NOV 11 1910 
 
 BX 5930 .B3 1919 
 Barry, J. G. H. 1858-1931. 
 The religion of the prayer 
 book 
 
/ 
 THE RELIGION OF 
 THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 THE REV. J. G. H. BARRY, D.D. 
 
 AND 
 
 THE REV. SELDEN PEABODY DELANY, D.D, 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 EDWIN S. GORHAM, Publisher 
 
 11 WEST 45th street 
 1919 
 
Copyright 
 
 BY 
 
 Selden Peabody Delany 
 1919 
 
TO 
 HALEY FISKE, ESQ. 
 
 IN RECOGNITION OF HIS DEVOTION TO 
 
 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 AND IN GRATITUDE FOR THE 
 
 PRIVILEGE OF HIS 
 
 FRIENDSHIP 
 
Digitized by the Internet Archive 
 
 in 2009 with funding from 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary Library 
 
 http://www.archive.org/details/religionofprayerOObarr 
 
ERRATA 
 
 Page 56, line i read prevent for present. 
 
 Page 60, line 24 read should for would. 
 
 Page 66, line 18 read of for or. 
 
 Page 70, line 25 read reign for region. 
 
 Page 78, line 18 insert af^rf between ecclesiastical 
 
 and national. 
 Page 260, line 21 read nineteenth for twentieth. 
 
CHAPTER 
 I 
 
 II 
 
 III 
 
 IV 
 
 V 
 
 VI 
 
 VII 
 
 VIII 
 
 IX 
 X 
 
 XI 
 XII 
 
 XIII 
 
 XIV 
 
 XV 
 
 XVI 
 XVII 
 
 TABLE OF CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Protestantism i 
 
 Papalism i6 
 
 Catholicity 40 
 
 The English Reformation . . 57 
 
 The Powers of Local Churches . 74 
 
 Dogmatic Religion 93 
 
 Principles of Interpretation . . 104 
 
 The Incarnation as the Means of 
 Union with God 115 
 
 The Sacramental System . . . 122 
 
 The Nature and Number of the 
 Sacraments 128 
 
 Regeneration in Baptism . . . 135 
 
 The Difference Between the 
 Baptized and the Unbaptized . 141 
 
 Confirmation 148 
 
 The Age for Confirmation . . 155 
 
 The Difference Between Con- 
 firmed AND Unconfirmed . . 161 
 
 The Meaning of Sin .... 168 
 
 The Remission of Sin .... 177 
 
CHAPTER 
 XVIII 
 
 XIX 
 
 XX 
 
 XXI 
 
 XXII 
 
 XXIII 
 
 XXIV 
 
 XXV 
 
 XXVI 
 
 XXVII 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 Preparation for the Sacraments i88 
 
 The Real Presence in Holy Com- 
 munion 198 
 
 The Eucharistic Sacrifice . . 205 
 
 The Chief Act of Worship . .211 
 
 The Reservation of the Blessed 
 Sacrament 217 
 
 Essentials of Continuity in the 
 Ministry 229 
 
 The Priesthood 239 
 
 Matrimony 245 
 
 Ceremonial 252 
 
 Fasting and Abstinence . . . 266 
 
H 
 
 PROTESTANTISM 
 
 r the diet of Speier which met on February 
 21, 1529, the controlhng CathoHc majority, 
 in conformity with the directions of the Emperor 
 Charles V, adopted a recess, or decree, which 
 was intended to settle the religious controversy 
 of the time. In substance, it provided that there 
 should be a complete toleration of Catholics in 
 Lutheran states, but no toleration of Lutherans in 
 Catholic states; and no toleration anywhere of 
 Zwinglians or Anabaptists. Further, it was pro- 
 vided that Lutherans should make no other in- 
 novations in their states. Against the recess six 
 princes and fourteen cities protested in the name 
 of God and of conscience whose dictates they 
 held to be above human law. Those who signed 
 the protest and their adherents came soon to be 
 called Protestants. From this beginning the 
 name came to be applied to all those who, how- 
 ever much they might differ among themselves, 
 had this at least in common, that they had aban- 
 doned the communion of the bishop of Rome; 
 
2 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 thus Protestant became the equivalent of anti- 
 Roman. 
 
 It is to be noted that Protestant was not 
 adopted as the designation of any reh'gious or- 
 ganization. In Germany the reformers usually 
 called themselves Evangelicals, holding that while 
 repudiating the claims of the papacy they were 
 not repudiating the Catholic religion, nor ceasing 
 to be of the Catholic Church. Later, the Calvin- 
 ists called themselves the Reformed Church, and 
 the Lutherans the Lutheran Church. The same 
 was true of the English Reformation. While 
 the English reformers spoke of themselves as 
 Protestants it was in this broad sense of anti- 
 Roman and without any notion of thereby com- 
 promising their Catholicity. Canon Dixon points 
 out that much confusion w^as introduced into 
 England by the adoption of the title Protes- 
 tant by those w^ho at the same time strenu- 
 ously insisted that they were Catholics. In this 
 use of the terms the true opposite of Protestant 
 is not Catholic but Papist; and the true opposite 
 of Catholic is not Protestant but heretic. While 
 English writers speak of the Protestant Religion, 
 the word was not adopted as a formal designation 
 of the Church of England. Indeed, in 1689 the 
 Lower House of Convocation after " a lively 
 debate as to whether the Church of England 
 
PROTESTANTISM 3 
 
 should be called ' Protestant ' rejected the term 
 as ' equivocal/ since Socinians, etc., were so desig- 
 nated." 1 
 
 Of late years the attempt has been made to 
 interpret the word Protestant as meaning liberal 
 and progressive. It is said that the name Protes- 
 tant " has survived as embodying for many the 
 conception of liberty, the right of private judg- 
 ment, of toleration of every progressive idea in 
 religion, as opposed to the Roman Catholic prin- 
 ciples of authority and tradition." Whether this 
 is a true description of modern Protestantism or 
 not, it certainly is not a true description of the 
 Protestantism of the Reformation period. That 
 was quite as intolerant as Romanism, and in 
 Germany adopted the principle of State suprem- 
 acy by which the religion of the subject followed 
 the religion of the sovereign — on the sovereign's 
 adoption of any religion, that became at once the 
 religion of the subject; so that the protest of the 
 Reformation was, as has been said, *' a protest. 
 not for the subjects' freedom to choose, but for 
 the sovereign's to prescribe." 
 
 We may take it for granted that in documents 
 of the eighteenth century the word Protestant 
 will be used in the broad sense of anti-Roman, 
 thus affording a common designation for many 
 
 1 MacColl, " The Reformation Settlement," p. 359- 
 
4 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 religious bodies which on theological grounds 
 would be found to be sharply divided. It was in 
 this sense that the Church of England and her 
 offspring — the Colonial Churches — came to be 
 thought of as Protestant. 
 
 But is the word Protestant a purely negative 
 word? Has it no positive connotation? Al- 
 though at first sight the religious bodies that is- 
 sued from the Reformation seem to have little in 
 common save their denials of the Catholic faith, 
 yet there are certain fundamental theological posi- 
 tions in which they agree and which we may take 
 to be the positive connotation of the word Protes- 
 tant. I will state them in the words of Dr. 
 Schaff: 
 
 " There are three fundamental principles of the 
 Reformation : the supremacy of the Scriptures 
 over tradition, the supremacy of faith over works, 
 the supremacy of the Christian people over an 
 exclusive priesthood." ^ 
 
 If Protestant is understood in the sense of 
 protest against the errors and abuses of the Pa- 
 pacy, the Anglican Church and its daughter 
 Churches may be called Protestant; but it is an- 
 other matter if Protestant is to be understood as 
 affirmative of the " fundamental principles of 
 the Reformation " as stated by Dr. Schaff or of 
 1 " History of the Christian Church," vol. VI, p. i6. 
 
PROTESTANTISM '5 
 
 any other set of theological affirmations. In that 
 case the formularies of the Anglican Church must 
 be studied with a view to ascertaining whether 
 their theological system is indeed Protestant, i. e., 
 in agreement with the theology of the leaders of 
 the Continental Reformation. 
 
 As Dr. Schaff's three principles seem to cover 
 the ground pretty thoroughly, let us test the al- 
 leged Protestantism of the American Church by 
 its agreement or disagreement with them. Of 
 course the position of the American Church is 
 that of the English Church unless it has explicitly 
 abandoned it. The first Protestant principle, 
 the supremacy of Scripture, is another way of 
 stating the right of private judgment. It does 
 not mean, to be accurate, the supremacy of Scrip- 
 ture, but the supremacy of the individual. What 
 the Scripture means will be what in the judgment 
 of the individual interpreter it means, and there 
 will be no external check or rein. One would 
 have thought that this would at least have made 
 for humility and that each interpreter, feeling that 
 his was a private interpretation, would have de- 
 clined to impose it on anyone else, inasmuch as 
 others were free to make their own interpretation. 
 But not so. The history of Protestantism is the 
 history of individual attempts to force private 
 interpretations of Scripture on the world as being 
 
6 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 the exclusive Gospel. This aspect of the Refor- 
 mation is well symbolized by the Marburg Con- 
 ference — the leading Reformers seated about the 
 table unable to agree in their interpretation of 
 Scripture — the Scripture that they had pro- 
 claimed supreme — and thus demonstrating the 
 unworkableness of their principle! 
 
 In contrast with the Protestant position the 
 formularies of the English Church assert that the 
 rule of faith is the Holy Scripture as interpreted 
 by the Church. That is, it treats the Christian 
 religion not as a secret hid in a book which each 
 man must find out for himself, but as an historic 
 faith coming to a man with the voice of author- 
 ity. A man might, indeed ought, to test this 
 faith, but he is to test it, not by its agreement with 
 his own private judgment, but by its agreement 
 with Scripture as interpreted by antiquity. 
 
 For example: The Ten Articles of 1536 say, 
 " As touching the chief and principal articles of 
 our faith . . . they ought and must most con- 
 stantly believe and defend all those things to be 
 true, which be comprehended in the whole body 
 and canon of the Bible, and also in the three 
 Creeds . . . and that they ought and must take 
 and interpret all the same things according to the 
 selfsame sentence and interpretation, what the 
 words of the selfsame creeds or symbols do pur- 
 
PROTESTANTISM ^ 
 
 port, and the holy approved doctors of the Church 
 do entreat and defend the same." 
 
 The act of Supremacy of EHzabeth, 1559, 
 provides that the Court of High Commission 
 *' shall not in any wise have authority or power 
 to order, determine, or adjudge any matter or 
 cause to be heresy, but only such as heretofore 
 have been determined, ordered, or adjudged to 
 be heresy, by the authority of the Canonical 
 Scriptures, or by the first four general Councils, 
 or any of them, or by any other general council 
 wherein the same was declared heresy by the ex- 
 press and plain words of the said canonical Scrip- 
 tures," etc. 
 
 Canon VI, of the Canons of 1571, orders 
 preachers to " see to it that they teach nothing in 
 the way of a sermon . . . save what is agreeable 
 to the teaching of the Old and New Testament, 
 and what the Catholic fathers and ancient bishops 
 have collected from the selfsame doctrine." ^ 
 
 Finally the Sixth of the Thirty-nine Articles, 
 contrary to the Protestant principle which makes 
 the individual the judge of what is Scripture, set- 
 tled the canon on the authority of the Church. 
 It declares that " Holy Scripture contains all 
 things necessary to salvation: so that whatever 
 
 1 Gee & Hardy, " Documents Illustrative of English 
 Church History." New York, Macmillan & Co., 1896. 
 
8 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 is not read therein, nor may be proved thereby, is 
 not to be required of any man, that it shall be 
 believed," etc., where it is obvious that the author- 
 ity which is to " prove " doctrine from Scripture 
 is the Church itself. In fact, nothing can be fur- 
 ther removed from the Protestant principle of the 
 supremacy of the individual than the Church of 
 England principle of the authority of the inter- 
 pretative tradition of the Church. 
 
 The second of Dr. Schaff's principles is the 
 supremacy of faith over works. It would be bet- 
 ter to state it as the doctrine of justification by 
 faith only. This is the very corner-stone of the 
 Protestant Reformation and is the most revolu- 
 tionary doctrine ever introduced into the Church. 
 If held in the sense in which Luther taught it, it 
 makes the Church and sacraments not only un- 
 necessary but unintelligible. The Christian has 
 but to believe, that is to give an intellectual assent 
 to, the promises of God in Christ, and he is ac- 
 cepted of God and the merits of Christ are im- 
 parted to him : he is saved. " Faith only " makes 
 the old historic Christian system an impertinence. 
 That this doctrine was not adopted by the Eng- 
 lish Reformers is obvious from the stress laid on 
 Church and sacraments in all the formal teaching 
 of the Church. The Eleventh of the Thirty-nine 
 Articles does, it is true, appear to accept the Lu- 
 
PROTESTANTISM 9 
 
 theran doctrine, but an analysis of the article 
 shows that the term " faith only " is not used in 
 the Lutheran sense of mere assent, and is not 
 given the exclusive place in the working of justi- 
 fication which is given it in the Lutheran system.^ 
 The third great principle of Protestantism is 
 the assertion of the priesthood of the laity, — or, 
 as it might better be expressed, the denial of any 
 other priesthood than the universal priesthood of 
 Christians. That every Christian is in a true 
 sense a priest with right of access to God is in- 
 deed a fundamental truth of the Christian reli- 
 gion. He partakes of the priesthood of Christ 
 in whom he is. It is also true that he is a king 
 by virtue of his participation in the royalty of his 
 risen Head. But if his royalty is not of such 
 a nature as to render the existence of magistrates 
 and his subjection to them impossible, it is diffi- 
 cult to see how the fact of his priesthood renders 
 impossible or unnecessary that there should be 
 any other priesthood in the Church. Nor, I 
 suppose, has any Protestant ever argued that be- 
 cause all Christians are prophets (as they surely 
 are) the office of preacher should be abolished. 
 Certainly the Anglican Church has never seen 
 any incongruity between the priesthood of the 
 
 iKidd, "The Thirty-nine Articles." New York, Gor- 
 ham, 1906. 
 
lO THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 laity and the existence of an official separate 
 priesthood. It conceives the Christian Church as 
 the Body of Christ, and understands that powers 
 belonging to the Body as such must still be exer- 
 cised through special organs. Hence the exist- 
 ence of its ordinal and the exclusive appropriation 
 of certain acts to those v^ho have been ordained 
 priests. 
 
 We conclude then that while in the broad sense 
 of historic opposition to the abuses that centred 
 about the papal system the Church to which we 
 belong may be called Protestant, it cannot rightly 
 be so called if what is implied by the w^ord is theo- 
 logical sympathy with the Continental Reformers. 
 The theology embodied in the formal documents 
 of the Church of England, and especially in the 
 Book of Common Prayer, is quite the reverse of 
 Protestant. 
 
 How, then, did the Church in the United States 
 come to place the word Protestant on the title- 
 page of the Prayer Book? Is there any clue to 
 the sense in which the word is there used ? 
 
 During the Colonial period the Church, of 
 which the legal title was the Church of England, 
 seems to have been colloquially known as the 
 Episcopal Church. To this, in Maryland at least, 
 Protestant was added. After the breaking out 
 of the war of the Revolution, there was an act 
 
PROTESTANTISM IT 
 
 passed by the Maryland legislature in 1779 in- 
 tended to secure the rights of the Church to its 
 property, etc., in which it is entitled the Protes- 
 tant Episcopal Church and its continuity with the 
 Church of England is recognized. What is said 
 to be the first formal adoption of the title in an 
 ecclesiastical document is found in a declaration 
 adopted at a meeting of clergy and laity held at 
 Chestertown, Md., 9 Nov., 1780. There it was 
 resolved '* That the Church known in the Prov- 
 ince as Protestant be called * The Protestant Epis- 
 copal Church.' " Of this Convention the Rev. 
 J. J. Wilmer writes : " The Rev. Dr. Smith, 
 Dr. Keene and mvself held the iirst Convention in 
 Chestertown, and I acted as secretary " ; he adds 
 that he " moved that the Church of England as 
 heretofore so known in the province be now called 
 the Protestant Episcopal Church, and it was so 
 adopted." ^ 
 
 Later, 13 Aug., 1783, at an important meeting 
 of clergy at Annapolis, the formal declaration 
 was adopted which described the Church under 
 this title, and it seems to have passed into general 
 use without discussion. 
 
 This '' Declaration of certain fundamental 
 Rights and Liberties of the Protestant Episcopal 
 
 1 Perry, " History of the American Episcopal Church," 
 vol. II, 22, 
 
12 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Church of Maryland," is important as throwing 
 light upon the meaning attached to the word Prot- 
 estant at the time and by those who gave it to the 
 Church. As I fancy it is not widely kiiown, I 
 will quote the greater part of it: 
 
 " Wherefore we the Clergy of the Protestant 
 Episcopal Church of Maryland, (heretofore de- 
 nominated the Church of England, as by law estab- 
 lished) with all duty to the Civil authority of the 
 State, and with all Love and Good will to our 
 Fellow-Christians of every other Religious De- 
 nomination, do hereby declare, make known, and 
 claim the following as certain of the fundamental 
 Rights and Liberties inherent, and belonging to the 
 said Episcopal Church, not only of common Right, 
 but agreeable to the express words, spirit and design 
 of the Constitution and Form of Government, afore- 
 said, viz. — 
 
 " 1st. We consider it as the undoubted Right 
 of the said Protestant Episcopal Church, in com- 
 mon with other Christian Churches under the 
 American Revolution, to complete and preserve 
 herself as an entire Church, agreeable to her an- 
 cient Usages and Profession ; and to have full en- 
 joyment and free exercise of those purely spiritual 
 powers which are essential to the Being of every 
 Church or Congregation of the faithful; and which, 
 being derived only from Christ and Apostles, are 
 to be maintained independent of every foreign or 
 
PROTESTANTISM 1 3 
 
 Other Jurisdiction, so far as may be consistent with 
 the Civil Rights of Society. 
 
 ** 2nd. That ever since the Reformation, it hath 
 been the received Doctrine of the Church vi^hereof 
 we are members (and which by the Constitution of 
 this State is entitled to the perpetual enjoyment of 
 certain Property and Rights under the denomina- 
 tion of the Church of England), that there be these 
 three orders of Ministers in Christ's Church: 
 Bishops, Priests and Deacons, and that an Epis- 
 copal Ordination and Commission are necessary to 
 the valid Administration of the Sacraments, and the 
 due Exercise of the Ministerial Functions in the 
 said Church. 
 
 " 3rd. That, without calling in Question, or 
 wishing the least Contest with any other Christian 
 Churches or Societies, concerning their Rights, 
 Modes and Forms, we consider and declare it to be 
 an Essential Right of the Protestant Episcopal 
 Church to have & enjoy the Continuance of the 
 said three orders of Ministers forever, so far as 
 concerns matters purely Spiritual, & that no per- 
 sons in the character of Ministers, except such as 
 are in the Communion of the said Church and duly 
 called to the ministry by regular Episcopal Ordina- 
 tion can or ought to be admitted into or enjoy 
 any of " the Churches, Chapels, Glebes or other 
 Property " formerly belonging to the Church of 
 England, in this State, & which by the Constitu- 
 tion and Form of Government is secured to the 
 
14 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 said Church, or her Superior Order of Ministers, 
 may in future be denominated. 
 
 " 4th. That as it is the Right, so it will be the 
 Duty, of the said Church, when duly organized, 
 constituted and represented in a Synod or Conven- 
 tion of the different Orders of her ministry and 
 People, to revise her Liturgy, Forms of Prayer & 
 public worship, in order to adapt the same to the 
 late Revolution, & other local circumstances of 
 America, which it is humbly conceived may and 
 will be done, without any other or farther Departure 
 from the Venerable Order and beautiful Forms of 
 worship of the Church from which we are sprung, 
 than may be found expedient in the Change of our 
 situation from a Daughter to a Sister Church." 
 
 I think that this document makes it quite evi- 
 dent that whatever else Protestant might mean to 
 its authors, it did not mean a break with the past, 
 the establishment of a new Church on the basis 
 of a new understanding of Scripture. To those 
 who signed this declaration, and we may be sure 
 that their position w^as that of the vast majority 
 of American Churchmen of the time, the Church 
 to which they belonged was a body having a vital 
 connection with the past, the maintenance of 
 which depended on the continuance of Holy Or- 
 ders. They gave no sign of thinking orders un- 
 important. The great trouble they put them- 
 
PROTESTANTISM 1 5 
 
 selves to to get the Episcopate is of itself a 
 measure of the value they placed upon them. 
 They valued them as ensuring at once the con- 
 tinuity of the Church with the past, and as a 
 means of securing the valid administration of the 
 sacraments. It v^ould be difficult to find a docu- 
 ment with less of the spirit of Protestantism 
 in it, whether one means by Protestantism the 
 three fundamental principles of the Reformation, 
 or the popular go-as-you-please-ism of the pres- 
 ent day. I think we are safe in concluding that 
 to the fathers of the American Church the 
 Protestant which they placed in its legal title was 
 indicative not of a theological position, but of an 
 historical tradition. 
 
II 
 
 PAPALISM 
 
 HE assertion of the Roman Catholic con- 
 troversialist is that the Church of England 
 is the brand new product of the Reformation. 
 The reply of the Anglican Catholic is that there 
 is much better ground for regarding the Roman 
 Church as a modern product than there is for so 
 regarding the Anglican. The modern Roman 
 Church dates from the council of Trent, that is 
 from the Reformation, in much the same sense 
 as the Anglican does : that is, in both Anglican 
 and Roman Churches there was, at that epoch, 
 an overhauling of the accumulations of the past, 
 a sorting out of the inheritance of the Middle 
 Ages, a rejection of some teaching and practices 
 and a retention of others. In the Anglican Ref- 
 ormation the attempt was to go back of the Mid- 
 dle As:es to what was conceived to be the belief 
 and practice of the Primitive Church; in the 
 Tridentine Reformation the attempt was to clar- 
 ify and codify Medieval teaching and to reduce 
 
 its heterogeneity to a uniformity under the Papal 
 
 i6 
 
PAPALISM 17 
 
 Supremacy. The result has been that in the 
 Anglican Communion there is variety of use and 
 practice which resembles nothing so much as the 
 variety of the Middle Ages, while in Rome there 
 has been a growing rigidity of doctrine and disci- 
 pline as the power of the Papacy has extended. 
 Then in 1870 came the climax when the claims 
 which had been persistently pressed were imposed 
 by authority as of faith. There has been in the 
 history of the Anglican Communion no such 
 revolutionary action as that whereby the Vatican 
 Council superseded the original constitution of 
 the Church by the proclamation of an infallible 
 Papacy. From the beginning the Church was 
 governed by bishops deriving their power from 
 their orders, and assembling from time to time to 
 witness to the faith that they had received from 
 their predecessors, and to give utterance to the 
 mind of the Church on such new questions as con- 
 fronted them. For this primitive constitution 
 there has been substituted, in the Latin Church, a 
 central power issuing infallible decrees on faith 
 and morals, and appointing and giving jurisdic- 
 tion to bishops who hold their office and exercise 
 their powers at its will. There has been no 
 change in the constitution of the Anglican Church 
 at any time even approximating this. The 
 crowning insolence is found in the assertion that 
 
1 8 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 the new papal constitution is the primitive con- 
 stitution of the Christian Church! 
 
 The only question worth debating between the 
 Anglican and the Roman Communions is this 
 question of the Papacy. The assertion of the 
 Vatican Council is that the decisions of the 
 Roman Pontiff, when he speaks ex cathedra as 
 teacher of all Christians in matters affecting faith 
 or morals, are in themselves and not from the 
 consent of the Church irreformable, and that the 
 Pope is endowed with the same infallibility as 
 that with which the Church is endowed. It is 
 also asserted that the interpretation of the past on 
 which the Vatican decree is based is no new thing, 
 but that the council is " adhering faithfully to a 
 tradition received from the first beginnings of the 
 Christian Faith." This was subsequently de- 
 clared by Leo XIII to be " the venerable and con- 
 stant belief of every age." " The consent of an- 
 tiquity ever acknowledged without the slightest 
 doubt or hesitation the bishops of Rome, and 
 revered them as the legitimate successors of S. 
 Peter." ^ 
 
 Let us be clear that what is asserted is that 
 the infallible papacy ruling the universal Church 
 
 1 Constitutiones dognvaticae Concilii Vaticani. The Satis 
 Cognitum of Leo XIII. 
 
PAPALISM 19 
 
 has existed from the beginning, being indeed 
 established by our Lord. Such an infalUble Pope 
 was S. Peter and such have been all his successors. 
 But there is no early evidence that S. Peter was 
 ever bishop of Rome. He was in Rome and was 
 martyred there as was also S. Paul; but all the 
 evidence goes to show that the Church of Rome 
 existed before either S. Peter or S. Paul came 
 there, and that it had its bishops from whatever 
 source derived. Bp. Light foot who, if anybody, 
 knew the literature of the early Church says: 
 " I cannot find that any wTiters of the first two 
 centuries and more speak of S. Peter as bishop 
 of Rome. Indeed their language is inconsistent 
 with the assignment of that position to him." 
 
 This is exceeding strange : for you will notice 
 that what we are dealing with is not the meaning 
 of an institution but its existence. There is end- 
 less disputation as to the meaning of the episco- 
 pate ; but there is no doubt at all that from primi- 
 tive times the episcopate has existed as a fact. 
 Laying aside all else for the present let us look 
 at what is implied in the assertion that the Papal 
 claims did exist from the beginning. Here are 
 some assertions : Bellarmine says, that in deal- 
 ing with the Papacy we are dealing with '* the 
 principal matter of Christianity." Perrone says 
 
20 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 that '' when we are treating about the Head of 
 the Church we are treating about the principal 
 point of the matter on which the existence and 
 safety of the Church herself altogether depends." 
 De Maistre says, '* the Sovereign Pontiff is the 
 necessary, only, and exclusive foundation of 
 Christianity," and the " supremacy of the Pope 
 is the capital dogma without which Christianity 
 cannot exist." And Leo XIII says that the Vati- 
 can teaching about the Pope is the *' venerable 
 and constant belief of every age." 
 
 If these stupendous claims were true they could 
 hardly fail to be evident to all men in all ages of 
 the Church's history. The fact that the only 
 proofs of them that are alleged are a few texts 
 of Holy Scripture which early Christian writers 
 variously interpreted, and a few passages from 
 early Christian writers which on the most liberal 
 interpretation cannot mean to attribute to the 
 bishop of Rome anything at all resembling the 
 claims at present set forth for him is sufficient 
 evidence of the non-existence of the papal power 
 in the early life of the Church. " If a great 
 Body like the Church had been subjected by its 
 Divine Founder to an infallible king, it could 
 hardly exist for three centuries without there 
 being very evident proofs that the rule of such 
 an infallible king was one of the chief factors in 
 
PAPALISM 21 
 
 its life. Government is not an abstract theory, 
 but a practical fact." ^ 
 
 If there should take place in this country a 
 revolution by which it should become a monarchy, 
 and after a time the royal government should 
 assert that the United States had always been a 
 monarchy, it would be a little difficult to persuade 
 people of this on the basis of a few passages 
 from early writers which were capable, if they 
 stood alone, of being interpreted as expressing a 
 preference for monarchy. The fact is that dur- 
 ing the first Christian centuries there is no trace 
 at all of the papal monarchy governing the whole 
 Church and every part of it; and not only is there 
 no trace of it, but the facts that exist negative the 
 whole idea of it. 
 
 There would seem to be no need of going into 
 the patristic interpretation of the so-called Petrine 
 texts in any detail. If the Roman claims were 
 true there could have been no hesitation in the 
 mind of early Christian interpreters as to the 
 meaning of these texts. If it were true that they 
 are the record of the conferring on S. Peter and 
 through him on his successors of all the powers 
 claimed by the modern papacy, the Church surely 
 must have known it, and there would have been 
 no variation in interpretation. But that is pre- 
 
 1 Denny, " Papalism," p. 96. 
 
22 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 cisely what the patristic interpreters do not know. 
 Out of ninety-five passages in which early Chris- 
 tian writers comment on the famous text, " Thou 
 art Peter," etc., they give as many as five differ- 
 ent interpretations. S. Augustine in the course 
 of his writing gives three different interpretations. 
 
 ** Now think what this means : it means more 
 than a want of agreement among the Fathers as to 
 the meaning of the expression * this rock ' ; it 
 means that they were entirely unaware of the sig- 
 nificance Rome has given it! If by 'this rock' 
 our Lord had meant S. Peter and his successors, is 
 it possible that the majority of a Church guided by 
 the Holy Spirit should have said that ' this rock * 
 meant Peter's Faith, not Peter himself ! Yet that 
 is what a majority of the Fathers do say. . . . We 
 are dealing with the sole passage on which every- 
 thing is built ; yet for centuries the accredited 
 teachers of the Church treat it differently and seem 
 wholly unaware of its tremendous import ! " ^ 
 
 It is significant, in this connection, that the 
 Roman Church found it desirable to change its 
 rule for the interpretation of Scripture. The 
 profession of faith prescribed by Pius IV required 
 assent to the following: 
 
 " I also admit Holy Scripture according to that 
 sense which Holy Mother Church has held and does 
 
 1 Hardy, " Catholic or Roman Catholic/' 
 
PAPALISM 23 
 
 hold, to whom it belongs to judge of the true sense 
 and interpretation of the Holy Scriptures, neither 
 will I ever take and interpret them otherwise than 
 according to (juxta) the unanimous consent of the 
 Fathers." ^ 
 
 Now it is quite plain that there is no unanimous 
 consent of the Fathers in the interpretation of 
 the Petrine text. We read, therefore, in the 
 Dogmatic Constitution of the Vatican Council : 
 
 " That is to be held the true sense of Holy Scrip- 
 ture which Holy Mother Church hath held and does 
 hold, to whom it belongs to judge of the true sense 
 and interpretation of Holy Scripture, and therefore 
 it is permitted to no one to interpret Holy Scrip- 
 ture contrary to this sense, nor likewise contrary 
 (Contra) to the unanimous consent of the Fa- 
 thers." 2 
 
 This is quite harmless, and we are certainly 
 not violating it when we deny the claims of the 
 papacy a Scriptural foundation. 
 
