 p. 149, folio ed.).. Both Watson and White had threatened the Queen 
 with excommunication, which meant forfeiture of her throne and 
 outlawry by the Roman Canon Law. 
 
 2 Fortnightly Review, Dec. 1899, p. 927. 
 
 •' Calendar of State Papers [Domestic), 1559-1580, p. 118. 
 
712 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 I was right therefore in saying that some of 
 the bishops were absent ' for no assignable reason.' 
 St. Asaph ' desired to be absent,' and gave no rea- 
 son ; nor did other absentees. In a subsequent 
 letter to his brother, however, the bishop does give 
 a reason for his absence, and it has nothing to do 
 with the writ of summons. He suddenly deserted 
 his diocese because he was ' in debt to the Queen 
 above ^^300 ' — a good deal more than those figures 
 represent in our money. There must have been 
 something serious connected with the debt, for the 
 good bishop made hurriedly for the Continent, and 
 ' the ports have been instructed not to suffer him to 
 pass.' 
 
 ' There is good authority for saying,' continues 
 Professor Maitland, * that the Bill was carried by a 
 majority of three. So if Goldwell [of St. Asaph] 
 had been summoned, and White and Watson had 
 been liberated, the Bill might have been lost, and, 
 for anything that I know to the contrary, Mr. 
 MacColl and 1 might be believing in transubstantia- 
 tion at this day.' I do not feel certain about 
 the ' good authority.' There is something a little 
 suspicious in the 'majority of three.' It was by 
 another * majority of three,' according to Sanders 
 — in whom Professor Maitland seems to repose 
 implicit confidence — that the Act of Supremacy 
 was passed. Fuller, as already quoted, pronounces 
 the assertion ' a loud untruth,' and the Queen herself 
 declared that all the peers ' agreed,' ' except the 
 Earl of Shrewsbury, Lord Montague, the Bishops, 
 
AN ANSWER TO PROFESSOR MAITLAND 713 
 
 and the Abbot of Westminster.' ^ The authorities 
 are not in full accord. Mr. Gee, in his careful 
 examination of the question, says : — 
 
 Those who voted against the third reading were the 
 Archbishop of York, the Bishops of London, Ely, 
 Worcester, Llandaff, Coventry and Lichfield, Exeter, 
 Chester, Carlisle, the Marquis of Winchester, the Earl of 
 Shrewsbury, Lords Montague, Morley, Shefi&eld, Dudley, 
 Wharton, Rich, North.^ 
 
 Rapin, following D'Ewes, says : — 
 
 The dissentients from it were the Archbishop of York, 
 the Marquis of Winchester, the Earl of Shrewsbury, 
 the Viscount Montague ; the Bishops of London, Ely, 
 Worcester, Llandaff, Coventry, Exeter and Chester ; the 
 Lords Morley, Stafford, Dudley, Wharton, Rich, and 
 North.3 
 
 Taking Mr. Gee's figures, which are the highest, 
 the dissentients consisted of nine bishops and nine 
 lay peers. The Abbot of Westminster, satisfied 
 apparently with his vote against the Supremacy 
 Bill, does not appear to have voted against the 
 Act of Uniformity. Professor Maitland's statement 
 therefore is that only thirty lay peers took sufficient 
 interest in the question to record their votes : twenty- 
 one for, and nine against the Bill. Is that likely ? 
 Have we got all the facts ? We know that the 
 
 • See ante, p. 578. 
 
 '^ The Elizabethan Clergy and the Settlement of Religion, p. 8. 
 Strype gives the same list, Ann. of Bcf. p. 61. 
 3 Hist, of Engla'nd, ii. 279. 
 
714 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Journals of Parliament then were kept very care- 
 lessly, revealing numerous lacunce in particulars. 
 
 But Professor Maitland calls the Episcopal proxies 
 to his aid : — 
 
 Then Peterborough had given a proxy to York, 
 London, and Lichfield ; Durham to York ; Bath to 
 York, London, and Exeter ; St. David's to York, London, 
 and Peterborough. If these proxies were used, assuredly 
 they were used on the Conservative side. 
 
 ' If these proxies were used.' So even Professor 
 Maitland's skill and diligence have failed to find a 
 clue to the tangled details of that legislation. But 
 is not his equation here as faulty as mine in counting 
 a mitred abbot among bishops ? According to him, 
 four bishops gave ten proxies among them, each 
 being entitled to one proxy only. Rapin had much 
 the same impression as to the main facts which I 
 have expressed, as the following quotation shows : — 
 
 Among the bishops then in England, some there were 
 who had complied with all the changes in religion since 
 Henry's breach with the Pope. Of this number were 
 Heath, Archbishop of York ; Tunstal, Bishop of Durham ; 
 Thirleby, Bishop of Ely ; and some others. These chose 
 to absent themselves from the Parliament because, as 
 they saw the Queen's intention, they durst neither openly 
 oppose it, nor assist in restoring the reformation, after so 
 public a desertion of it in the last reign. Both appeared 
 to them equally incommodious.^ 
 
 That, I believe, is the general opinion among our 
 historians hitherto, who thus share with me the 
 
 ' Hist, of England, ii. 279. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PKOFESSOE MAITLAND 715 
 
 Professor's severe censure, ' that Mr. MacColl's 
 statement of the case can only be saved from a 
 charge of unscrupulous partizanship by a confession 
 that highly important facts were forgotten.' 
 
 The following argument of mine * bewilders ' 
 Professor Maitland, and provokes another sally of his 
 amiable banter : — 
 
 Now the first step which Elizabeth took in eccle- 
 siastical legislation was to repeal the repealing Acts of 
 Mary, thus reviving the state of things which existed 
 when Mary came to the throne. The effect of this astute 
 policy was to disqualify the Marian bishops to vote 
 either in Parliament or Convocation, and they were thus 
 disqualified when the Act of Uniformity came before 
 them, and had in fact subjected themselves to heavy 
 penalties by voting at all. . . . [And so] their votes 
 [against that Act] were — quite legally and canonically — 
 regarded as null and void. 
 
 This is inaccurate, and I thank Professor Mait- 
 land for correcting me, although I cannot accept the 
 validity and accuracy of all the criticism which he 
 bestows on the quotation. He is quite accurate in 
 saying that ' Elizabeth did not " repeal the repealing 
 Acts of Mary " until after the Act of Uniformity had 
 passed the House of Lords.' He is also accurate 
 in saying that ' the two Bills [of Supremacy and 
 Uniformity] received the Koyal Assent on the same 
 day.' He is, however, a little misleading in saying 
 that the House of Lords ' had not done with the Act 
 of Supremacy when it finished its work on the Act 
 of Uniformity.' That way of putting the matter 
 
716 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 suggests an erroneous inference. The parliamentary- 
 history of the two Acts is most confusing. On my 
 return to London after reading Professor Maitland's 
 article I spent some days in following their gyrations 
 through the Journals of both Houses of Parliament. 
 No easy matter, for the Bills underwent several meta- 
 morphoses and changes of titles in the course of 
 their tossings between the two Houses. The sum 
 of the matter, however, is that the Supremacy Bill 
 was first introduced into the House of Commons 
 on February 21, 1559, and read a third time on 
 February 22. On February 27 it reached the House 
 of Lords, and was read a second time on March 13. 
 Then began a series of parliamentary evolutions 
 which baffle accurate inquiry. A new Bill, supple- 
 mentary to the Supremacy Bill, suddenly appeared 
 in the House of Lords on March 15, and was read 
 a third time, together with the Supremacy Bill, 
 on March 18, w^hen both were sent down to the 
 Commons. It is impossible to follow the wanderings 
 of the Bill between the two Houses during the 
 following six weeks, but on April 29 the Supremacy 
 Bill passed its third reading in its final form in the 
 Lords on April 29. 
 
 The Act of Uniformity had a still stranger 
 parliamentary career. In its original form, with a 
 different title, it took precedence of the Supremacy 
 Act by nearly a week, having been read a first time 
 in the Commons on February 16, under the title of 
 * Bill for Common Prayer and Administering of 
 Sacraments.' After that it vanishes into space, and 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PROFESSOK MAITLAND 717 
 
 the baffled inquirer searches the Journals of Parlia- 
 ment for it in vain. But on April 18 his eye lights 
 on a * Bill for the Unity of the Service of the Church 
 and Ministration of the Sacraments,' which passed 
 its first reading on that day, and its second and third 
 reading on the two following days. Then again it 
 eludes pursuit till it is discovered in the House of 
 Lords on April 26 under the title of ' The Bill for 
 the Uniformity of Common Prayer, and Service in 
 the Church, and Administration of the Sacraments.' 
 It passed its third reading on April 28, one day 
 before the Supremacy Act. In rigid fact therefore it 
 is quite true that the House of Lords ' had not done 
 with the Act of Supremacy when it finished its work 
 on the Act of Uniformity.' But the truth is that 
 the Supremacy Bill was perfectly safe before the 
 Uniformity Bill reached the House of Lords, or even 
 its first reading in the Commons.. Mr. Gee is thus 
 well within the facts when he says that ' the 
 Supremacy Bill had reached its final stage before 
 the Bill of Uniformity was again introduced.' ^ In 
 
 ' The Elizabethan Clergy, p. 8. Had I known of this excellent 
 book before searching the Journals of Parliament for myself in this 
 matter, I might have saved myself much trouble. Strype also is on 
 my side : ' March the 22nd, the Bill for the restitution of the First- 
 Fruits and Tenths was returned from the Lower House ; and con- 
 cluded by the Lords. And likewise the Bill for restoring the 
 Supremacy to the Imperial Crown, with a New Proviso added by the 
 Commons ; which was read the First, Second, and Third Time, and 
 concluded ; the Bishops of York, London, Winton, Llandaff, Coventry, 
 and Litchfield, Exon, Chester, Carlisle, and the Abbot of Westminster 
 dissenting ' {Ann. of Eef. p. 59). I was thus substantially right in 
 saying that Elizabeth had astutely secured the Supremacy Act 
 
718 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 short, the Supremacy Act was secure before the 
 Marian bishops had an opportunity of considering 
 the Act of Uniformity ; and the Supremacy Act 
 repealed the Marian Statutes. EKzabeth had thus 
 a formidable weapon in her hand, to wield or to 
 withhold — for the Eoyal veto was then a reality — 
 before the bishops had time to commit themselves. 
 I am happy to find myself here in agreement with 
 Mr. Gee, who writes : — 
 
 The protest of Convocation, and the animus which it 
 displayed, caused the authorities, we can scarcely doubt, 
 to take the precaution of fortifying themselves behind the 
 Supremacy Act before they again pressed on the Uni- 
 formity Bill.i 
 
 In a sense therefore the argument which ' be- 
 wilders ' Professor Maitland was even stronger than 
 I put it, as a weapon completely under one's own 
 control is more serviceable than a weapon which is 
 chiefly controlled by others. The Supremacy Bill, in 
 its main provisions, was read a third time in the 
 Lords on March 22, when only two lay peers voted 
 against it, and its passage through the House of 
 Commons was assured. From that day the Queen 
 had the Marian bishops in her power ; and more 
 completely too than if the Supremacy Bill had 
 become an Act. While it remained in its parlia- 
 mentary stage it could be modified in favour of the 
 
 before asking the consent of the Lords Spiritual to the Act of 
 Uniformity. The former had passed both Houses in all its main 
 provisions a month before the latter was brought before PS'l'liament. 
 • The Elizabethan Clergy, p. 8, 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 719 
 
 bishops if they showed any disposition to accept the 
 new Prayer Book, as a few of them did ; ^ but once it 
 received the Koyal Assent its energy passed practi- 
 cally out of the power of the Queen. The nine 
 bishops who braved the ordeal by voting against the 
 Uniformity Bill deserve all honour for their courage, 
 
 ' E.g. Tunstall. The following letter, which he wrote to Cecil four 
 months after the Act of Uniformity had become law, shows that he 
 was willing to accept the Prayer Book and Act of Uniformity if he 
 could secure his diocese against the ruthless wreckage perpetrated 
 in London and elsewhere, without regard to law, by the Puritan 
 faction : — 
 
 ' Eight Honourable, after my humble recommendations to your 
 Mastership it may like you to understand that where I have been 
 the last week of the Queen's Majesty's lying at Hampton Court 
 somewhat importune upon you to have brought me to the Speech of 
 Her Majesty. And now She is departed thence, and by her gests 
 (as I am informed) should go to Horsley, Guildford, Chobham, and 
 Windsor, and in removings I know the time not to be convenient to 
 make any suit unto Her Majesty shall come to some stay. I beseech 
 Her Majesty to send me word by the bearer where she think best for 
 me to repair to Her Highness at some resting-place, wherein you 
 shall do me singular pleasure and find me to be yours and to be 
 ready in some part to recompense it to my power (God willing) or 
 occasion may serve. 
 
 ' And where I do understand out of my diocese of a warning for a 
 visitation to be had there, these shall be to advertise your Master- 
 ship, that albeit I would be as glad to serve the Queen's Highness 
 and to set forward all her affairs to her contentment as any subject 
 in her realm, yet if the same visitation shall proceed to such end in my 
 diocese of Durham as I do plainly see to be set forth herein London, 
 as pulling down of altars, defacing of images by taking away of the 
 crucifixes, I cannot in my conscience consent to it, being pastor 
 there, because I cannot myself agree to be a sacramentary, nor to 
 have any new doctrine taught in my diocese. Wherefore I thought 
 meet to advertise your Mastership, humbly beseeching the same not 
 to think me thereunto moved either for any forw^ardness, malice, or 
 contempt, but only because my conscience will not suffer me to 
 
720 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and I am in full sympathy with what Professor 
 Maitland says on that subject. Even after the Acts 
 of Supremacy and Uniformity had become law 
 Elizabeth was most anxious to retain the services of 
 the bishops in possession : — 
 
 Elizabeth sent several Protestant bishops to the 
 Catholic bishops then in durance, to intimate that if they 
 would but publicly conform to the offices and prayers of 
 the Church as established, she would not exact from 
 them the oath [of Supremacy]. They all refused, saying, 
 
 * It would be abjuration of communion with their Church.' 
 Upon this the Queen nominated bishops for York and 
 
 receive and allow any doctrine in my diocese other than Catholic. 
 As knoweth Almighty Jesu who ever preserve your Mastership to His 
 pleasure and yours. 
 ' From London the XIX^^' of August, 1559. 
 
 ' Your Mastership's humble most assured, loving Friend 
 
 ' CUTH", DUKISME. 
 
 • To the Eight Honourable and my very loving Friend 
 
 ' Sir Wm. Cecil, Knight, Chief Secretary unto the Queen's 
 Highness.' 
 
 Strype furnishes additional evidence of Tunstall's willingness to 
 conform if he could save his diocese from the havoc which he was 
 witnessing in London : * And it was said (but that he thought it 
 some disgrace, and that his Bishoprick was likely to be elsewhere 
 disposed) he would have complied with the Queen's laws. For the 
 Archbishop assured the Queen, that he complied during his life 
 [i.e. under Elizabeth] in several points of the Eeformation ' {Ann. of 
 Ref. p. 45). But the See of Durham had been suppressed in 
 Edward's reign to enrich greedy courtiers, and covetous eyes were 
 now again on its princely revenues. So it was contrived that the 
 good old bishop should have no opportunity of making his suit to the 
 Queen. He was even insulted in the hope of forcing him to resign. 
 He died three months afterwards ; but Elizabeth saved his see from 
 the spoilers. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PROFESSOK MAITLAND 721 
 
 other places, which, because of the number of Papists 
 in those parts, she had hitherto avoided.^ 
 
 This was a year after the Act of Uniformity had 
 become law. Is it credible, let me ask in passing, 
 that either Elizabeth or her episcopal emissaries 
 believed that Incense and Reservation were illegal 
 at the very time that the Marian bishops were 
 solicited to conform and retain their sees, and for the 
 purpose, too, of conciliating * the number of Papists 
 in those parts ' ? The more one studies the history 
 of that period, the less possible it becomes to ac- 
 cept the historical or legal basis of the Lambeth 
 Decisions. 
 