 Not only is it true that the Roman Catholic 
 assertion that the Papalist interpretation of the 
 Petrine texts is that of the Fathers is unfounded; 
 but it is also true that the passages quoted from 
 
 i"The Profession of Faith Prescribed by Pius IV." 
 (Denzinger, p. 234.) 
 
 2 "The Dogmatic Constitution of the Vatican." (Den- 
 zinger, p. 288.) 
 
24 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 the Fathers to show that they recognized the 
 papacy as an existing fact do not prove what they 
 are quoted to prove. It is perfectly true th?t in 
 very early times the see of Rome was regarded 
 as the see of Peter. Its early history was asso- 
 ciated with the great names of Peter and Paul. 
 Moreover, it was the bishopric of the world's 
 capital. It was the one Apostolic see in the 
 West. It was altogether natural that it should 
 be held in special reverence, especially in the 
 West. This reverence finds expression from 
 time to time in the writings of the Fathers. But 
 what in their writings is at most the expression 
 of a feeling of Rome's supremacy in dignity is 
 quoted by the modern Roman controversialist as 
 though it applied to all that is claimed for the 
 papacy by the Vatican Council — as though the 
 claims of Pius IX were in the minds of the Fa- 
 thers. It is a clever enough trick, but it is only 
 a trick. There are no utterances of the Fathers 
 which at all imply a knowledge on their part of 
 any claim of the Pope to possess Jure divino juris- 
 diction over the whole Church. It is well to be 
 clear about this. The passages quoted from 
 early Christian writers in support of the papal 
 theory may equally well or better be understood 
 otherwise. If you come to them with the papal 
 theory in your mind as an established fact, you 
 
PAPALISM 25 
 
 can make them fit; but no one would build up a 
 papal theory out of them. For centuries the 
 Church with these passages before it did not give 
 them a papal interpretation. 
 
 The explicit nature of the papal claim that the 
 Vatican doctrine is the " venerable and constant 
 belief of every age " of the Church excludes the 
 possibility of development. The theory of de- 
 velopment is a very attractive one. You can ac- 
 count for whatever exists by it. By it, it would 
 have been fairly easy to account for the papacy. 
 But the papacy no doubt saw wisely when it re- 
 jected it, for it not only explains but it desuper- 
 naturalizes. A papacy developed in the Middle 
 Ages or in the post-Reformation period might 
 claim a certain ecclesiastical sanction, but it could 
 hardly claim divine right. If the Church had 
 got on for centuries without it, it could not claim 
 to be of the esse of the Church. It is essential to 
 the papal theory that all the papal powers should 
 have existed from the beginning. But this, as we 
 have seen, is more than difficult to prove. A 
 certain class of Roman Catholic scholars see this 
 and feel the difficulty of the Roman position. 
 They therefore in the face of their own authori- 
 tative documents attempt to account for the 
 growth of the papacy on the theory of develop- 
 ment. 
 
26 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 " What we find in the primitive Church is a 
 church that is primitive, that is to say, a germ en- 
 dowed with a tendency toward what we now see; 
 a germ defined in itself and possessed of its own 
 character and of a beginning of organization, in 
 such sort that the present order would necessarily 
 flow from it through the co-operation of circum- 
 stances which would be to the germ what the earth 
 and the atmosphere are to the plant. Now, what is 
 it in the embryonic Church that represents the cen- 
 tral authority in which we to-day see the bond of our 
 Church ? It is the primacy of Simon Peter." ^ 
 
 No more does Tixeront find the papacy of the 
 Vatican decrees in the primitive Church. 
 
 " It is impossible, do what one will, to efface the 
 sense of these declarations [of S. Cyprian] and to 
 believe that he who made them had a clear and 
 complete idea of the pontifical primacy." ^ 
 
 " To the bishop of Rome texts and facts mani- 
 festly attribute or suppose an undisputed considera- 
 tion and a special authority of which the nature 
 and extent are as yet not entirely determined." ^ 
 
 This sums up the Anti-Nicene period. And 
 further, on the same period, Tixeront says : 
 
 1 Sertillanges, " L'Eglise," vol. I, p. 154. 
 « " Hist, des Dogmes," I, p. 427. 
 ^Ibid., p. 514. 
 
PAPALISM 27 
 
 " This resume of the state of theological teaching 
 on the eve of Arianism shows us the Church fixed 
 on the bases of its behef, and, on the whole, ready 
 to define it in broad lines when need shall arise. 
 The organ of these definitions will be its hierarchy, 
 and it is because the prerogatives of this hierarchy 
 are recognized that the Church will be able to im- 
 pose its decisions and dissipate the attacks of which 
 they will be the object. Unfortunately this hier- 
 archy will find itself divided, and personal rivalries 
 as much as doctrinal divergences will prolong be- 
 yond measure the debates that a sincere discussion 
 would have closed in a few hours. But at least 
 these debates, by their very extent, will be the occa- 
 sion of a more complete clearing up of the evan- 
 gelistical revelation and of a more sensible progress 
 of the Christian society in the understanding of its 
 faith." ^ 
 
 This would seem to have been a good place 
 for the living voice to come in! 
 
 "The holy doctor (S. Augustine) admits that in 
 his judgment an appeal may be allowed to the see 
 of Rome. But does he grant the Pope a doctrinal 
 authority which is infallible and sovereign? That 
 is a question to which it is impossible to give a firm 
 answer. The passages which are invoked to deny 
 it are in no ways certain. Those which are alleged 
 in its support are no more so. It is a question, not 
 
 ^Ibid., p. 516. 
 
28 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 of the Pope speaking alone, but of the Pope united 
 with a council, which is very different." ^ 
 
 The assertion of the modern papacy is that it 
 is no new thing, gradually developed, but that 
 with all its powers it has existed, not in germ, 
 but explicitly from the beginning. We have 
 shown that the Fathers of the Church did not 
 know of the existence of the papacy in the mod- 
 ern meaning of it. We now propose to show that 
 it was not known by members of the Roman 
 Church itself up to 1870. If development were 
 not explicitly denied by the authoritative state- 
 ments of the Roman Church it might be conceiv- 
 able that, as Sertillanges argues, the germ of the 
 papal doctrine should have grown until it reached 
 the stage of definition; but if it be true that a 
 doctrine when it is presented either for theolog- 
 ical discussion or as a practical claim of govern- 
 ment is widely denied by wholly orthodox teach- 
 ers to be any part of the Christian faith, its claim 
 to be either primitive or Catholic falls. I pro- 
 pose to demonstrate that the papal infallibility 
 has been constantly denied and repudiated as a 
 doctrine of the Church by Roman Catholics of 
 unimpeachable orthodoxy. The following pas- 
 
 1 Tixeront, vol. II, p. 390, On Tixeront's treatment of 
 the Pope's denial of transsubstantiation see volume III, 
 page 378. 
 
PAPALISM 29 
 
 sages are taken from Sparrow Simpson's " Ro- 
 man Catholic Opposition to Papal Infallibility " : 
 
 " Bossuet's survey of history from the Apostolic 
 Age to his own time, Scripture, Fathers, Councils, 
 Theologians, confirmed him in the truth of the prin- 
 ciples of the Church of France. The ultimate and 
 therefore irreversible decision in faith depended on 
 the Collective Episcopate, and on that only; as 
 voicing the belief of the Universal Church. 
 
 " * What benefit to the Church,' he exclaims in 
 a striking passage, * can exist in that doubtful au- 
 thority, which the Church has not yet affirmed, of 
 a Pope's ex cathedra decisions? We live in the 
 seventeenth century of the Catholic Church, and 
 not yet are orthodox and saintly men agreed about 
 that infallibility. To say nothing of the Councils 
 of Constance and of Basle, saintly and learned men 
 are opposed to it. And if many private individuals 
 clamor greatly, and pour forth imprudent censures 
 against them, yet neither the Catholic Church nor 
 Rome itself passes any condemnation upon them. 
 Three hundred years we have controverted it with 
 impunity. Has the Church waited for peace and 
 security down to this our age, until the seventeenth 
 century is almost at an end ? Plainly, then, the se- 
 curity of pious souls must rest in the consent of 
 the Universal Church. It cannot be that they 
 should acquiesce in the doubtful Infallibility of the 
 Roman Pontiff. ... A doubtful Infallibility is not 
 that Infallibility which Christ bestowed. If He 
 
30 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 had granted it at all He would have revealed it to 
 His Church from the very beginning. He would 
 not have left it doubtful, inadequately revealed, nor 
 useless for want of an indisputable tradition/ (P. 
 95-6.) 
 
 " When in the year 1788 a Committee of English 
 Romanists was formed to appeal to Parliament for 
 the removal of Roman disabiHties, the petitioners 
 declared that it was a duty which they owed to their 
 country, as well as themselves, to protest ir a for- 
 mal and solemn manner against doctrines which 
 constituted no part of their principles, rehgion or 
 belief. Among these they rejected the theory that 
 excommunicated princes may be deposed or mur- 
 dered by their subjects. They declared that no 
 ecclesiastical power whatever can absolve subjects 
 from allegiance to lawful temporal authority. 
 They wrote : * We believe that no act that is in 
 itself immoral or dishonest can ever be justified 
 by or under colour that it is done either for the 
 good of the Church or in obedience to any ecclesi- 
 astical power whatever.' And — what now par- 
 ticularly concerns us here — they said : ' W^e ac- 
 knowledge no Infallibility in the Pope.' (P. 99- 
 100.) 
 
 " This protestation of the Roman Catholics of 
 England brought about the passing of the Relief 
 Act of 1 791. The representative character of the 
 document may be realized from the fact that it was 
 signed by all the four Vicars Apostolic; that is by 
 
PAPALISM 3 1' 
 
 all the highest Roman authorities in England, by 
 240 priests; and in all by 1,523 members of the 
 Anglo-Roman body, among whom most of the edu- 
 cated and influential laity were included. It would 
 be interesting to ascertain what proportion the 240 
 priests bore to the total number of Roman clergy 
 in this land. Accurate statistics are not easily ob- 
 tained. The Committee of EngHsh Romanists 
 claimed that the total number of Roman priests in 
 England did not exceed 260. Berington, in 1780, 
 estimated the number as nearer 360, of whom no 
 were ex-Jesuits. From these figures it would ap- 
 pear that, if the Jesuits are left out, nearly the 
 whole body of Roman clergy in England, including 
 their four bishops, committed themselves frankly 
 to rejection of Papal Infallibility. (P. 100.) 
 
 " The history of Irish Roman beHef is similar. 
 An Act for their relief was passed in 1793. It 
 contains an oath which states that * it is not an ar- 
 ticle of the CathoHc Faith, neither am I thereby 
 required to believe or profess that the Pope is in- 
 falHble.' 
 
 " No less unmistakable is the language of a Ro- 
 man Catholic Bishop in England in 1822 : — 
 
 " * Bellarmine and some other divines, chiefly 
 Italians, have believed the Pope infallible, when 
 proposing ex cathedra an article of faith. But in 
 England or Ireland I do not believe that any Catho- 
 lic maintains the Infallibility of the Pope.' " (P. 
 
 lOI.) 
 
32 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 An interesting echo of these statement appears 
 later, in a letter from Lord Acton to Mr Glad- 
 stone, written from Rome during the Vatican 
 Council : 
 
 "Rome, March 15th (1870). 
 " My dear Mr. Gladstone, — 
 
 " A protest on the question of Papal Infallibility 
 was presented to-day by certain bishops of the 
 United Kingdom. 
 
 " They exhort the Legates to pause before they 
 put that doctrine to vote. They state that the Eng- 
 lish and Irish Catholics obtained their Emancipa- 
 tion, and the full privileges of citizenship by sol- 
 emn and repeated declarations, that their religion 
 did not teach the dogma now proposed; that these 
 declarations made by the bishops and permitted 
 by Rome, are in fact the condition under which 
 Catholics are allowed to sit in Parliament and to 
 hold offices of trust and responsibility under the 
 Crown ; and that they cannot be overlooked or for- 
 gotten by us without dishonour. 
 
 " I have reason to believe that one at least of the 
 prelates who have signed this most significant paper 
 would not be among the theological opponents of 
 the Definition, but that he regards this considera- 
 tion of morality and public integrity as an insuper- 
 able barrier for men enjoying the benefit of the Act 
 of Emancipation." ^ 
 
 i"Lord Acton's Correspondence," vol. I, p. iii. 
 
PAPALISM 33 
 
 To continue our quotation from Simpson : 
 
 " * A principle,' echoed Dupanloup ; * even grant- 
 ing that were so, I answer, is it then essential to the 
 life of the Church that this principle should become 
 a dogma of faith? How, then, explain the fact that 
 the Church has lived for eighteen centuries with- 
 out defining a principle essential to her existence? 
 How explain the fact that she has formulated all 
 her doctrine, produced her teachers, condemned all 
 heresies, without this definition?' (P. 170.) 
 
 " Another exposition of the Roman faith for 
 English-speaking people is the famous book called 
 Keenan's Catechism. It is entitled * Controversial 
 Catechism, or Protestantism Refuted and Catholi- 
 cism Established/ The edition of i860 is described 
 as the third edition, and in its seventeenth thousand. 
 It bears the imprimatur of four Roman bishops, 
 two of them being Vicars Apostolic. In these ap- 
 probations we are assured that ' the sincere searcher 
 after truth will here find a lucid path opened to 
 conduct him to its sanctuary ; while the believer will 
 be hereby instructed and confirmed in his faith.' 
 From 1846 to i860 it was being largely circulated 
 throughout England, Scotland, and Ireland. 
 
 " The book contains the following question and 
 answer : 
 
 "' (Q) Must not Catholics believe the Pope in 
 himself to be infallible? 
 
 " * (A) This is a Protestant invention : it is no 
 
34 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 article of the Catholic faith: no decision of his 
 can oblige under pain of heresy, unless it be re- 
 ceived and enforced by the teaching body, that is 
 by the bishops of the Church/ (P. iii.) 
 
 " * We are still,' wrote Dollinger to the Arch- 
 bishop, * waiting the explanation how it is that, until 
 1,830 years had passed, the Church did not formu- 
 late into an article of faith a doctrine which the 
 Pope, in a letter addressed to your Grace, calls 
 the very foundation principle of Catholic faith and 
 doctrine? How has it been possible that for cen- 
 turies the Popes have overlooked the denial of this 
 fundamental article of faith by whole countries 
 and in whole theological schools? And was there 
 a unity of the Church when there was a difference 
 in the very fundamentals of belief? And — may 
 I further add — how is it then that your Grace 
 yourself resisted so long and so persistently the 
 proclamation of this dogma? You answer, because 
 it was not opportune. But can it ever be " inoppor- 
 tune " to give believers the key to the whole build- 
 ing of faith, to proclaim the fundamental article 
 on which all others depend? x\re we not now all 
 standing before a dizzy abyss which opened itself 
 before our eyes on the i8th July?' Dollinger con- 
 cluded with a deliberate and emphatic rejection of 
 the new Decree : * As a Christian, as a theologian, 
 as a historian, as a citizen, I cannot accept this 
 doctrine.' " (P. 320.) 
 
 There are a few other things which it seems 
 
PAPALISM 35 
 
 well to note. A good deal of reliance is placed 
 by Roman Catholic controversialists on the asser- 
 tion that a body must have a head; and if it is 
 rcjtjlied that Christ is the Head of the Body the 
 answer is that that no doubt is true as concerns 
 the whole Church, but that a visible Church with 
 which we are here concerned must have a visible 
 head, and that that visible head is the successor 
 of S. Peter. The Satis Cognitiim says, '* Cer- 
 tainly Christ is a King forever; and though In- 
 visible, He continues unto the end of time to 
 govern and guard His Church from Heaven. 
 But since He willed that His Kingdom should be 
 visible He was obliged when He ascended into 
 Heaven, to designate a vicegerent on earth." On 
 this Denny comments : 
 
 " Now, this obligation to appoint a vicegerent 
 on earth which is here alleged to be incumbent on 
 Christ as the invisible King of the Church, implies 
 that, according to the will of God, it is essential 
 that there should be a single individual who should 
 be the head of the Church Militant here on earth. 
 To be so essential it would be necessary that the 
 Church on earth should be a separate entity, entire 
 and complete in itself, and which consequently re- 
 quires to possess a head to itself. But the contrary 
 is the fact. The Church Militant here on earth is 
 but a portion, and that the smallest, of a great 
 whole, made up of the Church Triumphant, the 
 
36 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Church Expectant, together with itself. Hence it 
 is obvious that prima facie the appointment of a 
 visible head for the portion of the one Church 
 here on earth is inconsistent with the unity of the 
 Church, for that is One Body, and can therefore 
 have but one Head, just as the human body can 
 possess but one head. Such a condition of things 
 would involve the consequence that the Church 
 Militant is another Church separate from the di- 
 vinely constituted Society, and thus a mere human 
 invention." ^ 
 
 Perhaps no assertion of the Roman controver- 
 sialist so impresses the unlearned outsider as the 
 assertion that the practical needs of the Church 
 require a Living Voice that can intervene to set- 
 tle controversies and to direct the perplexed faith- 
 ful. Doubt and controversy are continual phe- 
 nomena of human life, and if the plain man is 
 to have a plain way to walk in, if he is to know 
 what to believe amid all the confusion of modern 
 tongues, he needs a guide ; and the guide at hand 
 is the successor of Peter. 
 
 It would perhaps be well for the plain man to 
 note that the questions which are raised to per- 
 plex him in the matter of religion are either ques- 
 tions which have been already answered or ques- 
 
 1 Denny, " Papalism," pp. lo-ii. 
 
PAPALISM 37 
 
 tions which do not need an answer. The conten- 
 tion of the Anghcan Church is that the faith 
 has been already sufficiently declared — there is 
 no need of constant determinations of questions 
 of faith. The explicit statement of the faith 
 which was sufficient for S. Augustine and S. 
 Gregory is still sufficient; there is no need of a 
 living voice to define it further. There are, no 
 doubt, in every generation many perplexing ques- 
 tions which we should like to have answered ; but 
 there is no authoritative answer because they are 
 not matters of faith to be received in order to 
 attain salvation. There is rightly in the Church 
 a place for free investigation and enquiry 
 in regard to questions which have not been de- 
 fined. We would not have it otherwise, for to 
 have it otherwise would be to court intellectual 
 stagnation. ** The Church which promises cer- 
 tainty without the pain of enquiry becomes more 
 and more the Church of those who do not wish 
 to enquire." 
 
 The Living Voice of the Church from the be- 
 ginning was uttered through free conciliar action. 
 For centuries the assembly of councils of bishops 
 was the normal method by which the Church ex- 
 pressed its mind. As a matter of historic fact 
 all the great dogmatic decisions of the Church 
 
38 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 were made, not by the papacy, but by councils. 
 Therein the episcopate to which our Lord com- 
 mitted the faith gave its testimony as to what it 
 was that was committed to it; and its decrees, 
 sent forth to the whole Church and recognized 
 by the universal episcopate became binding on the 
 faithful. This normal mode of expression was 
 rendered impossible by the divison of Christen- 
 dom; but already, when the division took place, 
 the faith had long been sufficiently stated. Con- 
 ciliar action could still express the mind of the 
 local church, enact discipline and take measures 
 to safeguard the faith. It is this, the true Liv- 
 ing Voice of the Church, that the papacy has 
 deliberately set itself to suppress. It has, wher- 
 ever its power has extended, made councils sub- 
 ordinate to the papacy and the organs of its 
 action. It has suppressed the episcopate as an 
 organ of the Church's self-expression. The epis- 
 copate to which the Lord committed the faith 
 and which for centuries gave testimony to the 
 faith committed to it, is, in the Roman commun- 
 ion, no longer a representative of the Body of 
 Christ, but a representative of the papacy. Ro- 
 man bishops are simply papal lieutenants sent out 
 to do the will of the Pope. The legitimate Liv- 
 ing Voice wherever the papacy has power has 
 been silenced. 
 
PAPALISM 39 
 
 Note. — The Roman official documents are collected in 
 Denzinger's " Enchiridion." Denny, " Papalism " (London, 
 Rivingtons, 1912) is an unanswerable criticism of the papal 
 position. Puller, "The Primative Saints and the See of 
 Rome" (New York, Longmans, 1914) is valuable. No 
 one interested in the subject can afford to miss W. J. 
 Sparrow Simpson, " Roman Catholic Opposition to Papal 
 Infallibility" (Milwaukee, The Young Qiurchman Co., 
 1910). Perhaps the best brief book is George Bayfield 
 Roberts, " The Papal Question " (London, Pitman & Sons, 
 1914). 
 
Ill 
 
 CATHOLICITY 
 
 ^^^HAT we have to attach any adjective to the 
 ^^^ word Church in order to distinguish true 
 from false and to avoid confusion is an indication 
 of human failure to attain a divine ideal. It 
 ought to be enough to describe ourselves as mem- 
 bers of the Church or as Christians, or, as the 
 first disciples described themselves, as " those of 
 the Way." But such a designation to-day only 
 calls out the question: *' What Church?" 
 *' What sort of Christians?" Orthodox de- 
 scribes those w^ho so designate themselves as 
 separate from the majority of Christians whom 
 they regard as having departed from the Faith. 
 Roman emphasizes the extension of an usurped 
 authority over a large part of the Christian West. 
 Protestant embodies an historical reference, and 
 calls up to minds to-day an amorphous theological 
 body of belief. Protestant Episcopal joins an 
 historical reminiscence to a note of the Church, 
 producing a name of small significance. The sad 
 
 thing is that when we think of ourselves as Chris- 
 
 40 
 
CATHOLICITY 4I 
 
 tians we should automatically think of ourselves 
 as separate from other Christians. Yet perhaps 
 it is as well to be reminded of our sins and the 
 sins of our fathers. 
 
 There are words which have degenerated to a 
 sectarian significance which in themselves have 
 from the beginning no such meaning. They are 
 words which seek to express qualities of the Body 
 of Christ. Catholic is a word of such primary 
 meaning which has been degraded to the sectarian 
 level. Back of the divisions of Christendom we 
 seek to find a common ground, or body of belief 
 and practice, which underlies those groups of 
 Christians, at least, who have held fast the 
 Creeds, the Sacraments and the Ministry of the 
 Church from the beginning. One aspect or qual- 
 ity of this underlying ground is that which we 
 designate as Catholicity. It is the meaning of 
 this word that we have now to examine. Though 
 we give our ecclesiastical organization a cor- 
 porate name (Protestant Episcopal) when we 
 speak of the Church as a corporation existing in 
 the United States of America ; when we think of 
 it as a spiritual fact, as the Body of Christ; when 
 as members of it we come before God in worship, 
 we speak of the Catholic Church. In this asser- 
 tion we do not mean to deny the claim of others 
 to the quality of Catholicity — we do not assert 
 
42 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 that we are all the Catholics that there are; but 
 we do assert our right to be called Catholic and 
 to be members of the One Holy Catholic and 
 Apostolic Church. 
 
 The original meaning of this word Catholic is 
 universal or general; and the temptation has been 
 to limit the ecclesiastical meaning of it by its ety- 
 mology rather than define it by its use. It has 
 been defined as indicating extension merely, so 
 that the Catholic Church is described as that 
 which extends throughout the world, and the 
 test of Catholicity has been found in numbers 
 and geographical distribution. " Embracing all 
 Christians," a dictionary rather foolishly says. 
 But when we remember that the Church never has 
 extended throughout the whole world, and that it 
 had the least extension when first the term came 
 into use, we feel that extension cannot be the 
 important element in the meaning. 
 
 The word makes its appearance in Christian 
 literature about the year no, in the Epistle of S. 
 Ignatius to the Church in Smyrna (cap. 8). 
 " Wherever the bishop appears, let the congrega- 
 tion be present; just as wherever Jesus Christ is, 
 there is the Catholic Church." In the account of 
 the martyrdom of S. Polycarp, c. 150 a. d., the 
 holy Martyr is represented as praying for " the 
 whole Catholic Church throughout the world '* 
 
CATHOLICITY 43 
 
 (cap. 8) ; and is described as " bishop of the Cath- 
 olic Church in Smyrna." These early uses of 
 the word do not stress the notion of extension 
 but of wholeness. Where our Lord is there is 
 the whole Church, the Church in its entirety. 
 Our Lord is described as '' Shepherd of the Cath- 
 olic Church throughout the world." (Cap. i6.) 
 This is mere tautology if Catholic means only 
 throughout the world. The writer means plainly 
 the Shepherd of the Church in its entirety. So 
 when S. Polycarp is described as the Catholic 
 bishop of Smyrna what is meant is that he was 
 the bishop of the whole Christian community, 
 and not head of any special group or groups. 
 
 When the word appears, then, the Catholic 
 Church is the whole Church as distinguished from 
 the local church. It is the re-naming of a fact 
 made familiar to us by our reading of the New 
 Testament. Wherever the Apostles went preach- 
 ing the W^ord they planted " churches." These 
 were congregations of baptized men and women 
 with a common meeting place and some elemen- 
 tary organization. It is not too much to assume 
 that in all such congregations elders were ap- 
 pointed and given control of the local teaching, 
 worship, etc. The Epistles of S. Paul are full 
 of allusions to these "churches." "All the 
 churches of the Gentiles." (Rom. XVI, 4.) 
 
44 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 "As I teach everywhere, in every church." (I 
 Cor. IV, 17.) '* The care of all the churches." 
 (II Cor. XI, 28.) But when S. Paul stops think- 
 ing about these groups of converts whom he has 
 brought to Christ and the spiritual care of whom 
 continually weighs upon him, and thinks of our 
 Lord and His work in the world and the outcome 
 of that work in the body of believers who have 
 been baptized into Christ, as one spiritual fact, 
 then we no longer hear of the church in Rome or 
 Corinth or Jerusalem, but we are presented with 
 a divine and heavenly thing — the Body of Christ. 
 This is the Church. This is the whole Church. 
 This is the Catholic Church which we, in the 
 Creeds, profess to believe. This Catholicity can- 
 not be expressed in terms of locality or extension 
 for it is a spiritual quality, the immanence in man 
 of the divine humanity. " We being many, are 
 one body in Christ, and every one members one 
 of another." (Rom. XII, 5.) " Ye are the body 
 of Christ, and severally members thereof." (I 
 Cor. XII, 2^?) " The Church, which is his body, 
 the fulness of him that filleth all in all." (Eph. 
 I, 23.) This has nothing to do with time or 
 place, but is spiritual fact. This is the Church 
 which according to S. Ignatius is where Jesus 
 Christ is, and of which, according to the Martyr- 
 dom of S. Polycarp, Jesus Christ is the Shepherd. 
 
CATHOLICITY 45 
 
 Of this Church, too, SS. Ignatius and Polycarp 
 were bishops and martyrs. But when we ask, 
 " Where is this CathoHc Church ? " we can 
 only be shown the '' churches " in this place or 
 that — in Jerusalem, in Antioch, in Smyrna. 
 None of these can we recognize as the whole 
 Church; and yet there is a sense in which the 
 church in this or that place is the whole Church, 
 not extensively but qualitatively. The Church in 
 Antioch or Smyrna is the localization of the Body 
 of Christ. There the Kingdom of the Incarna- 
 tion is manifested. There are all the powers of 
 the Church of the Living God. 
 
 For again, we must grasp Catholicity, not as 
 quantity, as extension, but as quality. CathoHcity 
 is the quality which makes it possible that the 
 Church should be world-wide. It fits it to be the 
 Church throughout all the world. The Church 
 is Catholic, not because it is the Church of all 
 (which it obviously is not), but because it is 
 fitted to be the Church of all. It is able to supply 
 the spiritual needs of all men. Our Lord through 
 his Church offers himself to our needs, calling 
 us to come to him and find in him all that we can 
 desire. Another way of expressing the same fact 
 is to say that the Church is equipped with all the 
 means necessary for ministry to men. Men find 
 themselves sinful, in need of forgiveness, of puri- 
 
46 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 fication, of renewed strength; they experience the 
 grace of sacraments and long for greater advance 
 in hoHness of Hfe; then, they find in the Body of 
 Christ the resources which supply all their needs 
 whatsoever they are. It is this quality of inex- 
 haustible resource, as we might call it, which en- 
 ables the Church to appeal with confidence to all 
 races and nations. We have no hesitation in 
 sending missionaries to nations far removed from 
 us in race and stage of culture; the Christian mis- 
 sionary goes to the lowest tribes of savages, he 
 goes to the nations of the Far East with their 
 elaborate and ancient civilization; he meets the 
 dwellers in the jungle and the dwellers in palaces; 
 and with all he has the same certainty that the reli- 
 gion that he has to ofYer is the religion they need. 
 It is the quality of a sect that it appeals to that 
 which is peculiar and local. A sect sees some 
 truth, or what it takes to be such, with great clear- 
 ness and stresses it to the exclusion of other 
 truths. It gathers those to whom the peculiar 
 sect-truth seems important and to whom it is con- 
 genial, and often great energy is developed in the 
 propagation of the truth. Sects in their origin 
 are zealous because of the concentration of effort 
 they have effected — their whole energy is di- 
 rected to one point. The Catholic Church seems 
 cold in comparison, and is reproached with being 
 
CATHOLICITY 47 
 
 formal and unspiritual; but the Church has to 
 hold the whole truth and may not for the sake of 
 a momentary advantage at one point sacrifice the 
 wholeness, the Catholicity of its faith. 
 
 It is no easy thing to maintain this Catholic 
 grasp on the Christian religion as a whole, to be 
 ever on the watch lest our religion become in fact 
 sectarian. That is one of the first dangers the 
 Church had to meet at the outset of its career. 
 There was a time during which it must have 
 looked from the outside as though the Church 
 were going to stagnate for a while as a Jewish 
 sect and then vanish away. Its members seemed 
 incapable of seeing past the Jewish Law. It was 
 S. Paul who was inspired with the vision of the 
 Catholic Church and who declined to be confined 
 within the bonds of some new and only slightly 
 more elastic Judaism. To S. Paul the Incarna- 
 tion meant the breaking down of all that divided 
 men, the removal of all obstacles to the carrying 
 of the salvation that is in Christ to all men. Be- 
 fore S. Paul's vision the walls of nationality fell 
 down ; race was as nothing ; social distinctions did 
 not exist. Christ is all and in all. 
 