 But to return to Professor Maitland. The real 
 point of the argument of which he falls foul is that, 
 even apart from the Act of Supremacy, the Marian 
 bishops were statutably and canonically disqualified 
 for sitting either in Parliament or Convocation. 
 The Pope's supremacy had been repudiated by both 
 Parliament and Convocation ; by Church and State 
 in their corporate capacity ; yet still without any 
 formal breach with the Holy See. Papal Supremacy 
 was restored by Mary without the sanction of Con- 
 vocation, and by parliamentary authority alone. 
 That was plainly uncanonical and unconstitutional. 
 Nor was this all. Mary expelled by mere Royal 
 fiat, as ' Supreme Head of the Church,' — a title which 
 she held and effectively exercised for a whole year 
 after her accession — all bishops and clergy, legally 
 
 ' Doc. from Simancas, p. 70. Cf. Strype, Ann. i. pt. i. 370, 372. 
 
 3a 
 
722 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 and canonically appointed, who refused to accept the 
 supremacy of the Pope ; and she intruded others 
 uncanonically into their places. This I ventured to 
 characterise as ' Erastianism.' But Professor Mait- 
 land, correcting me, calls it * the highest of high 
 Catholicism ' ; which proves, if he will forgive me 
 for saying it, that he has not read, or has forgotten, 
 the Thesis of Erastus, and uses ' Catholicism ' in 
 some esoteric sense of his own. He has given me 
 much good advice, for which I am grateful, and ends 
 his criticism with the covert, and I dare say well- 
 deserved sneer : * The party to which Canon MacColl 
 belongs has been learned.' Well, I will summon 
 two of its most learned members into the lists in the 
 crucial contention between the Professor and myself 
 — namely, the canonical status of the Marian bishops 
 and the ecclesiastical status of the Prayer Book of 
 1559. 
 
 My first witness is the late Rev. Sir William 
 Palmer, of whom Newman says : — 
 
 He was the only really learned man among us. He 
 understood theology as a science ; he was practised in 
 the scholastic mode of controversial writing; and I 
 believe was as well acquainted, as he was dissatisfied, 
 with the Catholic Schools. 
 
 And elsewhere, speaking of Palmer's ^Treatise on 
 the Church of Christ,' Newman says : — 
 
 As was to be expected from the author, it was a most 
 learned, careful composition. ... As to Mr. Palmer's 
 book, it was one which no Anglican could write but him- 
 self — in no sense a tentative work. The ground of 
 
AN ANSWER TO PROFESSOE MAlTLAND 723 
 
 controversy was cut into squares, and then every objec- 
 tion had its answer. 
 
 Again : — 
 
 So happily at least did he follow the logical method 
 of the Roman schools, that Father Perrone in his treatise 
 on dogmatic theology recognised in him a combatant 
 of the true cast, and selected him as a foe worthy of 
 being vanquished. Other soldiers in that field he 
 seems to have thought httle better than the lanzknechts 
 of the middle ages, and, I dare say, with very good 
 reason.^ 
 
 I need not quote Perrone's high opinion of 
 Palmer ; but if Professor Maitland cares to see it, 
 he will find it in the second volume of the * Prae- 
 lectiones,' vol. ii. pp. 867-8 ; 905. 
 
 No one has recognised more cordially than I have 
 done Professor Maitland's learning and brilliant 
 qualities ; but I am sure he v^ould be the first to 
 admit that in the region of theology and canon 
 law he must yield the palm to Palmer. Let us then 
 see what Palmer says on the point in dispute between 
 Professoj Maitland and myself : — 
 
 I deny that the bishops then occupying sees in 
 England were legitimate bishops, as will be presently 
 shown. Therefore it was needless to solicit their 
 sanction of those acts [of Supremacy and Uniformity], or 
 to regard their opposition. The lower House of Convoca- 
 tion, too, consisted generally of men who were of the 
 same faction, and who had been active in all the 
 irregular proceedings of the last reign, besides being 
 
 • Apologia, pp. 108, 142. 
 
 3 A 2 
 
724 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 intruded into the benefices of others ; so that their 
 petition to the bishops in favour of the Roman Supre- 
 macy &c. deserved no attention.' 
 
 My next authority is the late Lord Selborne. 
 After show^ing that the Prayer Books of 1549 and 
 1552 had synodical authority, he says : — 
 
 It is insisted, however, that at all events Queen Eliza- 
 beth's Act of Uniformity of 1559 (which restored with some 
 slight qualifications the use of the Book of 1552) was an 
 act of the civil power alone, without synodical con- 
 currence. Those who lay stress on this either forget 
 what had taken place in Queen Mary's time, or attribute 
 more importance than is really their due to the variations 
 in the Book of 1559, and the Statute of that year, from 
 the Book of 1552. In the first year of Queen Mary's 
 reign an Act had been passed by Parhament alone — 
 without any sort of ecclesiastical sanction, not even that 
 of the Pope, for the reconciliation with Rome was of 
 later date — for restoring throughout the Queen's domina- 
 tions [all the pre-Reformation services and the Papal 
 Supremacy. This was followed by the expulsion of such 
 bishops and clergy as refused to conform, and the 
 intrusion of others into their places].^ 
 
 Lord Selborne accordingly argues, quite legiti- 
 mately, that what the civil power alone — Mary and 
 her Parliament — had done, without any ecclesiastical 
 sanction, the civil power alone — Elizabeth and her 
 Parliament — could undo without any ecclesiastical 
 sanction. And, he might have added, with a good 
 
 ' Treatise on the Church of Christ, i. 485. 
 2 Defence of the Church of England, p. 62. 
 
AN ANSWER TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 725 
 
 deal more excuse. For there was a perfectly cano- 
 nical and valid Convocation which Mary might have 
 consulted, which was not the case on Elizabeth's 
 accession. Professor Maitland would be the first to 
 admit that Lord Selborne's authority in the sphere 
 of constitutional law is not inferior to his own. So 
 that, supported on the side of canon law by the 
 great authority of Sir W. Palmer, and by the not less 
 eminent authority of Lord Selborne on the side of 
 constitutional law, I can bear the shock of Professor 
 Maitland 's formidable assault without fear of being 
 overthrown. 
 
 It was a singular misfortune for the English 
 Church and nation that Henry VIII. was not suc- 
 ceeded by Elizabeth instead of her brother, that pre- 
 cocious prig of a boy, who became a pliant tool in the 
 hands of nobles and courtiers — men who made the re- 
 form of religion a cloak for the plunder of the Church 
 in their own sordid interests. If they had devoted the 
 ecclesiastical spoils, as they professed their intention 
 of doing, to the purposes of national education and 
 the relief of the poor, something might be said for 
 them. But these were nearly all absorbed in Court ex- 
 travagance, in demoralising luxury, and in amassing 
 private fortunes. One of the many evil consequences 
 was the alienation of the native leaders of the Eefor- 
 mation, and the adoption in their place of a band of 
 foreigners and returned fugitives, who wanted not 
 reformation, but revolution, in Church and State. 
 The consequence was the national reaction under 
 Mary, followed by the recoil caused by her persecut- 
 
726 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 ing zeal and by the unpopularity of her Spanish hus- 
 band. In that crisis the ecclesiastical hierarchy 
 played their cards with amazing folly and maladroit- 
 ness. What could have been more stupid than to 
 precipitate the conflict by refusing to take part in 
 the coronation of the Queen, foolishly hoping thereby 
 to prevent her accession ? ^ Then the lower House of 
 Convocation, of which the canonical status was so 
 insecure, rivalled the rashness of the bishops by 
 flaunting in the face of the nation the hated supre- 
 macy in temporal and ecclesiastical affairs of the Pope, 
 whose usurpations and extortions had by the time 
 of Henry YIII. exhausted the patience of the whol6 
 realm. Hence Henry's comparatively easy triumph. 
 It was not doctrine that the English nation rose up 
 against, but practical abuses and the intolerable 
 intervention in our domestic affairs of an Italian 
 ecclesiastic, who claimed the right of appointment 
 to all ecclesiastical benefices, and bestowed many 
 of the richest posts in the Church on foreigners who 
 
 ' Nares relates the following curious incident in connexion with 
 Elizabeth's coronation : — 
 
 ' In the account to be seen at the Ashiriolean museum, when the 
 Queen approached the " aulter," where kussyns (cushions) of gold were 
 placed for her use, we read that " Secretary Cycill delivered a booke 
 to the Bussop, and there was a Bussop standing at the left hand of 
 the aulter." It might be difficult to say who this bishop was, as, 
 according to Collier, Hethe and the rest of that order absented 
 themselves ; while the Protestant bishops, Barlow, Scory, and 
 Coverdale, lay under a sentence of deprivation [but uncanonical]. 
 The service was certainly performed according to the ancient custom, 
 and directed by the Koman Pontifical, but without any elevation of 
 the host.' — Memoirs of Lord Burleigh, vol. ii. p. 24. 
 
 I wonder if there is any other record of this second bishop. 
 
AN ANSWER TO PROFESSOR MAITLAND 727 
 
 did not understand a word of English, and some 
 of whom never visited the places from which they 
 drew their revenues. I remember Dr. Dollinger once 
 remarking to me that the healthy condition of the 
 Church in Germany was a serious obstacle to the 
 success of the Old Catholic Movement. ' Our 
 bishops,' he said, ' are, for the most part, men of 
 good education and intellectual mark. Our clergy 
 are, on the whole, respectable and educated men. 
 There are no crying abuses. The multitude have 
 thus no practical grievance, and the controversy 
 about the Pope's infallibility, portentous as it is in 
 its consequences, does not come home to them. 
 We are therefore in this curious position, that while 
 the German bishops have taken the lead against 
 Papal infallibility, the masses do not respond because 
 to them the controversy is an academic one.' 
 
 In England the Pope's supremacy was a practical 
 grievance. Its usurpations and exactions were felt in 
 every parish. Transubstantiation was but a name ; 
 but Peter's pence, and annates, and collation to bene- 
 fices, and appeals to Home, and other devices for 
 drawing money out of England, touched the people at 
 large and roused their resentment. To proclaim the 
 supremacy of the Pope on Elizabeth's accession was 
 thus a fatuous challenge on the part of the lower 
 House of Convocation, and a challenge to which the 
 mass of the clergy did not respond, as their ac- 
 quiescence in the new order of things proved : an 
 acquiescence made easy by the Queen's wise policy 
 in combining the old ceremonial with the remodelled 
 
728 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 liturgy in the vernacular. But the secession of the 
 bishops forced Elizabeth to fill their places with 
 men who disliked the religious compromise of 1559 
 more than the Marian bishops disliked it, though, 
 wiser in their generation, they yielded a grudging 
 and meagre conformity. Even Bonner confessed 
 that he saw no serious objection to the Prayer Book 
 of 1549, although he might not himself have com- 
 piled it exactly like that. 
 
 And now I come to the central point of Professor 
 Maitland's article, round which his criticism plays 
 somewhat pungently. He begins with the following 
 appeal, in which, I fear, he attaches more impor- 
 tance to what I write than it deserves or the public 
 is likely to ratify : — 
 
 Mr. MacCoU has the public ear, and what he says, 
 even by way of hypothesis, will soon be believed by the 
 many, and will pass into the manuals. Therefore I will 
 ventm^e to make an appeal to him for the reconsideration 
 of a doctrine that he has promulgated touching the 
 events of the year 1559, and more particularly touching a 
 newly discovered convocation of the clergy. 
 
 The title of the article in which the distinguished 
 writer honours me with this friendly appeal is : 
 ' Canon MacColl's New Convocation.' I turned 
 immediately to the article of mine in the ' Fortnightly 
 Keview ' of October 1899, on which he bases his 
 indictment and appeal, and I rose from its perusal 
 wondering at the strange fancies which sometimes 
 flit across the mental retina of great minds. For 
 
AN ANSWER TO PROFESSOR MAITLAND 729 
 
 the simple truth is that I have nowhere laid claim 
 to the discovery of any convocation, old or new, or 
 ' promulgated ' in that matter any ' doctrine ' of my 
 own at all. On writing the article which has 
 received the distinction of Professor Maitland's 
 criticism, I went to visit some friends in the country, 
 and there came across Mr. Wayland Joyce's book, 
 ' The Sword and the Keys,' which I had read some 
 years before and forgotten. On turning over the 
 leaves I came upon a passage which struck me. I 
 copied it, and inserted it into my article, with a few^ 
 remarks of my own, when I received the proof. 
 Here is the whole alleged ' discovery ' that has 
 supplied Professor Maitland with materials for an 
 article which admiring critics have characterised as 
 ' masterly ' and ' brilliant ' ; and which I have 
 myself enjoyed none the less for being the object of 
 such admirable literary fencing. Let the reader 
 judge :— 
 
 The late Mr. Wayland Joyce discovered the following 
 document, to which he gives the reference, in the State 
 Paper Office : — 
 
 ' The Book of Common Prayer, published prwio 
 Elizabeth, was first resolved and established in the time 
 of King Edward VI. It was re-examined, with some 
 small alterations, by the Convocation, consisting of the 
 said Bishops and the rest of the clergy, in primo Eliza- 
 beth, which being done by the Convocation, and pub- 
 lished under the Great Seal of England, there was an 
 Act of Parliament for the same book, which is ordinarily 
 printed in the beginning of the book. Not that the book 
 was ever subjected to the censure of the Parliament, but 
 
730 THE EBFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 being agreed upon and published as aforesaid, a law was 
 made by the Parliament for the inflicting of a penalty 
 upon all such as should refuse to use and observe the 
 same. Further authority thereto is not in the Parlia- 
 ment, neither hath been in former times yielded to the 
 Parliament in things of that nature ; but the judgment 
 and determination thereof hath ever been in the Church 
 thereto authorised by the King, which is that which is 
 yielded to Henry VIII. in the Statute of 25 his reigne.' 
 
 'This State Paper,' Mr. Joyce tells us, 'is in the 
 handwriting of Sir Thomas Wilson, the first Keeper 
 of the State Paper Office, established by King James I. 
 in 1608, and the date of the document may there- 
 fore be approximately assigned.' In this document we 
 have three crucial statements : (1) that the Prayer 
 Book of 1559 was sanctioned by Convocation ; (2) ' by the 
 said bishops ' and the Lower House of Convocation ; (3) 
 that the book was not ' subjected to the censure [i.e. the 
 revision] of the Parliament,' the province of Parliament 
 in such cases being limited to the function of enforcing 
 the use of the book by means of civil penalties. This 
 was unquestionably the doctrine of Elizabeth. 
 
 Of this I give a fev^ examples, and add : — 
 
 The truth appears to be that, on the refusal of the 
 Marian bishops to accept the new ecclesiastical regime, 
 their opposition was ignored as invalid, and the book was 
 immediately submitted to and approved by a convoca- 
 tion of the Bishops who had been unjustly deprived — ■ 
 possibly, also, by some of those not deprived, like 
 Tunstall — and of a Lower House consisting of clergy 
 specially summoned. We have no record of this. But, 
 in the first place, the Eegisters of Convocation were 
 very badly kept at that time. Contemporary writers tell 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOR MAITLAND 731 
 
 us that page after page contained nothing but the names 
 of the members of Convocation present, and sometimes 
 not even that. In the second place, the Convocation 
 Registers perished altogether in the Fire of London in 
 1666. 
 