 Through this sense of its adaptation to univer- 
 sal human nature Catholicity gains the notion of 
 Orthodoxy, when divisions arise. The sect or 
 party, as we have seen, is such because it grasps 
 
48 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 one truth or one aspect of truth, and draws its 
 strength from the concentrated effort that this 
 makes possible. But the Catholic Church cannot 
 insist on any one truth because it has all truth as 
 its trust. But Catholicity stands more firmly in 
 the long run. It will lose locally and temporarily 
 while some one aspect of religion catches the pub- 
 lic eye or falls in with the popular taste; and it 
 will be soundly abused as out of touch with the 
 modern mind. When metaphysical theology was 
 in fashion the Church was roundly abused for its 
 insistence on good works; now that good works 
 are all the rage and men are saved by social serv- 
 ice, the Church is abused for its insistence on 
 metaphysical theology. But wisdom is justified 
 of all her children. The fret of the weather — 
 rain and wind and wave constantly breaks ofif 
 masses of ice from the glacier, which sail gaily 
 out to sea and presently melt and vanish ; but the 
 glacier remains. 
 
 In a wider sense the Church is Catholic as com- 
 prising all the elect. It is the Communion of 
 Saints. Much of our difficulty would be avoided 
 if we would remember that. We lose heart be- 
 cause of the petty divisions of the Church here. 
 We are disheartened and ashamed of our presen- 
 tation of the Gospel whether among some heathen 
 tribes or in an American village. Nothing is 
 
CATHOLICITY 49 
 
 more disheartening than the village with its hand- 
 ful of inhabitants and its dozen of " churches " — 
 all practically empty of a Sunday morning, while 
 roads swarm with motors. But whatever these 
 empty edifices signify they do not prove that the 
 Church is divided. They are evidence that our 
 understanding of the Gospel is faulty, and our 
 attempt to present it in great measure failure ; but 
 the Church of God still remains, notwithstanding 
 our efforts to wreck it. Our divisions are but the 
 angry waves on the surface of the ocean, stirred 
 by storms and capable of doing a certain amount 
 of damage ; but the great underlying depths of the 
 ocean are undisturbed. So the central life of the 
 Church is untouched in its union with our Lord. 
 
 I do not want to minimise the disaster of divi- 
 sions; but we must be clear what the disaster is 
 and the extent of the damage. It is disaster to 
 certain souls; but the life of the Church is un- 
 touched in its Catholic Unity. It is the one Home 
 of God's elect. Into the Haven behind the veil 
 there are streaming constantly the souls who have 
 been rescued from the trials of earth and are en- 
 tered into their rest. We of the Church Militant 
 are but a missionary station of the Catholic 
 Church, and we stress too much our importance 
 when we cry that the Kingdom is lost when there 
 has been at most an affair of outposts. Let us 
 
50 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 remember that the Catholicity of the Church is a 
 quahty of the Body of Christ; we may cut our- 
 selves away from that body, but the body will 
 remain and will remain Catholic. 
 
 Again : because the Church is Catholic it is ex- 
 clusive. We are tempted to-day to a notion of 
 Catholicity which is merely inclusive and there- 
 fore characterless. The " great church " of mod- 
 ern Protestantism is an attempt to escape the plain 
 meaning of the results of division by setting up a 
 false ideal of a Catholic Church as a body com- 
 posed of all sorts of well meaning people who have 
 agreed to disregard their differences and play at 
 being one. This might be possible if the Chris- 
 tian religion were a human discovery. If it be- 
 longed to men they might do as they liked with 
 it. But it is in fact a revelation committed to 
 the Church to keep; the Church is its custodian 
 and cannot act as though it were lord of it. It 
 must, as trustee, teach truth and deny error. It 
 is tolerant, but there are necessary limits of tol- 
 eration. It can tolerate the presence of intel- 
 lectual sinners, as it can of any other sinners ; but 
 it has no right to tolerate their sin. There is no 
 charity in suffering a disease-breeding center to 
 exist because it may hurt some one's feelings to 
 attack it; and it is not charity to let falsehood 
 go unrebuked and misstatement uncorrected be- 
 
CATHOLICITY 51 
 
 cause the propagators of error are well-meaning 
 people. If any Christian body approve error it 
 destroys, so far forth, its Christian character. 
 1 say, so far forth, because it appears that the 
 Catholicity of the local church may be grievously 
 injured, without being destroyed. For example, 
 the assertion of the Roman Church as to the pa- 
 pacy seems not to have wholly destroyed its 
 Catholicity. But it is inconceivable that the 
 whole Church should ever affirm untruth; our 
 Lord's promise must be held to deny that. If the 
 Church could affirm error, Christianity would be 
 reduced to a philosophy, a system of speculation 
 rather than a system of truth. 
 
 We will note one other characteristic of Ca- 
 tholicity: wherever the Church is, it is wholly. 
 *' Where two or three are gathered together in 
 my Name, there am I in the midst of them." 
 The Catholic Church is not achieved by a sum in 
 addition ; it is not that all the '* local " or " na- 
 tional " churches *' make up " the Catholic 
 Church. The Catholic Church is a divine and 
 heavenly fact that is manifested in this or that 
 place; i. e., all the powers and graces of the Cath- 
 oHc Church are wherever it at all is. 
 
 Amid our present divisions it is felt that there 
 is great difficulty in discovering the Catholic 
 Church. It were an easy way out of the diffi- 
 
52 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 culty to identify some one existing body, e. g., 
 the Orthodox or the Roman CathoHc, with the 
 Cathohc Church ; but the problem is not quite so 
 simple. But if it cannot be solved in this way, 
 how are we to solve it? If there may be error 
 in the local attempts to express the truth whether 
 in Constantinople or Rome or Canterbury, are 
 we not very much at sea ? Are there any practi- 
 cal tests of Catholicity? 
 
 There would seem to be no reason for casting 
 aside the well known tests proposed by S. Vin- 
 cent of Lerins. They have to be applied with a 
 certain amount of common sense, as indeed S. 
 Vincent himself applied them, and not in a 
 wooden way ; but so applied they give us, I think, 
 the tests we want. S. Vincent says : 
 
 " In the Catholic Church itself we take great care 
 that we hold that which has been believed every- 
 where, always, by all. For that is truly and prop- 
 erly * Catholic/ as the very force and meaning of 
 the word shows, which comprehends everything 
 almost universally. And we shall observe this rule 
 if we follow universality, antiquity, consent. We 
 shall follow universality if we confess that one 
 Faith to be true which the whole Church through- 
 out the world confesses; antiquity if we in no wise 
 depart from those interpretations which it is plain 
 that our ancestors and fathers proclaimed ; consent 
 if in antiquity itself we eagerly follow the defini- 
 
CATHOLICITY 53 
 
 tions and beliefs of all, or certainly nearly all, 
 priests and doctors alike." 
 
 That then is Catholic which is everywhere held 
 and taught in the Church. When a doctrine is 
 proposed as Catholic we have in the first place 
 to look to its universality. The local is checked 
 by the universal. This test at once excludes local 
 peculiarities, not as necessarily untrue, but as not 
 being binding on Christians with the necessity of 
 Faith. The teaching of a Church like the Angli- 
 can may contain many things which are the out- 
 come of the historical circumstances of England 
 during the last few centuries; these may be true 
 and they may be important, but they cannot be 
 imposed as Catholic. Fortunately the Anglican 
 Communion has not been given to Creed making 
 and has nothing to take back in these matters. 
 
 This note of everyzvhere is, of course, common 
 sense. Christianity is a revealed religion, and 
 whatever was revealed in it to be held with the 
 necessity of faith must have been as necessary 
 in the first century as in the twentieth; and is as 
 necessary for one set of Christians as for another. 
 If it appears then that certain groups of Chris- 
 tians are insisting on certain dogmas as " of 
 faith, '^ which are unknown to other Christians, 
 then they fail of the test of universality and may 
 be set aside so far as their claim to Catholicity is 
 concerned. 
 
54 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 That faith must not only have been universally 
 held, but it must have been so held from the be- 
 ginning. It is conceivable that we should dis- 
 cover in Christendom a dogma or practice which 
 makes the claim of Catholicity and which sup- 
 ports its claim by an appeal to universal accept- 
 ance; and yet it may turn out on examination 
 that the belief or practice is a complete novelty 
 — that its origin and development can be traced 
 back to the period of the Reformation or to the 
 Middle Ages. It can be demonstrated that it has 
 not been always believed. It therefore fails to 
 be recognized as Catholic. What was of faith 
 at the beginning, is of faith now ; what is of faith 
 now must have been so from the beginning. The 
 function of the Christian Church in matters of 
 faith is not to invent but to transmit. What is 
 called development of doctrine is either the at- 
 tempt to add to the faith new dogmas (which is 
 illegitimate), or is but the completer statement 
 of what has always been held. This latter, which 
 is always going on, is not a process of developing 
 truth-germs, but is a further thinking into old 
 truths which must always take place where the 
 truths are being used. We believe in God, 
 Father, Son and Holy Spirit; and all Christians 
 have been bound to so believe from the begin- 
 ning; but the mind of the Church finds fuller 
 
CATHOLICITY 55 
 
 content in these words as the centuries go on. 
 
 The third Vincentian test is that the truth pro- 
 posed to us must be a truth accepted by all, by 
 which it is meant that the recognition of the truth 
 must be by a moral universality, not by a numer- 
 ical unity. S. Vincent does not mean " all Chris- 
 tians "; he is careful to say, " by all, or certainly 
 nearly all, priests and doctors alike." Dr. Kidd 
 points out that S. Vincent really means by priests, 
 bishops; that is the actual appeal is to those to 
 whom has been committed by our Lord the keep- 
 ing of the Faith. 
 
 This process of identification of the faith, so 
 to call it, is seen in the method of the statement 
 of the faith through the CEcumenical Councils. 
 Those Councils do not meet from time to time 
 in the history of the Church to set forth new 
 dogmas of the faith; but they meet, when the 
 faith is being denied, to testify as to what is the 
 faith. They do not say. This shall be the faith 
 from henceforth; they say. This has been the 
 faith from the beginning. And their testimony 
 is not final; it requires ratification by the mind 
 of the Church. It is not till the decrees of CEcu- 
 menical Councils have been accepted, in S. Vin- 
 cent's words, by " all, or certainly nearly all, 
 priests and doctors aHke '' that they are of Catho- 
 lic force. 
 
56 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 This Vincentian test does not present a proper 
 restatement of the articles of the faith. To-day 
 the need of restatement is being urged with great 
 force and insistence. Restatement is always 
 needed. Each generation has to think over its 
 faith in the terms of its own experience. But a 
 proper restatement must be one that preserves, 
 not destroys, the thing restated. One rather 
 more than suspects that some of the loudest advo- 
 cates of restatement would, if they were frank, 
 be advocates of destruction. It is not a restate- 
 ment of the Catholic doctrine of the resurrection 
 of the body to deny that our Lord rose again the 
 third day with his entire humanity; or that we 
 shall in any sense have a bodily resurrection. 
 But to define the word body in terms of our pres- 
 ent knowledge of matter, and not in terms of an- 
 cient or mediaeval science, would seem to be 
 proper restatement. 
 
 What we have most to see to is that we hold 
 fast the faith once for all delivered to the saints, 
 and which has been everywhere, always and by all 
 believed. So doing we shall be Catholics. 
 
 Note.— I am greatly indebted to the following : Lacey, 
 " Catholicity." The Young Churchman Co., Milwaukee, 
 Wis. Kidd, "How Can I be Sure that I am a Catholic?" 
 In Modern Oxford Tracts. Longmans, Green & Co, 1914. 
 
IV 
 
 THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 
 
 ^TT^HERE," asked the Roman controversial- 
 VJL/ ist, " was your Church before the Refor- 
 mation?" "Where," was the AngHcan retort 
 courteous, " was your face before you washed 
 it?" The same truth has been expressed with 
 more suavity by Bishop Bramhall, who said, " I 
 make no doubt that the Church of England before 
 the Reformation and the Church of England 
 after the Reformation are as much the same 
 church as a garden before it is weeded and after 
 it is weeded is the same garden." The weeding 
 of gardens, however, is a delicate process not apt 
 to be successfully prosecuted by amateurs; the 
 expert is needed, else the flowers will go and the 
 weeds remain. 
 
 Looking at the Reformation in Western Eu- 
 rope as a whole there is evidence of a good deal 
 of amateurish work. '' Plough up the garden 
 and make a new start," was a ruling maxim when 
 institutions, beliefs, practices, good, bad, and in- 
 different, were swept out of existence, and new 
 
 57 
 
58 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 churches with new theologies erected on the site 
 of the old. As we look back at the process we 
 are not convinced of its necessity or desirability. 
 There were, no doubt, abuses and superstitions 
 connected with current beliefs and practices at the 
 close of the Middle Ages in the matter of " Pur- 
 gatory, Pardons, Worshipping, and Adoration as 
 well of images as of relics, and also invocation 
 of Saints " ; but to utterly abolish the thing abused 
 is not to reform it. There were doubtless abuses 
 in the Episcopal administration in many places, 
 but they were not corrected by the suppression of 
 the Episcopate and the confiscation of the prop- 
 erty of the Church by the State. So old and 
 widespread an institution as Monasticism was 
 bound to have its faults ; but they were not made 
 good by wiping the institution out of existence 
 and purchasing support for the Reformation by 
 transferring the property of the religious houses 
 to court favorites. Looking at the results of the 
 Reformation as a whole they do not give much 
 encouragement. We can to-day see that the type 
 of religion produced is not higher than that of the 
 Middle Ages. We see the churches of the Lu- 
 theran tradition mere instruments of the authori- 
 ties of the state, and those of Calvinistic tradition 
 a mere reflection of the popular mind. 
 
 Have we anything better to say about the 
 
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 59 
 
 Church of England and its children in the British 
 Colonies and America? I think we have. This 
 at least is true, that the Reformation in England 
 took its own decided line and was based on prin- 
 ciples which were quite different from those 
 which shaped the continental Reformation. We 
 may express the difference broadly as follows: 
 that whereas the continental Reformation was 
 fundamentally doctrinal, the English Reformation 
 was fundamentally constitutional. 
 
 The continental Reformation issued in a new 
 constitution and a new theology : the English 
 Reformation issued in a reassertion of the con- 
 stitutional principles which had governed the 
 Church in the first centuries of its existence. The 
 Continental Reformation claimed to revert to the 
 religion of the Bible, but in reality, by its repudia- 
 tion of all authority of interpretation and its 
 assertion of the right of private judgment, made 
 not the Bible, but what any Reformer thought the 
 Bible taught the standard of doctrine. The Eng- 
 lish Reformation, by its appeal to the Scriptures 
 as interpreted by the Christian past, avoided indi- 
 vidualism and gained an intelligible principle of 
 theological statement. 
 
 There is nothing more foolish at this late day 
 than to attribute the English Reformation and the 
 origin of the English Church to Henry the Eighth. 
 
6o THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 No doubt Henry's matrimonial infelicities gave 
 room for the English discontent with things as 
 they were in the Church to develop, and shaped 
 the course taken by reforming legislation. But 
 every religious movement in the whole history of 
 the Church has been conditioned and shaped in 
 its course by the accidents of its setting. Our 
 Lord suffered under Pontius Pilate, but the 
 Christian religion does not derive its virtue from 
 that historical incident. The Nicene definition 
 of our Lord's consubstantiality with the Father 
 is largely conditioned by the conversion of Con- 
 stantine and the subsequent effects of his reign; 
 but it is not true that the Catholic doctrine as set 
 forth by the Council is due to Constantine. The 
 events of Henry's reign shaped the course of the 
 Anglican Reformation, and gave color to many 
 of its events ; but it did not originate a new 
 Church. On the contrary, the continual assertion 
 of Reformation legislation was that the old 
 Church was asserting its rights and emerging 
 from the papal bondage. Henry's character was 
 not an important factor, and it is absurd that the 
 Churches of the Anglican rite would be re- 
 proached with the character of Henry the Eighth, 
 especially by the children of the Church which 
 placed Alexander VI on the papal throne and 
 made de Retz Cardinal Archbishop of Paris. At 
 
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 6l 
 
 most the English Church inherited Henry VIII; 
 it did not freely prefer him. 
 
 There would have been a reformation in Eng- 
 land though Henry VIII had never been born. 
 The causes had long been working and the most 
 superficial knowledge of the history of England 
 during the centuries preceding the Reformation 
 makes clear the vast amount of unrest and dis- 
 satisfaction that was generated by the enforce- 
 ment of the papal claims. The day of infallibil- 
 ity was not yet. The Roman claims took the 
 form of the assertion of the right of jurisdiction 
 over the whole Church. Whatever were the for- 
 tunes or misfortunes of individual popes during 
 the Middle Ages, the policies of the papacy re- 
 mained the same. It was a policy of steadily 
 asserting claims which by virtue of their continu- 
 ous assertion came at length to have the color of 
 antiquity. A claim which is always being made 
 will have its moments of success, which will more 
 than offset its moments of failure; for any suc- 
 cess can be quoted as a precedent in the future. 
 
 And no doubt the claims of the papacy to exer- 
 cise jurisdiction met with growing success and 
 recognition. There were many reasons why this 
 should be so. The claim of the papacy was to be 
 court of final appeal, and in case of an appeal the 
 court will always make at least one friend. If 
 
62 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 the papacy supported the local ruler in his troubles 
 and brought him the backing of the hierarchy and 
 the monastic orders, it was a favor he would be 
 quite inclined to recompense by some acknowl- 
 edgment of the power that aided him. If the 
 papacy intervened to support the local clergy 
 against Episcopal tyranny, or the Episcopate 
 against the lay power, it would in either case make 
 friends of the mammon of unrighteousness. In 
 the insecurity of the Middle Ages it was undoubt- 
 edly of advantage to have an international power 
 which could intervene in national disputes, and if 
 the power had acted with fairly uniform justice 
 and claimed no more than a customary jurisdic- 
 tion, all would have been well. The trouble arose 
 from this, that the papacy claimed its jurisdiction 
 as of divine right and as of undefined content 
 and exercised it in ways that were tyrannical and 
 unjust. By the close of the XVth century it 
 had become plain to all men that the chief end of 
 the exercise of the papal jurisdiction was the ag- 
 grandizement of the papacy. The burden of tax- 
 ation constantly increased. The number of the 
 rich bishoprics and benefices of the English 
 Church which were given by papal authority to 
 the Italians of the papal entourage passed all 
 bounds. The cost and inconvenience of appeals 
 to Rome had become oppressive in the extreme. 
 
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 63 
 
 It is not too much to say that in the century pre- 
 ceding the Reformation England was quite openly 
 looted in the interests of the papal curia. As a 
 consequence there was great restlessness and many 
 attempts were made to check the abuses of the 
 papal jurisdiction by legislation. 
 
 If there had arisen in the English Church at 
 this time a strong leader of the type of Luther 
 or Calvin whose interests were predominantly the- 
 ological, the discontent with Rome might have 
 been turned in the same direction as on the Con- 
 tinent, and a revolution followed by the erection 
 of an entirely new church might have taken place. 
 Fortunately no such leader arose. Henry VIII 
 had no interest in a theological revolution, but 
 remained theologically a Catholic unto the end. 
 His quarrel was with the papacy, and the parlia- 
 ment and convocation were content to follow his 
 lead, and to declare their independence of Rome. 
 This was a very simple matter to accomplish. 
 Legislation was passed forbidding appeals to 
 Rome and asserting the competence of the English 
 Church to terminate all cases in her own courts, 
 and the Roman jurisdiction was gone! The ec- 
 clesiastical side of the assertion of Anglican free- 
 dom was this : that " the Bishop of Rome hath 
 no greater jurisdiction in England than any other 
 foreign bishop." There was no need of a theo- 
 
64 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 logical revolution, neither the constitution nor the 
 creed of the Church were touched, but the Refor- 
 mation was accomplished. 
 
 The close of the reign of Henry VIII saw the 
 English Church freed from the universal juris- 
 diction of Rome, in full control of its own affairs. 
 Nothing that it had done separated it from the 
 unity of the Catholic Church. Communion with 
 Rome was in abeyance, but might be resumed at 
 any time that Rome should consent to recognize 
 the legitimate rights and powers of the Anglican 
 Church. The Anglican Church, in fact, has never 
 excommunicated Rome, nor withdrawn from 
 its communion; the guilt of schism lies on the 
 Roman side, and if unity was preserved, so far 
 as the English Church was concerned, so was the 
 entire Catholic constitution of the Church. Its 
 creeds are unchanged, and no new articles have 
 been added to them. It Vv-as still governed by a 
 hierarchy consisting of bishops, priests, and dea- 
 cons ; it maintained the same worship and admin- 
 istered the same sacraments. The Church of Eng- 
 land at the death of Henry VIII was the same 
 church that it was at his accession, and nothing 
 had been done to affect its Catholic character. 
 
 There had been begun in the last part of Hen- 
 ry's reign a revision of the devotional formularies 
 of the church. The Bible had been translated 
 
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 6$ 
 
 into English and set up in each church, and it 
 was ordered that a chapter should be read from 
 it after the Te Deum and Magnificat. The Lit- 
 any was issued in English for use in church. 
 Cranmer was occupied in translating and reform- 
 ing the service books of the Church when the 
 King died. 
 
 With the accession of Edward VI we enter 
 upon a new stage in the Reformation. For the 
 next century the question for the English Church 
 was whether it was to be carried in a Protestant 
 direction and lose its Catholic character, or 
 whether it would be able to hold substantially the 
 position it had taken before the accession of Ed- 
 ward. We must remember that while the King 
 and convocation had held steadily to the Catholic 
 belief and practice, England was not so isolated 
 as to be uninfluenced by the Protestant Reforma- 
 tion on the Continent. The writings of the Con- 
 tinental reformers had wide circulation in Eng- 
 land, notwithstanding the efforts of the govern- 
 ment to prevent it. They influenced many, and 
 the party which looked for guidance to the 
 Continent came into power at the accession of 
 Edward. The King himself was but nine years 
 old, and the actual power fell into the hands of 
 Somerset, and after his fall into those of North- 
 umberland. The chief interest they had was in 
 
66 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 plundering the Church. What property had been 
 left by Henry VIII was speedily seized by the 
 government of Edward VI. It is a sordid tale 
 which fortunately it does not fall to us to retell. 
 The first prayer book of Edward VI was pub- 
 lished in 1549, as we have noted. Archbishop 
 Cranmer was at work on it before the death of 
 Henry VIII. It was a book of great merit and 
 all subsequent revisions of the Prayer Book ex- 
 cept the first have looked back to it and worked 
 nearer to it. It translated the old Latin services 
 and simplified them. This they much needed, as 
 in the course of centuries they had become very 
 complex and unfitted for popular services such as 
 the Prayer Book undertook to provide. The 
 result was that the seven hours, which were es- 
 sentially monastic services, were condensed into 
 the Morning and Evening Prayer or the new 
 book. The principal point of the new services 
 was that they secured the continuous reading of 
 the Psalter through the month and the reading of 
 the whole Bible in the daily lessons. The prin- 
 cipal service was that which had for its title in 
 the new book '' The Supper of the Lord and Holy 
 Communion, commonly called the Mass." This 
 was the revision of the Latin mass, retaining all 
 its essential features as they had existed from the 
 earliest times, only simplifying or omitting non- 
 
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION (>"] 
 
 essential elements. The book is thoroughly 
 Catholic in all its provisions. It retained the eu- 
 charistic vestments which were inherited from 
 the past. The rubrics were much simplified, but 
 there is no doubt that the traditional ceremonial 
 would have continued in use except in case of 
 priests of Protestant leanings, who no doubt 
 would have discontinued much of it. 
 
 There was, of course, more or less opposition, 
 both from conservatives who disliked change of 
 any sort, and from the governing Protestant 
 party who detested the whole theological position 
 of the book. The latter party was soon able to 
 make its power felt. 
 
 With the accession of Edward VI reformers 
 from the continent began to come over to Eng- 
 land in great numbers, with the benevolent inten- 
 tion of helping on the Reformation of the English 
 Church. They had their natural allies in those 
 whose interests lay in the direction of further 
 plunder of the Church. The Protestant party 
 thought that nothing had as yet been done in the 
 way of reform and were most anxious for a 
 further change in the formularies of the Church. 
 The party of plunder had the greater success. 
 What endowments had been left by their prede- 
 cessors they seized. They plundered and dis- 
 persed the ancient libraries, selling them for old 
 
68 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 paper. Not a book or manuscript was left in the 
 library of the University of Oxford. Westmin- 
 ster Abbey narrowly escaped being pulled down 
 to furnish material for the new palace for Som- 
 erset. The parish churches were plundered of 
 their vestments; chalices were melted down or 
 used for goblets; bells and the lead from church 
 roofs were sold ; vestments were sold and turned 
 to domestic uses. Thus Protestantism furthered 
 the cause of progress in education and the arts. 
 
 Naturally the first Prayer Book would prove 
 unacceptable to such as these, but they did not 
 find it easy to change it. The new prayer book 
 was prepared which was but a slight revision of 
 the old, but the act of Uniformity which was to 
 give it legal standing, actually declared it to be 
 unnecessary by its statement that the first book 
 was agreeable to the word of God and the primi- 
 tive Church. The book w^as Catholic in essen- 
 tials, though less Catholic in details, than the first 
 book. Vestments were forbidden; invocation of 
 saints and angels and prayers for the dead were 
 stricken out. It is not necessary to say much 
 about it, as it is important only as showing how 
 little the Protestant party was able to do in the 
 hour of their highest success in England. It 
 never came into general use, as the death of Ed- 
 ward opened the way for a reaction. 
 
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 69 
 
 The excesses of the Protestant party made de- 
 cent folk ready to go back to the state of things 
 before the Reformation. It was unavoidable that 
 the reign of Mary should be reactionary. The 
 Protestant leaders promptly ran back to the Con- 
 tinent at the note of danger and many EngHsh 
 clergy of kindred mind accompanied them. 
 Mary had little trouble in bringing England back 
 to the papal obedience, and would have had little 
 trouble in keeping it there had she been content 
 to rule as an English woman with an EngHsh 
 policy. But her marriage with Philip of Spain 
 and her subjection of England to Spanish inter- 
 ests, together with the violent persecution she set 
 up, rendered her unpopular, and what is more 
 important, generated so great a hatred of the 
 papal religion that it has been very difficult to 
 teach not only Romanism, but Catholicism, in 
 England ever since. 
 
 Fortunately Mary's reign was brief and the 
 accession of her half-sister, Elizabeth, brought 
 England back to sanity and a certain measure of 
 freedom. Unfortunately the hostility of Spain 
 and Rome threw Elizabeth in a large measure 
 back upon the Protestant party for support. The 
 English clergy who had taken refuge on the Con- 
 tinent came back with an accentuated Protestant- 
 ism, clamoring for radical reformation. There 
 
70 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 remained, of course, a considerable element in the 
 Church who preferred to be left to the old ways 
 undisturbed. There was also what we may call 
 an Anglican party whose position would be rep- 
 resented by the first prayer book of Edward VI. 
 The inclinations of the Queen were to the policies 
 of her father, and it was her steadiness in oppo- 
 sition to Protestantism which no doubt saved the 
 Catholic heritage of the Church. She made it 
 possible for the clergy who valued the Catholic 
 position of the Church to maintain themselves and 
 make progress in the face of the Protestant propa- 
 ganda which was always going on. The changes 
 in the formularies of the Church during this reign 
 were slight. The new Prayer Book came into 
 use in 1559 and was at once accepted. Out of 
 some 9000 clergy all but 200 accepted the new 
 book. The tendency of the book was away from 
 the second book of Edward and toward the first 
 book. The Eucharistic vestments which had been 
 discontinued by the second book were restored. 
 
 It was not to be expected that the Protestant 
 party would be satisfied with the Elizabethan set- 
 tlement; but they accepted it with the hope of 
 overthrowing it later. The whole region was, 
 ecclesiastically speaking, a long struggle of the 
 Protestant party, or Puritans as they came to be 
 called, to alter the constitution and worship of the 
 
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION *J1 
 
 Church. One emphatic proof of the Cathohcity 
 of the Church and of the Prayer Book is found 
 in the fact that Protestants have never found 
 them satisfactory and have again and again 
 sought to change the constitution of the Church 
 and the formularies of its faith and worship. 
 From the death of Ehzabeth to the Restoration 
 of Charles II it was continually doubtful whether 
 the Church would not fall under the control of 
 those who would so alter it as to destroy its Cath- 
 olic character. Fortunately when Protestantism 
 gained full control of England in the time of the 
 Puritan domination it chose to abolish the Church 
 altogether rather than " reform " it, and therefore 
 when Puritanism fell the Church came back un- 
 harmed. 
 
 Still the circumstances of the Reformation pe- 
 riod left permanent marks upon the Church. 
 While it emerged from the turmoil of the Civil 
 War with its constitution and creed and worship 
 unharmed and thoroughly Catholic, it also 
 emerged with a considerable body of clergy and 
 laity who were Protestant in belief and com- 
 pletely out of sympathy with the doctrine, disci- 
 pline and worship of the Church. These in time 
 gained the upper hand and imposed upon the 
 formularies of the Church the tradition of a Prot- 
 estant interpretation. Fortunately they did not, 
 
"^2 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 in the day of their power, care to do more than 
 that. They might easily in the XVIIIth cen- 
 tury have revised the Prayer Book in the Protes- 
 tant direction and made over the ordinal to suit 
 their own theories of the ministry, but they did not 
 think it worth while; and this is now becoming 
 impossible and the results of the Anglican Refor- 
 mation are our inheritance rather than those of 
 the Continental Reformation. The members of 
 the Anglican Communion everywhere recite the 
 creeds which set forth the faith once delivered 
 to the saints; they are governed by the threefold 
 ministry legitimately descended from the Apos- 
 tles; they worship Almighty God by a liturgy 
 embodying all the elements of sacramental wor- 
 ship; they use all the sacraments which from the 
 beginning have been in use in the Church as the 
 channels of Divine grace. 
 