 That is all : an interpolation of less than a page 
 hastily inserted in an article of fifteen pages after 
 the article was in type ; and avowedly credited to 
 Mr. Wayland Joyce not only in the text, but in a 
 foot-note which gave the reference to his book. I 
 am glad to have afforded Professor Maitland an 
 opportunity of exhibiting his controversial skill ; 
 but his just confidence in his own knowledge and 
 acumen has led him astray, I venture to think, 
 in the main points of his criticism on me. I have 
 dealt with some of them already, and shall now 
 tackle the chief of them — my supposed discovery of 
 ' a New Convocation.' Let us then examine the 
 document which Professor Maitland dismisses with 
 such blighting scorn. The body of it is given in the 
 passage just quoted from my article. It is all that 
 Mr. Wayland Joyce gives, and all that I had seen 
 when I copied it from his book. It is prefaced as 
 follows : — 
 
 There returned into England upon Queene Marye's 
 death that had been bishops in K. Ed. 6 tyme 
 
 1. Coverdale 3. Chenye 
 
 2. Scorye 4. Barlow 
 
 There remained Bishops for sometyme that were 
 Bishops in Queen Marye's tyme 
 
 1. Oglethorpe B. of Carleile who crowned Q. Eliz. 
 
 2. Kichin B. of Landafe. 
 
732 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 There were Bishops in the Parlament holden primo 
 Eliz. and in the Convocation holden at the same time. 
 Edmonde B. of London Kalph B. of Covent. and 
 John B. of Winton Lichfeilde 
 
 Eichard B. of Wigorne Thomas B. of Lincolne 
 James B. of Exon 
 
 Then follows immediately the passage quoted on 
 p. 729, which was the only part of the document that 
 I had seen when I quoted it. 
 
 Professor Maitland treats the whole document 
 with supercilious contempt. ' It so happens that 
 when I first saw it at the Record Office,' he says, ' I 
 did not know that any part of it had been published, 
 nor had I read Mr. MacColl's book or article. For 
 a moment I enjoyed the little thrill that comes to us 
 when we fancy that we have unearthed a treasure, 
 and then I said " Rubbish ! " and turned the page.' 
 After quoting it, he asks, ' What shall we say of this 
 stuff?' 'Is what stands before us a lie? Its 
 audacity seems to crave a more merciful verdict, and 
 I do not know that its writer intended it for publica- 
 tion.' It may have been a ' fraud ' by some Angli- 
 can ' who resented the Puritanic interference of the 
 House of Commons ' ; but ' as at present advised, I 
 incline to a lenient judgment. Perhaps we see an 
 idle romance that was meant for the fire. Perhaps 
 an attempt to write history a priori, and an attempt 
 that did not satisfy its maker. Perhaps an inchoate 
 lie that never got beyond the first draft.' 
 
 Now may I venture to say, in all courtesy, that 
 this does not seem to me quite the proper or wise 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 733 
 
 attitude for a distinguished Professor to assume 
 towards a document that has been thought worth 
 preserving by successive Keepers of the State Papers 
 till now ? He would probably have adopted a dif- 
 ferent tone if his impatient scorn had not tempted 
 him to hazard a number of * guesses ' instead of 
 examining the facts a little more carefully. Certainly 
 the facts are scanty : but they reveal a little more 
 than appears from Professor Maitland's summary 
 dismissal of the document into the limbo of ecclesias- 
 tical ' rubbish.' 
 
 In whose handwriting is the document? Pro- 
 fessor Maitland did not think it worth while to 
 trouble himself with such a triviality. Yet surely it is 
 an important question. There are two copies of 
 the document, in two different hands, in the Record 
 Office, and the second copy has this endorsement — 
 
 Power of Convoca" in framing the Book of Common 
 Pray^, &c., and of the Act of ParP. 
 
 1 Igf Th. Wilson's hand. 
 
 Sir Thomas Wilson was the first Keeper of the 
 State Paper Office established by King James in 1607. 
 He was a man of knowledge and integrity, and lived 
 within forty-eight years of the events to which the 
 document refers. Is it likely that he would have 
 taken the trouble to preserve and make a copy of a 
 document which he must have known to be ' rub- 
 bish ' if there was no foundation for it at all ? 
 
 ' This mark I take to be merely a hurriedly formed bracket or 
 flourish. 
 
734 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 But what evidence is there that the copy of the 
 document is in Sir Thomas Wilson's hand ? Who 
 wrote the endorsement ? I am informed by three 
 experts, one of them being an Assistant Keeper 
 at the Kecord Office, that the endorsement is in 
 the handwriting of Sir Joseph Wilhamson. There 
 could hardly have been a more competent authority. 
 Born in 1603, he was educated at Westminster 
 School and Queen's College, Oxford, of which he 
 became a Fellow. He was a distinguished scholar, 
 which his University recognised by creating him 
 doctor of laws. In 1661 he became Clerk of the 
 Council and Keeper of the State Papers. He was 
 subsequently sent as British Plenipotentiary to 
 arrange the Treaty of Cologne. For some years he 
 represented Kochester in Parliament, and in 1674 
 became Principal Secretary of State. He left a 
 valuable collection of MSS. and i.^6,000 to his 
 College. On the whole, not a likely man to endorse 
 ' rubbish.' He must have been familiar with the 
 handwriting of Sir Thomas Wilson, his predecessor 
 in charge of the State Papers, and his endorsement 
 is therefore conclusive. 
 
 But Mr. Wayland Joyce was in error in 
 supposing that he was the first to discover this 
 document. It was discovered at least sixteen years 
 previously by the editor of the ' Calendar of State 
 Papers, Domestic Series,' for the years 1547-1580, 
 and he tabulates it as follows : — ^ 
 
 * p. 143. The volume was published in 1856, and the first three 
 hundred pages, including this document, were printed in 1853. The 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 735 
 
 46. Nov. 1559. List of Bishops who returned into 
 England on Queen EKzabeth's accession, and of the 
 Bishops present in the first Parliament. Progress of the 
 Convocation in framing the Book of Common Prayer. 
 
 47. Another copy of the above. 
 
 The editor was Mr. Lemon, v^ho was for years 
 Assistant Keeper at the Record Office. He was an 
 expert in the matter of handwriting, and made the 
 period comprising these documents a special study. 
 When he has any doubt about a document or part 
 of a document he puts a qaery within brackets. 
 There is no query here. Another expert not likely 
 to patronise 'rubbish.' 
 
 Mr. Thompson (Mr. Lemon's successor in the 
 Record Office) has written in the margin of the 
 office copy of Mr. Lemon's volume : ' Query as to 
 date, was it not in 1607 ? ' This query I under- 
 stand as referring to the date of the MS., not the 
 events, which undoubtedly belong to the first year 
 of Elizabeth. Mr. Thompson therefore identifies 
 the handwriting as Sir Thomas Wilson's. A third 
 authority not likely to be imposed upon by ' rubbish.' 
 
 This being the state of facts, I do not see that 
 there was anything so absurdly wild in my ven- 
 turing on a guess which, I honestly think, has 
 more of probability in it than any of the series of 
 guesses in which Professor Maitland has indulged. 
 
 first edition of Mr. Joyce's book was published in 1869. Mr. Lemon 
 was employed in the State Paper Office before all the Papers were 
 transferred to the Becord Office. He was selected to edit the im- 
 portant Papers relating to Edward's and Elizabeth's reigns on 
 account of his special knowledge of the subject. 
 
736 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 My guess was that the Marian bishops — at least 
 those who appeared in ParHament — having formally 
 refused their assent to the revised Prayer Book, 
 their votes were ignored as invalid, and an informal 
 synod of clergy and the surviving Edwardine 
 bishops was called to examine* the Book. I said 
 frankly that ' we have no record of this,' but added 
 that this was not a fatal objection : first, because 
 the records of Convocation were meagrely and 
 irregularly kept ; secondly, because they all perished 
 in the Great Fire of 1666. 
 
 Now first as to the canonical invalidity of the 
 votes of the Marian bishops. We have already seen 
 that a number of bishops and clergy, who had been 
 legally and canonically appointed, were expelled 
 by Mary as ' Supreme Head of the Church ' without 
 any concurrence on the part of the Spiritualty ; 
 while the vacancies thus created were filled by 
 persons intruded by the civil power only. Had they 
 accepted the revised Prayer Book, there is little 
 doubt that the flaw in their title would have been 
 made good. But they refused, and were eventually 
 expelled by the only power to which they owed 
 their position — the civil power. In strictness of 
 law, their votes in the House of Lords were invalid. 
 Let me quote on this point an author of higher 
 authority in this matter even than Professor Mait- 
 land, who confesses, with the candour of a true 
 scholar, that his able book on ' Eoman Canon Law 
 in the Church of England ' is 'an incursion into a 
 region that was unfamiliar to him, namely, that of 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 737 
 
 ecclesiastical jurisprudence.'^ To the writer, from 
 whom I am about to quote, the region was familiar 
 ground, and his authority was acknowledged even 
 by the Koman Curia. After showing from Koman 
 canonists that Justinian and emperors before him 
 had, in the words of De Marca, ' sometimes punished 
 contumacious bishops by expulsion from their sees 
 and suspension from the execution of their offices ' 
 for uncanonical conduct, he proceeds : — 
 
 If the duty and right of the sovereign was to see the 
 canons enforced and the rights and liberties of the Church 
 maintained ; . . . and if those prelates, whose bounden 
 duty it w^as to act in accordance with the canons, refused 
 positively to obey them, or to yield any submission to 
 their prince ; then there was no resource left but to expel 
 those refractory and disobedient persons, and invite the 
 Church to ordain wiser and better men in their places. 
 . . . But the propriety of this expulsion will still 
 further appear when we reflect that they who were 
 expelled, though ordained and possessed of sees according 
 to the laws of the land and Acts of Parliament, were 
 not canonically and spiritually in possession. Of these 
 bishops Heath had been translated to the metropolis of 
 York, and Thirlby to the see of Ely, by the authority of 
 the Eoman patriarch, forbidden by the canons. The 
 Bishops of Lincoln, Lichfield, Bath, Peterborough, St. 
 Asaph, Carlisle, Chester, had been ordained by the 
 schismatical metropolitans, Pole and Heath, who had 
 been ordained or confirmed by the Eoman patriarch, 
 contrary to the canons. The Bishops of Winchester, 
 Exeter, and St. David's had intruded, the legitimate 
 pastors being still alive. The Bishop of Worcester was 
 
 ' See Preface, p. v, 
 
 3b 
 
738 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 illegitimately restored, after having been deprived for 
 absence from his duty. None of these prelates (whatever 
 legal and parliamentary right they might have had) had 
 any valid canonical or spiritual right to the sees they 
 occupied, and all. had acted contrary to the canons in 
 attempting to introduce the Eoman jurisdiction.^ 
 
 Now Elizabeth v^as far less of an Erastian than 
 Mary, and she had a deep-seated objection to 
 Parliament legislating for the Church v^ithout the 
 Church's own sanction. It does not seem therefore 
 to me unreasonable to believe that, finding the 
 Marian bishops and Convocation hopelessly opposed 
 to the new ecclesiastical regime, she should con- 
 voke an informal synod of the surviving canonical 
 bishops and some representative clergy, and submit 
 the Prayer Book to their revision. Mr. Wayland 
 Joyce was no mean authority, nor was his life-long 
 study of this department of English ecclesiastical 
 history, like Professor Maitland's, ' an incursion 
 into a region unfamiliar to him.' Yet Mr. Joyce, 
 like the authorities at the Eecord Office, takes quite 
 seriously the document which Professor Maitland 
 has tried to laugh out of court. After quotino^ it, he 
 says : — 
 
 Upon this evidence therefore it appears, while it is 
 admitted that the Elizabethan Prayer Book was not sub- 
 mitted to that Convocation which met January 24, 1559, 
 concurrently with Queen Elizabeth's first Parliament, yet 
 that the Book was authorised by a Synod or Convocation 
 
 ' Palmer's Origines Liturgicce, ii. 286 7. The italics are 
 Palmer's. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PROFESSOR MAITLAND 739 
 
 of English bishops — unjustly and uncanonically deprived 
 in the last succession, but now restored to their rightful 
 authority — and of the rest of the clergy. It is, moreover, 
 to be observed that this conclusion is strongly supported 
 by the contents of the preamble to the present Act of 
 Uniformity, where the Elizabethan Prayer Book is dis- 
 tinctly said to have been * compiled by the Reverend 
 Bishops and Clergy.' ^ 
 
 What is the explanation of that statement in the 
 Act ? It does seem to corroborate the assertion made 
 in Professor Maitland's ' rubbish.' For certainly the 
 Prayer Book was not revised by the Marian bishops 
 and Convocation. Mr. Joyce, too, has, like myself, 
 exposed himself to Professor Maitland's lash, for he 
 says : ' The fact that the Convocation Kegisters were 
 burnt in the disastrous Fire of London in 1666 has 
 rendered any satisfactory investigation of this sub- 
 ject extremely difficult.' 
 
 The late Bishop Phillpotts of Exeter has left 
 behind him a great reputation for the accuracy and 
 extent of his learning in the region of English 
 ecclesiastical history and canon law. It was not his 
 habit to write at random : he formed his opinions 
 deliberately and weighed his words carefully. Bishop 
 Phillpotts then, in his well-known letter to the 
 parishioners of Helston, says : ' When the acces- 
 sion of Queen Elizabeth brought back the Eefor- 
 mation, she and the Convocation, and the Parlia- 
 ment, deliberately rejected the simpler direction of 
 Edward's Second Book, and revived the ornaments 
 
 ' The Sword and the Keys, p. 25. 
 
 3 B 2 
 
740 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 of the First.' Dr. Phillpotts was far too well informed 
 not to know that the {de facto, not de jure) Con- 
 vocation of primo Elizabeth had nothing to do with 
 the Prayer Book. What Convocation, then, did he 
 mean ? He does not explain ; but we may be sure 
 that he had some reason for his assertion. 
 
 At the risk of provoking some more of Professor 
 Maitland's genial sarcasms, I will venture to sug- 
 gest that there are lacunce in the Parliamentary 
 history of Elizabeth's Prayer Book which have yet to 
 be filled up, and some isolated facts which naturally 
 find their explanation in some such synod as that 
 mentioned in Professor Maitland's 'rubbish.' Why, 
 for example, was the Bill for the ratification of the 
 Prayer Book, after its first reading in the Commons, 
 suddenly withdrawn for good and all, and another 
 Bill, with a new title, introduced more than two 
 months afterwards and rapidly passed, after the 
 Supremacy Bill was safe ? It is evident that some- 
 thing took place in the interval, of which we have 
 no record. But we have hints which help to fill the 
 blank. There is first the fact that the Queen wished 
 to restore Edward's First Prayer Book. Yielding 
 on that point, she instructed Cecil to submit to the 
 Committee that had been appointed to revise the 
 Second Book a series of suggestions aiming at the 
 restoration of several of the usages allowed under 
 the First Book. For instance : ' Whether such cere- 
 monies as were lately taken away by King Edward's 
 Book might not be resumed, not being evil in them- 
 selves ? Whether the image of the cross were not 
 
AN ANSWER TO PROFESSOE MAITLAND 741 
 
 to be retained ? Whether processions should not be 
 used? Whether in the celebration of the Com- 
 munion priests should not use a cope beside a sur- 
 plice ? ' ' Whether it be not convenient to continue 
 the use of praying for the dead in the communion ? 
 Whether the Prayer of Consecration in the First 
 Communion Book should be left out ? ^ Whether 
 the Sacrament were, according to the First Book, to 
 be received into the communicant's mouth, or to be 
 delivered into his hand ? Whether the Sacrament 
 v^ere to be received standing or kneeling ? ' ^ 
 
 All these suggestions were rejected by the com- 
 mittee of revisers. But they were all secured by the 
 Ornaments Rubric," coupled with the 25th clause of 
 the Act of Uniformity ; and one of them was inserted 
 in the Book after it left the committee's hands, 
 namely, the rubric enjoining kneeling at the recep- 
 tion of the Sacrament. Let me quote Strype here : 
 
 What the original draught of the Service Book was, 
 as it came from the divines' hands, and was presented to 
 the House, would be worth knowing. I suppose very 
 little was altered by the Parliament ; yet something, it 
 seems, was. For it appears by Guest's [one of the 
 revisers] paper that the posture of receiving the Sacra- 
 ment either kneeling or standing was left indifferent 
 in the Book by the divines, and that every one might 
 follow the one way or the other : for this reason, to teach 
 men that it was lawful to receive either way. But the 
 
 ' This refers to the omission of the Invocation in the Prayer of 
 Consecration in the Second Book (Strype, Ann. of Bef. vol; i. pt. ii. 
 p. 463). 
 
 2 Ann. of Bef. vol. i. pt. i. pp. 120-1. 
 
742 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Parliament, I suppose, made a change here, enjoining the 
 ancient posture of kneeling, as was in the old Book.^ 
 
 Elizabeth, I venture to think, took care that 
 Parliament did not do anything of the kind. Her 
 views on that point v^ere emphatic and peremp- 
 tory, as I have already shown in other parts of 
 this volume. But one fact is plain, namely, that 
 the Book which left the hands of the revisers had 
 neither the rubric on kneeling nor the Ornaments 
 Bubric, and the Book which the Act of Uniformity 
 sanctioned had both.^ By whose authority were 
 they inserted ? I venture to suggest that the Queen, 
 finding the committee of revisers unmanageable, 
 summoned a synod of clergy and the surviving 
 canonical bishops, and secured their consent to the 
 Book before it was presented to Parliament. This 
 would explain the withdrawal of the first edition of 
 the Act of Uniformity and the delay of more than 
 two months before the appearance of the second. 
 She was at that time evidently anxious to conciliate 
 the Marian bishops, and she wished to present the 
 Prayer Book to them in as palatable a form as she 
 could before introducing the Act of Uniformity which 
 was to enforce its use. ' April was almost spent,' says 
 Strype, ' before the divines had finished this new 
 
 ' Ann. of Ref. vol. i. pt. i. pp. 121-2. 
 
 '^ The evidence of Sandys, who must have known, being himself 
 one of the revisers, is decisive on that point. ' The Parliament,' he 
 says, ' draweth to its close. The last Book of Service is gone through 
 with a proviso to retain the ornaments which were used in the first 
 and second year of King Edward,' &c. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 743 
 
 Service Book ; wherein was a proviso to retain the 
 ornaments which were used in the Church in the 
 first and second years of King Edward VL, until it 
 pleased the Queen to take order for them.' ^ Dates 
 are important here. The Book left the revisers' 
 hands towards the end of March, and the second 
 edition of the Act of Uniformity made its first ap- . 
 pearance in Parliament a month later, when the 
 session was near its end. "Why the delay ? And 
 what happened in the interval ? Possibly such an 
 informal synod as I have suggested, and which, pace 
 Professor Maitland, may be the ' convocation ' re- 
 ferred to in the document in which the Professor 
 finds nothing but ' rubbish ' and ' stuff.' 
 
 For we must remember that the words ' convoca- 
 tion ' and ' synod ' were used very loosely in those 
 days. To give one instance. The Articles of Keligion 
 which were published in 1552 bore this title : ' Articles 
 which were agreed to in the Synod of London in the 
 year 1552 by the bishops and other godly and learned 
 men, to root out the discord of opinions, and establish 
 the agreement of true religion.' Yet they were 
 never submitted to Convocation or any formal synod. 
 We have two explanations of this erroneous title. 
 Heylin suggests that the Articles were thus called 
 because they were ' the work of some bishops and 
 certain other learned men sufficiently empowered for 
 
 * Strype contirms Sandys's statement that what the Elizabethan 
 Ornaments Eubric sanctioned were the ornaments of Edward's first 
 and second years. And he calls Sandys's ' gloss ' ' the conjecture of a 
 private man.' 
 
744 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 that end and purpose.' ^ "When Cranmer's attention 
 was called to the title he answered that he ' did not 
 like it,' but when he ' complained thereof to the 
 Council, it w^as answered by them, that the Book was 
 so entitled because it w^as set forth in the time of the 
 Convocation ' ^ — that is, I presume, during the 
 session of Convocation. Yet Archbishop Parker, 
 nine years afterwards, speaks of the Articles of 1552 
 as ' the Articles set forth in a synod at London in 
 King Edward's time.' ^ 
 
 I must, further, dissent from Professor Maitland's 
 interpretation of the document in question. ' But 
 one thing seems perfectly clear,' he says, ' namely, 
 that this writer knows nothing of two Convocations, 
 the earlier of which was all for papal supremacy, 
 while the later enacted the Prayer Book.' That ' the 
 writer knows nothing of two Convocations,' I dis- 
 pute. That he knows nothing of an ' earlier ' and a 
 ' later ' Convocation, I admit. But who has attributed 
 such knowledge to him ? The writer does not say, 
 nor has it, as far as I know, been suggested, that the 
 two sets of bishops named by him sat in one Con- 
 vocation . The paper looks to me like a note made by 
 the writer for future use, and not written with the 
 exactness of a man writing history. His reference 
 to * Chenye ' is of course inaccurate, but not more 
 inaccurate than Professor Maitland's. The former 
 makes Cheyne a bishop a little too early. The Pro- 
 
 ' History of Bef. i. 256-7. 
 
 2 Burnet, History of the Bef. iii. 369. 
 
 3 Ihid. p. 511. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 745 
 
 fessor denies that Cheyne was a bishop at all ; for 
 such I take to be the meaning of his ironical query 
 ' whether Cheyne was made bishop for only this once.' 
 There is nothing in the document to imply that, in 
 the writer's opinion, ' good Father Coverdale was 
 sitting cheek by jowl with bloody Bonner,' ' or 
 whether Mr. Barlow . . . hurried home in time to 
 meet those Holy Confessors, White and Watson, ere 
 they went to the Tower.' But the document is 
 before the reader, and he can judge for himself 
 whether Professor Maitland has not pressed into it 
 a meaning w^hich does not necessarily belong to it. 
 
 I remarked ^ on the singular fact that the Marian 
 bishops did not contradict Elizabeth's assertion, 
 in her Letters Patent sanctioning the Latin Prayer 
 Book, that the Act of Uniformity was passed with 
 the consent of the three Estates of the Realm. 
 ' Bonner flatly contradicted it,' retorts Professor 
 Maitland. I beg his pardon. Bonner, some six 
 years afterwards, pleaded, under the advice of a 
 clever lawyer, 'the expert Plowden,' as Professor 
 Maitland calls him, that the Act of Supremacy 
 lacked the assent of the Lords Spiritual. But in a 
 letter which he addressed to the Queen personally,^ 
 two years previously, giving his reasons for refusing 
 to take the oath of supremacy, he says nothing about 
 the invalidity of the Act caused by the opposition 
 of the spiritual peers. That point was raised by 
 his counsel six years after the Queen's Letters 
 
 See p. 347. 
 
 Strype, Life of Grindal, p. 487. 
 
746 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Patent had claimed the assent of the three Estates 
 of the Kealm for the Act of Uniformity. For 
 whatever reason, it is the simple truth that the 
 Marian bishops, Bonner included, never contra- 
 dicted tliat assertion. 
 
 Professor Maitland tells me that if I look at a 
 parchment copy of the Act of Uniformity ' lying at 
 Westminster,' I shall 'see reason to suspect that the 
 House of Lords amended the Bill and, in effect, 
 erased from the Litany that rude prayer for deliver- 
 ance from the detestable enormities of the Pope.' 
 That was in the debate on Elizabeth's Act of Uni- 
 formity. But the statement of mine which Profes- 
 sor Maitland seems to be controverting refers to the 
 Parliamentary history of the Uniformity Act of 1662. 
 Besides, I said nothing about ' amending the Bill.' 
 
 The Professor also asks me in a way which 
 implies that I had made an extraordinary assertion, 
 ' Where did he learn that the clergy in Convocation 
 is one of the three Estates of the Kealm ? Where 
 did he learn that every Act to which those three 
 Estates have assented was laid before a Convocation ? 
 Where, above all, did he learn that the assent of Con- 
 vocation is the assent of the Lords Spiritual in Par- 
 liament ? ' As a matter of fact, I have not made 
 any of the three assertions which are here interroga- 
 tively denied. But on the other hand, if I had 
 made the first and last, stated somewhat differently 
 from Professor Maitland, I should not have been 
 very far wrong. The second is absurd, and receives 
 no support from anything that I have written. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 747 
 
 Convocation is constitutionally the Ecclesiastical 
 Estate, and sat in Parliament in former days in that 
 capacity : the Lower House in the House of Com- 
 mons, the Upper House in the House of Lords. 
 But the attendance of the Lower House in Parlia- 
 ment was irregular, because the members found it 
 irksome and expensive. In process of time it lapsed 
 by desuetude. In the first Convocation in the reign 
 of Edward VI. the Lower House petitioned for the 
 restoration of their unrepealed right in the follow- 
 ing words : — 
 
 That the clergy of the lower House of Convocation 
 may be admitted to sit in Parliament according to ancient 
 usage. 
 
 Should their petition be rejected, they desired 
 ' that no Bills, in which the Christian religion, the 
 persons, estates, or jurisdiction of the clergy, are con- 
 cerned may pass without the assent of the clergy,' 
 that is, in Convocation. The following quotations 
 from Collier give the facts succinctly : — 
 
 That the lower House of Convocation, in their 
 request for sitting with the Commons in Parliament, 
 insisted upon nothing more than being restored to ancient 
 privileges, appears by the King's writ directed to every 
 bishop : in which summons the bishop is first required to 
 appear in person, at the time and place prepared for the 
 Parliament. This part of the writ is the same in substance 
 with those sent to the temporal peers. After this follows 
 the premunitory clause, in which the bishop is commanded 
 ' to give notice to (prior or) dean and chapter of his 
 cathedral church, and to the archdeacons, and all the 
 
748 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 clergy of his diocese, that the prior, dean, and arch- 
 deacons, in their own persons, the chapter by one, and the 
 clergy by two proper proxies, sufficiently empowered by 
 the said chapter and clergy, should by all means be 
 present at the Parliament with him, to do and consent to 
 those things which by the blessing of God, by their 
 common advice, happened to be ordained in the matters 
 aforesaid : and that the giving this notice should by no 
 means be omitted by him.' 
 
 If the bishop happen to be beyond sea, and in no 
 condition to execute the King's writ, the summons was 
 sent to his Vicar-General, and by him the clergy of the 
 diocese had the same notice to come to Parliament, as if 
 the bishop had been at home.^ 
 
 After some observations of an explanatory 
 character, Collier proceeds : — 
 
 That the lower clergy formerly sent their represen- 
 tatives to Parliament may be proved by a famous resolu- 
 tion in Bird and Smith's case in the reign of King 
 James I. How the Lord Chancellor Edgerton ; Popham, 
 Chief Justice of England; Coke, Chief Justice of the 
 Common Pleas ; and Fleming, Chief Baron, besides 
 other things, resolved that the canons of the Church made 
 by the Convocation and the King, without a Parliament, 
 shall bind in all ecclesiastical matters no less than an Act 
 of Parliament. As a medium to prove this, they affirm 
 the Convocation was once part of the Parliament. And 
 since the low^er clergy were parted from the House of 
 Commons, they carried their share of legislature along 
 with them into the Convocation. They formed their 
 resolution, further, upon a celebrated precedent of both 
 Houses of Parliament, 21 Henry VIIL, where, after a full 
 debate in a conference, it was resolved, that when the 
 
 ' Eccles, Hist. v. 214. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOR MAITLAND 749 
 
 Convocation makes canons concerning matters within 
 their jurisdiction, they are binding to the whole realm. ^ 
 
 These summonses of representatives of the clergy 
 to the House of Commons go back certainly to 
 Edward I., and continued to be issued dow^n to 1640. 
 We have a survival of the right of Convocation to 
 regard itself as one of the Estates of the Eealm in the 
 privilege of the clergy to tax themselves through 
 their proctors in Convocation and the bishops. 
 This privilege they surrendered voluntarily in 1664, 
 but v^ith a clause reserving their right to resume it 
 if they saw fit ; a clause which, I suppose, w^ould 
 still enable them to do so. The Act in which they 
 made this provisional surrender is called ' An Act 
 for granting a Eoyal aid unto the King's Majesty.' 
 Like some other parts of the British constitution, 
 the exact status of the clergy in Parliament does 
 not seem ever to have been clearly defined. The 
 truth appears to be that they sat in Parliament at 
 first as representing the Spiritualty on its secular 
 side, and in Convocation on its ecclesiastical side. 
 They attended Parliament reluctantly, however, and 
 gradually their appearance in Convocation at the 
 King's summons came to be accepted as an equi- 
 valent for Parliamentary attendance. In the reign 
 of Henry VIII. the House of Lords did not sit on 
 Convocation days ^ : a recognition, apparently, of 
 
 • Eccles. Hist. v. 21(^-7. 
 
 2 Wake's Authority of Christian Princes over their Synods 
 Asserted, p. 221. Cf. Stubbs, Const. Hist. iii. 481 : under Henry VIII. 
 the House of Lords adjourned ' by royal authority owing to the 
 absence of the Drelates in Convocation.' 
 
750 THE EEFORMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 the necessity of their presence for vaHd legis- 
 lation. 
 
 I submit therefore that the facts hardly justify 
 the peremptoriness of Professor Maitland's criticism, 
 or the magisterial tone which he has thought proper 
 to adopt in this matter. 
 
 The only other criticism of Professor Maitland 
 which I feel called upon to notice concerns the rela- 
 tion of the Church of England to the Eoman Canon 
 Law more than it does me. But the subject is im- 
 portant, and I offer some remarks upon it. 
 
 'Wisely,' says Professor Maitland of Elizabeth 
 on her accession, ' she allowed Richard Chetwood 
 and Ann [ ? Agnes] his wife to pursue their appeal to 
 the Bishop of Eome.' This is one of those half- 
 truths which, in my humble judgment, vitiate a 
 good deal of Professor Maitland's reasoning in his 
 learned book on ' Eoman Canon Law in the Church 
 of England.' To one who knew no more about the 
 facts than the words just quoted reveal they con- 
 vey, unintentionally of course, an erroneous impres- 
 sion, namely, that Elizabeth approved of appeals 
 to Rome. The fact, however, is that the very 
 Act (of Supremacy) in which the Queen allowed 
 Chetwood and his wife to pursue this appeal to 
 Rome forbids all such appeals under severe penalties. 
 Indeed the very sentence in which this concession is 
 made rejects the authority of the See of Rome. 
 Here it is : — 
 
 And where one pretended sentence has heretofore 
 been given in the Consistory in Paul's before certain 
 
AN ANSWER TO PROFESSOR MAITLAND 751 
 
 judges delegate, by the authority legatine of the late 
 Cardinal Poje, by reason of a foreign usurped power and 
 authority, against Richard Chetwood, Esq., and Agnes 
 his wife, at the suit of Charles Tyrril, gentleman, in a 
 cause of matrimony solemnised between the said Richard 
 and Agnes, as by the same pretended sentence more 
 plainly doth appear, from which sentence the said Richard 
 and Agnes have appealed to the Court of Rome, which 
 appeal does there remain, and yet is not determined &c. 
 
 The Act goes on to say that if the Court of Eome 
 will, within sixty days, ' reverse the said pretensed 
 sentence,' the Queen will graciously allow the va- 
 lidity of the sentence. The Act says in effect : 
 ' By the usurped authority of the Bishop of Rome, 
 operating through the illegal medium of a Papal 
 Legate, an unjust sentence was pronounced against 
 a married couple, who in the late reign appealed to 
 Eome for justice. If the Roman Court reverse the 
 sentence within sixty days, we will confirm its de- 
 cision ' : the plain inference being that otherwise the 
 sentence will be disallowed. . This was an acknowledg- 
 ment of Papal jurisdiction for which his Holiness, I 
 imagine, would feel but small gratitude. 
 