 And today we rejoice that some doctrines of 
 value which were obscure at the Reformation are 
 emerging from their obscurity to the light of 
 practice : that ceremonial which had been reduced 
 to a minimum is bringing back to our services 
 the beauty and symbolic expression which is so 
 valuable in its teaching power ; that the Religious 
 Life, the destruction of which was the saddest 
 feature of the Reformation, is restored in its full- 
 ness, and we look with confidence to a future when 
 
THE ENGLISH REFORMATION 73 
 
 the spirit of the charity of the Catholic life shall 
 finally end the divisions which Protestant influ- 
 ence brought to us and make us all of one mind 
 in Christ Jesus our Lord. 
 
,v 
 
 THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES 
 
 ^^^HE notion of a national church is one that 
 ^^y may easily be so stated as to be of com- 
 plete conflict with the conception of the Catholic 
 Church. One often reads utterances about na- 
 tional churches which seem to imply that the 
 boundaries of nationality are the necessary limits 
 of ecclesiastical jurisdiction and that the Catholic 
 Church is a sum in arithmetic, arrived at by add- 
 ing together the various national churches. But 
 all such phrases as national churches, or parts or 
 branches of the Church need to be used with the 
 greatest caution and with an understanding of the 
 very limited nature of their application. 
 
 The Catholic Church is one with an inner and 
 essential unity, w^hich but for human sin would 
 produce an external unity; but sin has produced 
 division, leaving the Church in an abnormal state. 
 As we see the Church today we see groups of 
 Christians associated together and in opposition 
 to other groups of Christians. The tendency of 
 each group has been to declare all other groups 
 
 74 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES 75 
 
 illegitimate and no part of the Body of Christ; 
 and if in any sense parts of the Body, very im- 
 perfect parts. We further see that certain of 
 those groups have in the past tended, and still 
 tend, to effect an organization on lines corre- 
 sponding to those of various nations and to hold 
 themselves wholly independent of other groups of 
 Christians however near them in other respects, 
 who are divided from them by the fact of their 
 inclusion in separate political organizations. We 
 have to inquire as to the meaning of this. 
 
 When our Lord ascended into heaven he left all 
 the powers of the Kingdom He had come to 
 found in the hands of His apostles to whom on 
 Pentacost He sent the Holy Spirit to guide them 
 and to lead them into all truth. They went forth 
 in the world in obedience to His command preach- 
 ing the word, gathering converts into the Church 
 through the gate of baptism and effecting some 
 elementary organization wherever they made dis- 
 ciples. When we get any clear light on what this 
 organization was we find it to be Episcopal. The 
 Church is everywhere governed by bishops early 
 in the second century, and, as Tertullian said, if 
 that be an error it is odd that all Christians should 
 have blundered into the same error. 
 
 The mere fact is that the Church was from 
 the beginning Episcopal and episcopally gov- 
 
*](> THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 erned. Every city, almost every village, had its 
 bishop. The belief of the Church was that the 
 bishops were the successors of the Apostles and 
 that the promises made by our Lord to the Apos- 
 tles were legitimately interpreted of the bishops; 
 to them, as to the successors of the Apostles, the 
 fate of the Church was committed, to them was 
 confided the government of the Church, and theirs 
 was the promise of our Lord that He would be 
 with them until the end of the world. That is to 
 say, all those things were theirs as the organs 
 of the Body of Christ, through which the powers 
 which had been committed to the Body func- 
 tioned. 
 
 In order that the Church might be governed at 
 all some sort of organization had to be effected 
 at an early date. A bishop, who at first had been 
 spiritual head of a group of converts in a special 
 place, but who, having preached there might leave 
 his converts under others' charge and himself go 
 on preaching elsewhere, came to be locally re- 
 strained and fixed ; came to be recognized as hav- 
 ing rule and jurisdiction over a certain territory; 
 that is to say the conception of a diocese arose. 
 The Apostles had no dioceses; they went every- 
 where preaching the Word, but their successors 
 preached and ruled in determined territory. As 
 the Church grew this diocesan organization 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES "jy 
 
 proved to be insufficient; many questions arose 
 which required for their settlement the conferring 
 of bishops with one another. Councils were as- 
 sembled to discuss and treat matters of general 
 concern. The theory of these councils, when it 
 became necessary to have a theory, was that all 
 bishops so gathered were equal, and that the pur- 
 pose of their gathering was to state the faith they 
 had received or legislate on matters of discipline 
 such as were constantly arising in the growing 
 complexity of the life of the Church. That these 
 bishops were equal no one doubted. That it was 
 their right by common action to settle questions 
 of faith and practice in the places under their 
 jurisdiction was equally undoubted. But such 
 Councils would need a presiding officer and there 
 would be matters which had to be attended to 
 after the council had adjourned; the acts of the 
 council would have to be made known to the ab- 
 sent; in short, circumstances would compel the 
 institution of some central and standing authority 
 which would unify the dioceses of contiguous 
 territory and be the organ of their united action. 
 It was through such necessity that the Church be- 
 came organized almost unconsciously into prov- 
 inces and, finally, the provinces gathered together 
 into Patriarchates. But in all cases the organ of 
 action was the council of equal bishops and the 
 
78 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 organ of action for the whole Church was the 
 General Council. 
 
 With the fall of the Roman Empire, the con- 
 version of the Germanic nations, the rising of new 
 Christian nationalities, a new set of questions 
 arose. The Church was international, or perhaps 
 we might say, supernational. It is of the essence 
 of Christianity to ignore national and race limits. 
 There is neither Jew nor Greek. But neverthe- 
 less race and nationality were found to be very 
 stubborn facts. It was found more than conven- 
 ient, it was found a practical necessity to recog- 
 nize national lines and make the organization of 
 the Church in provinces to correspond with the 
 national Hmits. It would not practically work 
 to have an archbishop in France exercising juris- 
 diction over bishops in Spain or Italy. By a 
 process of adjustment ecclesiastical national fron- 
 tiers were made coterminous, and when national 
 frontiers were changed, the ecclesiastical frontiers 
 were changed to correspond. 
 
 But there is nothing sacred about this arrange- 
 ment; nor does the group of dioceses which cor- 
 responds territorially to England or France mean 
 anything spiritually. The national Church is 
 merely the group of dioceses which covers terri- 
 tory which civilly is a sovereign state. In other 
 words, the national Church is the organized reli- 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES 79 
 
 gion of the country, but it is not, quo ad national, 
 an expression of the Catholic life of the Church. 
 That life is expressed in it through its proper 
 ecclesiastical organ, the hierarchy. The national 
 Church has no claim at all to a separate Hfe as 
 though it were a self-sufficing whole. If the dio- 
 ceses which constitute the national Church of 
 England, which constitute, that is, England acting 
 ecclesiastically became separated from the rest of 
 Christendom, the fact is not to be justified on 
 the ground of the right of the national Church 
 to take independent action; the separation must 
 be judged by the same rules which would guide 
 in the estimate of the action, say, of groups of 
 dioceses which got at odds under the civil juris- 
 diction of the Roman Empire. Nationality is no 
 justification of division. 
 
 What happened at the Reformation was not 
 that the self-sufficient national Church of England 
 asserted its right of self-determination; there is 
 no such ecclesiastical unit as a national Church in 
 such a sense as that; what happened was that cer- 
 tain provinces of the Catholic Church, that is the 
 provinces of Canterbury and York, asserted 
 through their convocations their right to deter- 
 mine their own affairs within their own limits. 
 This was the assertion of a right inherent in the 
 Episcopate. That it had been encroached upon 
 
80 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 during a considerable time, and that the said prov- 
 inces had yielded to the encroachment, did not and 
 could not make the right valid. The time had 
 now come for the assertion of it, and it was as- 
 serted. If the Papacy, finding its usurped claims 
 denied, chose to divide Christendom and break off 
 communion with the Provinces of England, that 
 was the incurring on its part of the guilt of 
 schism, the sin of a divided Christendom. 
 
 Inasmuch as the Christian faith is the trust 
 of the whole Church, it follows that what it is 
 can only be settled with authority by the whole 
 Church. The articles of faith which were formu- 
 lated by General Councils became binding on the 
 conscience when they had been recognized by the 
 whole Church acting through the Episcopate as 
 true statements of the faith received from our 
 Lord and His Apostles. Definitions of doctrines 
 by local Churches may be true, but they are not 
 of faith. The formularies of the local churches 
 contain a good deal of religious teaching which is 
 valuable and which is adapted to the spiritual in- 
 struction of the individual Christian. Loyalty 
 to the particular church of which we are members 
 requires that we accept and act upon this leading; 
 but our attitude toward such teaching is not our 
 attitude toward the creeds. The creeds are be- 
 lieved as necessary to salvation. The teaching 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES 8l 
 
 is accepted as wholesome and profitable to growth 
 in the spiritual life. 
 
 Fortunately the Anglican Church has not been 
 given to creed making. It has never formulated 
 any Articles of Faith. The Thirty-nine Articles 
 are not, of course, Articles of Faith, but just 
 what they are called, Articles of Religion. They 
 are the embodying of theological definitions 
 drawn up to serve a temporary purpose in the 
 circumstances of XVIth century England. They 
 are an immensely clever document, drawn up 
 by men of competent theological knowledge and 
 with a firm belief in the essentials of the Catholic 
 Faith. Their problem was so to state the theo- 
 logical questions which were then in dispute as 
 to enable as many men as possible of divers 
 theological positions to sign their statements. 
 Ideally, it may be questioned whether this is a 
 thing that ought to have been done ; but from the 
 point of view of practical politics it was a thing 
 that had to be done. Read in the light of Catho- 
 lic theology these Articles are with the exception 
 of two or three phrases entirely justified. The 
 pity of it is that they soon came to be interpreted 
 by men utterly ignorant of Catholic theology and 
 a Protestant meaning fixed upon them. This is 
 most certainly not their meaning, and they must 
 be interpreted in accord with the other theological 
 
82 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Utterances of the English Church; but they serve 
 no useful purpose to-day and the American 
 Church is wise in not requiring submission to 
 them. To us, they are but an interesting his- 
 torical document. 
 
 The local Church, then, claims no right to 
 formulate Articles of Faith; it receives the Faith 
 and teaches it. But short of that, it does claim 
 the right to order the teaching, worship, and dis- 
 cipline of its own members. Its duty is to see 
 to the teaching of the Faith. This it provides for 
 by the theological statements it sets forth as re- 
 ceived from the Catholic Church, by setting forth 
 the services, catechisms, and so on. By provid- 
 ing for the training of men for the priesthood 
 and in other ways. Its members produce works 
 of theology, history, and so on. A vast volume 
 of teaching is poured forth by the Church through 
 its various channels and regarded as a whole it 
 is of a very mixed character. Of the ships of 
 Solomon it is written that some brought back 
 gold and silver and some peacocks and apes. I 
 suppose Solomon had not much difficulty in dis- 
 tinguishing the gold from the apes. We perhaps 
 have more difficulty; but it is always possible to 
 test the various utterances that come to us under 
 the guise of Christian teaching by the standard of 
 the faith once for all delivered; that is, by the 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES 83 
 
 formal and authorized statement of the Church. 
 One has not much sympathy with the complaint 
 that people cannot tell what to believe because of 
 the diversity of teaching in the Church to-day. 
 There need be no such difficulty in anything that 
 is essential. The duty of every man is to know 
 the Catholic Faith. It is learned not by listening 
 to sermons but by studying the Catholic formu- 
 laries. Any one who is thoroughly versed in 
 these will not be led into error ; and short of essen- 
 tials there are many points of religious teaching 
 where diversity of teaching is allowable. What 
 is to be regretted is, that so few members of the 
 Church take any pains to know their own religion. 
 The particular Church claims the right to legis- 
 late for itself, and enforce its legislation. Here 
 was the point of acute difference with Rome 
 which led to the separation. Rome claimed the 
 right to receive appeals from the courts of the 
 English Church. This had been tolerated as a 
 matter of ecclesiastical arrangement; it was 
 claimed as a matter of divine right. This Eng- 
 land denied and forbade appeals. Of course, by 
 ecclesiastical arrangement appeals may be carried 
 anywhere. If the proper authorities saw fit, ap- 
 peals might be carried from the United States to 
 the court of the Archbishop of Canterbury; but 
 such an arrangement being made could at any 
 
54 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 time be terminated. The carrying of appeals to 
 Rome was terminated, and English cases were 
 tried in England, as to-day American cases are 
 tried in the courts of the American Church. The 
 particular Church may enact any canons it chooses 
 for its own government, and make rules for the 
 discipline of its own clergy and laity. The rules 
 that we to-day actually live under are found in 
 the Canons of the General Convention of the 
 Church in America, and in the Canons of the dio- 
 cese in which we live. Other rules affecting our 
 lives may be found in the Prayer Book, as, for 
 example, in the Table of Fasts and Feasts. 
 Every member of the Church is bound to know 
 the rules that affect his life, and to practise what 
 is enjoined, and to avoid what is prohibited under 
 penalty of sin. 
 
 In the ordering of services, the enactment of 
 ceremonial and all that pertains to the perform- 
 ance of public worship the particular church is 
 free. The way in which this right has been ex- 
 ercised in the past appears from the multitude 
 of Liturgies and Office Books of one kind and 
 another which have come down to us. While the 
 essentials of Divine worship remain the same, 
 local circumstances and social changes from age 
 to age require some modifications of the expres- 
 sion of worship. The Christian Year as we have 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES 85 
 
 it was a gradual formation. The calendar is con- 
 stantly open for the reception of new Feasts and 
 Fasts. The needs of time and place call for spe- 
 cial services. The ordering of these things be- 
 long to the particular church, or, in many in- 
 stances to the particular bishop. The duty of 
 providing for the services of the Church belongs 
 originally to the bishop. His jus litnrgicum as it 
 is called is the authority to order all things per- 
 taining to the rendering of public worship. But 
 this inherent right of the bishop has been limited 
 under circumstances of ecclesiastical organization. 
 As bishops came to act together in the govern- 
 ment of the Church, such common action neces- 
 sitated the surrender of individual powers in the 
 interests of group action. An ecclesiastical prov- 
 ince enacts legislation which is binding on all the 
 members of the province. The Church in the 
 United States of America on its organization as 
 a province of the Catholic Church independent of 
 the mother church of England, adopted constitu- 
 tions and canons and certain formularies of wor- 
 ship. The bishops assenting to these constitu- 
 tions and canons have surrendered certain powers, 
 and have merged them in the power of the Church 
 as a whole. The jus liturgicum is now exercised 
 under certain restrictions, and perhaps we might 
 say that the ju^ liturgicum of the individual bishop 
 
86 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 has been surrendered in certain respects to the 
 General Convention of the Church It is no 
 longer for the individual bishop to set forth per- 
 manent services which would interfere with, or 
 supersede the services set forth by common au- 
 thority ; but the individual bishop may set forth a 
 service which shall meet the special need of a 
 special occasion, or he can set forth a permanent 
 service which does not trench upon the ground 
 covered by existing services. That is, he cannot 
 set forth a new liturgy, but he can license special 
 Collects and Epistles and Gospels for special days, 
 as for a parish anniversary or upon some day of 
 state observance. He might authorise a special 
 service for constant use, as for the meetings of 
 Guilds and Societies. It would seem that under 
 this unsurrendered jus liturgicum he could license 
 a special form of evening service which would not 
 supersede or interfere with Evening Prayer, as, 
 for instance, a service of a popular kind where 
 there is Mission preaching, or a service of the 
 Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, where that 
 is appropriate. That is to say, the surrender of 
 the ecclesiastical powers under the constitution of 
 the Church in America which insures a large 
 measure of common action through the General 
 Convention is not of such a nature as to render 
 the Episcopate a mere instrument of administra- 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES 8/ 
 
 tion, but still leaves a large measure of flexibility 
 to the administration of the individual bishop, 
 and leaves room for initiative in the course of his 
 dealing with his diocese. 
 
 There remains a question of principle which is 
 more difficult to deal with : that is the case of the 
 right of the particular Church to interfere with 
 or discontinue uses and practices which in the 
 course of centuries have become part of the life 
 and action of the Catholic Church. We can best 
 get at what is meant by taking one or two cases. 
 
 The case of Unction of the sick stands by itself. 
 By the time of the Reformation it had acquired 
 universal recognition as a Sacrament, and the first 
 Prayer Book of Edward VI provides for its ad- 
 ministration. We cannot but feel that its omis- 
 sion from subsequent editions of the Prayer Book 
 is a great blot on the Churches of the Anglican 
 Communion. Unction is a part of our CathoHc 
 inheritance from the past, and the faithful have 
 the right to receive this sacrament. Neglect of 
 a particular church to provide a service for its 
 administration cannot invalidate that right. In 
 such a case as this it would seem rather more 
 than the right ; it would seem to be the duty of the 
 individual bishop to provide for the proper care 
 of the sick by blessing the oil of Unction, and 
 
88 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 supplying it to his clergy together with the 
 licensed office for its administration. 
 
 Another case falling under the same principle 
 is that of the invocation of saints. The practice 
 of invocation has been the practice of the whole 
 Church from at least the third century. It played 
 a great part in the life and development of the 
 Mediaeval Church. It is one of the practices that 
 have to be intelligently dealt with if Church unity 
 is ever to become a fact. At the Reformation 
 the practice of invocation was removed from the 
 public services of the Church and they have re- 
 mained without it ever since. It may, no doubt, 
 be held that the particular church has the right 
 in setting forth services to exclude Invocation. 
 No one would contend that invocations are nec- 
 essary to the validity of services ; but it can hardly 
 be held that the silence of the Church on the prac- 
 tice renders the practice illegitimate. It is obvi- 
 ously quite open to any one to use Invocation in 
 their private devotions. It would also seem le- 
 gitimate to use them in special services licensed 
 by proper authority. It may be pointed out in 
 this connection that the priest having cure of souls 
 is under the necessity of providing numerous serv- 
 ices for special societies and on special occasions, 
 without reference to his bishop, but, of course, 
 subject to his correction. 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES 89 
 
 While we are discussing the nature and limits 
 of the authority of the Church, we may 'well 
 notice a common criticism of the Churches of the 
 Anglican Communion. We are said by our Ro- 
 man critics to have no authority. This is a lit- 
 tle puzzling at first, as we undoubtedly have the 
 authority of the universal Church as expressed 
 in its creeds and in its Councilar action back of 
 our teaching in matters of Faith. As we do not 
 claim to be the whole Catholic Church, but only 
 a particular Church, we do not claim to formulate 
 new articles of faith, or teach with infallible au- 
 thority anything that the Catholic Church has not 
 always taught. But we do claim to set forth 
 the whole Catholic religion and deal with such 
 matters in belief and practice as are not of uni- 
 versal application, with all the authority of a par- 
 ticular church. 
 
 What, however, seems to be meant by our 
 critics is not that we have no authority, but that 
 we do not exercise the sort of discipline that 
 seems to them to be desirable. " People believe 
 and act just as they like in your Church. One 
 sort of service is found in one place and another 
 in another. One thing is taught in one pulpit 
 and denied in another. In the Episcopal Church 
 you never know what is going to be said or done." 
 All of which is no doubt true within limits. 
 
90 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 When you tell a story, all depends upon the accent 
 with which you tell it. 
 
 It is not altogether clear that uniformity in the 
 sense here attached to it is desirable. One of the 
 things which characterized the mediaeval Church 
 was its flexibility and lack of uniformity. In this 
 respect Churches of the Anglican Communion 
 are much more like the mediaeval Church than is 
 the Roman. The uniformity of Latin Christen- 
 dom which to many seems so admirable is the 
 late outcome of a deliberate policy on the part of 
 the Papacy to subject all things to Rome and 
 shape them in accord with a Roman model. Per- 
 sonally, I think there is a great deal to be said for 
 the sort of freedom in the rendering of services 
 and so on that obtains in the American Church. 
 If I had to choose between that and the Roman 
 authoritative ordering of all details to the very 
 minutest I should certainly choose our own way. 
 
 But, it is said, it is not only just a matter of 
 services; it is a matter of Christianity itself. 
 False teaching is tolerated, and the faithful are 
 subjected to heretical priests. But this state of 
 things, so far as it exists, is not cured by denounc- 
 ing it. What is the way out? 
 
 There is the Roman way of excommunicating 
 all teachers who are estimated to be erroneous. 
 There is something to be said for this way; it 
 
THE POWERS OF LOCAL CHURCHES QI 
 
 appeals to a certain kind of temperament, the 
 sort that believes you have answered a question 
 when you have burned the questioner. But there 
 is another point of view, and that is that the busi- 
 ness of the Catholic religion is not to burn ques- 
 tioners, but meet and answer all questions. That 
 is the only way that questions are ever dealt with 
 satisfactorily. There have been many instances 
 of the impatient method of dealing with questions 
 or even assertions. We do not look back with 
 much joy at records of the criticism of the doc- 
 trine of evolution or of the results of Biblical re- 
 search. I do not think that the Church to-day is 
 very proud of the utterances of the bishops who 
 drove Newman out of the Church and made 
 Pusey's life so difficult. The next generation will 
 not be at all proud of those who now denounce 
 higher criticism of the Scriptures or devotions to 
 our Lord in the Blessed Sacrament. The policy 
 of toleration and discussion is a slow one and re- 
 quires patience and self-restraint. It is easier 
 and quicker to throw stones and build pyres. 
 But such a policy of suppression of what we do 
 not believe always has been, and always will be 
 futile. 
 
 But the danger to souls? Well, God has put 
 souls into a dangerous world. I suppose He 
 would not if He thought danger so bad for them. 
 
92 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 And the great danger for souls arises from their 
 own carelessness and neglect resulting in igno- 
 rance. Those are in great danger who do not 
 take pains to know the truth, but if we know the 
 truth, the truth will make us free, — free from 
 the danger of false teachers among other things. 
 
VI 
 
 DOGMATIC RELIGION 
 
 ^^:;^HERE are two words which invariably stir 
 V^ the wrath of the " Hberal thinker," the 
 words dogma and asceticism. On the other 
 hand, it is the mark of a CathoHc thinker to be 
 able to live comfortably with these words and 
 what they stand for. The offence of dogma is 
 that it imposes limits on speculation, that it as- 
 serts that certain truths are definitely ascertained. 
 The claim of liberalism is that there are no fixed 
 truths and that all statements of fact are eternally 
 open to question and that certainty in any matter 
 is impossible. This conception of truth reduces 
 the Church, in the words of the Russian writer, 
 Khomiakoff, to '' a society of good men, dififer- 
 ing in all their opinions, but earnestly seeking for 
 truth, with a total certainty that it has not yet 
 been found, and with no hope at all ever to find 
 it." 
 
 From this point of view the Christian Religion 
 is a fluid system of opinions subject to constant 
 change. If that were true we may be pretty 
 
 93 
 
94 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 certain that the Christian ReHgion would have 
 long ago ceased to exist. This is not a guess ; the 
 Christian centuries have seen the rise and fall of 
 innumerable systems of thought — philosophies, 
 religions, heresies — the speculations of thinkers 
 great and small. They rose and flourished and 
 declined, but the Christian Religion went on. 
 Many of them, in the hours of their triumph, 
 proclaimed that Christianity was a thing of the 
 past, a superstition which was fast losing its hold 
 on the human mind. Most of these boasters have 
 been long buried and their names forgotten; but 
 Christianity goes on. There are those to-day 
 who publish it abroad that they are watching by 
 the death-bed of Christianity, but Christianity 
 will see the grass growing on their graves as 
 green as that upon the graves of their prede- 
 cessors. 
 
 The Christian Religion survives and will sur- 
 vive precisely because it is not a system of specula- 
 tive thought, but because it has fixed truth to offer. 
 It is eternal because it is dogmatic. It is, of 
 course, the only religion which can be dogmatic, 
 because it alone is possessed of certainty. Nat- 
 ural religions are religions which man thinks out 
 for himself. He considers the phenomena of 
 nature and life and draws conclusions which he 
 generalizes in a religious system. Such religious 
 
DOGMATIC RELIGION 95 
 
 systems are subject to constant change because 
 the more man thinks about nature and Hfe, the 
 more he sees (or thinks he sees) into their mean- 
 ing. His conclusions of to-day will be displaced 
 by the new conclusions of to-morrow. But su- 
 pernatural religion is God's communication of 
 knowledge about Himself and the universe He 
 has made, and of His abiding relation to it. 
 
 The opposition of the modern man to reHgious 
 dogma is mysterious. In other departments of 
 knowledge a dogmatic system is sought. Dogma, 
 — I learned when a boy from somebody's book, 
 and the definition has been unceasingly useful to 
 me, — dogma " is positive truth positively ex- 
 pressed." I do not see that anyone can object 
 to that unless they feel that they have no truth to 
 express. 
 
 I know it will be said that " it is not the truth 
 we object to, but the hard and fast, the stereo- 
 typed, expression of it. After all, the Christian 
 Religion goes back to the New Testament, and 
 there are no dogmas there." No doubt: the 
 Christian Religion goes back even behind the New 
 Testament to a body of knowledge and experience 
 of which the New Testament is a partial expres- 
 sion. It is true that dogmatic statements do not 
 characterize the New Testament; yet if dogmas 
 are positive truths positively expressed there 
 
96 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 would seem to be a good many of them there. 
 There are certain *' dogmas " concerning God, 
 for instance: God is Light, God is spirit, God 
 is love. These are quite positive statements. 
 There are plenty of others. '' Except a man be 
 born again he cannot see the kingdom of God." 
 " Except ye be converted and become as little 
 children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of 
 heaven." " This is my Body." " This is my 
 Blood." 
 
 " But these statements are not developed into 
 a creed. It is one thing to say that God is love, 
 and another to say that He is Trinity in Unity 
 and Unity in Trinity. Why not be content with 
 the first saying, God is Love? We can all agree 
 on that." I am afraid we could not. I am 
 afraid that we could all agree on it only on condi- 
 tion that we should none of us think about it. 
 It is not at all true that all men are agreed as to 
 the meaning of love; and we can only have the 
 appearance of agreeing on condition that we 
 stop thinking. Men who think, disagree; we 
 may like it or not, but that is the fact. And we 
 can hardly suppose that the opponents of dogma 
 are the opponents of thought: on the contrary, 
 they are the " thinkers " par excellence. The dif- 
 ference is that the undogmatic thinker does not 
 regard his conclusions as certain; that is, he does 
 
DOGMATIC RELIGION 97 
 
 not SO hold them in theory ; in practice, there have 
 been no greater dogmatists than these same un- 
 dogmatic thinkers. 
 
 We may state the matter thus. The undog- 
 matic thinker starts from premises that are hypo- 
 thetical and reaches conclusions that are disputa- 
 ble. The dogmatic thinker starts from premises 
 which he regards as fixed, and will submit his 
 conclusions to the criticism of other truths which 
 are equally fixed. He knows that his reasoning 
 is erroneous if his conclusions bring him into op- 
 position with the ascertained body of Christian 
 dogma. The liberal, on the basis of his personal 
 conclusions, has no hesitation in saying that the 
 whole Christian past has been mistaken if it dif- 
 fers from him; the Christian dogmatist has no 
 difficulty in saying that he is mistaken if his con- 
 clusions conflict with the Christian past. 
 
 The Creed, no doubt, is not explicitly in the 
 Scriptures ; it is not even derived from the Scrip- 
 tures. It is the result of an attempt of the Chris- 
 tian consciousness to formulate its experience of 
 our Lord. As such it can be checked up and 
 verified by means of that other record of experi- 
 ence of our Lord which we call the New Testa- 
 ment. Ceaselessly thinking upon this experience 
 and all that is implied in it, and gathering deeper 
 experience as time went on, the Church was able 
 
98 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 finally to settle upon the various clauses of the 
 Creed as being a not inadequate expression of the 
 truth it had learned. It did this, I say, by experi- 
 encing and then thinking out the meaning of the 
 experience. People talk as though some com- 
 mittee of bishops at a council had the matter of 
 a Creed referred to them, and brought in a report 
 which was adopted, and the result was the Apos- 
 tles' Creed! That is, of course, nonsense. The 
 Creed was gradually produced, and it was 
 adopted, not because a committee recommended 
 it but because the Church recognized in it the 
 ideal expression of its experience. It has stood 
 in the life of the Church, not as an explanation 
 of the inexplicable, but as a guide and directory 
 of Christian Experience. 
 
 In this process of building up a body of truth 
 the Church was but doing what could not be 
 avoided — it was thinking and registering the re- 
 sults of its thought. This is what is being done 
 in any department of human knowledge. We are 
 never tired of boasting of the progress of knowl- 
 edge, of science, made during the last hundred 
 years. What do we mean by progress in this 
 case? We mean thinking and experiencing and 
 recording the results in generalizations which we 
 call principles and laws; we mean the collection 
 of vast masses of facts and the reduction of them 
 
DOGMATIC RELIGION 99 
 
 to formulae which can be easily handled. In 
 other words, the scientist of to-day aims to ob- 
 serve, and on the basis of his observation to con- 
 struct, to formulate, a creed. The formulation 
 of this creed is the measure of progress. The 
 aim of science is not to keep all questions open 
 but to close as many as possible. It aims to nar- 
 row the field of uncertainty. The more dogmas 
 it can accumulate the better. There is, of course, 
 this limitation ; that no results of scientific investi- 
 gation are infallible — the results may be consid- 
 ered at any time in the light of farther knowledge. 
 This must be so because the data of science are 
 of human discovery. Our claim is that this 
 limitation does not obtain in matters of faith, 
 because they are not of human discovery, but of 
 divine revelation. They are facts about God and 
 His relation to the universe which man can only 
 know by revelation. We either do not know 
 them at all or we know them infallibly. Scien- 
 tific conclusions can be revised, as the whole 
 atomic theory has lately been revised. The doc- 
 trine of the Trinity cannot be revised because we 
 know only what has been revealed. 
 