 Professor Maitland's commendation of Elizabeth 
 for acting ' wisely ' in recognising, as he thinks, the 
 right of Rome to hear an appeal from an English 
 ecclesiastical court, is in accordance with the thesis 
 which he has undertaken to establish in his ' Roman 
 Canon Law in the Church of England.' The ques- 
 tion affects the historical position of the Church of 
 England intimately, and I will therefore conclude 
 
75^ THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 this chapter with a few remarks upon it. Professor 
 Maitland's studies — which however he confesses to 
 be of a recent character in this matter, being in fact 
 ' an incursion into a region that was unfamihar to 
 him ' — have led him to ' attribute to the Boman 
 Canon Law,' that is, to the Pope's jurisdiction, ' an 
 authority over the doings of the EngHsh Ecclesiasti- 
 cal Courts such as it is not commonly supposed to 
 have wielded.' This is a conclusion, he admits, 
 which has ' not been generally accepted in this 
 country by those whose opinions are the weightiest,' 
 and ' has recently been rejected by the report of a 
 Eoyal Commission signed by twenty-three illustrious 
 names,' including that of the Bishop of Oxford, than 
 whom it would be impossible to quote a more 
 authoritative name. Professor Maitland, in short, 
 has convinced himself, and naturally seeks to convince 
 the public, that the English Church acknowledged 
 the supremacy of the Pope in the most unqualified 
 sense before the Keformation. The Professor's own 
 claims on behalf of his theory are modest, as becomes 
 a man of wide and accurate scholarship. All he 
 aspires to is the ' hope ' that his book ' may perhaps 
 do a little to promote the further exploration of a 
 not uninteresting tract of English history.' But it 
 is sometimes the misfortune of eminent men to 
 receive less appreciation than their due through 
 the indiscriminate panegyrics of admiring disciples. 
 This, I believe, has been the fate, to some extent, of 
 Professor Maitland. His book was saluted in certain 
 quarters as a new landmark in the domain of eccle- 
 
AN ANSWER TO PEOFESSOR MAITLAND 753 
 
 siastical history, occupying in that region much the 
 same place which Newton's ' Principia ' takes in the 
 sphere of physics. Professor Maitland himself, while 
 combating the view of Dr. Stubbs and other eminent 
 scholars, says : ' It is likely that they are in the right 
 and I am in the wrong.' 
 
 I have read Professor Maitland's book carefully, 
 and more than once, and, while acknowledging its 
 learning and ingenuity, I remain unconvinced. The 
 Professor may think me prejudiced. Ifc is difficult 
 to be entirely free from prejudice in any matter in 
 which one is interested. But prejudice, in the sense 
 of predisposition in favour of one of two issues, does 
 not necessarily make one unfair. The warmth of 
 our sympathy may even induce us to test the merit 
 of its object with closer scrutiny from jealousy of its 
 rival. Indifference, on the other hand, is not always 
 a criterion of impartiality. To avoid the suspicion 
 of being ' an advocate of one of two Churches, the 
 English or the Koman,' Professor Maitland thinks 
 it necessary to assure the public that he is * a dissen- 
 ter from both, and from other Churches.' And he 
 opens the article to which I have been replying with 
 the words : 'With " the crisis in the Church " and 
 " the Lambeth decision " this paper will have nothing 
 to do. In the one I take no interest ; the other I have 
 not read.' And further on he classes himself among 
 ' the infidels whose " gifts " I may " dread." ' I do 
 not say that this neutral attitude towards Christianity 
 need bias Professor Maitland against the claims 
 of the Church of England. But undoubtedly that 
 
 3c 
 
754 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 frame of religious detachment does bias, and that 
 avowedly, a number of men among us against the 
 Church of England. A popular writer has lately 
 published a book in order to prove that the Eoman 
 creed, in the most extreme development of Ultramon- 
 tanism, is the only logical form of Christianity ; and 
 this for the scarcely veiled purpose of discrediting 
 Christianity. I am far from suggesting that Profes- 
 sor Maitland had any such aim. I sincerely believe 
 that he wrote in the interest of what he believes to 
 be historical truth. But his book certainly is an 
 illustration of the proverb that ' extremes meet,' for 
 it has been welcomed with avidity by Agnostics on 
 the one hand and by Ultramontanes on the other : 
 by the latter naturally, but why by the former, 
 unless for the purpose of damaging the Church of 
 England and discrediting Christianity by identifying 
 it with the most extreme form of Romanism ? 
 
 Both parties seem to me to have been somewhat 
 premature in proclaiming the triumph of Professor 
 Maitland over those writers on constitutional history 
 and Canon Law ' whose opinions,' the Professor 
 himself allows, 'are the weightiest.' It is, in my 
 humble judgment, possible to admit the accuracy of 
 the Professor's general statement of facts, yet deny 
 his conclusion. Nor are his inferences in matters of 
 detail always warranted by his facts. For instance, 
 speaking of the decretals of Gregory IX., Boniface 
 VIII., and John XXII., he says :— 
 
 Each of them was a statute book deriving its force 
 from the Pope who published it, and who, being Pope, was 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PROFESSOE MAITLAND 755 
 
 competent to ordain binding statutes for the Catholic 
 Church, and every part of it, at all events within those 
 spacious limits that were set to Papal power by the jus 
 divinum naturale. 
 
 Professor Maitland seems here to exclude the 
 Orthodox Church from ' the Catholic Church,' for in 
 none of the Oriental Churches was the supremacy of 
 the Pope ever allowed. But his statement does not 
 apply in its integrity even to Catholic countries on 
 the Continent, like France and Austria.^ It is of 
 course true that while the false decretals were 
 believed .to be genuine, the Koman Canon Law 
 enjoyed a kind of loose general supremacy in the 
 ecclesiastical courts of Europe, yet a supremacy never 
 accepted without any qualification, and in England 
 certainly never by any formal act received as of bind- 
 ing force without qualification or appeal. On the 
 contrary, the State, with the concurrence of the 
 Spiritualty — by prohibitions ; by restraint of appeals ; 
 by checks on the reception of Papal Bulls ; by 
 renunciation of gifts illegally conferred by Bulls ; by 
 declarations in Parliament on the action of Legatine 
 Courts, and of ecclesiastical courts as Legatine, 
 especially in the fifteenth century — persistently re- 
 fused to admit the claim which Professor Maitland 
 has made on behalf of Papal jurisdiction. The sound- 
 ness of a conclusion, like that of a chain, may some- 
 times be tested by the soundness of a single link. 
 Let us apply this test to the alleged unquestioned 
 acknowledgment of the Pope's unlimited supremacy 
 
 • See ante, pp. 362-3. 
 
 3 c 2 
 
756 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 in the ecclesiastical courts in England. One of Pro- 
 fessor Maitland's panegyrists — himself, too, claiming 
 to be an expert on this subject— has cited what he 
 considers a decisive proof of the accuracy of Professor 
 Maitland's views as against Dr. Stubbs's. It happens, 
 however, that this test case proves the exact opposite 
 of what the panegyrist intended. It is the case of 
 Nicolas Hereford who was condemned for heresy 
 by the Archbishop of Canterbury (a.d. 1382). He 
 appealed to Kome, and managed to escape to the 
 Holy City and lodge his appeal in person. The Pope 
 received the appeal ; which proves nothing. The 
 Pope was always glad to receive appeals from all 
 and sundry. Every appeal was ostensibly a proof of 
 his universal jurisdiction. So he heard Hereford's 
 appeal, and confirmed the English Primate's sentence. 
 But the question is not whether the Pope received 
 Hereford's appeal and reheard his case, but whether 
 the Archbishop of Canterbury admitted Hereford's 
 right of appeal. Any tyro knows that when a right 
 of appeal is recognised the appeal suspends ad 
 interim the execution of the judgment of the inferior 
 court. Did it do so in Hereford's case ? On the 
 contrary, the Archbishop denounced the appeal as 
 'frivolous and pretended' {frivola et prete^isa) , and 
 manifestly illegal in addition {necnon errorem juris 
 in se manifestum continentem) . The Pope was too 
 acute to reverse Archbishop Courtney's sentence, and 
 thereby invite a rebuff. But the Archbishop of 
 Canterbury not only denounced Hereford's appeal as 
 'frivolous,' 'pretensed' (to use the old word), and 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 757 
 
 illegal ; he proceeded forthwith to execute his own 
 sentence and excommunicated Hereford for his pains 
 at St. Paul's Cathedral on the first day on which ' a 
 very large congregation ' could be present to witness 
 it.^ And this striking repudiation of the Pope's 
 authority in English ecclesiastical courts is made 
 all the more emphatic by the fact that Archbishop 
 Courtney was in other matters what might be called 
 an Ultramontane. 
 
 A learned Koman Catholic, Canon Moyes, tried 
 to evade the force of Courtney's denial of the right 
 of appeal to Eome, when I appealed to it in the 
 * Contemporary Review,' by alleging that by the 
 Roman Canon Law appeals to Rome of a frivolous 
 character were forbidden. That cannot possibly 
 apply to Hereford's case : first, because an appeal 
 on a question of heresy cannot be described as 
 frivolous ; secondly, because the Pope did receive 
 the appeal and rehear the case, thereby proving 
 that he did not consider the appeal ' frivolous,* 
 though the Archbishop did. 
 
 This case alone, it seems to me, suffices to over- 
 throw Professor Maitland's thesis. But it is far 
 indeed from standing alone. In the year 1350, for 
 example, the Archbishop of Canterbury confirmed 
 the election of the Chancellor to the University of 
 Oxford, upon which the Bishop of Lincoln appealed 
 to the Pope. The Primate, so far from admitting the 
 right of appeal, pronounced it frivolous and illegal, 
 and cited the appellant before him for contempt.^ 
 
 > Wilkins, Condi, iii. 165-6. ^ j^^^^ p_ 7 
 
758 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 In the year 1414 the University of Oxford pre- 
 sented to King Henry V. certain articles for the 
 reformation of the universal Church. The second 
 article protests against the appointment of Cardinals 
 by the absolute v^ill of the Pope ; the fifth against 
 the detestable simony practised at the Eoman 
 Curia ; the sixth against the prodigal grant of Papal 
 indulgences ; the seventh against the enormous ex- 
 tortions practised by the Apostolic See in various 
 fees ; and also against the reservation of first-fruits, 
 * autJiorised by no written law,' but * a grave scandal 
 both to the said See and the v^hole Christian Church.' ^ 
 
 In declaring that the Papal reservation of first- 
 fruits was ' authorised by no written law,' the 
 University touched a most important point which 
 Professor Maitland has overlooked in his learned 
 dissertation. Great , weight was allowed to the 
 Eoman Canon Law in the ecclesiastical courts in 
 England, and its supremacy may be said to have 
 been generally allowed, with large reservations. 
 But underlying all this was the conviction that it 
 was not really supreme, and when it came in con- 
 flict with the national law in any point which 
 touched the dignity or interest of the national 
 authority, it would be, and often was, resisted with 
 success. Thus we find Archbishop Courtney, in the 
 ParHament of 1392, protesting against the Pope's 
 encroachments, and declaring his resolve ' to stand 
 with our Lord the King, and support his crown in 
 the matters above mentioned, to his power,' whenever 
 
 ' Wilkins, iii. 361. 
 
AN ANSWEK TO PKOFESSOE MAITLAND 759 
 
 a question arose in which he had to choose between 
 the Koman Canon Law and the Law of the Land. 
 And this declaration is all the more significant because 
 the Primate at the same time protests his acceptance 
 of the Koman Pope's authority in general. The result 
 was the Statute of Praemunire, imposing penalties on 
 certain Papal usurpations which were authorised by 
 the Koman Canon Law. The Lords Spiritual con- 
 curred in all points with the temporal peers and the 
 commons in putting these restrictions on the Pope's 
 authority. In his letters to the Primate and to the 
 Duke of Bedford, some years afterwards. Pope Martin 
 denounced this statute as * execrable,' and reproached 
 the Primate bitterly for assenting to it. ' You can 
 see,' he said, ' the authority of our blessed Saviour 
 and the Apostolic See despised and trampled on, 
 without so much as dropping one word of remon- 
 strance.' And to the Duke he protests that ' the 
 jurisdiction of the Koman Church and ecclesiastical 
 liberty had been oppressed by the force of that 
 execrable statute, which was contrary to all reason, 
 divine and human.' ^ 
 
 And how would Professor Maitland reconcile the 
 deposing power, claimed and exercised by the Popes, 
 with his theory ? The decretum, De Hcereticis, c. 3, 
 is part of the Corpus Juris. Here is an extract from 
 it :— 
 
 ' Quamvis dudum in regno Angliae jurisdictio Eomanas ecclesiae 
 et libertas ecclesiastica fuerit oppressa, vigore illius execrabilis 
 statuti, quod omni divine et humanae ration! contrarium est, &c. — 
 Fuller, Church Hist. i. 464 ; Collier, Eccl. Hist. iii. 207-9, 340-1. 
 
760 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 If a temporal lord, after having been required and 
 admonished by the Church, shall neglect to cleanse his 
 land from heretical defilement, let him be excommunicated 
 by the metropolitan and the other bishops of the province. 
 And if he shall through contempt fail to give satisfaction 
 within a year, let this be signified to the Sovereign 
 Pontiff, that he may thereupon declare his vassals ab- 
 solved from allegiance to him, and offer his land for 
 seizure by Catholics, that they may, after expelling the 
 heretics, possess it by an incontestable title, and keep it 
 in the purity of the faith. 
 
 This decree entirely justified the excommunica- 
 tion of Elizabeth and the consequent absolution of 
 her subjects from their allegiance, and the offer of 
 the kingdom by the Pope to Spain or France. 
 
 Surely Professor Maitland would not maintain 
 that the Church of England ever adopted that part 
 of the Canon Law. And can a Church which 
 claimed and exercised the right of dispensing with the 
 Eoman Canon Law ad libitum — choosing what it ap- 
 proved and rejecting what it disapproved — be said to 
 have acknowledged the unqualified supremacy of that 
 law ? When pressed by Dr. Stubbs's high authority, 
 Professor Maitland will not go further than to say 
 that ' in all probability large portions (to say the 
 least) of " the Canon Law of Kome " were regarded 
 by the Courts Christian in this country as absolutely 
 binding law.' ^ But is not this virtually a surrender 
 of the Professor's whole case ? Courts which claim 
 and exercise the right to pick and choose ad libitum 
 
 ' Roman Canon Law in the Church of England, p. 2. 
 
AN ANSWEE TO PEOFESSOE MAITLAND 761 
 
 among the decrees of a code claim in fact to be 
 superior, not inferior, to the code, and no theoretical 
 maxims in Lyndwood will get rid of that fact. The 
 right to select implies the right to reject. 
 
 Dr. Stubbs admits that the Koman Canon Law 
 had * great authority ' in the English courts. Pro- 
 fessor Maitland thinks that he disposes of that 
 admission as follows : 
 
 The Pope expressly legislates for England among 
 other countries. He says that an English prelate on the 
 occasion of a visitation is not to receive more than a 
 certain' sum of money. Such a statute you can obey, or 
 you can ignore'; no third course is open to you. If you 
 deny that it binds you, then you allow it no great 
 authority ; you allow it no authority whatever. 
 
 This is hardly convincing. It assumes the point 
 in dispute, namely, the unreserved acknowledg- 
 ment of the Pope's unqualified supremacy de jure 
 and de facto. A statute by an English Parliament 
 must be obeyed or disobeyed. A statute by a 
 foreign ecclesiastic, claiming jurisdiction in England, 
 supreme over all causes, was a different matter. 
 Great or little authority might be conceded to it 
 according to circumstances, as in Elizabeth's conces- 
 sion in Chetwood's appeal. A power which adopted 
 * large portions' of the Koman Canon Law claimed 
 ipso facto the right of determining the amount of 
 authority that was due to any particular decretal.' 
 
 ' ' Authority might be allowed by mutual consent, hni jurisdiction 
 implies a legal force which was never granted to the Papacy.' — For 
 Church and Crown, p. 12. By the Eev. C. E. Harris, B.A. An able 
 and instructive pamphlet. 
 
762 THE KEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 On the whole, then, I respectfully submit that 
 if the authority of the eminent writers, of whom 
 Dr. Stubbs is one of the chief, is to be overthrown, 
 it still remains to be done. 
 
INDEX 
 
 Abimelech, 194 
 
 Abraham, 194 
 
 Acton, Lord, on Vatican Council, 
 
 491 
 Acts of the Apostles, 181 
 Advertisements, the, 391, 394, 
 
 398, 407 
 
 informality of, 409 
 directed against the Puri- 
 tans, 410, 444, 448 
 Agnostic tactics, 753, 754 
 Agnus Dei, the, 109 
 Alasco, 420 
 Albertus Magnus, 212 
 Aldenham, Lord, 442 
 Alexander the Great, 72 
 Alfonso Liguori, Saint, 254 
 Alice, Princess, 318 
 
 on prayers for the dead, 318 
 An ambiguous document, 731, 
 
 740-3 
 Ananias and Sacerdotalism, 199 
 Andrewes, Bishop, 116, 150, 271, 
 
 306 
 Angeli, Monsignor, 533 
 Anglican Church. See Church 
 
 of England 
 Anglican Orders. See Church of 
 
 England 
 Anselm, 81 
 Antagonistic theories of worship, 
 
 xxxix 
 Apocalypse, the, 78 
 Argyll, Duke of, on Zwinglianism, 
 
 159 
 Ariansand Athanasian Creed, 321 
 
 Aristotle and the Eucharist, 27 
 
 Arius, 496 
 
 Armada, the, 93 
 
 Arnobius, 122 
 
 Art and Puritanism, xxxix 
 
 Arthur, King, 317 
 
 Article XXVIII., 674, 694 
 
 Articles, the, 70, 128 
 
 revision of, in 1562, 131 
 the Twenty-eighth Article 
 
 discussed, 161 et seq. 
 the Twenty-sixth, 202 
 the Twenty-second, 296, 315 
 Ascension, Feast of, 172 
 Ashburnham's (Lord) Prayer 
 Book and Ornaments Rubric, 
 442 
 * At all times of ministration, 
 647 
 I Athanasian Creed, 171, 321 
 ; Atonement : 
 
 j doctrine of, 39, 49-72 
 
 j a Cambridge Fellow burnt 
 
 ' for heterodox opinions on, 
 
 97, 208 
 : Augsburg, Confession of, 33, 293 
 
 i Bacon, Loed, 74, 107, 121, 147 
 
 I Baines, Bishop, on Infallibility, 
 
 I 489 
 
 ! Balbo, 525 
 
 i Bancroft, Archbishop, 393 
 
 Baptism, use of cross in, 37 
 
 Baptists, 103 
 
 Barlow, consecration of, 462 
 
764 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Baronius, 513 
 Barrington, Bishop, xxxi 
 Barrow, Bishop, 116, 286, 306, 
 
 307 
 Basnage on Transubstantiation, 
 
 130 
 Baxter, 36, 135, 137, 431 
 Bayard, 213 
 
 Beaconsfield on Eitualism, xxxvii 
 Beam-light, 644, xlii 
 Bellarmine, 142, 325, 506, 507 
 Benholme, Lord, 377 
 Bennett. See Cases 
 Benson, Archbishop, Lincoln 
 
 judgment of, 439 
 Berkeley, Bishop, 287 
 Beveridge, Bishop, 116 
 Bingham, 165 
 Bishops and Church crises, xv- 
 
 xxiv 
 
 their influence, xli 
 Bismarck, 527 
 Black Eubric. See Eubrics 
 Blandford, Bishop, on Prayers for 
 
 the Dead, 307 
 Boccaccio, story of, 517 
 Bodmin and Corff Cases, 421, 
 
 422 
 Bodmin Inventory, 634 
 Bonaventura, 247 
 Bonnechose on clergy, vii 
 Bonner on Prayer Book, 728 
 
 on Act of Supremacy, 745 
 Bossuet, 149 
 Boyd, Dr., 373 
 Bradlaugh, Mr., 390 
 Bramhall, Bishop, 116, 132, 134, 
 
 136, 138, 143, 270 
 Bredock, Bp., and Speaker Len- 
 
 thall, 273 
 Brewer, Dr., 336 
 Brooke, Rev. Stopford, 242 
 Brougham, Lord, on rubrical 
 
 interpretation, 668-671 
 Bucer, 165, 420, 447 
 Buchanan, George, 114 
 Bull, Bishop, 116, 306 
 Bullingham, Bishop, 409 
 Burleigh, Lord, 94, 103, 106, 435 
 
 Burnet, Bishop, 99, 156, 285, 309 
 Bishop Butler and Purgatory, 
 315 
 
 Caibns, Lobd, 459 
 Calvin, 46, 340 , 
 Calvinists : 
 
 view of Eucharist, 7, 140 
 habit of persecution, 102 
 in England, malign Laud, 
 
 119 
 object to prayers for dead, 
 303, 310 
 Camden, 126 
 Canons : 
 
 of 1571, 35, 37 
 
 of 1603, 37, 269 
 
 the Twenty-fourth Canon, 
 
 392 
 the Fourteenth, 425 
 Canterbury, Archbishops of. See 
 
 Temple and other names 
 Capes, Rev. J., 242 
 Capernaum, Christ's discourse at, 
 
 14, 22, 28, 30, 32, 124 
 Cardinals : 
 
 Allen, 82, 85, 91 
 Antonelli, 520, 531 
 of Como, 82, 84, 91 
 Franchi, 520 
 Galimberti, 520, 536 
 Jacobini, 524 
 John di Lugo, 470 
 Manning, 254, 312, 461, 478, 
 
 489, 502 
 Monaco della Valetta, 522 
 Newman on Ultramontan- 
 
 ism, 137 
 on Sir W. Palmer, 153 
 on the Roman Curia, 253 
 on confession, 267 
 on purgatory, 312, 313 
 on the Reformation, 335, 
 
 489, 495 
 his definition of ' ex ca- 
 thedra,'' 505, 552 
 Cardinal Nina, 523 
 Palavicino, 130 
 
INDEX 
 
 765 
 
 Cardinals : 
 
 Pecci, 520. See also Popes 
 Eampolla, 524, 532, 536 
 Schiaffino, 522, 536 
 Cardinal Vaughan, 460 
 on Anglican Orders, 465, 
 
 470, 538, 542 
 Cardinal Wiseman on Papal 
 
 Infallibility, 488 
 the cardinalate at death of 
 
 Pius IX., 512 
 Papal negotiations with 
 Crispi, 535 
 Caroline Bishops : 
 
 illustrious list of, 116 
 opinions held by, 132 
 Casati, Count Gabrio, 528 
 Cases : 
 
 Bennett Case, 3, 159, 434 
 
 Blunt Case, 426 
 
 Bodmin Case, 422 
 
 Dunbar Heath, 452 
 
 Edrick, 383 
 
 Gorham, 451 
 
 Lincoln judgment, 439 
 
 Lockhart, 375 
 
 Purchas, 371, 385, 388, 399, 
 
 416, 422, 440, 457 
 Eidsdale, 105, 385, 390, 399, 
 410, 422, 445 
 Catechism, the, 19, 140 
 Catherine of Genoa, Saint, 312 
 Cecil, Secretary, 379, 405 
 Chalcedon, Eoman Catholic 
 Bishop of, 138 
 
 Bramhall's controversy with, 
 144 
 Charles I., fidelity to English 
 
 Church, 114, 115 
 Cheke, Sir John, 341 
 Chichester, Bishop of, 133 
 Chillingworth, 281 
 Christendom, reunion of, xxxi, 
 
 137, 327 
 ' Christian Year.' See Keble 
 Church Association, 435 
 Church of England : 
 
 how far it sanctions doctrine 
 of Real Presence, 3, 11, 35 
 
 Church of England : 
 
 not committed to consub- 
 stantiation, 33, 35 
 
 Baxter calls Pearson a repre- 
 sentative divine of, 37 
 
 use of cross in baptism in, 
 38 
 
 Anglican divines on Eu- 
 charist, 80 
 
 as a Divine institution, 103' 
 
 greatness of its clergy in 
 seventeenth century, 116 
 
 royal supremacy binding on 
 its clergy, 125 
 
 validity of orders not dis- 
 puted by Rome in six- 
 teenth century, 128 
 
 Venetian ambassador's sum- 
 mary of its creed, 133 
 
 Roman objections to Angli- 
 can orders, 143 
 
 doctrine of Eucharist similar 
 to that of Greek Church, 
 145, 146 
 
 proposed union of, with 
 Galilean Church, 151 
 
 did not become Zwinglian at 
 Reformation, 155 
 
 narrowness of some clergy 
 of, 160 
 
 confession in, 217, 233, 264, 
 272, 275-292, 294 
 
 prayers for dead in, 298-310, 
 318 
 
 doctrine of purgatory in, 311, 
 330 
 
 not a new Church at Refor- 
 mation, 333 
 
 Convocation and Parliament, 
 369 
 
 spiritual courts in England 
 and Scotland, 371-377 
 
 ornaments and vestments in, 
 385, 392, 430 
 
 Elizabeth and, 406 
 
 cause of dearth of clergy, 
 437 
 
 validity of Anglican orders, 
 460 et seq., 537 
 
766 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Church of England : 
 
 doctrine of intention in, 472 
 Eoman criticism of, 513 
 DoUinger on, 517 
 validity compared with that 
 
 of Eoman orders, 519 
 papal bull against its orders, 
 a blessing in disguise, 539 
 sympathy of Eastern Church 
 
 with, 541 
 its continuity to be insisted 
 
 on, 543 
 folly of present agitation 
 against, 550 
 Church of Eome : 
 
 Jesuits sent by, to England, 
 
 92 
 did not dispute validity of 
 Anglican orders in six- 
 teenth century, 128 
 distinction between Church 
 
 and Court of, 136, 138 
 auricular confession in, 226 
 evils produced by celibacy, 
 
 231 
 form of absolution in, 267 
 doctrine of purgatory in, 312 
 doctrine of intention in, 473, 
 
 516 
 striking illustration of the 
 
 doctrine, 476 
 contradictions in defining 
 
 Papal InfaUibility, 482 
 See also Eoman Catholics, 
 Papacy, and Popes 
 Church of Scotland. See Presby- 
 terians 
 Clarendon, Earl of, on Laud, 
 
 118 
 Clark, Sir Andrew, on training 
 
 youth, 235, 260 
 Clergy in Parliament, 746-749 
 Clerical indiscretions, 563 
 Clerical and military obedience, 
 
 v-vii 
 Coke, Sir Edward, on ecclesias- 
 tical legislation, 351 
 Coke, Lord, on construction of 
 statutes, 383 
 
 Coke's charge, 592 
 Coleridge on personal responsi- 
 bility, 206 
 Coleridge, Sir John, 388 
 Colher, 306, 409 
 Colossians, Epistle to, 54, 70 
 Communion of the Sick. See 
 
 Eucharist 
 Confession : 
 
 to laymen, 211-214 
 Protestant hatred of, 217, 
 
 219 
 fallacies concerning, 220 
 manuals of, 224 
 Cornewall Lewis on, 225 
 uses of, 233, 238 
 advantages of confessor 
 
 being a priest, 242 
 imaginary dangers of, 248 
 compulsory, 251 
 secrets of, betrayed, 252 
 indiscriminate denunciation 
 
 of, 257 
 ignorance concerning, 262 
 injunctions concerning, 268 
 Articles, Eubrics, and Canons 
 
 on, 269-271 
 evidence that it was prac- 
 tised. 272-275 
 taught by divines, 275-293 
 Consubstantiation, 3, 32 
 
 erroneously confounded with 
 Eeal Presence, 152 
 Convocation, independence of, 
 
 369 
 Cooke, Professor, on spiritual 
 
 world, 184 
 Cornelius and sacerdotalism, 199 
 Corpus Christi, 145, 147 
 Corpus Juris, the, 87, 507 
 Cory, Nicholas, 421 
 Cosin, Bishop, 116, 124,140,166, 
 
 280, 306 
 Coutances, Bishop of, 127 
 Cowan, Lord, 376 
 Cox, Bishop, 409 
 on crucifix, 622 
 on Elizabeth's respect for 
 law, 625 
 
INDEX 
 
 767 
 
 Cranmer, 102, 121, 125, 155, 268, 
 275, 298, 339, 342, 466, 685 
 
 Cranworth, Lord, 385 
 
 Creighton, Dr., and Sir W. 
 Harcourt, 290, 416 
 
 ' Crisis in the Church,' xxxviii 
 
 Crispi, 524 
 
 ideahsm of, 529 
 negotiations with Papacy, 
 532-569 
 
 Crown and Church, 331, 333. 
 See also Elizabeth 
 
 Cyprian and Eucharistic Vest- 
 ments, 420 
 
 Cyril, Saint, 9 
 
 Dante, ' Inferno ' quoted, 64 
 
 Darboy, Archbishop, 494, 495 
 
 Darwin, Charles, ' Life ' quoted, 
 173 
 
 ' Origin of Species,' 175 
 
 David, Calvin on, 47, 49 
 
 Dedication Services, 635 
 
 De Maistre, 551 
 
 De Quincey, 227, 277 
 
 Denzinger's Enchiridion, 463 
 
 Dibdin. See Ornaments Eubric 
 
 Diocletian, edicts of, 123 
 
 Disraeli, Mr. See Beaconsfield 
 
 Divinity, Lady Margaret Profes- 
 sor of, 36 
 
 DoUinger and Manning, xii 
 
 DoUinger, Dr., 80, 154, 250, 493, 
 516, 536 
 
 Don John of Austria, 88 
 
 Don Juan de Ydraquez, 85 
 
 Donne, Dr., 34, 277 
 
 Douay, 88, 92 
 
 Doyle, Bishop, 486 
 
 Dozy, Professor, on Moorish 
 Spain, 472 
 
 Drummond, Professor Henry, 
 48 
 
 Ducange, 161 
 
 Duchesne, Abb6, 538 
 
 Dupin, 151 
 
 Durham Letter, xxxvii 
 
 Eastern Churches, 2 
 
 Sacrament not carried about 
 
 in, 63 
 compulsory marriage of 
 
 clergy in, 232 
 how far they accept Purga- 
 tory, 325 
 Patriarch's letter to Pope, 
 
 327, 464 
 orthodoxy of liturgies of, 471 
 sympathy of, with English 
 Charch, 541 
 Echard, 126 
 
 Edmund, Archbishop, 213, 247 
 Edrick. See Cases 
 Edward VI., 99 
 
 persecution under, 102 
 Prayer Books of, 125, 156 
 different rubrics of, 163, 341, 
 378 et seg[. See also 
 Prayer Book 
 Edward VI.'s influence, 725 
 Elders are ecclesiastical persons, 
 
 372 
 Electioneering tactics, xxxvii 
 Elijah's translation, 178 
 Eliphas, 60 
 Elisha, 178 
 Elizabeth, Queen: 
 
 lines on the Keal Presence, 
 
 34 
 and Mary Queen of Scots, 
 
 83,86 
 attempts on her life inspired 
 
 by Jesuits, 85 
 and defended by modern 
 
 apologists, 89 
 excommunication of, 90, 
 
 108, 127 
 her struggle with Pope, 94 
 policy to bishops, 96, 101 
 action of clergy on her acces- 
 sion, 126 
 and the reservation of the 
 
 Sacrament, 164, 692 
 Injunctions of, 268 
 restores omissions in Second 
 Prayer Book of Edward 
 VI., 304, 386, 395, 427 
 