 One of the objections to dogma takes this form. 
 The dogrnas of the Christian faith, it is said, 
 are unintelligible, and we cannot, as rational be- 
 ings, believe what we do not understand. How 
 
lOO THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 often one hears that: " I cannot believe what I 
 cannot understand." This is, however, mere 
 confusion of thought. In reahty, there is noth- 
 ing in the world that we do understand if we 
 only push our investigation far enough. The 
 formulae of science which are so often taken 
 to be explanatory are in fact only descriptive. 
 They are descriptive of the way in which things 
 happen, not explanatory of how they happen. 
 But the man in the street is very apt to take a 
 definition for an explanation, and if you state 
 the law of gravitation to him, imagines that he 
 understands why one body attracts another. We 
 understand very little, if by understanding we 
 mean having an exhaustive account of any phe- 
 nomenon. In that sense we neither understand 
 gravitation nor the doctrine of the Trinity. But 
 without understanding why a. thing is we can per- 
 fectly well understand that it is. No one denies 
 the fact of gravitation; the fact is demonstrable. 
 Nor is there any ground for denying any fact of 
 revelation without examining the evidence for 
 it. It stands on its evidence. I can perfectly 
 well believe that God is Trinity in Unity though 
 I am not able to explain that truth. To know a 
 fact and to know the mode of a fact are two 
 things; and that we do not know the latter is no 
 ground for denying the former. 
 
DOGMATIC RELIGION 10 1 
 
 The religion of the Catholic Church has always 
 been dogmatic; that is, the Church has assumed 
 to be the guardian and teacher of truths that it 
 did not discover, but which it has received. 
 These truths have come to it by revelation and 
 the record of the revelation is contained in the 
 Scriptures of which the Church is the " witness 
 and keeper." And inasmuch as the Scriptures 
 were produced through members of the Church 
 for the use of members of the Church, and were 
 committed to the keeping of the Church, the 
 Church has always claimed and exercised the 
 right to interpret the Scriptures. It " has au- 
 thority in matters of faith." This means that it 
 has authority to teach what the Christian Reli- 
 gion is, and that its authority is final. 
 
 The Church has exercised this right in the ac- 
 ceptance and promulgation of the decrees of the 
 general councils, and in the drawing up and pub- 
 lishing of the creeds, and in the setting forth of 
 liturgies. It imposes these dogmatic statements 
 as conditions of membership. It requires assent 
 to the creed as a preliminary to baptism; it re- 
 quires the renewal of the baptismal vow before 
 proceeding to confirmation. It requires a con- 
 tinually renewed confession of the faith by its 
 insertion of the creeds in the daily offices and in 
 the Mass. In the office for the visitation of the 
 
I02 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 sick the minister is directed to rehearse the Arti- 
 cles of the Faith, and the sick person is directed 
 to answer, '' All this I steadfastly believe." Can- 
 didates for any grade of the sacred ministry are 
 not only required to accept the Scriptures as con- 
 taining the Christian Revelation and to pledge 
 themselves (in the case of those advanced to the 
 priesthood and episcopate) *' to banish and drive 
 away from the Church all erroneous and strange 
 doctrine contrary to God's word," but they are 
 required to recite the Creed in the course of the 
 service. The priest is not to teach what appeals 
 to him as probably true, or what he judges will 
 be acceptable to the Modern Mind, but he has the 
 explicit commission " always so to minister the 
 doctrine and sacraments, and the discipline of 
 Christ, as the Lord has commanded, and as this 
 Church hath received the same." In fact, the 
 Church requires a profession of the faith as a 
 preliminary to all sacraments with the exception 
 of matrimony. 
 
 I think that there would be much less talk 
 about " unintelligible and barren dogmas " if 
 those who thus speak would set themselves to 
 learn what dogmas of the faith are for. They 
 are not intellectual puzzles ; they are not traps to 
 catch unwary speculators; they are not explana- 
 tions of the inexplicable; they are guides to 
 
DOGMATIC RELIGION IO3 
 
 thought and action. It is perfectly easy to learn 
 to use dogmas and by so doing to find their rich 
 significance. When the dogma of the Trinity 
 has led us to fruitful prayer to each of the 
 three divine Persons, when the dogma of the In- 
 carnation has led us to the realisation of our 
 privileges as the children of God, v^hen the dogma 
 of the forgiveness of sins has led us to the joy 
 of complete absolution, we shall cease to regard 
 dogmas as offences, and seek to find through their 
 guidance increasing fulness of spiritual experi- 
 ence. 
 
VII 
 
 PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION 
 
 ^^:;^HE Book of Common Prayer which is put 
 ^^^ into our hands by the Church is at once the 
 law of our worship and of our behef. When the 
 question is raised, What does the American 
 Church teach? the obvious source to which we 
 turn for an answer is the Prayer Book. And yet 
 it is true that we find many men using the Prayer 
 Book and professing loyalty to it, who yet differ 
 radically in their teaching. How are we to de- 
 termine who is right? 
 
 In other words, what are the principles of inter- 
 pretation which are to be applied in determining 
 the meaning of the Prayer Book? No document 
 whatever is self -interpretative. A law may be 
 drawn up with the greatest possible care, and yet 
 when it is put in operation there will arise differ- 
 ences of interpretation, and we only know what 
 the meaning of the law is after it has been passed 
 upon by the highest court. Similarly, there must 
 
 be some principle by the application of which we 
 
 104 
 
PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION IO5 
 
 may ascertain the meaning of the formularies of 
 our worship and faith. 
 
 We cannot leave them to be interpreted by the 
 individual private judgment. That is the blun- 
 der that the Protestant reformers made at the 
 time of the Reformation and which their descend- 
 ants have perpetuated. The Holy Scriptures in- 
 terpreted by the individual land us in chaos. 
 Protestant Christendom is the sufficient record of 
 the failure of that theory. Even those holding 
 the theory found themselves unable to live up to 
 it. Luther and Calvin and Knox were as intent 
 on impressing their interpretation of the Scrip- 
 tures on others as were the popes, whereas, on 
 their announced principles, they ought to have had 
 no quarrel with the popes or with each other, but 
 simply to have said, " Your interpretation holds 
 for you, of course, as mine holds for me." Pri- 
 vate judgment ought not to mean Luther's judg- 
 ment or Calvin's judgment, but any man's judg- 
 ment. Why should Luther have been so intent 
 on making other men accept his doctrine of justi- 
 fication by faith only? A doctrine arrived at by 
 private judgment can hardly be taught with any 
 force. It remains a private opinion. 
 
 That is equally true of the Anglican formula- 
 ries. We must have external standards to which 
 to refer them. What standards are there? 
 
I06 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 It has been proposed to test them by compari- 
 son with the writings of AngHcan theologians 
 contemporary with their formulation. Learned 
 gentlemen have spent much time in collecting pas- 
 sages from the writings of the reformers of the 
 Tudor period. They say, " This is what Cran- 
 mer and Ridley believed about the ministry and 
 the sacraments, and this, therefore, is what the 
 formal documents of the Church must be held to 
 mean. It seems to me that a good deal of time 
 has been wasted by the partisans of different 
 theological schools in constructing catenae of pas- 
 sages from Tudor and Stuart divines to rule the 
 interpretation of the Prayer Book. Such catenae 
 have their value; but it is the value of illustrating 
 the vogue of a given interpretation rather than 
 that of determining the interpretation itself. 
 Passages proving that Tudor bishops did not be- 
 lieve in their orders or in the real Presence are 
 of use in determining the orthodoxy of the indi- 
 vidual bishop, if any one at this late date is inter- 
 ested in that, but they prove nothing at all as to 
 the meaning of the Prayer Book. And that for 
 this reason : that the Church of England when at 
 the Reformation it put forth its revised Prayer 
 Book, and other doctrinal statements, did not ap- 
 peal to the opinions of contemporary bishops and 
 theologians, but did appeal to the Holy Scriptures 
 
PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION IO7 
 
 interpreted by the tradition of the Church ; that is, 
 by the doctrinal decrees of the conciHar period 
 and the writings of the Fathers of the undivided 
 Church. This appeal was made explicitly over 
 and over again in the course of the Reformation 
 legislation. It is made in the matter of orders 
 in the Preface to the Ordinal. We there read: 
 " It is evident unto all men, diligently reading 
 Holy Scripture and ancient Authors, that from 
 the Apostles' time there have been these Orders of 
 Ministers in Christ's Church, — Bishops, Priests 
 and Deacons." The principle here stated may be 
 generalized to apply to all doctrinal statements. 
 Our reply then to those who collect passages from 
 the Reformers as the standard of the interpreta- 
 tion of the Prayer Book is that we do not in the 
 least care what they teach so far as that purpose 
 is concerned. The Church to which we owe alle- 
 giance does not appeal to them. We regret that 
 the demonstration shows them to have been in 
 error, but we have no intention of following them 
 therein. 
 
 The appeal of the Anglican Reformation, then, 
 is, in the first place, to the Bible. A doctrine to 
 be of faith must be a part of the revelation con- 
 tained in Holy Scripture. If it is not, it may be 
 as true as you like, but it cannot be binding on 
 the conscience with the obligation of faith. In 
 
I08 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 most cases this test of explicit agreement with 
 Scripture is sufficient. BeHef in God, in our 
 Lord's Incarnation and death on our behalf is 
 indisputably to be found there. But inevitably 
 the reference of many statements of our docu- 
 ments to biblical sources will be challenged. In 
 that case the appeal is to the interpretative tradi- 
 tion of the Church. What was actually taught 
 about the matter in dispute during the first cen- 
 turies of the Church's life, the centuries during 
 which the Church was thinking out the meaning 
 of the revelation committed to it? It may seem 
 to most of us sufficiently obvious that the state- 
 ment of the Baptismal Office about the newly 
 baptized child, that this child is regenerate, is a 
 truly biblical doctrine; and yet it is disputed and 
 our appeal must be to the constant teaching of 
 the Church from the beginning for the accuracy 
 of our report as to the biblical doctrine. 
 
 While it is true that we are entitled to disre- 
 gard the utterances of contemporary writers as 
 having any more than an illustrative value, there 
 is a class of contemporary documents which are 
 of interpretative value in our attempt to under- 
 stand the religion of the Prayer Book. This class 
 of documents is composed of the formal utter- 
 ances of the Church through its accredited chan- 
 nels. There is a whole series of documents be- 
 
PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION ICQ 
 
 ginning from the Reformation Parliament and 
 Convocation of 1529 and going down through the 
 whole Reformation period which are very valu- 
 able as indicating the mind of the Church on mat- 
 ters to-day in dispute. From them the mind of 
 the Anglican Church on such matters as the papal 
 jurisdiction, the invocation of saints, the real 
 Presence can be gathered. 
 
 Our method of interpretation then would be 
 to take the statements of the Pra3^er Book in their 
 simple grammatical meaning. Take as an illus- 
 tration, its teaching about the Eucharist. The 
 Catechism would seem to be sufficiently plain. It 
 declares that there are two parts of the Lord's 
 Supper : an outward part or sign, which is bread 
 and wine; and an inward part or thing signified 
 which is " the Body and Blood of Christ which 
 are spiritually taken and received by the faithful 
 in the Lord's supper." The statement is pre- 
 pared for children, and one would think that any 
 fairly intelligent child would understand its mean- 
 ing. But what a child would easily understand, 
 an adult, sophisticated by theory, may not under- 
 stand. He comes to a definition, not to get a 
 meaning out of it, but to impose one upon it. In 
 case therefore that a question is raised as to the 
 meaning of the Catechism, we have to interpret 
 it. We can do this, in the first place, by refer- 
 
no THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 ence to other parts of the Prayer Book, notably 
 to the Communion Office itself. When the priest 
 distributes the elements to the faithful he declares 
 that what he is giving is the Body and Blood of 
 Christ. If the interpretation drawn from the 
 Prayer Book is challenged the recourse is to the 
 official documents of the Church. It is not at all 
 to the point to collect passages from the writings 
 of the Reformers. Contemporary opinion in this 
 particular instance was in a state of chaos; but 
 reference must be made to the formal utterances 
 of the Church. The XXXIX Articles are not 
 of faith, but they have a certain weight which 
 does not attach to the opinions of any individual 
 reformer. The XXVIIIth Art. declares that '' the 
 Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the 
 Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual man- 
 ner." The documents hold all together and have 
 a perfectly plain and consistent meaning. 
 
 They do not, however, as we know, command 
 universal assent; and with those who do not as- 
 sent it would be purposeless to continue the argu- 
 ment inasmuch as such will have departed utterly 
 from the principle of an authoritative interpreta- 
 tion being possible, in favor of the principle of 
 private judgment; and when a man asserts that 
 he is the final court of appeal as to the meaning 
 of a doctrine all use of argument falls. But for 
 
PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION III 
 
 those who want an intelligible principle of inter- 
 pretation we may carry the appeal from the offi- 
 cial documents of the English Church to the final 
 court which is the Holy Scripture interpreted by 
 the mind of the universal Church. The appeal 
 is not to Holy Scripture simply, for that would 
 land us again in the jungle of private judgment, 
 n Scripture means what / think it means reli- 
 gion is reduced to mere individualism and tends 
 to vanish altogether. But Scripture actually 
 means (on the Catholic hypothesis) what the 
 Church understands it to mean; and in this spe- 
 cial case of the Eucharist we have the consent of 
 the Church in its formal action in councils and 
 in the liturgies it has authorized and the constant 
 interpretation of the Scriptures and authorized 
 documents by the great Catholic Fathers, to 
 whose interpretation of the Christian Religion the 
 English Church plainly appeals. It may seem at 
 first sight that the writings of the Fathers are of 
 as little authority as the writings of the Reform- 
 ers as a source of interpretation; but this is not 
 so. The writings of the great Fathers of the 
 East and West have always been held to embody 
 the Catholic interpretation of the Church's formal 
 documents and while, of course, no formal au- 
 thority attaches to any passage from S. Chrysos- 
 tom or S. Augustine, the mind of the Church as 
 
112 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 to their orthodoxy is sufficiently plain and the 
 explicit appeal of the Anglican Church is to the 
 Holy Scriptures as interpreted by them. In the 
 case of the Eucharist this interpretative tradition 
 in the sense of the real Presence is continuous. 
 
 Here, then, we have an intelligible rule of in- 
 terpretation which is sufficient to free us from the 
 vagaries of private judgment. If any one, priest 
 or bishop, local or national council, teaches any- 
 thing as of faith it is easy to bring the teaching 
 to book. We are not left to the tender mercies 
 of the individual interpretation of religion, as it 
 is often said of us by some of our critics. 
 
 But one perceives the objection that while this 
 method of arriving at truth is no doubt the au- 
 thorized one, yet it has this particular difficulty 
 that the plain man cannot apply it. It is a method 
 for scholars, but it is not only scholars who need 
 to know the Catholic faith. 
 
 To which the answer is that the plain man does 
 not have to go beyond the simple grammatical 
 meaning of his Prayer Book. All that he needs 
 for the solution of his difficulties is there; so long 
 as he is content with it he need not trouble about 
 vexed questions. If those w^ho are set as his 
 teachers deny the plain meaning of his Prayer 
 Book, he can still adhere to it rather than to them, 
 and go his way. Of doctrines which to-day are 
 
PRINCIPLES OF INTERPRETATION 113 
 
 called in question the chief are the Virgin birth 
 of our Lord, His bodily resurrection from the 
 dead on the third day, His real Presence in the 
 Holy Communion, the necessity of Episcopal or- 
 dination to a valid ministry. These doctrines are 
 no doubt denied from the pulpits of the Church 
 and in the writings of certain of her ministers. 
 But it must be perfectly clear to the plain man 
 that the grammatical meaning of the Book of 
 Common Prayer asserts all these things. If he 
 chooses to go beyond this position and follow 
 theological controversy in these high matters, he 
 ceases to be a plain man and puts himself in the 
 place of the scholar with all the scholar's responsi- 
 bilities. He will have the scholar's problems to 
 deal with. The questions raised and the methods 
 suggested for their solution have a certain diffi- 
 culty, it is true, but the difficulty is not one that is 
 peculiar to theological discussions. The same 
 sort of difficulty inheres in the process of arriv- 
 ing at conclusions in any department of human 
 knowledge. Those who want conclusions of this 
 sort must be content to work for them. The an- 
 cients had a way of consulting an oracle when 
 they wanted guidance in any department of life, 
 but the answers of the oracles which have come 
 down to us do not suggest that the results of the 
 method were altogether satisfactory. There is 
 
114 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 one part of the Christian Church which still ad- 
 heres to the oracular method, but again, the re- 
 sults are not convincing. It remains for the plain 
 man to take the teaching the Church gives him 
 in its obvious sense or to resort to the methods of 
 the scholars. Whether you v^ant to know the 
 meaning of a passage of S. Paul or the meaning 
 of a passage of Shakespeare ; whether you want to 
 know the constant teaching of the Church on the 
 real Presence or the varying teaching of science 
 on the constitution of the material universe, you 
 must work. The Church offers you the method 
 of simple acceptance or the method of patient 
 research; each method has its advantages — and 
 its penalties. 
 
VIII 
 
 THE INCARNATION AS THE MEANS OF 
 UNION WITH GOD 
 
 Vr^HAT think ye of Christ?" is a question 
 Vjy that must be faced by every reHgious 
 teacher to-day. To this question two radically 
 different answers are being given by teachers who 
 call themselves Christians. 
 
 The first answer is what we may call the an- 
 swer of natural religion. Jesus Christ was the 
 best man that ever lived; the greatest of all the 
 saints. After waiting for centuries God finally 
 found in him a man after His own heart, so god- 
 like in character that he might even be called 
 divine. In that sense, that he was so godlike in 
 character, he manifested God to the world. But 
 he was entirely human like the rest of us : he was 
 bom in the natural way of a human father and 
 mother; he lived a perfectly natural life; there 
 was nothing miraculous about him at all ; he went 
 through all the same experiences through which 
 we must pass, only he withstood all temptation 
 and came forth triumphant without a scar and 
 
 "5 
 
Il6 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 without a stain. His life was terminated by his 
 death upon the cross. That was the end. 
 Among his devoted followers fanciful stories 
 soon developed, about his conception and nativity, 
 his infancy and childhood, a ministry teeming 
 with miracles, and his resurrection and ascension. 
 His disciples could not believe that this man 
 whom they had loved so deeply could have come 
 into the world like other men, or that death had 
 been the end. So they invented the stories which 
 make up the greater part of the gospel narrative. 
 Now this view of Christ is not only the Uni- 
 tarian view; it is the view of what has been called 
 " the wide church," which admirably describes 
 the popular religion of the average man in the 
 street. Perhaps one of the best representatives 
 of " the wide church " is the editor of The Out- 
 look, Dr. Lyman Abbott. In one of his later 
 books called '' My Four Anchors," he describes 
 the character of our Lord, and then goes on to 
 say : " That is a character worth having, that is 
 a life worth living. And that is what I mean by 
 the divinity of Jesus Christ. There is not a great 
 deal, now, of debate between Unitarians and 
 Trinitarians." Then further on he says : " I do 
 not need to decide whether he rose from the dead. 
 I do not need to decide whether he made water 
 into wine, or fed five thousand with two loaves 
 
THE INCARNATION II7 
 
 and five little fishes. Take all that away, and 
 still he stands the one transcendent figure toward 
 whom the world has been steadily growing, and 
 whom the world has not yet overtaken even in 
 his teachings." A little later he says: ** I do 
 not know what is his metaphysical relation to the 
 Infinite. I say it reverently — I do not care." 
 ('* My Four Anchors," pp. 24, 27, 32.) 
 
 This answer would no doubt be given in sub- 
 stantially the same way by some men in the Prot- 
 estant Episcopal Church to-day: not by all, of 
 course, but by many of the men who call them- 
 selves Broad Churchmen. Not long ago the 
 Dean of the Cambridge Theological School, Dr. 
 Hodges, brought out a book called " Everyman's 
 Religion." In that book he quotes something 
 that Dr. Everett of Harvard wrote about our 
 Lord : " His divinity is not that of one who has 
 come down from above; it is that of the life in 
 which the divine element that has been working 
 in the world comes at last to its consummation." 
 The comment of Dean Hodges upon these words 
 is, *' This may not satisfy all the requirements of 
 the Nicene theology, but it touches the heart of 
 the truth." 
 
 The other answer to the question, '' What think 
 ye of Christ?" is a radically different answer. 
 It is the answer of the Catholic religion. Jesus 
 
Il8 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 was the Son of God made man; His divinity is 
 that of one who came down from Heaven; He 
 was conceived by the Holy Ghost, born of the 
 Virgin Mary. His pubHc ministry was full of 
 miracles; after His death and burial He rose 
 from the dead; He ascended into heaven, and is 
 now reigning in power and glory in the Kingdom 
 of the Father. 
 
 It does not take so long to explain this answer, 
 for it is very clear-cut and dogmatic, — so simple 
 and brief that it can be taught to children. The 
 answer of natural religion is too involved, too 
 hazy, too indefinite, too philosophical, to be taught 
 to children ; too grand to be taught to simple folk. 
 
 Now the question is, which of these two an- 
 swers is taught by the Episcopal Church? On 
 which side do we array ourselves : on the side of 
 the Catholic religion, or on the side of the natural 
 religion of the man in the street ? For an answer 
 to this question we must go to the Prayer Book; 
 for the Prayer Book is the authoritative state- 
 ment of our standards of doctrine and worship 
 and practice. Very well then, let us turn to the 
 Collect for Christmas Day. The opening words 
 strike no uncertain note : " Almighty God, who 
 hast given us thy only-begotten Son to take our 
 nature upon him, and as at this time to be born 
 of a pure virgin." Or let us turn to the Proper 
 
THE INCARNATION 1 19 
 
 Preface for Christmas : " Because thou didst 
 give Jesus Christ thine only Son, to be born as at 
 this time for us; who, by the operation of the 
 Holy Ghost, was made very man, of the substance 
 of the Virgin Mary his mother; and that with- 
 out spot of sin, to make us clean from all sin.'' 
 This is the same faith which we profess in the 
 Nicene Creed : " And in one Lord Jesus Christ, 
 the only-begotten Son of God; Begotten of his 
 Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of 
 Light, Very God of very God; Begotten, not 
 made; Being of one substance with the Father; 
 By whom all things were made ; Who for us men 
 and for our salvation came down from heaven, 
 And was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Vir- 
 gin Mary, And was made man." If anyone 
 wishes any further evidence that the Prayer Book 
 teaches the Catholic Faith in the Incarnation of 
 our Lord, let him read the second of the Thirty- 
 nine Articles. 
 
 What difference does it make which of these 
 two views we take? It makes all the difference 
 that there is between hope and despair, between 
 light and darkness. Either God has visited and 
 redeemed His people or He has not. We must 
 choose one horn of the dilemma. 
 
 If the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation be 
 true, then indeed God has rent the veil. The 
 
I20 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 eternal Son has come into our world, taken our 
 human nature, spoken through human lips, 
 thought through a human mind, ministered with 
 human hands, walked on human feet, and loved 
 with a human heart. As we look upon the Cross, 
 we realize that it makes a tremendous difference 
 whether the figure hanging there is the incarnate 
 Son of God or simply a good man; for upon that 
 depends whether it was an atonement for the sins 
 of the world or simply a martyr's death for a 
 principle. If God has come into the world, as 
 we believe and as the Prayer Book teaches, then 
 as we contemplate the life of our Lord, we know 
 that we have found a clear and distinct revelation 
 of the Divine will as to the kind of life we should 
 try to live. We need no longer walk in dark- 
 ness, for the Light of the world has made clear 
 the path that we should take. 
 
 If on the other hand God has not come into our 
 world, and has not spoken clearly and distinctly, 
 then there is no revelation of God of which we 
 may be sure. For if Jesus was simply a man like 
 the rest of us, then there is no reason why w^e 
 should accept his example as our ideal any more 
 than the example of Buddha or Mohammed or 
 Confucius or Nietzsche. Confronted by all these 
 different ideals of character, how are we to know 
 which of them is the truest and the best? If we 
 
THE INCARNATION 121 
 
 simply choose the one that most appeals to us, 
 how do we know that we are not deluded or mis- 
 taken ? 
 
 At any rate there can be no doubt that tlie 
 Prayer Book teaches that the Son of God has be- 
 come incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin 
 Mary, and that because of that fact we may be 
 born again and made the children of God by adop- 
 tion and grace, and by the cross and passion of 
 Christ we may be brought unto the glory of His 
 resurrection. 
 
IX 
 
 THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 
 
 ^^:^HE Christian religion is admirably summed 
 ^^y up in the Collect for Christmas-day: 
 " Almighty God, who hast given us thy only- 
 begotten Son to take our nature upon him, and as 
 at this time to be born of a pure virgin; Grant 
 that we being regenerate, and made thy children 
 by adoption and grace, may daily be renewed by 
 thy Holy Spirit; through the same our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, who liveth and reigneth with thee 
 and the same Spirit ever, one God, world without 
 end. Amen.'* 
 
 The Incarnation is here set forth as the basis 
 of the Christian Covenant. And then we ask 
 that we may be regenerate and made God's chil- 
 dren by adoption and grace; and that we may 
 daily be renewed by the Holy Spirit. In other 
 words, we are to be born again and made God's 
 children by the sacrament of Holy Baptism; and 
 to be given grace for all our daily needs, by 
 means of the other sacraments. Of course we 
 
 122 
 
THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM I23 
 
 cannot draw all this teaching from the words 
 of the Collect; but when we look at the other 
 teaching of the Prayer Book, we see plainly that 
 the sacraments are considered as the means by 
 which we are brought into union with the incar- 
 nate Son of God, or are kept in union with Him, 
 or restored to that union after we have fallen 
 away. 
 
 The Church, the bride of Christ, is our loving 
 Mother. She cares for us from the cradle to 
 the grave. She brings the infant to the font to 
 be made one with Christ ; she brings the child who 
 has arrived at years of discretion to the Bishop, 
 to receive through the laying on of hands the 
 strengthening gifts of the Holy Ghost; she feeds 
 us throughout the time of our earthly pilgrimage 
 with the Bread of Life; she unites a man and a 
 woman in Holy Matrimony, and conveys to them 
 from Christ the grace to fulfil the obligation of 
 that holy estate; she brings to the Bishop the 
 man who has been called of God to serve Him 
 in one of the sacred orders of the Ministry, that 
 through the laying on of hands he may receive 
 the Holy Ghost for the office and work to which 
 he has been called ; she applies the merits of the 
 Precious Blood of Christ to the penitent sinner 
 through the words of absolution spoken by the 
 priest; and finally through anointing with the 
 
124 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 holy oils she comforts and restores her children 
 who are suffering from serious illness, or enables 
 them to meet the terrors of death with faith and 
 resignation. 
 
 Now let us see just what is the teaching of the 
 Prayer Book concerning the sacraments. Are 
 they regarded as real means of union with Christ, 
 or are they simply tokens of a spiritual condition 
 already existing, without any power to effect a 
 change in the recipient? The definition of a sac- 
 rament in the Church Catechism is very clear-cut 
 and decisive : " an outward and visible sign of an 
 inward and spiritual grace given unto us ; or- 
 dained by Christ Himself, as a means whereby we 
 receive the same, and a pledge to assure us 
 thereof." Thus the effect of Baptism upon the 
 child is that he is " regenerated and grafted into 
 the body of Christ's Church." In the sacrament 
 of the Eucharist the inward part is " the Body 
 and Blood of Christ, which are verily and indeed 
 taken and received by the faithful." It is plain 
 therefore that the Prayer Book teaches that the 
 sacraments are effectual signs, — signs which 
 have the power to effect what they signify. 
 
 The Protestant confessions of faith may per- 
 haps be interpreted as teaching that the outward 
 action in a sacrament is a sign of saving faith 
 in the recipient, but they explicitly deny that it is 
 
THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM I25 
 
 a means by which grace or faith are conferred. 
 The CongregationaHsts hold that the Lord's Sup- 
 per " is to be celebrated by Christian Churches 
 as a token of faith in the Saviour, and of broth- 
 erly love. The Baptists teach that '* Baptism is 
 an ordinance of the New Testament, given by 
 Christ, to be dispensed upon persons professing 
 the faith, or that are made disciples; who, upon 
 profession of faith, ought to be baptized, and 
 after to partake of the Lord's Supper." (Cur- 
 tis, *' Dissent in Its Relation to the Church of 
 England," pp. 128, 143.) 
 
 The difference is indeed striking. The Protes- 
 tant formularies hold that sacraments are to be 
 administered as tokens that people are in an ideal 
 spiritual condition; the Prayer Book holds that 
 sacraments confer grace, and so help to produce 
 an ideal spiritual condition. 
 
 The difference in these two views may be made 
 clearer by an illustration. If a group of school 
 children were sent to the dentist to have their 
 teeth examined, and cards were given to all the 
 children who were found to have perfect teeth, 
 those cards would be like the sacraments from 
 the Protestant point of view. If, on the other 
 hand, cards were given only to children who had 
 defective teeth, and these cards gave them the 
 right to be properly treated by the dentist, the 
 
126 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 cards would then be like the sacraments from the 
 Catholic point of view. 
 
 The conviction of the Church in this matter is 
 further expressed in Article XXVI, which asserts 
 that the un worthiness of the ministers does not 
 hinder the effect of the sacraments : 
 
 ** Although in the visible Church the evil be 
 ever mingled with the good, and sometimes the 
 evil have chief authority in the Ministration 
 of the Word and Sacraments, yet forasmuch 
 as they do not the same in their own name, but in 
 Christ's, and do minister by his commission and 
 authority, we may use their Ministry, both in 
 hearing the Word of God, and in receiving the 
 Sacraments. Neither is the effect of Christ's 
 ordinance taken away by their wickedness, nor 
 the grace of God's gifts from such as by faith, 
 and rightly, do receive the Sacraments ministered 
 unto them: which be effectual, because of Christ's 
 institution and promise, although they be minis- 
 tered by evil men." 
 