768 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Elizabeth, Queen : 
 
 beliefs of, 335, 357, 379, 387, 
 575 
 
 upholds ceremony, 397 
 
 the Advertisements, 402 
 
 determination to enforce 
 ritual, 406-416 
 
 Puritanism under, 435 
 
 Act of Uniformity of, 440 
 
 thirtieth Injunction of, 442 
 
 her views on doctrine and 
 ritual, 575-586, 633, 721 
 
 on crucifix and images in 
 churches, 577, 581, 582, 
 585, 622-626 
 
 resolved to restore religion 
 as leftby Henry VIII., 577, 
 579, 590 
 
 repudiated Headship of 
 Church, 577 
 
 and Papal Supremacy, 577, 
 578 
 
 her interpretation of Orna- 
 ments Eubric, 579 
 
 on the Mass, 581, 584 
 
 disliked Puritans more than 
 Papists, 582, 583 
 
 her moderation and toler- 
 ance, 585, 589 
 
 political outlook at her 
 accession, 586 
 
 religious parties at her 
 accession, 589 
 
 policy coincided with her 
 wishes, 590, 593 
 
 her Letters Patent, 688-696 
 Ely, Bishop of, 101 
 English Church Union, 331, 413 
 Epiphany, feast of, 172 
 Erastianism of Queen Mary, 
 
 721, 722 
 Eucharist : 
 
 Zwinglian view of, 1, 7 
 
 Transubstantiation and the 
 Eeal Presence, 2-4, 140 
 
 Hooker, doctrine of, 4-10, 
 11, 14 
 
 Keble's view of, 11 
 
 Eucharistic Presence, inde- 
 pendent of faith, 12-15 
 
 Eucharist : 
 
 Christ's own teaching of, 
 
 20-22 
 attacks on, 31 
 doctrine of Eeal Presence in, 
 
 34 
 as a sacrifice, 35, 39-79, 
 
 142 
 Anglican divines on, 80, 122, 
 
 124 et seq. 
 their differences with Eome 
 
 on, 140 
 adoration of the Sacrament, 
 
 144 
 reservation of the Sacra- 
 ment, 146, 160-173 
 Catholic doctrine of, not 
 
 rejected at Eeformation, 
 
 155 
 judicial decisions on, 159 
 infrequent celebrations of, 
 
 171 
 Cranmer and, 466 
 Eucharistical adoration, 675 
 Eusebius, 123, 420 
 Eutychianism, 34 
 Evangelicals, 142, 196 
 
 Ferry, Jules, 527 
 
 Field, 306 
 
 Flavian, Saint, 506 
 
 Fleury, 513 
 
 Florence, Council of, 462 
 
 France : 
 
 famous letter on religion by 
 
 Burleigh to, 107-112 
 Church in, subservient to 
 Napoleon, 151 
 Franciscans, 130 
 Frederick Barbarossa, 317 
 Freeman, 335 
 French Eevolution and Eoman 
 
 orders, 474 
 Friend, Sir John, 269 
 Fuller on Books of 1548 and 
 1549, 656 
 on Sanders, 578 
 Fust, Sir Herbert Jenner, on Lay 
 Baptism, 666 
 
INDEX 
 
 769 
 
 Gandolphy's ' Liturgy,' xxxii 
 Gardiner, 157 
 
 Gee on Elizabethan clergy, 126 
 on Act of Supremacy, 713, 
 718 
 General Councils, 35 
 the Lateran, 128 
 of Trent, 128, 130, 199, 
 
 297 
 of Florence, 297 
 the Vatican, 482, 491 
 the Seven (Ecumenical 
 
 Councils, 327 
 and the Church, 504 
 Gibbon, 258 
 Gillis, Bishop, 481 
 Ginoulhiac, Archbishop, 484 
 Gioberti, 525 
 
 Gladstone, Right Hon. W. E. : 
 on disestablishment, xxxvi 
 on other questions, 118, 147, 
 154, 315, 321, 334, 524, 
 527, 538 
 Glasgow, Archbishop of, 86 
 Gneist, Dr., on the English 
 
 Church, 350 
 Goethe on Confession, 243 
 Gorham. See Cases 
 Greek Church, 2 
 
 no feast of Corpus Christi 
 
 in, 145 
 rejects Purgatory, 325 
 See also Eastern Churches 
 Green's (Mrs. J. E.) State Papers, 
 
 351 
 Greg, Mr. W. E., xxxviii, 322, 645 
 Gregory XIII. See Popes 
 Gregory, Saint, 124 
 Grey, Lady Jane, 345 
 Grimthorpe, Lord, 295, 439 
 Grindal, Bishop, 409, 414 
 Grotius on the Canon of 1571, 
 
 37 
 Grub, Dr., 373 
 Gueranger, Dom, 506 
 Guise, Duke of, 82, 86, 91 
 Guizot, 80 
 
 Gutch's 'Collectanea Curiosa,' 
 686 
 
 Halifax, Lord, 331 
 
 letter to ' Times,' 375 
 Sir W. Harcourt and, 377 
 Hall, Bishop, 116, 118, 278 
 Hallam, Arthur, 71 
 Hallam, Henry, 48, 80, 98, 100, 
 
 115, 227, 250 
 Hamilton, Sir William, 28, 
 
 185 
 Harcourt, Sir William, 118, 133, 
 147, 250, 331, 338, 345-347, 
 377, 413, 435, 438 
 Hatton, Sir Christopher, 101, 707 
 Hay, Bishop, 483 
 Hayward on 'The Order of the 
 
 Communion,' 655 
 Heath, Dunbar, 452 
 Heber, Bishop, 307 
 Hebrews, Epistle to, 15, 311 
 Henry (Prince) of Battenberg's 
 
 funeral, 318 
 Henry VIII., struggle against 
 Pope did not begin with, 93, 
 156, 335 
 Herbert, George, 286 
 Heylin, 133 
 
 on ' The Order of the Com- 
 munion,' 655 
 High Commission Court, 119 
 Hole (Dean) on Eeservation, 
 
 170 
 Holy Communion. See Eucharist 
 Hook, Dr., 543 
 Hooker : 
 
 doctrine of Eucharist, 2, 4- 
 1 10, 14, 26, 145, 466 
 
 on confession, 234, 271, 276, 
 ' 317 
 
 : Hope, Lord Justice Clerk, 374 
 j Hormisdas, 508 
 Home, Bishop, 409 
 Hosea and Atonement, 60 
 Hughes, Archbishop, on Infalli- 
 bility, 487 
 Hume on religion under Eliza- 
 beth, 584 
 Humphrey, Father, 481 
 Husenbeth, Dr., 489 
 Hutton, E. H., 41, 315 
 
 3d 
 
770 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Incarnation, the, 16, 18 
 
 Hutton's Essay on, 41 
 
 meaning of, 59 
 
 the means of atonement, 68 
 Incense : 
 
 why forbidden, 555 
 
 its legality covered by Orna- 
 ments Kubric, 626-628 
 
 Maskell on, 630 
 
 antiquity of, 630 
 
 Kenaudot on, 630 
 
 Pellicia on, 631 
 
 Cardinal Bona on, 681 
 
 Archbishop Theodore on, 631 
 
 Apostolical Canons on, 632 
 
 Warren on, 632 
 
 Absence of rubrical direc- 
 tions no argument, 632 
 
 used in Elizabeth's chapel, 
 633 
 
 Onus prohandi on oppo- 
 nents, 627, 635 
 
 Bishop Lloyd's usage, 636 
 
 Daniele Barbaro's ' no7i 
 acque, iion fuochi,^ 641 
 Indulgences, 135 
 Infant communion, 676 
 Innocent III. See Popes 
 Intermediate State, 296-330 
 Intransigeants of the Vatican, 
 522, 532, 542 
 
 Jacobean bishops, 116 
 
 James, St., Luther on the Epistle 
 
 of, 49, 122 
 James I., 114, 423 
 James IL, 148 
 Jansenius, 509 
 Jenner, Sir Herbert, on Prayers 
 
 for the Dead, 663 
 Jessel, Sir George, 459 
 Jesuits : 
 
 policy under Elizabeth, 85 
 from Kome and Douay, 92, 
 
 109, 112 
 hinder reconciliation be- 
 tween the Churches, 133 
 and confession, 228, 231 
 
 Jevons on marvels of science, 
 
 54, 189 
 Jewel on crucifix, 622 
 Job quoted, 60 
 
 John, King, and the Pope, 81 
 Johnson, John, 448 
 Joinville, 213 
 Joyce Wayland, 729, 730, 731, 
 
 734, 738, 739 
 Justus Jonas, Catechism of, 275 
 Juvenal quoted, 235, 257 
 
 Keble's ' Christian Year ' quoted, 
 
 10, 192, 241 
 Kedney, Dr., 66 
 Keenan's Catechism, 481 
 Ken, Bishop, 116, 282, 306 
 Kennet, 272 
 Kenrick, 487 
 
 Kensit, Mr., 222, 295, 416 
 Kinglake on desert sounds, 190 
 Kingsley, Charles, 316 
 
 on Catholic antiquity, xxviii 
 Knolles, 409 
 
 Knox, Father, 87, 92, 504, 510 
 Krakatoa, eruption of, 190 
 
 Labouchere, Mr., his exposure 
 
 of Kensit, 222 
 Lambeth Decisions : 
 
 violate Anglican principles, 
 
 566 
 not based on judicial or 
 
 spiritual authority, 567, 
 
 viii-xiii 
 dangerous results of, 567, 
 
 568, 574, XXXV 
 not authorised by Prayer 
 
 Book Preface, 568-574 
 opposed to history, 592 
 assume that the Reformation 
 
 was a fresh start, 660 
 authorities to the contrary, 
 
 662-673 
 painful dilemma, xiii 
 alienate Eastern Churches, 
 
 xxxiv 
 
INDEX 
 
 771 
 
 Lambeth Decisions : 
 
 will aid Rome, xxxv 
 lead to disestablishment, 
 xxxvi 
 ' Lambeth Faire,' 429 
 Lamennais, 505 
 Langton, Stephen, 81 
 Latimer, 103, 276, 298 
 Laud, 116 
 
 broadmindedness of, 118 
 his noble death, 120 
 Heylin's Life of, quoted, 133 
 Legality of Elizabethan usages, 
 
 625 
 Leibnitz, 27, 147, 189, 293 
 Leicester, Earl of, 408 
 Leigh, Mr. Pemberton, 385 
 Leland on Elizabethan ritual, 633 
 Lemon, Mr., 734 
 Lenthall, 273 
 Leo XIII. and the ' Eeconcil- 
 
 ables,' 531 
 Lewis, Sir George Cornewall, 225, 
 
 458 
 Lingard, Dr., 489 
 Lloyd, Bishop, 450 
 Lockhart. See Cases 
 London, Bishop of. See Creigh- 
 
 ton 
 London compared with ancient 
 
 Rome, 259 
 Lopes, Mr., 455 
 Luke, Saint (iii. 21, 22), 179 
 Lushington, 452 
 
 Luther, letter to Henry VIII., 32 
 and Con substantiation, 34 
 teaching on original sin, 48 
 view of Eucharist, 140 
 system of confession, 243, 
 293 
 Lutherans, 2, 25, 32, 76, 102 
 Lyall, Dean, 547 
 
 Macaulay, 116, 337 
 
 Maccabees, book of, and prayers 
 
 for the dead, 298 
 Maclean, Sir J., 421 
 Magna Carta, 81 
 
 Maitland, Professor : 
 
 on Elizabeth, 575, 580, 750 
 
 on Erastianism, 722 
 
 his appeal a mistake, 728- 
 
 731 
 his ' rubbish,' 732 
 his guesses, 732, 735 
 his views criticised, 744, 745 
 on Roman Canon Law, 750 
 unattached religiously, 753 
 erroneous inferences, 754 
 Petitio principii, 761 
 
 Manning. See Cardinals 
 
 Marconi, 189 
 
 Marian bishops disqualified, 721 
 
 Martinengo, Abbot, 519 
 
 Martensen on Eucharist and 
 confession, 26, 294 
 
 Martineau, Dr., 141, 193, 196 
 
 Mary an Erastian, 721, 738 
 
 Mary Magdalene, 18, 180 
 
 Mary, Queen of England, 347, 
 379, 418, 427 
 
 Mary, Queen of Scots, 83, 88, 90, 
 102 
 
 Maskell on incense, 630 
 
 Mastin v. Escott, 663 
 
 Matthew, Saint, on Christ'3 
 baptism, 179 
 
 Maule, Sir William, 385 
 
 Maurice, F. D., 290, 316 
 
 Mayenne, Duke of, 82, 91 
 
 Mazzini, 525 
 
 Melanchthon on original sin, 47 
 
 Mill, John Stuart, on laws of 
 thought, 185 
 
 Milton on Puritanism, xl 
 quoted, 192 
 
 Minutius Felix, 122 
 
 Montague, Bishop, 116 
 
 Monte Casino, 524 
 
 Moody, Mr., 263 
 
 Moors in Spain, 472 
 
 Morcaldi, 333 
 
 Moi-ley, Bishop, on confession, 
 272 
 
 Mosheim, 153 
 
 Murray, Bishop, on Papal infalli- 
 bihty, 486 
 
772 THE EEFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Naaman, 76 
 Napoleon : 
 
 on Christ's Divinity, 72 
 quotation from his conversa- 
 tion, 72 
 attaches importance to reli- 
 gion, 151 
 Nardi, Monsignor, and Aloisius 
 
 Vincenzi, 498 
 Neale on Elizabethan Ritualism, 
 
 583 
 Newman on bishops, xxii. See 
 
 also Cardinals 
 Newton, 107 
 Nicene Creed, 4, 34 
 
 Homoousion of, 496 
 Nichol, Sir John, on Lay 
 
 Baptism, 662 
 Nonconformists compared with 
 
 Puritans, 539 
 Norfolk, Duke of, Newman's 
 letter to, 495 
 
 Obedience to Episcopal authority, 
 
 554, v-viii 
 Obedience to rubrics, 557-562 
 Omission = prohibition, 631 
 Oratory, the London, 86, 90 
 ' Order of the Communion,' 649- 
 
 660 
 Ornaments imply appropriate 
 
 ceremonies, 644, 645 
 Ornaments Rubric : 
 
 insisted on by Elizabeth, 
 
 575 
 its meaning, 594 
 ' By authority of Parliament,' 
 
 595-597 
 Cosin on, 596 
 Edward VI.'s second year, 
 
 597 
 Mr. Dibdin's argument exa- 
 mined, 598 
 usus loquendi, 598, 607-613 
 Royal Assent to Prayer Book 
 
 of 1559, 599, 602, 607 ' 
 ' general pardon ' argument, 
 603-607 
 
 Ornaments Rubric : 
 
 Royal Assent ending the 
 
 Session, 613, 618 
 destruction of books and 
 
 ornaments, 618 
 legalises incense, 626 
 does not mean prescriptions 
 
 of Book of 1559, 648 
 refers to usages of 1547-8, 
 649 
 Overall, Bishop, 116, 140, 279, 
 
 306 
 Oxford movement, 153, 167 
 
 Paget, Lord, and Church pro- 
 perty, 101 
 Palmer, Rev. W., on Purgatory, 
 
 325 
 Palmer, Sir W., on Marian bi- 
 shops, 723, 737 
 
 Treatise, 153, 306, 325 
 Papacy : 
 
 forgeries in connexion with, 
 
 80, 457 
 policy of, 81 
 
 unscrupulousness of, at Re- 
 formation, 82 
 animus against Elizabeth, 
 
 84-93 
 encroachments before Refor- 
 mation, 93 
 innovations of, 327 
 Mary restores Papal supre- 
 macy in England, 348 
 Papal decrees and councils, 
 