 This article does not mean that the Church con- 
 dones unworthiness in her ministers, for in the 
 second part it is expressly stated that such minis- 
 ters should be deposed. It is rather intended to 
 guard people against undue scruple and anxiety 
 in receiving the sacraments. For if they were 
 effectual means of grace only when administered 
 
THE SACRAMENTAL SYSTEM 1 27 
 
 by morally sincere and worthy ministers, the peo- 
 ple could never know whether or not they were 
 receiving valid sacraments. 
 
 Thus it is plainly the teaching of the Prayer 
 Book that whenever we receive any of the sac- 
 raments we receive a real spiritual gift, we be- 
 come " partakers of the Divine nature." But of 
 course this gift will be of no avail to us unless 
 we sincerely co-operate with it. There are two 
 ways in which we must co-operate : by preparing 
 our souls in advance so that they will be good soil 
 for the Divine seed to grow in ; and by using the 
 Divine gifts with whole-hearted energy and ap- 
 plication. 
 
 The parable of the Sower teaches us the impor- 
 tance of the kind of soil in which the seed is sown. 
 The parable of the Talents teaches us the danger 
 of incurring the Divine condemnation by keeping 
 our talents wrapped in a napkin. Some of us 
 receive more grace than others, just as one man 
 in the parable received five talents, another two, 
 and another one. If we do receive the sacra- 
 ments frequently we must show the results in our 
 lives and our work. " To whom much has been 
 given, of him shall much be required." 
 
X 
 
 THE NATURE AND NUMBER OF THE 
 SACRAMENTS 
 
 XT is one of the most striking miracles of 
 ecclesiastical history that the Anglican 
 Church, at the time of the Reformation, sur- 
 rounded and invaded by Protestant teachers, 
 should have so largely remained loyal to the faith 
 and practice of Catholic Christendom. This is 
 especially noticeable in her teaching on the sac- 
 raments. For it was upon the subject of the 
 sacraments that there was the widest divergence 
 between Catholic and Protestant teaching. 
 
 Let us see first what was the teaching of the 
 great Protestant leaders of the Reformation era. 
 Zwingli held the sacraments in the lowest possi- 
 ble esteem. He taught that they were merely 
 signs of a covenant between man and man; they 
 were external things without any spiritual value 
 in themselves, and without any spiritual effect 
 upon those who received them. Luther and Me- 
 lanchthon held that the sacraments were tokens 
 
 128 
 
NATURE AND NUMBER OE SACRAMENTS 1 29 
 
 of a covenant between God and man, pledges of 
 the truth in the Divine promises of forgiveness, 
 and means of assurance and peace. Their effect 
 was confined to the subjective acts of the indi- 
 vidual at the moment of reception, Luther va- 
 ried in his teaching from time to time; but his 
 permanent belief was that the sacraments were a 
 sort of visible preaching to enkindle faith. Cal- 
 vin taught that only the elect received Divine 
 grace; and therefore in his opinion the inward 
 grace of the sacrament was divorced from the 
 outward sign. In general, the Protestants held 
 that the sacraments could have merely a subjec- 
 tive effect, and that objectively they were not 
 means of grace at all. The Catholic view was 
 that the sacraments were actual and objective 
 means of grace, effecting what they signified in 
 the souls of the recipients. 
 
 Now let us see what is the teaching of Article 
 XXV in the Prayer Book on the nature of the 
 sacraments. The first paragraph reads as fol- 
 lows : " Sacraments ordained of Christ, be not 
 only badges or tokens of Christian men's profes- 
 sion, but rather they be certain sure witnesses 
 and effectual signs of grace and God's good-will 
 towards us, by the which He doth work invisibly 
 in us, and doth not only quicken, but also 
 strengthen and confirm our faith in Him." This 
 
130 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 leaves nothing to be desired as a declaration of 
 Catholic doctrine concerning the sacraments. 
 
 As to the teaching of the Prayer Book on the 
 number of the sacraments, this same Article goes 
 on to name all the Seven Sacraments of Catholic 
 tradition, and refrains from saying that any of 
 them are to be rejected. If it were the intention 
 of the Church to reject one or more of the seven, 
 this would clearly be the place to say so. What 
 then are these seven Sacraments as named in the 
 Prayer Book? Baptism, the Supper of the Lord, 
 Confirmation, Penance, Orders, Matrimony, and 
 Extreme Unction. 
 
 Now it is perfectly true that the Article does 
 divide them into the two greater and the five 
 lesser sacraments. Baptism and the Supper of 
 the Lord are called the two greater sacraments, 
 because they are generally necessary to salvation, 
 — which means necessary for all states of life or 
 people in general, — and because the Gospel gives 
 us a record of their having been ordained by 
 Christ our Lord. The institution of the five 
 lesser sacraments is not recorded in the Gospel : 
 and these sacraments are adapted to the particu- 
 lar needs of special classes of people: children 
 coming to years of discretion, those repenting of 
 grievous sin, those who are called to the sacred 
 ministry, a man and woman seeking to be united 
 
NATURE AND NUMBER OE SACRAMENTS I3I 
 
 in wedlock, and those who are seriously sick or 
 in danger of death. These lesser sacraments 
 might be called sacraments of the Church, as dis- 
 tinguished from sacraments of the Gospel : But 
 as our Lord gave His Divine authority to the 
 Church, they come to us really guaranteed by His 
 authority. 
 
 The rest of the language in the Article about 
 the five lesser sacraments is unfortunately am- 
 biguous and obscure. It speaks of them as " be- 
 ing such as have grown partly of the corrupt 
 following of the Apostles, partly are states of life 
 allowed in the Scriptures." The use of the word 
 " partly " is ambiguous, because it may mean 
 that part of the rites connected with each sacra- 
 ment may have come from the corrupt following 
 of the Apostles, or that one or more out of the 
 five may have come from this corrupt following. 
 If the latter be the one intended, it does not tell 
 which of the sacraments are to be thus singled out 
 for vituperation. The former meaning is the 
 only one that makes sense. For it is historically 
 true that during the middle ages the administra- 
 tion of the sacraments had become cluttered up 
 with all sorts of extraneous rites and ceremonies 
 which often hid rather than expressed the true 
 significance of the sacraments themselves. 
 
 Fortunately this article is not the only teaching 
 
132 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 of the Prayer Book upon the subject of the sac- 
 raments. In the case of three of the five lesser 
 sacraments, we have forms for their administra- 
 tion duly set forth in the Prayer Book ; and these 
 forms bear witness to the belief of the Church 
 that in these sacraments there is an outward sign 
 which conveys an inward grace. In Confirma- 
 tion through the outward sign of the laying on of 
 the Bishop's hands and the form of words accom- 
 panying that act, the soul is strengthened with the 
 Holy Ghost the Comforter and given power daily 
 to increase in His seven-fold gifts of grace. In 
 Matrimony, through the outward sign of the giv- 
 ing formal consent and the giving and receiving 
 a ring, and through the Benediction given by the 
 Priest, the man and woman are filled with spirit- 
 ual benediction and grace, to enable them so to 
 live together in this life that they may in the 
 world to come have life everlasting. In Orders, 
 — to illustrate by the '' Form and Manner of 
 Ordering Priests," — through the laying on of the 
 Bishop's hands the young deacon receives the 
 Holy Ghost for the of^ce and work of a priest 
 in the Church of God. 
 
 The American Prayer Book contains no definite 
 form of absolution suitable for use in the sacra- 
 ment of Penance. In the English Prayer Book, 
 in the Office for Visitation of the Sick, the sick 
 
NATURE AND NUMBER OE SACRAMENTS 133 
 
 person is " to be moved to make a special confes- 
 sion of his sins, if he feels his conscience trou- 
 bled with any weighty matter." And then the 
 Priest is directed '' to absolve him, if he humbly 
 and heartily desire it, after this sort : *' Our 
 Lord Jesus Christ, who hath left power to 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." Our Prayer Book, how- 
 ever, plainly teaches that in the ordination of a 
 priest he is given the power of absolution; for 
 these words used by the Bishop admit of no other 
 meaning : " Whose sins thou dost forgive, they 
 art forgiven; and whose sins thou dost retain, 
 they are retained." Therefore if the priest is to 
 exercise that power, he must use the form of 
 absolution sanctioned by centuries of use in the 
 Catholic Church and officially set forth by the 
 Church of England. 
 
 It is greatly to be deplored that there is no pro- 
 vision in our Prayer Book for the Unction of the 
 Sick. In the words of Bishop Forbes, " the unc- 
 tion of the sick is the lost pleiad of the Anglican 
 firmament." But if the Prayer Book is silent 
 about anointing the sick with holy oil, the New 
 
134 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Testament is not silent. The injunction of the 
 Apostle James is clear and unmistakable : " Is 
 any sick among you ? Let him call for the elders 
 (meaning presbyters) of the Church. And let 
 them pray over him, anointing him with oil in 
 the name of the Lord." Therefore if our people 
 are to obey the Bible, it is the duty of our Bishops 
 to consecrate the Holy Oils, and our priests 
 should always be ready to heed the call of the 
 sick and anoint them with oil in accordance with 
 Catholic precedent. 
 
XI 
 
 REGENERATION IN BAPTISM 
 
 ^^^!^HE Baptism of Infants is a very beautiful 
 ^^y and impressive ceremony. There are cer- 
 tain features about it that would commend it to 
 all people, whether they were professing Chris- 
 tians or not. It must seem fitting to everybody 
 that a little child should be brought as early as 
 possible to be dedicated to the service of God. 
 Then too the act of giving a child a name, which 
 he is to bear through life, should be surrounded 
 with a certain amount of ceremony and dignity. 
 It would seem reasonable also that the parents 
 should come at a stated time and give some sort 
 of a pledge for the right bringing up of their 
 children; and that there should come with them 
 friends who would promise to take the place of 
 the parents, if the parents should die or should 
 fail to bring up their children properly. To all 
 Christians it cannot but seem expedient and 
 proper that little children should be brought very 
 early to Christ. It does not require a great deal 
 of religion to believe that our Lord may exert 
 
 135 
 
136 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 some influence upon a child, even before it has 
 arrived at years of discretion. We recall the 
 instance in our Lord's ministry vi^hen mothers 
 brought their babies to Christ, and He laid His 
 hands upon them and blessed them. His disci- 
 ples did not see the sense of bringing babies to 
 their Master, and would have kept them from 
 Him; but He rebuked them and said, " Suffer the 
 little children to come unto me, and forbid them 
 not: for of such is the kingdom of God." 
 
 This much, at least, most people would be will- 
 ing to believe about the Baptism of Infants. But 
 the Church asks us to believe a great deal more 
 than this. The Church accepts all that is taught 
 by natural religion; and in addition asks us to 
 believe in certain supernatural effects of Baptism. 
 We can see w^ith our eyes some of the natural 
 advantages of Baptism; the Church asks us to 
 believe in something we cannot see, something 
 that takes place in the soul of the child. 
 
 The supernatural change that is effected by 
 Baptism is called regeneration, or new birth. In 
 the Prayer Book offices for Baptism, immediately 
 after Baptism is administered, we find these 
 words, '' Seeing now, dearly beloved brethren, 
 that this Child (or this Person) is regenerate, 
 and grafted into the body of Christ's Church, let 
 us give thanks unto Almighty God for these bene- 
 
REGENERATION IN BAPTISM 137 
 
 fits." This supernatural effect of Baptism was 
 taught by our Lord when He said, " Except a 
 man be born of water and of the Spirit, he cannot 
 enter into the kingdom of God." This however 
 is not altogether clear to most people : for the con- 
 ception of a new birth is not one that seems 
 plausible to the natural reason. In fact, it is im- 
 possible to describe it adequately; we can only 
 approach the description of this spiritual experi- 
 ence through symbols and figures of speech. 
 
 We may say that the new birth in Baptism is 
 like the planting of a seed in the ground. When 
 a person is baptized a seed of new life is planted 
 within him. When a seed is planted in the soil, 
 it does not necessarily follow that a plant or a 
 tree will grow up in that spot. Whether any- 
 thing will grow there depends upon the nature of 
 the soil, the supply of rain and sunshine, the pres- 
 ence or absence of weeds, and so forth. It is 
 very much the same with the seed of new life 
 that was planted in our souls when we were bap- 
 tized. The fact that we were baptized is no guar- 
 antee that anything good is going to come of it. 
 In a great many cases nothing good does come 
 of it. That is why there are so many baptized 
 people that are a disgrace to the Christian Church. 
 But that is no argument against Baptism. 
 Whether the seed of new life planted in Baptism 
 
138 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 will bring forth the fruit of good living or not 
 depends upon the amount and kind of cultivation 
 which that new life receives. If we practice our 
 religion sincerely and earnestly, if we avoid evil 
 companions, if we pray daily and receive the sac- 
 raments with devotion and faith, if we are regu- 
 lar in the worship of God, if we truly repent of 
 our sins, if we are trying daily to follow the ex- 
 ample of our Saviour Christ, then from that seed 
 of new life planted in us at Baptism there ought 
 to be growling up a new life, which will gradually 
 crowd out the old. 
 
 By nature we are the children of a fallen race. 
 That is the meaning of original sin. God created 
 the human race with the gift of His life, in a 
 state of righteousness. At the very beginning 
 of the race the life of God was lost through sin, 
 and that accounts for our inheriting a nature 
 which easily falls into sin. We have inherited 
 human nature bereft of the life of God. But God 
 has mercifully provided that we may be born 
 again and receive the life of God through Bap- 
 tism. The actual facts seem to belie this theory : 
 but the reason is that we have all sinned since our 
 Baptism. Had we used the grace which God 
 through Baptism entrusted to us, sin would not 
 now have such hold upon us. 
 
 We might state the matter in still another way. 
 
REGENERATION IN BAPTISM I39 
 
 The human race has been a failure. God looked 
 back over human history and saw that from the 
 very beginning that history had been marked by 
 sin. God willed to blot out this huge mistake 
 by making a new creation. " Behold, I make all 
 things new." He willed to form on the earth a 
 new human family, and to that end He sent His 
 only-begotten Son into the world. The incarnate 
 Son of God became the second Adam, the new 
 Head of the race. God provided that all men 
 might be united to that second Adam, taken up 
 into the family of God, grafted into the new crea- 
 tion, through the sacrament of Baptism. By 
 Baptism we are made " members of Christ, chil- 
 dren of God, and inheritors of the kingdom of 
 heaven." 
 
 Baptism, simple as it is, carries with it tre- 
 mendous obligations. The Church thus ad- 
 dresses the sponsors who answer for the infant: 
 *' Ye are to take care that this child be virtuously 
 brought up to live a godly and a Christian life; 
 remembering always that Baptism doth represent 
 unto us our profession; which is, to follow the 
 example of our Saviour Christ, and to be made 
 like unto Him; that, as He died and rose again 
 for us, so should we who are baptized die from 
 sin, and rise again unto righteousness ; continually 
 mortifying all our evil and corrupt affections, and 
 
140 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 daily proceeding in all virtue and godliness of liv- 
 ing." That is the obligation that rests upon all 
 of us who have been baptized. The life of the 
 baptized must necessarily be different from the 
 life of the unbaptized. God expects great things 
 from us in our character and in our actions. God 
 has given us the power to do great things; and 
 we are responsible in His sight for a terrible fail- 
 ure if we do not live up to that high calling. 
 
XII 
 
 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE BAP- 
 TIZED AND THE UNBAPTIZED 
 
 the beginning of the Order in the Prayer 
 Book for the Burial of the Dead this rubric 
 is to be found : " Here is to be noted, that the 
 Office ensuing is not to be used for any unbap- 
 tized aduhs, any who die excommunicate, or who 
 have laid violent hands upon themselves." It 
 must seem to many that this classifying of unbap- 
 tized adults with those who die excommunicate, 
 and with those who have committed suicide, is 
 rather a harsh stricture upon the unbaptized. 
 For we know there are many adults who are un- 
 baptized through no fault of their own, but simply 
 because they never had the importance of baptism 
 brought to their attention. Many of them are 
 good people, thoroughly respectable and decent 
 members of the community. Their lives may be 
 largely governed by Christian standards of mo- 
 rality. Indeed they look upon themselves as 
 
 141 
 
142 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Christians and would feel insulted if some one 
 spoke of them as heathen or pagan. 
 
 Why should there be this discrimination against 
 unbaptized adults? What can the Church mean 
 by refusing to allow her burial office to be read 
 over the bodies of those who die unbaptized? 
 
 The answer is that the Church has composed 
 this office for those who die in sacramental union 
 with Christ, and who therefore are members of 
 His mystical Body the Church. If a man has 
 been baptized and has not been put out of the 
 communion of the Church nor taken his own life, 
 the Church assumes that he was in a state of 
 grace when he died and therefore that he is in 
 Christ. There are many statements in the Burial 
 Office which are intelligible only on the suppo- 
 sition that the deceased person was by virtue of 
 his baptism a member of Christ, the child of 
 God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of Heaven. 
 
 Let us look at the Burial Office with this in 
 mind. Take the opening sentence for example: 
 " I am the resurrection and the life, saith the 
 Lord : he that believeth in me, though he were 
 dead, yet shall he live : and whosoever liveth and 
 believeth in me, shall never die." This plainly 
 implies that the deceased person has made some 
 definite act of faith in Christ, that he has by bap- 
 tism put on Christ. The familiar sentence which 
 
BAPTIZED AND THE UNBAPTIZED I43 
 
 is said at the grave and is so full of comfort for 
 mourners, " Blessed are the dead who die in the 
 Lord," brings to the mind instantly the fact of 
 the mystical union with Christ which began at 
 baptism and has been developed and strengthened 
 by a life of faithful discipleship. The wonderful 
 burst of praise at the end of the Lesson, " Thanks 
 be to God, which giveth us the victory through 
 our Lord Jesus Christ," would mean nothing ex- 
 cept for those who have in some way been brought 
 into vital relation with the victory of Christ. 
 The prayer, " Almighty God, with whom do live 
 the spirits of those who depart hence in the Lord " 
 and also the prayer ** O Merciful God, the Father 
 of our Lord Jesus Christ who is the Resurrection 
 and the Life; in whom whosoever believeth, shall 
 live, though he die," are both applicable only to 
 those who can in some very real sense be consid- 
 ered as being members of the mystical Body of 
 Christ. 
 
 The Church holds that certain things may be as- 
 serted as definitely true of those who have been 
 baptized and have not shut themselves off from 
 the love of Christ by mortal sin ; or of those who, 
 if they have shut themselves off, have been re- 
 stored through penitence and absolution. The 
 Church says nothing of the unbaptized. The 
 Church does not profess to have any definite 
 
144 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 knowledge of their condition either in this Hfe or 
 the Hfe hereafter. She has on the other hand 
 very positive convictions, based upon the definite 
 promises in the Gospel, as to the spiritual state of 
 the baptized. The Church leaves the unbaptized 
 to the uncovenanted mercies of God. God may, 
 and doubtless does, bestow rich gifts of grace 
 upon those who have never been baptized. No 
 one can question this who has known anything of 
 the saintly lives of many members of the Quaker 
 sect. Then too there are many people in heathen 
 lands, such as India for example, who have at- 
 tained to high states of mystical perfection. The 
 Church nowhere says that the unbaptized are lost. 
 God only knows what has become of them. And 
 it is just because the Church does not know any- 
 thing about the unbaptized that she refuses to 
 allow her Burial Office to be used over them. She 
 makes in the Burial Office very definite statements 
 as to the spiritual relation of the departed soul 
 to Christ. This she would have no right to do in 
 regard to the unbaptized. 
 
 The Church does not refuse to allow this Burial 
 Office to be used for unbaptized infants. This is 
 significant in view of what is often urged as an 
 objection against the Church, that the Church is 
 committed to the belief that infants who die un- 
 
BAPTIZED AND THE UNBAPTIZED 145 
 
 baptized go to Hell. Whatever may be true of 
 certain Calvinistic bodies this statement has never 
 been made in any portion of the Anglican Church. 
 The truth is that the Church refuses to say what 
 happens to infants who die unbaptized. She sim- 
 ply urges upon the parents the duty of bringing 
 their children to be baptized, and lays all possible 
 stress upon the importance of this duty. By 
 implication she blames those who would keep their 
 children away from baptism. The Church how- 
 ever is primarily concerned with insisting that 
 great spiritual blessings come with infant baptism. 
 No doubt there is the background of Catholic 
 tradition which should be considered in this con- 
 nection. Catholic tradition teaches that infants 
 who die unbaptized do not go to Hell, but neither 
 do they go to Heaven. They go to what is called 
 by the theologians the limhiis infant orum. That 
 is the border-land of Heaven, a condition of joy 
 and felicity as great as they are capable of enjoy- 
 ing, who have never been born again in Baptism. 
 The saying of our Lord that " Except ye be born 
 again of water and the spirit, ye cannot enter into 
 the Kingdom of Heaven" has been interpreted 
 in this sense, that the unbaptized can never enter 
 Heaven. But to say that the unbaptized cannot 
 enter Heaven is not the same as to say that they 
 
146 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 will go to Hell. The instinct of the Catholic 
 Church has always shrunk from any such conclu- 
 sion as that. 
 
 The Church then plainly teaches that there is a 
 difference between the baptized and the unbap- 
 tized. For this belief we have the authority of 
 Christ Himself. Speaking of S. John the Baptist, 
 He said, *' Among those that are born of woman 
 there is not a greater prophet than John the Bap- 
 tist : but he that is least in the Kingdom of God 
 is greater than he." The most obscure baptized 
 infant is greater than the wonderful prophet, John 
 the Baptist, because by virtue of Christian bap- 
 tism the infant is regenerate and grafted into the 
 Body of Christ. The seed of a new spiritual na- 
 ture is planted in the infant's soul. Consequently 
 the spiritual capacity of the infant is vastly greater 
 than the spiritual capacity of John the Baptist, 
 or David, or Abraham, or Plato, or Socrates. 
 
 There is as great a difference between the inner 
 nature of a baptized and an unbaptized person as 
 there is between the inner nature of a man and a 
 dog. A dog is capable of enjoying a bone, or of 
 running through the fields in pursuit of a wounded 
 bird ; but he is not capable of sitting down in his 
 master's library and enjoying a book. So the 
 unbaptized are capable of great physical, intel- 
 lectual, and spiritual joys; and no doubt they will 
 
BAPTIZED AND THE UNBAPTIZED I47 
 
 be rewarded in the next world, in so far as they 
 have Hved up to what Hght they had here, by 
 being permitted to share in the highest joys of 
 which they are capable. They will not be capable 
 of sharing in the joys of Heaven, because they 
 have not been made partakers of the Divine nature 
 through Christian Baptism. 
 
 On such grounds mainly is to be based the jus- 
 tification for Christian missions to the heathen. 
 We wish to go into all the world and preach the 
 Gospel to every creature and baptize them into 
 the Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
 the Holy Ghost, in order that they may be given a 
 higher spiritual capacity. They will then be 
 capable of enjoying all the good things God has 
 prepared for them that love Him, both in this 
 world and in the new world to come. 
 
XIII 
 CONFIRMATION 
 
 ^^^HERE are many notions current about Con- 
 ^^y firmation that are entirely mistaken. They 
 spring largely from the chaotic rehgious situation 
 which surrounds us. It is not surprising that peo- 
 ple who have imbibed their religious information 
 from all sorts of teachers and lecturers should 
 have erroneous ideas upon some points. First 
 then it may be well to lay aside some of these er- 
 roneous notions, and then we shall be in a position 
 to understand what Confirmation really is. 
 
 Confirmation is not joining the Church. We 
 join the Church when we are baptized. In the 
 Public Baptism of Infants, we pray that "he, 
 being delivered from thy wrath, may be received 
 into the ark of Christ's Church." After the child 
 is baptized, the Minister says, " Seeing now, 
 dearly beloved brethren, that this child is regen- 
 erate, and grafted into the body of Christ's 
 Church." The mistake of course is due to the 
 fact that many Protestant denominations have in- 
 vented a ceremony which they call "joining the 
 
 148 
 
CONFIRMATION I49 
 
 Church/' which consists in shaking hands with 
 certain persons and admitting them to all the privi- 
 leges of that particular fellowship. 
 
 Confirmation is not the religious parallel of 
 graduation. Our spiritual graduation comes at 
 death, for it is then that our days of schooling 
 and preparation are over and we enter upon our 
 real life. And yet many children are taught to 
 look upon their Confirmation as a graduation 
 from Sunday School, and often from the Church. 
 They have received their instructions and been 
 presented with their diploma, — so they think, — 
 and only too frequently they turn their backs upon 
 the Church and never give it another thought. 
 The Prayer Book affords no ground for any such 
 notion. On the contrary it assumes that those 
 who are confirmed will continue to practice their 
 religion faithfully, that they may daily increase 
 in the manifold gifts of grace. The Bishop prays, 
 " let thy Holy Spirit ever be with them ; and so 
 lead them in the knowledge and obedience of thy 
 Word, that in the end they may obtain everlast- 
 ing life." 
 
 Confirmation is not the assumption of a new 
 responsibility. Somehow the extraordinary no- 
 tion has grown up that until one is confirmed the 
 sponsors are entirely responsible for the keeping 
 of the baptismal vows, but that after confirmation 
 
150 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 the responsibility falls upon oneself. If that were 
 true, it might be better to go through life uncon- 
 firmed. But we cannot escape responsibility so 
 lightly. We are in any case responsible before 
 God for keeping the vows that were made in our 
 name at our Baptism, just as we are responsible 
 for observing the ordinary decencies of life and 
 for performing the duties of American citizen- 
 ship. It is true that we are not consulted when 
 we were taken to the Font and born again as chil- 
 dren of God; but neither were we consulted when 
 we were brought into the world, nor when we 
 were born as Americans rather than as Chinese 
 or South Sea Islanders. Confirmation does not 
 put upon us any responsibility which was not 
 there before; it simply gives us additional spirit- 
 ual strength to enable us to meet the increasing 
 power of temptation and to be true to the vows of 
 our Baptism. 
 
 It is true that in Confirmation we do renew the 
 vows of our Baptism; we do with our "own 
 mouth and consent, openly before the Church, 
 ratify and confirm the same." But a child does 
 the same thing every time he repeats the answer 
 in the Catechism, *' Yes, verily; and by God's help 
 so I will." The ratifying and confirming of one's 
 baptismal vows is not the essential thing in Con- 
 firmation, nor does it give the sacrament its name. 
 
CONFIRMATION 15 1 
 
 Children do not confirm themselves. They come 
 to be confirmed (or strengthened) by the Bishop. 
 It would really be absurd to ask a busy adminis- 
 trator like the Bishop to visit a church once a year 
 simply to hear some children and grown people 
 renew their Baptismal vows, — which they do 
 whenever they recite the Catechism. No, the re- 
 newal of vows is merely a preliminary to the great 
 act for which the Bishop came to the church, the 
 laying on of his hands that they might receive 
 the Holy Ghost. Before he does that, it is nec- 
 essary that he should know that they are in ear- 
 nest about trying to live the Christian life, that 
 they have really repented of their sins, and fully 
 purpose to amend their lives in the future. All 
 of this is implied in the answer, " I do." 
 
 What then is Confirmation? Confirmation is 
 a sacrament, — not one of the two great sacra- 
 ments of the Gospel which are " generally neces- 
 sary for salvation," but one of the five " com- 
 monly called sacraments," — an outward and visi- 
 ble sign of an inward and spiritual grace. The 
 outward and visible sign is the laying on of the 
 Bishop's hands, accompanied by the suitable form 
 of prayer, which in our Prayer Book contains the 
 words, " Strengthen them, we beseech thee, O 
 Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Comforter, and 
 daily increase in them thy manifold gifts of grace : 
 
152 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 the Spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit 
 of counsel and ghostly strength, the spirit of 
 knowledge and true godliness; and fill them, O 
 Lord, with the spirit of thy holy fear." The in- 
 ward and spiritual grace is the coming of the Holy 
 Spirit into the soul with all His strengthening 
 power. 
 
 The Holy Spirit came to us in our Baptism to 
 give us life. In Confirmation He comes to give 
 us strength, to round out the perfect development 
 of our spiritual manhood. But here we must be 
 careful not to fall into the error that Confirmation 
 is the completion of Baptism. Baptism is com- 
 plete in itself, — a spiritual birth, — just as the 
 birth of a child is complete even though the child 
 dies in infancy. Baptism is the sacrament of 
 spiritual birth. Confirmation is the sacrament of 
 completed spiritual manhood. It is necessary 
 now, just as it was necessary in the first age of the 
 Church. It was not enough that the Samaritans 
 should be converted and baptized through the 
 preaching of S. Philip the Deacon; the Apostles 
 at once sent down from Jerusalem S. Peter and S. 
 John to administer the sacrament of Confirmation. 
 When they were come, they " prayed for them, 
 that they might receive the Holy Ghost. . . . 
 Then laid they their hands upon them, and they 
 
CONFIRMATION 153 
 
 received the ./loly Ghost." That is precisely what 
 happens wh .1 a Bishop visits one of our churches 
 for Confirn . tion. He prays for them that they 
 may be str .gthened with the Holy Ghost the 
 Comforter; and then he lays his hands upon them, 
 and they receive the Holy Ghost. 
 
 It is to be regretted that the beautifully simple 
 and impressive ceremony which the Prayer Book 
 provides for Confirmation should so often be al- 
 most buried by a long and elaborate service with 
 many hymns, and often by two long addresses 
 from the Bishop. The Veni Creator might well 
 be sung during the laying on of hands. This is 
 a widespread custom and adds greatly to the im- 
 pressiveness and dignity of the office. But there 
 is no reason why there should be other hymns, 
 or why the ch,,' should take this opportunity to 
 render a long and elaborate anthem. The Prayer 
 Book does not -iay that the Bishop should preach 
 on this occasion, — much less that he should give 
 a long and scholarly discourse which is above the 
 heads of all the children who have been confirmed. 
 Neither is it necessary that he should instruct 
 them as to the meaning of the Communion or of 
 Confirmation. If they have been properly pre- 
 pared this is superfluous ; if not, it would probably 
 be too little. He might make a short personal 
 
154 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 appeal to the class to be loyal to their ideals, and 
 it would have great force. But otherwise, the 
 Prayer Book provides just what the occasion de- 
 mands. 
 
XIV 
 THE AGE FOR CONFIRMATION 
 
 now old ought children to be when they are 
 confirmed? Most people perhaps would 
 answer this question by telling how old they them- 
 selves were when they were confirmed, — as if that 
 proved anything. Others would turn to psychol- 
 ogists and educators for an answer, and ask them 
 what is the age of decision in a child's life. That 
 certainly has a more plausible sound. Still others 
 would submit the question to their rector or 
 bishop; and when we bear in mind the scriptural 
 injunction, " Obey them that have the rule over 
 you," this would seem to be the best method of 
 all for getting an answer to our question. But 
 for a Prayer Book Churchman none of these ways 
 are right: for the only right way is to go to the 
 Prayer Book and find out what the Church therein 
 authoritatively sets forth to be the proper age for 
 Confirmation. 
 
 We may well rejoice to find that the Church 
 has the wisdom not to set any artificial age limit 
 as the proper time for Confirmation. It would 
 
 iSS 
 
156 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 be as sensible to say that all children must attain 
 to a certain height or a certain weight before they 
 can be confirmed, as to say they must have had 
 a certain number of birthdays. What the Prayer 
 Book does say is that Confirmation is for " those 
 who are baptized, and come to years of discre- 
 tion." In the address to the Sponsors after an 
 infant has been baptized, the Prayer Book gives 
 this direction : " Ye are to take care that this 
 child be brought to the Bishop to be confirmed by 
 him, so soon as he can say the Creed, the Lord's 
 Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and is suffi- 
 ciently instructed in the other parts of the Church 
 Catechism set forth for that purpose." This 
 might be the case with some children when they 
 are ten years old, and with others when they are 
 fourteen. The Church appears to teach that chil- 
 dren come to " years of discretion " when they 
 begin to know the difference between right and 
 wrong, and the meaning of temptation. 
 
 May we not say therefore that bishops and 
 priests are going quite beyond their rights when 
 they declare, as some of them do, that no children 
 are to be confirmed until they have attained a 
 specified age? The Prayer Book represents the 
 authority of the Church in this matter; and the 
 Prayer Book plainly sets forth what the Church 
 regards as the necessary requirements for Con- 
 
THE AGE FOR CONFIRMATION 1 5/ 
 
 firmation. It nowhere mentions a particular age 
 as one of these requirements. Obviously the par- 
 ish priest who presents the candidates to the 
 Bishop is the judge as to whether those candidates 
 are duly qualified to receive the laying on of 
 hands. It is difficult to see why the Bishop 
 should have anything to say about the matter: 
 his duty is simply to lay hands upon the candidates 
 presented to him. 
 
 It is commonly supposed that it is the duty of 
 the parish priest to make a thorough canvass of 
 the parish and secure as many candidates for his 
 confirmation class as possible. This however 
 is not the intention of the Prayer Book. In the 
 Office for the Public Baptism of Infants the 
 Church exhorts the sponsors " to take care that 
 this child be brought to the Bishop to be confirmed 
 by him, so soon as he can say the Creed, the Lord's 
 Prayer, and the Ten Commandments, and is 
 sufficiently instructed in the other parts of the 
 Church-Catechism set forth for that purpose." 
 Ideally therefore the parents and sponsors should 
 bring the child, while he is yet of tender age, and 
 put him into the hands of the priest in order that 
 the priest may present him to the Bishop. This 
 is very different from the common practice of 
 waiting until the child has reached the difficult 
 years of advanced adolescence; and then pleading 
 
158 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 with him, and coaxing him, and wrestling with 
 him, in the forlorn hope that he may consent to 
 join the confirmation class. 
 
 So far as preparation for Confirmation is 
 concerned, the Prayer Book has little to say. 
 It simply insists that the candidates should be 
 baptized, should be in a state of grace, and 
 should have learned the Church Catechism. The 
 subtitle of the Catechism is as follows : " An 
 instruction, to be learned by every person be- 
 fore he be brought to be confirmed by the 
 Bishop." The Prayer Book makes no provision 
 for a class of elaborate instruction in Church 
 doctrine, continuing for many weeks. No doubt 
 such instruction is most desirable and necessary 
 for such adults as have been prevented by 
 Protestantism or unbelief from being confirmed 
 at an earlier age. But the point I am now 
 insisting upon is that for children the Church 
 ideal is a life-long instruction in the Catechism 
 by their parents at home, supplemented by public 
 catechising by the parish priest in church. We 
 have departed a long way from that ideal. 
 
 That the Church lays great stress upon the 
 spiritual state of the child or adult who is about 
 to be confirmed is clear from the prayer the Bishop 
 is directed to use in the Confirmation Office just 
 before the laying on of hands. These words 
 
THE AGE FOR CONFIRMATION 1 59 
 
 particularly are of great significance : " Al- 
 mighty and everliving God, who hast vouchsafed 
 to regenerate these thy servants by Water and the 
 Holy Ghost, and hast given unto them forgiveness 
 of all their sins; Strengthen them, we beseech 
 Thee, O Lord, with the Holy Ghost the Com- 
 forter." These words imply of course that they 
 have already been baptized. That is plain on the 
 face of it. But they also imply that they have 
 been absolved from all sins which they may have 
 committed since their Baptism. In the mind of 
 the Church therefore it is most essential that 
 before one is confirmed, all obstacles of sin must 
 be removed from the soul, in order that the seven- 
 fold gifts of the Spirit may have full sway. 
 
 At the present time, in our preparation of 
 children for Confirmation, we are inclined to lay 
 too much stress on the intellectual side of religion 
 and too little on the spiritual side. The result is 
 that many children have come to regard Con- 
 firmation as the completion of their religious 
 education, corresponding to commencement exer- 
 cises in the grammar school, — with which indeed 
 it often synchronizes. In consequence they not 
 only drop out of the Sunday School but they 
 often fall away from the Church entirely. This 
 is particularly true of children who have been 
 brought up under the influence of Lutheran 
 
l60 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 traditions. It is absolutely necessary for the 
 future well-being of the Church that we should 
 teach our children to regard Confirmation as a 
 most opportune gift of Divine grace which is 
 giv^en to them at the precise time when they begin 
 to feel the power of temptation. 
 
 A priest once told a boy of about the age of 
 twelve that he was old enough to be confirmed. 
 The boy said he would ask his father if he would 
 give his permission. The father told the boy 
 that it would be better to wait a few years until 
 after he had had his good time ! It is to be feared 
 that this is altogether too common an attitude 
 among American fathers. May we not teach 
 them to adopt as their ideal what Bishop Jeremy 
 Taylor lays down as the rule " which the Church 
 of England and Ireland follows, that after infancy 
 but yet before they understand too much of sin, 
 and when they can competently understand the 
 fundamentals of religion, then it is good to bring 
 them to be confirmed, that the Spirit of God may 
 prevent their youthful lusts, and that Christ by 
 His word and by His spirit may enter and take 
 possession at the same time " ? 
 
XV 
 
 THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CON- 
 FIRMED AND UNCONFIRMED 
 
 I\TAN who had been brought up a Presby- 
 terian, but had for some time attended the 
 services of the Episcopal Church with his wife, 
 went with her to an early communion service on 
 Christmas. It was the first time he had been to 
 an early celebration of the Holy Communion ; and 
 Avhen the time came for the people to go to the 
 altar rail to receive the Blessed Sacrament, he 
 arose to go forward with his wife. He was 
 much astonished and somewhat hurt to be told by 
 her that he could not receive because he had never 
 been confirmed : especially as he had been in other 
 Episcopal Churches when all those present were 
 invited to come forward and receive the Sacra- 
 ment. 
 
 Now one cannot but feel a certain sympathy for 
 this man. He was a devout Christian, according 
 to his light; and an eminently respectable and 
 decent member of society. Why was he not 
 
 i6i 
 
1 62 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 quite as fit to receive Holy Communion as the 
 Other men in the congregation? Or if he was as 
 fit, why was he barred out ? 
 
 The answer is suppHed by a simple and clear-cut 
 provision in the Prayer Book. At the end of the 
 office for Confirmation there is a rubric which 
 says : " There shall none be admitted to the 
 Holy Communion until such time as he be con- 
 firmed, or be ready and desirous to be confirmed." 
 This does not mean that readiness and desire for 
 Confirmation in themselves constitute a ground 
 for admission to Holy Communion. It is in- 
 tended merely to provide for extraordinary cases, 
 as when a person is dying. Bishop Wheatly, in 
 commenting on this rubric says, " This is exactly 
 conformable to the practice of the Primitive 
 Church, which always ordered that Confirmation 
 should precede the Eucharist, except when there 
 was extraordinary cause to the contrary : such as 
 was the case of CHnical Baptism, or the absence 
 of a Bishop, or the like; in which cases the Eu- 
 charist is allowed before Confirmation." 
 
 But there are clergy in the Church who invite 
 all Christians to receive the Blessed Sacrament, 
 whether they have been confirmed or not. How 
 do they justify their action, in view of the above 
 rubric ? They say it is simply a rule the Church 
 has adopted for her own children, for such as 
 
THE CONFIRMED AND UNCONFIRMED 163 
 
 have been baptized and trained in the Church. 
 Furthermore they say that the real mind of the 
 Church is expressed in the Invitation, " Ye who 
 do truly and earnestly repent you of your sins, 
 and are in love and charity with your neighbours, 
 and intend to lead a new life, following the com- 
 mandments of God, and walking from henceforth 
 in His holy ways; draw near with faith, and 
 take this holy Sacrament to your comfort." 
 Here nothing is said about the necessity of being 
 confirmed. But, it may be asked in reply, why 
 should we interpret the former statement as 
 applying only to the Church's own children, and 
 not the latter ? Surely it is reasonable to assume 
 that the Church in this invitation is addressing 
 those who have conformed to the Church's rules 
 elsewhere set forth, and therefore have been duly 
 baptized and confirmed. 
 
 It would be preposterous if outsiders, "whose 
 Baptism, if valid, is irregular, and whose teaching 
 has been defective, were to be granted admission 
 to the full privileges and the holiest mysteries of 
 the Church, with less preparation than those who 
 have been trained in her ways," (Bishop Hall.) 
 
 No one would object if he were barred out of 
 the innermost sanctuary of a lodge until he had 
 taken the requisite degrees of initiation, A man 
 who has just entered the Masonic Order does not 
 
164 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 expect to have all the privileges of a thirty-second 
 degree Mason. 
 
 Granted then that it is the law of the Church 
 that none can be admitted to the Holy Com- 
 munion until they have been confirmed, let us try 
 to see why that should be the law of the Church. 
 
 By Confirmation, those who have attained to 
 years of discretion, having renewed their bap- 
 tismal vows and given evidence of faith and 
 repentance, are fully equipped for the Christian 
 life by the Seven-fold gifts of the Holy Ghost. 
 A real influx of Divine grace is accomplished 
 through the layin; .x^^ of the Bishop's hands, 
 Certainly the Church i?"not asking too much when 
 she ordinarily requires this full spiritual equip- 
 ment as a preliminary condition for receiving 
 Holy Communion, 
 
 Furthermore, in the present condition of 
 Christendom, when many of our fellow Chris- 
 tians, who have been brought up with defective 
 views of the sacrament of Holy Communion, — 
 or with no views at all, — may be in the congrega- 
 tion when the Eucharist is celebrated, it would be 
 very dangerous to invite them all to receive the 
 Sacrament. There would be danger of causing 
 irreparable spiritual damage to their souls. S. 
 Paul has warned us of the danger of receiving 
 the Sacrament without discernment. (I Cor. 
 
THE CONFIRMED AND UNCONFIRMED 165 
 
 XI, 28-30.) '' Let a man examine himself, and 
 so let him eat of that bread and drink of that cup. 
 For he that eateth and drinketh unworthily, eateth 
 and drinketh damnation to himself, not discerning 
 the Lord's body. For this cause many are weak 
 and sickly among you and many sleep." 
 
 The Church is surely right in demanding that 
 both those whom she has brought up from 
 infancy, and those who have been nursed and 
 trained by other systems of religion should alike 
 be fully instructed in the Church's doctrine of the 
 sacraments,— to say nothing of the spiritual gifts 
 received in Confirmation,— before they are per- 
 mitted to partake of the Body and Blood of 
 Christ. 
 
 The classes of instruction in preparation for 
 Confirmation are quite as much classes for in- 
 struction in preparation for First Communion. 
 In fact the members of such classes should 
 be instructed in the whole doctrine of the 
 Church relating to matters both of faith and 
 practice. The members of Protestant denomi- 
 nations, who fail to see the need of their be- 
 ing confirmed, are probably assuming that they 
 have long been receiving the same sacraments 
 which the Church now refuses to them, and that 
 they were confirmed when they joined their 
 particular denominations. Both of these assump- 
 
1 66 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 tions are mistaken. The Protestant denomi- 
 nations have thrown over the priesthood ; and they 
 have no intention of changing the bread and wine 
 in the Lord's Supper into the Body and Blood of 
 Christ. Their Lord's Supper therefore cannot 
 be the same as the Holy Communion of the Prayer 
 Book rite. As for Confirmation, the essential 
 element therein is the laying on of the hands of 
 a Bishop or an Apostle; and as the Protestant 
 denominations have also dispensed with the his- 
 toric Episcopate, their ceremony of " joining the 
 Church " cannot be the same thing as Confir- 
 mation. 
 
 The Church then plainly teaches in the Prayer 
 Book that there is a difference between confirmed 
 and unconfirmed persons. That is why she 
 refuses Holy Communion to those who are uncon- 
 firmed. The difference is not that confirmed 
 persons are any better morally than unconfirmed 
 persons. Some confirmed persons may easily 
 be on a very much lower plane than some of those 
 who are unconfirmed. The difference is simply 
 that those who have been confirmed have been 
 given by the Holy Ghost a better spiritual equip- 
 ment than they had before. This of course 
 ought to result in their becoming morally supe- 
 rior, not to other people, but to what they them- 
 
THE CONFIRMED AND UNCONFIRMED 167 
 
 selves were before. Unfortunately human be- 
 ings do not always live as they ought to live. If 
 they did, all communicants of the Church would 
 be saints. 
 
XVI 
 
 THE MEANING OF SIN 
 
 XT requires no deep or prolonged study 
 of the Book of Common Prayer to convince 
 us that its offices are intended to deal with sin. 
 Sin, it is felt, is the great disaster separat- 
 ing the soul from God. The danger of sin, its 
 nature and its remedy, is pointed out again 
 and again, and the members of the Church are 
 exhorted to avail themselves of God's mercy 
 whether in the way of forgiveness for the sins 
 of the past, or as aid and strength against the 
 assaults of sin in the future. The Sponsors of 
 the child to be baptized are told that our Lord 
 Jesus Christ " hath promised in His Gospel " to 
 release the child from sin; and after the baptism 
 when the child is declared to be " regenerate " 
 thanks are given for the gift and prayer is made 
 that he " being dead unto sin " may live the new 
 life of the regenerate. Later, in the Confirma- 
 tion Office, the bishop referring to this fact, prays 
 that those whom God has regenerated, and to 
 whom He has given *' forgiveness of all their 
 
 i68 
 
THE MEANING OF SIN 169 
 
 sins " may now be strengthened with " the Holy 
 Ghost, the Comforter." The daily offices of 
 Morning and Evening Prayer provide in the 
 General Confession and Absolutions forms for 
 the acknowledgment of sinfulness and the assur- 
 ance of God's willingness to receive the sinner 
 who repents. This form is repeated in the Com- 
 munion Office, and while it is not sacramental, 
 that is, does not convey the grace of pardon, it is 
 of comfort to those who do '' truly and earnestly 
 repent " as bringing to them the offer of accept- 
 ance by God whenever they do truly repent. The 
 meaning of repentance is the message of the Ex- 
 hortations which are from time to time read as a 
 warning and stimulus to those who are lax in 
 making their communions. One of the long ex- 
 hortations points those who are unable to quiet 
 their own consciences, that is, those who are 
 in mortal sin, to the *' minister of God's Word " 
 as an aid to the " quieting of his conscience, and 
 the removing of all scruple and doubtfulness." 
 This is softened from the English Book which 
 plainly says that the reason of his coming is that 
 by ** the Ministry of God's holy Word he may 
 receive the benefit of Absolution." In the Office 
 for the Visitation of Prisoners the prisoner is 
 exhorted to repentance and told, " except you re- 
 pent, and believe, we can give you no hope of 
 
170 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 salvation." Repentance is also urged upon the 
 sick person, in the Office for the Visitation of the 
 Sick. There can be no doubt about the serious- 
 ness of the Church's thought about sin and its 
 danger. 
 
 It may seem unnecessary to stress such obvious 
 facts ; but the truth is that to-day there is a grow- 
 ing restlessness under the Church's teaching about 
 sin. The movement of " Hberal thought " is eas- 
 ily followed ; it has moved steadily during the last 
 century. There was first an attack on the per- 
 sonality of the devil, and it was insisted that what 
 the Gospel meant by the devil was not a person 
 at all but an evil influence; in any case, whatever 
 the Gospel taught, that was all that an enlight- 
 ened person could believe. The next step was 
 the denial of eternal punishment. The Gospel 
 seemed explicit enough about this, but again, it 
 was explained that we were quite mistaken in 
 our understanding of it. That in any case, the 
 most the modern man could believe in was some 
 sort of temporary discipline after death; so, for 
 the liberal man, hell followed its lord the devil 
 into the realm of exploded superstitions. To- 
 day, we have moved forward another stage and 
 the present attack is on sin. The modern mind 
 is prepared to grant — temporarily, at least — 
 that man is imperfect, but it does not see its way 
 
THE MEANING OF SIN I7I 
 
 to granting more than this; and it cannot conceive 
 of this imperfection as entaihng disastrous spir- 
 itual consequences in another sphere of existence. 
 
 This teaching, or at least most features of it, is 
 rather widely preached to-day, and therefore it 
 is well to be clear that the Book of Common 
 Prayer holds quite another doctrine about sin. 
 It still holds the doctrine of sin which has been 
 the teaching of the Church from the Apostles' 
 days onward. We are not here concerned to de- 
 fend it; we are only concerned to state it as the 
 teaching of the formularies of the Church to 
 which we belong. 
 
 Traditional Christianity teaches that sin is law^ 
 lessness. It is deliberate violation of the known 
 will of God, and, as such, carries with it spiritual 
 consequences. The effect of baptism is to cleanse 
 the soul and to bring it into union with God ; to 
 make the baptized person, in S. Peter's words, 
 " a partaker of the divine nature." The union of 
 man with God in Christ lasts as long as the man 
 wills it to last; until, that is, he breaks the union 
 by his own deliberate act by which he sets himself 
 against the will of God. 
 
 The sin which attacks this union may be of 
 various degrees of intensity, and is described by 
 theologians with reference to this intensity as 
 mortal or venial sin. It is to be remembered that 
 
172 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 such classification is ideal, and that what is easily 
 described on paper is not always easy to be dis- 
 guished in life. Yet speaking broadly, there is 
 not very much difficulty in judging of the 
 nature of our sins, except certain that lie on the 
 border line. 
 
 A mortal sin is one that puts the soul in a state 
 of spiritual death, that is, that destroys the union 
 that there is between the soul and God. Such a 
 sin, therefore, must be, in technical language, 
 grave matter; that is the act must be some- 
 thing of great importance. It is obvious that 
 if I am irritated at the interruption of my work 
 by, let us say, the telephone ringing, that is sin, 
 but it is not a grave matter. If, however, I 
 am so annoyed by some occurrence that I strike 
 and injure a person, that is grave matter. If a 
 child steals a handful of peanuts from a fruit 
 stand that cannot be grave matter; but if a man 
 breaks into a house and steals, that certainly is. 
 That, then, is the first mark of mortal sin, that it 
 is grave matter. 
 
 The second is that the sin be committed with 
 full knowledge of the nature of the act. Under 
 the present educational dispensation in Church 
 and State there is a very widespread ignorance of 
 sin. There is no doubt a good deal of violation 
 of God's will which is quite unintentional; that 
 
THE MEANING OF SIN I73 
 
 is, it is the result of ignorance and not of malice. 
 Where there is not knowledge there is not re- 
 sponsibility — except the responsibility to know, 
 which should always be taken into account. 
 There appears to be a very widespread ignorance 
 in the Church as to the obligation to be present 
 at a celebration of the Holy Communion on Sun- 
 days and Holy Days. A child is usually ignorant 
 of some of the responsibilities of its state of life. 
 Now, when an act is committed which is mate- 
 rially mortal sin, and the person who commits it 
 is ignorant of the nature of the act and of its 
 relation to God's will, the act cannot be formally 
 mortal sin, that is, it cannot have the full effect 
 of mortal sin on the relation of the soul to God. 
 It is quite possible under present conditions for 
 persons to contract matrimony within the forbid- 
 den degrees and so to live in material sin without 
 knowledge of the fact. This of course would not 
 be formal sin. 
 
 The third mark of mortal sin is that it should 
 be committed intentionally, with full consent of 
 the will. In the last illustration, of marriage 
 within the forbidden degrees, there is lack of in- 
 tention to sin as well as lack of knowledge. So 
 long as one does not intend to break the law of 
 God with full knowledge that it is God's law one 
 cannot be held to have sinned mortally. 
 
174 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Venial sin is sin that while failing in one or the 
 Other of the above notes of mortal sin is still in 
 conscious violation of the will of God. Perhaps 
 our most frequent failure is in this matter. Most 
 of our sins are about trivial things; pride, anger, 
 covetousness and the rest do have some hold upon 
 our lives and do manifest themselves there, but 
 not in any very grievous way, not in a way that 
 we should call grave matter. There are other 
 sins which we commit with partial knowledge; 
 we suspect that we ought not to do them but 
 we have never completely informed ourselves. 
 There are still other acts which are done because 
 we are not watchful or careful — sins of inad- 
 vertence, of surprise, of carelessness. 
 
 I am afraid that it is rather the fashion to think 
 lightly of venial sin. But in fact, in the case of 
 Christians who are at all in earnest about the 
 spiritual life, venial sin is the real and besetting 
 danger. Earnest Christians rarely fall into mor- 
 tal sin; if the temptation to mortal sin presents it- 
 self they are under no illusion as to its nature 
 and meaning, and resist accordingly. Even if 
 they fall, the very greatness of the fall sends them 
 to repentance. But the constant daily tempta- 
 tions, the perpetual opportunity of petty sins, — 
 these are the spiritual danger of earnest Chris- 
 tians. They do not kill the soul ? That is true ; 
 
THE MEANING OF SIN I75 
 
 but they do reduce the spiritual vitality, they do 
 keep the spiritual life at a low ebb. If one were 
 to ask, Why do not *' good people " make more 
 progress in the spiritual life? I think the answer 
 would be quite ready at hand — tolerated venial 
 sin. So long as we are content to live at close 
 quarters with all sorts of petty violations of the 
 will of God, excusing ourselves on the ground 
 that they are not of much importance, we cannot 
 expect to advance in the spiritual hfe. Hence, I 
 take it, the reiterated exhortations in the Prayer 
 Book to acknowledge and confess our sins. 
 
 What is the penalty of sin? " The penalty of 
 sin is to be a sinner." It is a great misfortune 
 that most of our words describing sin and its 
 outcome are words derived from legal process. 
 This at once injects into the description of the re- 
 lation of the sinner to God the notion of a possi- 
 ble arbitrariness in God's dealing with us. The 
 average man appears to think that the Christian 
 teaching is that God forgives or punishes sin just 
 as He feels at the moment; that when He pun- 
 ishes He might just as well pardon if He wanted 
 to — or vice versa. That can only be because we 
 conceive both punishment and forgiveness as ar- 
 bitrary, that is, as having no meaning in connec- 
 tion with the sin itself. But if we try to think it 
 out, that is quite inconceivable. A sin is an act 
 
176 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 having a certain reaction on the relation of our 
 soul to God. It may injure that relation (venial 
 sin) or it may destroy it (mortal sin) ; but in 
 either case the outcome is not a punishment in- 
 flicted but a result that follows. There is no 
 other punishment than that involved in the sin 
 itself. Hell is the state of being in mortal sin, 
 that is, of being excluded from the presence of 
 God. God does not sentence any one to hell ; the 
 man who dies in mortal sin, dies with a destroyed 
 spiritual capacity and therefore incapable of the 
 Beatific Vision. The divine love always does 
 what it can to win man from sin, but it cannot 
 force men to give up sin. If man loves sin rather 
 than God, that is the right of his free will. But 
 the life and death of our Lord is the constant 
 proclamation of the love of God for sinners, the 
 proclaiming of the Cross the constant summons 
 of the children to the Father. More than invite, 
 not even God can do. 
 
XVII 
 THE REMISSION OF SIN 
 
 CHE New Testament has a good deal to say 
 about sin and its effect on the relation of 
 man to God. One of the most wonderful things 
 about the revelation of God in Christ, is the reve- 
 lation of the divine attitude toward the sinner. 
 " While we were yet sinners Christ died for 
 us." Christ came to " put away sin." In fact 
 the life and death of our Lord are shown as an 
 effort on God's part to overcome sin and death. 
 The willingness of God to forgive is at the cen- 
 ter of the Christian Revelation. 
 
 As we have seen in the preceding chapter, the 
 Prayer Book simply echoes the biblical language 
 about sin. It warns continually of the dangers 
 of sin and warns the members of the Church to 
 deal with it seriously, especially when they are 
 preparing to approach the sacraments. 
 
 Now we can imagine some one coming fresh 
 to this teaching and saying, " I see the truth of 
 what the New Testament and the Prayer Book 
 say about sin; I acknowledge my own selfishness 
 
 177 
 
178 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 and need of forgiveness; I believe that I am truly 
 repentant; what then am I to do to obtain for- 
 giveness? " You remember that this is the ques- 
 tion that was asked over and over again in the 
 first days of the Church, and the answer was al- 
 ways the same. It was asked of S. Peter and the 
 other Apostles on the first day of Pentecost when 
 after S. Peter's sermon his hearers were " pricked 
 in their heart, and said unto Peter and the rest 
 of the Apostles, Men and brethren, what shall we 
 do?'* It is asked of the Church by every one 
 who is converted to the Christian Faith, and the 
 answer is still the same answer that S. Peter 
 made : *' Repent and be baptized every one of 
 you in the name of Jesus Christ for the remission 
 of sins." There are objectors who ask, " Why 
 be baptized ? Is it not enough to repent ? God's 
 promise is to those who repent." True; God 
 does promise remission of sins to those who re- 
 pent, and more than that, He tells them how to 
 obtain it. He promises forgiveness and He ap- 
 points the instruments of it. The Church has felt 
 that it is so important that this should be made 
 clear that it has put it in the Creed : " I believe 
 in one baptism for the remission of sins." The 
 Church sets out the conditions of baptism, it ap- 
 points a form for its administration, it sets apart 
 a minister to perform the office. If any one still 
 
THE REMISSION OF SIN 179 
 
 asks, " Can I not be forgiven without baptism ? " 
 one can only reply that when a means of forgive- 
 ness has been provided it would seem pointless to 
 ask what might happen if one did not use it — 
 as pointless as for one to ask in a burning house, 
 whether one really had to go down the fire escape. 
 There are questions which sane people do not ask! 
 We can imagine a convert to Christianity who 
 has received baptism coming back to a priest 
 after a little while and saying, " I have fallen into 
 sin again; what am I to do?" I understood 
 when I was baptized that baptism could not be 
 repeated. But sin has been repeated. Is it true 
 that there is no farther forgiveness?" If there 
 is no farther forgiveness, the Gospel is surely not 
 so "Good News" as we thought it. Further- 
 more, there is nothing in the Gospel about a single 
 forgiveness. There are warnings of the danger 
 of post-baptismal sin; but the teaching of Scrip- 
 ture is that God will always forgive when we 
 truly repent. So our answer is : " Yes, there is 
 always forgiveness where there is repentance." 
 The natural question of our enquirer will then 
 be: " How, this time, am I to get forgiveness; 
 what is the means provided? This is a perfectly 
 natural question ; if there was a means provided 
 for the forgiveness of sins committed before bap- 
 tism it is wholly to be expected that there will be 
 
l8o THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 an equally definite instrument provided for the 
 forgiveness of sins committed after baptism. If 
 there is a man appointed by God to act for him 
 in the one case, it is to be expected that there will 
 such an one be found in the other. 
 
 Let us suppose that our enquirer when he has 
 fallen into post-baptismal sin, instead of going 
 to a priest and asking his questions, takes up his 
 Prayer Book and tries to find if it has anything 
 pertinent to say. He will find in the first office 
 that he comes to a statement that will comfort 
 him. The statement is this : '' Almighty God 
 . . . hath given power, and commandment to His 
 Ministers, to declare and pronounce to his people, 
 the Absolution and Remission of their sins." 
 This *' absolution and remission " which is " de- 
 clared and pronounced " must be a definite act of 
 some sort, like the forgiveness in baptism. But 
 when did Almighty God give this ? Our enquirer 
 did not raise the question when he was baptized ; 
 but it interests him now in view of his wider ex- 
 perience. When is any such ministerial power 
 conferred? He looks through his Prayer Book 
 till he finds " the Form and manner of Ordering 
 Priests " and there discovers that when a priest 
 is ordained by a bishop, the bishop, with the 
 priests present, lays his hand upon him and says : 
 " Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and 
 
THE REMISSION OF SIN l8l 
 
 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." ^ This would seem to be suffi- 
 ciently explicit of the intention of the Church in 
 ordination, and to explain who is the person com- 
 petent to deal with the matter of post-baptismal 
 sin. The conviction of the enquirer that this is in 
 fact the mind of the Church will be strengthened 
 when he reads in the exhortation at the end of the 
 Communion Office the direction that the sinner 
 who can not quiet his own conscience, who, that 
 is, is in mortal sin, is to go to some minister of 
 God's Word and open his grief. Thus his duty 
 will become plain. 
 