 486 et seq. 
 Papacy and Monarchy in 
 
 modern Italy, 525 
 change of policy at death of 
 
 Pius IX., 520 
 See also Popes 
 Papal InfallibiHty, 130, 460, 479 
 contradictions in definitions 
 
 of, 482 
 divisions in Vatican Council 
 
 over, 491 
 essentially modern doctrine, 
 497 
 
INDEX 
 
 773 
 
 Papal Infallibility : 
 Vincenzi on, 499 
 General Councils and, 504 
 Dr. Ward on, 509 
 flaw in theory of, 511 
 Papal Nuncios : 
 
 in Paris, 82, 86, 91 
 Monsignor Sega, 88 
 Monsignor Ruifo Scilla, 493 
 Cardinal Giustiniani, 514 
 Parker, Archbishop, 94, 102, 268, 
 276, 379, 392 
 Strype's Life of, 397 
 weakness of, 404 
 and Puritans, 410, 419 
 consecration of, 462 
 Parkins, Sir William, 269 
 Parliament : 
 
 and the Church, 35, 93, 100 
 forbidden by Elizabeth to 
 initiate ecclesiastical legis- 
 lation, 351 
 Sir William Harcourt's 
 
 theory contested, 353 
 English Church Union and, 
 
 331 
 Acts of Uniformity, 339-350, 
 380, 382, 388, 391, 413, 
 440 
 Elizabeth repudiates right 
 of, to legislate for Church, 
 349, 279 
 Long Parliament and Prayer 
 
 Book, 389 
 Act of 1644 against vest- 
 ments, 423 
 Parsons, Father, 85, 87 
 Pascal, 45 
 
 Patteson, Sir John, 385 
 Paul, Saint, 4, 16, 19, 24, 34, 44, 
 54, 58, 66, 76, 79, 115, 122, 181, 
 200, 465, 542 
 Paul V. See Popes 
 Pax, 584 
 
 Peacock's catalogue, 634 
 Pearson on the Creed, 36, 116 
 Pedro, Don, 526 
 Pelling, Dr. Edward, 152 
 Perrone, Father, 153, 213, 296 
 
 Persons. See Parsons 
 
 Persons affected by Lambeth 
 
 Decisions, 553 
 Peter, Saint, 21, 67, 180, 200, 542 
 Peter Lombard, 212, 247 
 Philip, Saint, 199 
 Philip IT. of Spain, 86, 88, 109 
 Phillpotts, Bishop, 426 
 
 on Prayer Book, 739 
 
 his sagacity, xxxiii 
 
 his wise policy, xxiv 
 
 on innovations, xxviii 
 
 claims of poor, xxix 
 Pilkington, Bishop, 408 
 Pius. See Popes 
 Popes : 
 
 personal integrity of, 81 
 
 struggle against, in England, 
 94 
 
 cease to be a political danger 
 in England, 114 
 
 the Pope and Napoleon, 151 
 
 Pope and General Councils, 
 504 
 
 invites Elizabethan bishops 
 to Council of Trent, 518 
 
 Adrian V., 513 
 
 Clementine V., 513 
 
 Eugenius IV., 462 
 
 Gregory X., 513 
 
 Gregory XIII., 82, 86, 88 
 
 Gregory XVI., 505 
 
 Innocent III., 128 
 
 John XII., 515 
 
 John XIX., 513 
 
 Leo VIIL, 513, 516 
 
 Leo X., 327 
 
 Leo XIIL, 521, 531, 534, 537, 
 541 
 
 Paul v., 88 
 
 See also Papacy 
 Praemunire, Statute of, 93 
 Prayer Book, the, 121, 125, 162 
 
 Latin one of 1560, 162, 265, 
 
 346, 347, 381, 688-704 
 not made by Crown, 339 
 historical summary of diffe- 
 rent Prayer Books, 339- 
 
 347, 424 
 
774 THE REFOEMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Prayer Book : 
 
 ceremonial of Edward VI.'s 
 first Prayer Book restored 
 by Elizabeth, 447 
 of 1559, 738, 739 
 in Parliament, 746 
 in Latin, 693-7, 703-4 
 used in Ireland, 697-701 
 Presbyterianism, 159 
 
 Church of Scotland, 371-377 
 Price Hughes, Mr., 160 
 Primate on fair play, xxv 
 
 contrasted with Phillpotts, 
 xxvi, xxvii 
 Primate, the. See Temple 
 Primitive Church, 629 
 Privy Council, Judicial Com- 
 mittee of, 105, 159, 311, 369 
 character of its judgments, 
 373, 387, 394, 411, ' 423, 
 429, 433, 438, 449, 452. 
 See also Cases 
 Progress of truth slow, xxi 
 Protestantism : 
 
 misconceptions of, 11 
 a Danish divine quoted, 25 
 Leibnitz a Protestant, 27 
 pluralists of the Keforma- 
 
 tion, 98 
 excesses of foreign Protes- 
 tants, 109 
 meeting at Albert Hall, 127, 
 
 438 
 Bramhall's description of, 
 
 139 
 Protestants believe in a Real 
 
 Presence, 140 
 hatred of confession, 217 
 but some Protestant divines 
 recommend it, 290 
 Psalms quoted, 74 
 Purchas Case. See Cases 
 Purgatory : 
 
 Eomish doctrine of, 135 
 Perrone's doctrine, 297 
 Legality of prayers for dead, 
 
 307 
 St. Catherine of Genoa on, 
 312 
 
 Purgatory : 
 
 meaning of, 314 
 Catholic doctrine of, 321 
 modern Roman teaching 
 
 concerning, 324, 328 
 Puritanism : 
 
 its excesses, 586, xxxix, xl 
 its intolerance, 585, 624 
 lawlessness of, 683 
 Cranmer on, 685 
 Milton on, xl 
 ruined art, xl 
 Puritans : 
 
 Puritan bishops, 96 
 reaction against, 106, 133 
 anarchical doctrines of, 114 
 lawlessness of, 117, 406, 
 
 439 
 did not object to reservation 
 
 of Sacrament, 165 
 the Puritan eschatology, 
 
 320 
 and the Rubrics, 389, 394, 
 
 396 
 opposition to vestments, 398, 
 
 445 
 Elizabeth and, 408, 410 
 their evidence to continuity 
 
 of ceremony, 418, 584 
 dislike of all clerical vest- 
 ments, 435 
 ♦ Pusillus grex,' 591,592 
 
 QuiRiNAL and Vatican, 524 et seq. 
 
 Ratio dicendi argument, 667, 
 
 671-673, 694, 695 
 Real Presence. See Eucharist 
 Reformation, 35, 37 
 
 teaching of its leaders, 46 
 condition of Church at, 80 
 causes of, 82 
 character of its leaders, 98, 
 
 100, 102 
 Laud's influence on Reforma- 
 tion settlement, 120 
 Sir W. Palmer on, 155 
 
INDEX 
 
 775 
 
 Reformation : 
 
 the Eeformers and confes- 
 sion, 265-295 
 and prayers for the dead, 
 
 300 
 a political movement, 333 
 Gladstone on, 334 
 Newman on, 335 
 Macaulay on, 337 
 and Chm'ch jurisdiction, 
 
 377 
 ignorance of history of, 439 
 its causes, 725-728 
 Eeformers always unpopular, xix 
 Registers, Parish, extract from, 
 proving use of vestments, 431 
 Renan, 41 
 
 Reservation, 160-173 
 why forbidden, 555 
 alternative forced on clergy, 
 
 556 
 ♦ form ' of, 677 
 ' but if any remain,' 678 
 Puritans on, 681 
 used in 1567, 686-8 
 medical testimony, 708 
 Resurrection, 22, 24 
 
 discrepancies in records of, 
 180 
 Reunion of Christendom, xxx, 
 
 xxxiv 
 Reynold's Constitutions, 249 
 Richard II., Statutes against 
 
 Papacy under, 93 
 Ridley, 103, 122, 276, 339 
 Ridsdale Case. See Cases 
 Ritualism : 
 
 denounced by Sir W. Har- 
 
 court, 360 
 character of Ritualist clergy, 
 484 
 Robertson, Dean of Durham, 339 
 Rock, Dr., 131 
 Rogers, Guinness, 196 
 Roman Canon Law : 
 in England, 750 
 not formally received, 755 
 test proofs, 756-761 
 deposing power, 759, 760 
 
 Roman Catholics : 
 
 in England loyal to Eliza- 
 beth, 93 
 political position of, 97 
 persecution of, 102 
 See also Papacy and Popes 
 Romanising, 564 
 Romans, Epistle to, 54, 115 
 Rome, compared with London, 
 
 258 
 Rdntgen rays, 191 
 Rosmini, 525 
 Rubrics : 
 
 the Ornaments Rubric, 37, 
 
 96, 105, 168, 575-649 
 under Elizabeth, 400, 407 
 Purchas Case and orna- 
 ments, 416 
 sanctioned by Parliament, 
 
 424 
 capricious interpretation of, 
 
 433, 440-456 
 the Black Rubric, 25 
 Rubric ordering reservation 
 
 of Sacrament, 162, 678 
 in office for Communion of 
 
 Sick, 163 
 of 1559 and 1662, 165, 168 
 general consideration of 
 
 Rubrics, 171 
 alteration in, under Edward 
 
 VI., 378 
 Rubric forbidding vestments, 
 
 380 
 Elizabeth and Rubrics of 
 
 Edward VI., 386 
 The Purchas judgment, 388 
 Act of Uniformity and, 396 
 Ruskin on Ritualism, 549, 550 
 
 Sacerdotalism : 
 
 meaning of, 193 
 in Old Testament, 194-199 
 the priesthood, 201 
 objections to, 204 
 absolution and, 206 
 an example of God's use of 
 means, 211 
 
776 THE EEFOKMATION SETTLEMENT 
 
 Sacerdotalism : 
 
 confession in connexion 
 with, 212-214 
 
 tendency of enforced celi- 
 bacy, 232 
 Sacrifice : 
 
 the Eucharist considered as, 
 39-79 
 
 St. Paul's teaching on, 44 
 Samson, 97 
 Sanders, 518 
 Sanders on Supremacy Act, 
 
 578 
 Sanderson, 451 
 Sandys, Archbishop, 102, 446 
 
 on crucifix, 623 
 Saul's disobedience, xiii 
 Savoy Conference, 36, 134 
 Schiaffino. See Cardinals 
 Science, and a spiritual world, 
 
 187-192 
 Scory, Bishop, 103 
 Selborne, Lord, 390, 459 
 
 on Marian bishops, 724 
 Sharp, Archbishop, 269 
 Sharp, Archdeacon, on Praver 
 
 Book, 425 
 Sheldon, Archbishop, 307 
 Sherr, Archbishop, 484 
 Short, Bishop, 284 
 Shrewsbury, Earl of, 83 
 Silvester, Matthew, 137 
 Simor, 484 
 
 Skertchly's ' Dahomey,' 183 
 Smith, Mr. Samuel, 220, 250 
 Soames, 409 
 Socrates, 47 
 Somers, tracts of, 133 
 Somerset, Duke of, 101 
 South, Dr., 284 
 Spedding, 107 
 Spencer, Herbert, 58 
 Spiritual world, the, 177 
 
 testimony of Scripture to, 
 178 
 
 Saint Stephen's martyrdom 
 instanced, 180 
 
 and conversion of St. Paul, 
 181 
 
 Spiritual world : 
 
 striking evidence of science 
 
 to, 181-184 
 Jevons quoted in support of, 
 
 187-189 
 scientific phenomena and, 
 189-192 
 Stanley, Dean, 316 
 Stephen, Saint, 180 
 Stephen, Sir James, 185 
 Stephens, Mr. Archibald, 434 
 Strype, 95, 103, 341, 401, 405, 
 
 416, 446 
 Stukely, Sir T., 89 
 Sturrock, 373 
 Sumner, Archbishop, 385 
 Supremacy Act and Letters 
 Patent, 696 
 in Parliament, 712, 716 
 Surplice forbidden in pulpit, xvi 
 Swift, description of English 
 
 vicar, 437 
 ' Synod ' used loosely, 743 
 
 Tait, Archbishop, 373, 385 
 Taylor, Jeremy, 116, 124, 280, 
 
 288, 306, 309 
 Taylor, Dr., 169 
 ' Te Deum,' the, 15 
 Temple, Archbishop : 
 
 on Incense and Eeservation, 
 553-707 
 
 his exposition of doctrine of 
 Eucharist, 1, 3 
 
 and consubstantiation, 32 
 
 on confession, 248 
 Tenison, 269 
 Tennyson, 317, 324 
 Teste, Louis, 521 
 Thirlwall, Bishop, 153, 158 
 Thomas, Saint, 24 
 Thomas Aquinas, 211, 247 
 Thompson, Mr., 735 
 Thorndike, viii, 122, 134, 306 
 Three Estates of Eealm, 745-749 
 'Times,' letters to, quoted, 159, 
 
 160, 167, 183, 250, 375 
 Tomline, Bishop, 285 
 
INDEX 
 
 777 
 
 Tomlinson, Mr. : 
 
 on Lincoln judgment, 439 
 ontheory of Elizabeth's Act 
 of Uniformity, 440-48 
 Tosti, Padre, 523-528 
 
 intermediary between Pope 
 and Italian monarchy, 
 529-535 
 Gladstone and, 538 
 Tractarians, 33, 148 
 Transubstantiation, 2, 8, 15 
 
 Anglican repudiation of, 125 
 belief in, no disqualification 
 
 for office, 128 
 Eoman definitions of, 128 
 contests between Francis- 
 cans and Dominicans over, 
 130 
 Tridentine doctrine of, 131 
 Wake's view of, 152 
 excluded in Twenty-eighth 
 Article, 161 
 Trent, Council of, 130, 518. See 
 
 also General Councils 
 Treves, Synod of, 212 
 Tunstall and Prayer Book, 719 
 Tyndal, William, 336 
 Tyndall, Professor, 182 
 
 Ultkamontanism : 
 
 opposition of France to, 151 
 theory of, opposed to history, 
 
 498 
 controversies on, 506 
 Umberto, King, 535 
 Uniformity Act of 1559, its 
 authority, 704-707 
 in Parhament, 716-719 
 Union with Eome, xxx 
 Uriah, 47 
 
 Ussher, Bishop, 116, 124, 270, 
 423 
 
 Vatican : 
 
 Council, 482, 491, 493, 503 
 
 and Quirinal, 524 
 Vaughan, Dr., 290, 294 
 Vaughan, Cardinal. See Cardinals 
 
 I Ventura, 525 
 
 j Vestments, 418, 420, 423 
 
 I why they fell into disuse, 
 
 { 428, 433 
 
 1 Vicarious faith, 677 
 
 I Vincenzi, Aloisius, 498 
 
 I Wake, Archbishop, 148-152, 283 
 I Walsh, Mr., 254 
 : Walsingham, Sir Francis, 97, 1 07, 
 126 
 
 Walton, Izaak, 271 
 
 Ward, Dr„ 505 
 
 Waterland, Dr., 116 
 
 on Lay Baptism, 664 
 ' Welldon, Dr., 322 
 
 Wesleyanism, 159 
 
 Wheatley, 286, 305, 424 
 
 White, Blanco, 231, 250, 474 
 
 White, 97, 98 
 
 Whitgift, 107, 707 
 
 Whittingham, Dean, 410 
 
 William Eufus and Pope, 81 
 
 William I., Emperor of Germany, 
 522 
 
 Williams, Mr. Watkin, 455 
 
 Williamson, Sir G., 734 
 
 Wilson, Bishop, 116, 306 
 
 Wilson, Mr., 311 
 
 Wilson, Sir T., 733 
 
 Wim borne. Lady, 438 
 
 Withers, George, 344, 396, 417 
 i Woolfrey, 307 
 
 ' Working men and Eitualism 
 xxxviii 
 
 Wiirtemberg, Confession of, 33 
 
 Xenoceates, 47 
 
 Zanchius, Jeeome, 418 
 ! Zeno, 47 
 
 Zola's ' Eome,' 522 
 
 Zwingli, 47, 122, 156 
 I Zwinglianism, in views of Eu- 
 j charist, 1, 160 
 i in Anglican divines, 150 
 
 3e 
 
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