 The statements in the American Prayer Book 
 have been softened somewhat from those in the 
 English Prayer Book; the softening being in- 
 tended, I fancy, to make the American Book pala- 
 table to the spiritual dullness of the Eighteenth 
 Century which was apt to be irritated by anything 
 in the nature of sacramentalism — superstition, 
 they would have called it. The English Book, in 
 the long exhortation in the Communion Service 
 tells the sinner who cannot quiet his own con- 
 
 1 1 neglect the alternate form as being very rarely used, 
 and of no different effect. 
 
l82 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 science to " come to me, 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," 
 etc. In the English Office for the Visitation of 
 the Sick it is directed that " the sick person shall 
 be moved to make a special confession of his sins, 
 if he feels his conscience troubled with any 
 weighty matter," i. e., mortal sin; after which the 
 priest is to give him a direct absolution — *' I ab- 
 solve thee from all thy sins, in the name," etc. 
 The American Church declares, in the Preface to 
 the Book of Common Prayer, that it " is far from 
 intending to depart from the Church of England 
 in any essential point of doctrine or discipline, or 
 worship, or further than local circumstances re- 
 quire." There would not appear to be any '' local 
 circumstance " that requires the American Church 
 to depart from the teaching of the Church of 
 England and, indeed, of the whole Catholic 
 Church, East and West, in this matter of the for- 
 giveness of post-baptismal sin. We may take it 
 as certain, in view of the above quoted language, 
 that the American Church intends the practice of 
 individual or auricular confession to continue. 
 
 The practice, of course, ultimately goes back 
 to our Lord's commission to His Apostles: 
 " Whose soever sins ye remit, they are remitted 
 
THE REMISSION OF SIN 183 
 
 unto them ; and whose soever sins ye retain, they 
 are retained." There are several points about 
 that statement that need to be noticed. In the 
 first place it is a commission to retain as well as 
 to remit. The sins that are submitted to the pos- 
 sessors of the apostolic commission are not to be 
 automatically remitted, but they are submitted 
 for judgment. In other words, the priest in the 
 confessional sits as judge, representing and hold- 
 ing the royal authority of our Lord. His action 
 is a judicial action. Under our present disci- 
 pline, or lack of it, it is only in rare cases that 
 the priest retains the sins submitted to him; but 
 he does so in cases in which he refuses absolution 
 or postpones it. The early Church was much 
 more severe in the matter of penance, and for 
 public mortal sins enforced a penance extending 
 over years, and in some cases refused absolution 
 except at the point of death. The later discipline 
 of the Church has inclined to the side of tolerance 
 and charity, and has reduced the required penance 
 for sin to a merely nominal amount, and grants 
 absolution before the performance of the penance. 
 It holds that those who are penitent need for their 
 reformation the grace of God, and should not be 
 left without the sacraments in their struggle with 
 
 sin. 
 
 Further, the judicial nature of the power 
 
184 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 committed by our Lord to the priest necessarily 
 implies that the case on which he has to give judg- 
 ment in exercising his power of binding and loos- 
 ing shall be submitted to him in detail. The chief 
 reason why a general confession such as that 
 which the congregation is directed to make in the 
 public services cannot be followed by a sacramen- 
 tal absolution, that is an absolution conveying the 
 grace of pardon, is that there has been submitted 
 to the priest no case on which to base a judgment. 
 The priest cannot judge because he does not 
 know. Absolution that is sacramental therefore 
 can only follow confession made in detail, con- 
 fession that is, stating the number and nature of, 
 at least, our mortal sins so far as they can be re- 
 called. It is true that in times of emergency, as 
 in accidents by land and sea, before battles, etc., 
 a general absolution is often, and rightly, pro- 
 nounced ; still this is only a conditional absolution, 
 though the condition be not expressed. Nor- 
 mally, the conduct of the tribunal of penance re- 
 quires the submission of individual sins and the 
 consideration of them that judgment may be 
 given. It must be remembered that all sins (at 
 least mortal) must be submitted. It sometimes 
 happens that a penitent washes to submit some spe- 
 cial sin and receive absolution for that. That is 
 impossible for the simple reason that it is not a 
 
THE REMISSION OF SIN 185 
 
 sin that is forgiven but a sinner — one cannot be 
 partly absolved and partly not. 
 
 There is one other thing that is involved in the 
 judicial nature of the sacrament of penance — the 
 sentence. This, which is called the penance, is, 
 as I pointed out, usually some small act, some 
 prayer or psalm to be said, v^hich the penitent is 
 directed to perform. But it must not be thought 
 unimportant because it is small. It is part of 
 the sacrament, and necessary to the integrity of 
 the sacrament. If through forgetfulness or oth- 
 erwise it is neglected, the fact must be mentioned 
 in the next confession. But in addition to the 
 penance of greater or less amount, the sentence of 
 the judge may require restitution; that is, the sins 
 submitted may be such as involve injury to our 
 neighbor of such sort that it can and therefore 
 must be made good. The rubrics at the begin- 
 ning of the Communion Office direct the Minister 
 to repel from the Holy Communion sinners of 
 certain classes. This, of course, is not simply 
 that the good name of the Church may be 
 guarded, but that those who sin may not by an 
 unworthy reception of the Holy Communion in- 
 crease their condemnation. The rule will hold 
 therefore in private confession that those who 
 decline to set right the wrong they have done, as 
 far as it is possible for them, must, for their own 
 
l86 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 sake be forbidden the sacrament. The confessor 
 therefore, in the case of such sins as require resti- 
 tution, will direct that such restitution be made; 
 and though he then proceed to give absolution, it 
 must be understood that the validity of the abso- 
 lution depends on the good faith of the penitent 
 receiving it. To decline to make restitution 
 which is the condition of our receiving absolution, 
 is, no doubt, mortal sin. 
 
 It is sometimes asked hov^ the discipline of the 
 Anglican Communion in regard to the sacrament 
 of penance differs from that of the Roman Catho- 
 lic Church. It differs in this: The Roman 
 Church makes confession compulsory. Its law 
 requires that all members of the Church shall 
 make their confession at stated intervals, and, 
 failing that, they have no right to the ministration 
 of the Church. That is, the Roman Catholic 
 Church takes the responsibility of conducting and 
 directing the life of its members by means of defi- 
 nite regulations. There is, no doubt, a good deal 
 to be said for that system; but it is not the An- 
 glican system. The Churches of the Anglican 
 Communion present the sacrament of penance to 
 their members as a privilege. They do not say, 
 " You must do this under penalty " ; they say, 
 *' Here is a wonderful privilege and opportunity. 
 If you really understand that this is the offer of 
 
THE REMISSION OF SIN 187 
 
 your Lord to forgive your sins you will not stop 
 to question, you will be eager to receive." It is 
 inconceivable that any one who has understood 
 the Church's doctrine of the remission of sins 
 should ever ask, ''Must I go to confession?" 
 Their only question will be, " May I then go to 
 confession whenever I feel the need of it?" 
 There is no doubt that the Anglican method af- 
 fords place for much laxity and fails to keep ig- 
 norant and feeble people up to its ideals; but it 
 avoids certain dangers of mechanical action, and 
 places the responsibility for the conduct of the 
 spiritual Hfe where it actually belongs — on the 
 individual Christian. 
 
XVIII 
 
 PREPARATION FOR THE SACRAMENTS 
 
 SACRAMENT is a supernatural act 
 wherein God and man are brought into 
 relation through the incarnate nature of the God- 
 man. The impact of God on the spiritual nature 
 of man is what is ordinarily described as grace. 
 Grace is God acting on man. It is evident that 
 when man draws near to God, inviting the fulfil- 
 ment of the divine promises attached to the sacra- 
 ments, it is essential that man should approach 
 this act in such a spiritual state as to profit by it. 
 For the sacramental action is reciprocal, the readi- 
 ness of God to impart himself requires for its 
 completion the readiness of man to receive and 
 assimilate the divine gift. 
 
 What the Church thinks of this presence of 
 God in the sacraments and of the need of prepa- 
 ration in our approach to Him is sufficiently plain 
 from the care it takes to guard such approach., 
 If the Church did not believe in a real action of 
 God in the sacrament of baptism, or if it did not 
 
 believe in a real Presence of our Lord in the sac- 
 
 i88 
 
PREPARATION FOR THE SACRAMENTS 189 
 
 rament of the Holy Communion, it is inconceiv- 
 able that it should guard the approach to them 
 with such care. If they are simply s3^mbolic rites 
 there can be no need of such detailed preparation 
 in the approach to them. And, in fact, those 
 who think of the Holy Communion as but bread 
 and wine eaten as a memorial of our Lord's death 
 do not feel the need of a preparation involving 
 self-examination, confession and fasting. 
 
 Let us see what is the attitude of the Prayer 
 Book in this matter of self-examination. The 
 Shorter Exhortation begins : *' Ye who do truly 
 and earnestly repent you of your sins, and are in 
 love and charity with your neighbors, and intend 
 to lead a new life, following the commandments 
 of God, and walking from henceforth in his holy 
 ways; draw near with faith," etc. The first of 
 the longer exhortations goes more into detail in 
 the matter of preparation, directing, '' First, to 
 examine your lives and conversations by the rule 
 of God's commandments; and whereinsoever ye 
 shall perceive yourself to have offended, either 
 by will, word, or deed, there to bewail your own 
 sinfulness, and to confess yourselves to Almighty 
 God, with full purpose of amendment of life. 
 And if ye shall perceive your offences to be such 
 as are not only against God, but also against your 
 neighbors ; then ye shall reconcile yourselves unto 
 
190 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 them; being ready to make restitution and satis- 
 faction, according to the uttermost of your pow- 
 ers, for all injuries and wrongs done by you to 
 any other; and being likewise ready to forgive 
 others who have offended you, as ye would have 
 forgiveness of your offences at God's hands; for 
 otherwise the receiving of the holy Communion 
 doth nothing else but increase your condemna- 
 tion." 
 
 Turning now to the Catechism, we find these 
 questions and answers : 
 
 Question. What is required of persons to be 
 baptized ? 
 
 Answer. Repentance, whereby they forsake 
 sin; and Faith, whereby they steadfastly believe 
 the promises of God made to them in that Sacra- 
 ment. 
 
 Question. What is required of those who 
 come to the Lord's Supper? 
 
 Answer. To examine themselves whether 
 they repent them truly of their former sins, stead- 
 fastly purposing to lead a new life; and have a 
 lively faith in God's mercy through Christ, and 
 a thankful remembrance of His death; and be in 
 charity with all men. 
 
 From these data we gather that the adequate 
 preparation for the sacraments involves the fol- 
 lowing: Faith, self-examination, repentance, 
 
PREPARATION FOR THE SACRAMENTS IQI 
 
 confession (sacramental confession if needed — 
 in case one cannot quiet one's own conscience that 
 is, is in mortal sin), a firm purpose of obedience, 
 charity with all, including intention of restitu- 
 tion, if necessary. This is surely a sufficiently 
 definite programme and implies the highest sort 
 of sacramental belief. 
 
 The fundamental requisite of our approach is 
 faith. " He that cometh to God must believe 
 that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that 
 diligently seek him." Without faith we should 
 not be moved to act at all. But the faith that is 
 required in our approach to God is not an intel- 
 lectual assent to certain propositions; it is not 
 even, as it is often expressed, faith in the prom- 
 ises of God; but it is faith in God Himself, that 
 is, complete surrender of ourselves to God. We 
 believe in God; and belief in any one implies 
 readiness of self -committal to them. Therefore 
 faith is the first step because we can take no other 
 step until we have abandoned ourselves to God. 
 When we think of faith as the first step in our 
 approach to the sacraments, we see that it means 
 a submission to God as acting in a certain way, 
 through certain means. We approach whatever 
 sacrament we are about to receive in confidence 
 and expectancy that God will give Himself to us 
 in that sacrament as He has promised. Faith 
 
192 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 means that we trust ourselves to our Lord and 
 His promised action without expecting or indeed 
 wishing to understand hozv the promise can be 
 fulfilled. Faith has no difficulty about regenera- 
 tion in baptism or the Real Presence in the Holy 
 Communion or about a priest being the instru- 
 ment of the divine forgiveness in confession. It 
 has no difficulty because of the completeness of 
 its self-surrender. It reserves nothing in the 
 obedience and it reserves nothing in the way of 
 intellectual surrender. 
 
 He w^ho has surrendered himself whole- 
 heartedly to God in the act of faith cannot but 
 feel pain when he realises that by sin he has vio- 
 lated the love of God. For that is the best ac- 
 count of sin, that it is a violation of the divine 
 love, a wound willingly inflicted on Him who 
 loved us and gave Himself for us. As we think 
 of our approach to God in the way He has ap- 
 pointed we are confronted with the thought that 
 we have blocked the way of approach by our own 
 sins. Hence sorrow for sin, or repentance. 
 That must be the root, the starting place of re- 
 pentance, the sense that we would have wounded 
 Love. Nothing else is adequate as the basis of 
 repentance — not fear of the consequences of sin, 
 not the pain of wounded pride which we call re- 
 morse; but just the feeling that we have, of our 
 
PREPARATION FOR THE SACRAMENTS I93 
 
 own willing act, wounded the love which sought 
 to draw us, shaken off with impatience the hand 
 which sought to restrain us within the compass 
 of the divine will. 
 
 But if repentance is to be adequate it must be 
 intelligent. We cannot repent of being sinners; 
 if we are sinners it is because we have wounded 
 the love of God in certain definite ways. In 
 other words, we do not repent of sin, we repent 
 of sins; and we can only repent of such sins as 
 we know that we have committed. Hence the 
 need of self-examination. Self-examination is 
 the reviewing of Hfe in the light of the will of 
 God, the careful going over the past with a view 
 to detailed knowledge of our state which and 
 which alone can serve as a basis for repentance. 
 '' The past is the past ; why go over that ? If you 
 have done anything wrong the only medicine for 
 that is to do right " — so men say. But the sin 
 that is past — the sin of yesterday, of last week, 
 of last year, is still a fact in my spiritual being 
 until it has been dealt with according to God's 
 will. Forgetfulness is not the same thing as for- 
 giveness ; my sin remains until I have repented 
 of it. The first " right " thing one has to do 
 after sinning is to come to God in repentance. 
 Those who tell us to forget the past and live in 
 the present, doing good now, would hardly so 
 
194 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 direct one who had injured them. We should 
 not expect to find them saying to a man who had 
 broken into their house, or run off with their 
 motor, " Never mind the past, my good man ; 
 what does the past matter? Turn your face to 
 the morning and live for the future ! " It is only 
 when God is injured that men think the injury 
 of small consequence. 
 
 Self-examination is the only adequate means 
 of knowing how our spiritual life is progressing, 
 of how we stand in the sight of God. It is not 
 difficult and it is of great spiritual profit if it be 
 systematic and frequent. Those who examine 
 their consciences daily do not find the practice 
 difficult, and they do find that the effect on their 
 lives is very deep and that they are in a state of 
 constant readiness for the sacraments. 
 
 Among the other advantages of frequent self- 
 examination is this, that it renders it impossible 
 to ignore the existence of mortal sin. It is 
 strangely possible for us to ignore our own spir- 
 itual state if we want to do so. It is possible to 
 remain long in mortal sin if we shut our eyes and 
 think about something else. But self-examina- 
 tion makes that impossible. It keeps the con- 
 science alert. If we have fallen into mortal sin, 
 the sight of that sin when we make our self- 
 cxamination distresses us. It is that unquiet con- 
 
PREPARATION FOR THE SACRAMENTS I95 
 
 science which sends us to the " Minister of God^s 
 Word " to '* open our grief " and receive the 
 comfort of absolution — how great a comfort 
 only those can know who have experienced it. 
 
 To the completeness of our repentance it is 
 sometimes necessary that we should evidence it 
 by external acts. We are to be in love and char- 
 ity with all men, so far as in us lies. It may be 
 that between us and our neighbor there is some 
 separating bar, a bar that we have erected. That 
 bar must be removed. Read carefully the rubrics 
 at the beginning of the Communion Office; they 
 make plain the Church's attitude in this matter. 
 Read the first of the long exhortations : " And 
 if ye shall perceive your offences to be such as are 
 not only against God, but also against your neigh- 
 bors; then ye shall reconcile yourselves unto 
 them ; being ready to make restitution and satis- 
 faction, according to the uttermost of your pow- 
 ers, for all injuries and wrongs done by you to 
 any other; and being likewise ready to forgive 
 others who have offended you, as ye would have 
 forgiveness of your offences at God's hands." 
 You are in love and charity when you have done 
 all that in you lies to remove ground of offence 
 between your neighbor and yourself. You are in 
 charity, not when you have certain feelings to- 
 ward your neighbor, but when you are ready and 
 
196 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 willing to pursue a Christian course of conduct 
 toward him. 
 
 It may be that under this broad head of sins 
 against charity there are certain sins which have 
 injured your neighbor; whether he knows it or 
 not is unimportant. Have you profited in any 
 way by your sin? In that case the wrong done 
 by which your neighbor has been injured and 
 you have profited must be made good. Restitu- 
 tion must be made. If you have injured any 
 one's reputation, if you have retained any one's 
 property, you must make it good. There can be 
 no true repentance if we are im willing (we shall 
 not always be able) to undo the harm we have 
 done. 
 
 Finally, as we review our lives and become con- 
 scious of their manifold sins and failures, we 
 must approach the sacraments with a full purpose 
 of amendment of life. This is one of the require- 
 ments, no doubt, that gives us pause. We know 
 that we have made our communion many times 
 with a purpose to amend, and we know that in 
 fact we have not amended. That, no doubt, is 
 serious. It is very serious if it be case of mortal 
 sin, because mortal sin can be overcome by God's 
 grace if we have the full purpose to use that grace. 
 Venial sins are more difficult to deal with and re- 
 quire more patience on our part. We have gen- 
 
PREPARATION FOR THE SACRAMENTS I97 
 
 erally spent a good deal of time learning venial 
 sin; we have cultivated impatience, or an un- 
 controlled mind which makes prayer difficult or 
 minor forms of pride. It requires time and pa- 
 tience and infinite care and watchfulness to root 
 out the habits we have formed. The test of our 
 purpose of obedience is whether we want to root 
 out sins and are diligently trying to do so ; the evi- 
 dence of struggle in our lives will be the evidence 
 of purpose. 
 
 So the Church tries to guard us and guide us ; 
 and loyally following her guidance, applying in 
 detail her councils, we can always approach our 
 Lord with glad hearts and the certainty of the 
 comfort and consolation of His Presence. 
 
XIX 
 
 THE REAL PRESENCE IN HOLY 
 COMMUNION 
 
 ^^^HE doctrine of the Real Presence expresses 
 ^^y the conviction of the Church that our Lord 
 Jesus Christ is really present in the Blessed Sac- 
 rament. This presence is due to the fact that the 
 bread and the wine, when the words of consecra- 
 tion are said over them by a priest, become the 
 Body and Blood of Christ. Nobody pretends 
 that this change is one that is easily explained or 
 understood. It is one of the most profound mys- 
 teries of the Christian religion, and must be taken 
 on faith. We are to believe that the consecrated 
 bread is the Body of Christ, and the consecrated 
 wine His Blood because of His words, " This is 
 my body " and " This is my blood " ; not because 
 it is intelligible to the natural reason. 
 
 Of course nobody believes that the Body and 
 Blood of Christ are present in the Sacrament in a 
 carnal, local, physical sense. He is not present 
 in the same way as our bodies are present in a 
 definite place at a particular time. We are not 
 
 198 
 
THE REAL PRESENCE IQQ 
 
 told to believe that we press with our teeth the 
 carnal flesh of Christ as we do our material food. 
 As the Twenty-eighth Article of Religion says, 
 " The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, 
 in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual 
 manner." Nevertheless the sacred Humanity of 
 our Lord is really present. That Humanity, 
 which hung upon the Cross and rose from the 
 tomb and is now enthroned in glory in heaven, is 
 present wherever the Blessed Sacrament is on 
 earth. 
 
 It is important to remember that it is the risen, 
 glorified Body of Christ which is present on our 
 Altars. The presence of His natural body in the 
 bread and wine at the Last Supper can only be 
 explained as miraculous. His glorified Body is 
 no longer subject to the laws of material bodies 
 in our three-dimensional world. It is conceiv- 
 able that the Body of Christ may now be a four- 
 dimensional Body; but how such a Body can be 
 present in our three-dimensional world is entirely 
 beyond our present comprehension. If we lived 
 in a flat world and knew only the two dimensions 
 of length and breadth, we should be at a loss to 
 understand the presence in our midst of a body 
 that possessed length and breadth and thickness; 
 and yet its presence would be very real. So in 
 our world the presence of the risen, spiritual Body 
 
200 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 of Christ may be very mysterious, but at the same 
 time very real. 
 
 There is in our daily sense experience a simple 
 phenomenon which is parallel to the presence of 
 our Lord's Humanity in the Eucharist. Take 
 any object in the natural world: a bright star in 
 the heavens, for example. It becomes present on 
 the retina of the eye of each one of us at the same 
 time, without being divided into fragments. It 
 becomes a present reality in each separate con- 
 sciousness. And yet if anyone made the state- 
 ment that any star could be present in many places 
 on earth at the same time, we would be inclined 
 to regard it as an absurd assertion. In somewhat 
 the same way as the star becomes present in the 
 mental consciousness of each one of us, the Body 
 of Christ becomes present on every Altar, and in 
 each particle of the consecrated elements, for us 
 to offer to God as our Sacrifice, and to receive 
 into our souls and bodies as our spiritual food. 
 
 M. Bergson has said, " A body is present wher- 
 ever its (attractive) influence is felt." The hu- 
 man bodies we now possess can make their influ- 
 ence felt only where they are locally and corpo- 
 really present; but the risen Body of Christ can 
 make its influence felt wherever a few of the 
 faithful are gathered together and a priest utters 
 
THE REAL PRESENCE 20I 
 
 the sacred words of consecration over the bread 
 and wine. 
 
 The alternative to belief in the Real Presence 
 is belief in a real absence. Of course all Chris- 
 tians believe that the Divine nature of Christ, — 
 His Eternal Godhead, — is present everywhere. 
 The presence of His Divine nature is not here in 
 question. What we are considering is, whether 
 we may believe that the human nature of Christ, 
 
 — comprising His Body and ]\Iind and Spirit, — 
 is really present amongst the assembly of the 
 faithful, as it was among the disciples in Galilee, 
 or only that it is far away in some distant heaven. 
 One or the other must be true. We cannot have 
 it both ways. 
 
 Now it is not of much consequence what any 
 individual in the Church believes on this subject, 
 
 — be he layman, priest, or bishop. The impor- 
 tant question which we are trying to answer is, 
 what does the Church authoritatively teach on this 
 matter in the Prayer Book? That is very easy 
 to find out. We are in fact troubled by an 
 embarrassment of riches, — there are so many 
 phrases in the Book of Common Pra3^er that bear 
 precisely upon this question. We have space to 
 look at only a few of them. 
 
 Let us first turn to the Church Catechism. To 
 
202 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 the question " What is the inward part, or thing 
 signified?" this answer is given: "The Body 
 and Blood of Christ, which are spiritually taken 
 and received by the faithful in the Lord's Sup- 
 per." Then the further question is asked: 
 " What are the benefits whereof we are partakers 
 thereby ? " And the answer is : " The strength- 
 ening and refreshing of our souls by the Body 
 and Blood of Christ, as our bodies are by the 
 Bread and Wine." If the Church intended to 
 make it clear that she believes in the Real Presence 
 of Christ in the Eucharist, it is difficult to see how 
 she could have used any plainer words. If the 
 Church did not mean that, these answers in the 
 Catechism are most confusing and mystifying. 
 
 In the Prayer of Consecration we pray, '' that 
 we, receiving them according to thy Son our Sav- 
 iour Jesus Christ's holy institution, in remem- 
 brance of his death and passion, may be partak- 
 ers of his most blessed Body and Blood." And 
 later in the same prayer we pray " that we may 
 worthily receive the most precious Body and 
 Blood of thy Son Jesus Christ." This must be 
 very uncomfortable language for both priest and 
 people to use, if they do not accept the CathoHc 
 doctrine of the Real Presence. 
 
 In the sentences which are pronounced by the 
 priest when he communicates the people he is 
 
THE REAL PRESENCE 203 
 
 directed to say *' The Body of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ " and " The Blood of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ." Then in the prayer of thanksgiving we 
 use the words : '' that Thou hast vouchsafed to 
 feed us who have duly received these holy myste- 
 ries, with the spiritual food of the most precious 
 Body and Blood of thy Son our Saviour Jesus 
 Christ." All of this is so strikingly clear and 
 definite and unmistakable that it seems capable of 
 only one interpretation. 
 
 In the rubric just before the priest gives Com- 
 munion to the people he is directed to give it '' To 
 the People also in order, into their hands, all de- 
 voutly kneeling." This requirement that the peo- 
 ple should kneel when they receive the Blessed 
 Sacrament caused great searchings of heart 
 among the Puritans in England in the sixteenth 
 and seventeenth centuries. They made frequent 
 attempts to persuade the authorities of the Church 
 to abolish this requirement and to permit people 
 to sit in their pews when they received the Sacra- 
 ment. They were pleading not for greater ease 
 or convenience. The Puritans had no desire to 
 make people more comfortable. They were 
 pleading for language that would commit the 
 Church to a belief that the bread and wine were 
 simply symbols of an absent Christ. The fact 
 that the Church steadily refused to accede to their 
 
204 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 requests is strong evidence that the Church has 
 always adhered to the traditional Catholic belief 
 in the Presence of our Lord in the Eucharist. 
 
 Finally in the first of the two long Exhorta- 
 tions at the end of the Communion Office we find 
 these beautiful words: ** Wherefore it is our 
 duty to render most humble and hearty thanks to 
 Almighty God, our heavenly Father, for that he 
 hath given his Son our Saviour Jesus Christ, not 
 only to die for us, but also to be our spiritual food 
 and sustenance in that holy Sacrament." No 
 words could express more clearly the belief of 
 Catholic Christians that our Lord, in the words of 
 S. Paul, was both *' delivered for our offences and 
 rose again for our justification." The Catholic 
 religion holds that our Lord not only died for us 
 upon the Cross, but also gave Himself to be our 
 Food in that Blessed Sacrament, so as to convey 
 to us His justifying grace. Protestantism, in 
 former days, believed that He died for us upon 
 the Cross; and that we appropriated the benefits 
 of His death by faith only. Modern Protestant- 
 ism has largely given up even the belief in the 
 atoning merits of the Cross. The words quoted 
 from the Exhortation show plainly that the 
 Prayer Book teaches the Catholic rather than the 
 Protestant doctrine. 
 
fi 
 
 XX 
 
 THE EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE 
 
 :10M primeval days every human tribe has 
 offered some kind of sacrifice to its god. 
 We all have in our nature some traces of these 
 primitive tribes. In the average modern congre- 
 gation most of the tribes of the ancient Anglo- 
 Saxon v^orld are represented. Our ancestors 
 came from various nations in Europe: and far 
 back in the remote past, antedating even the birth 
 of Christ, our ancestors in those European coun- 
 tries, — in the hills of Ireland, by the Lakes of 
 Britain, or in the forests of Germany, — were 
 wont to gather together before an altar; and at 
 that altar there stood a priest, who as their mouth- 
 piece and representative offered a sacrifice to 
 some god. 
 
 Whenever therefore we assemble in church to 
 take part in the Celebration of the Holy Euchar- 
 ist, we instinctively feel akin to peoples of all 
 races and all times. Buried deep in the inner- 
 most being of every one of us is the instinct which 
 
 tells us that it is right and fitting to gather to- 
 
 205 
 
206 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 gether to offer some kind of sacrifice to God. It 
 is in the blood, we cannot help it ; no matter what 
 our religious beHefs may be, there is that deep 
 inborn instinct, coming down through countless 
 generations from primeval ancestors, which leads 
 us to assemble before an altar, to speak through 
 the priest as our mouthpiece to God, and to com- 
 mission him as our representative to offer for us 
 a sacrifice to God. 
 
 It is an interesting study to try to discover 
 what the offering of sacrifice has meant in the 
 past. If we investigate the history of the ancient 
 races of the world, we shall find that in the in- 
 fancy of many of these races there prevailed the 
 horrible repulsive practice of human sacrifice. 
 This practice is still observed to-day by some of 
 the more ignorant races of the world, — the offer- 
 ing of human blood upon an altar to God. More 
 frequently however we find traces of the offering 
 of the blood of animals upon the altar; and in 
 many instances the offering of the fruits of the 
 earth, — the wheat and the corn and other prod- 
 ucts of the harvest, — as a thank-offering to the 
 particular god in whom that race or tribe believed. 
 There has always been the sense that the sacrifice 
 was to be made to one who was feared and loved, 
 and out of that which cost something to the giver. 
 Thus we find always, underlying the sacrifice, a 
 
THE EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE 207 
 
 recognition of the power and over-lordship of 
 God. This was a right instinct, however it mani- 
 fested itself, whether in the sacrifice of human 
 life, or of animal hfe, or of the fruits of the earth. 
 
 Now the Christian sacrifice which we offer in 
 the Holy Eucharist does not destroy, it rather 
 continues the religious traditions of the race; but 
 all that is gruesome or cruel in the practise of 
 human and animal sacrifices has passed away. 
 We come to God as did our forefathers, or the 
 people of other races and tongues, to offer our 
 sacrifice, our holy gifts, in this sacrifice of the 
 New Covenant instituted by our Lord Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 And what is it that we offer to God in the sac- 
 rifice of the Eucharist? We offer primarily the 
 Lamb of God who was slain for the sins of the 
 world; and in so doing we offer the one, true, 
 pure, and perfect sacrifice. We plead before God 
 the sacrifice He made upon the Cross for the sins 
 of the whole world, and in doing that we are 
 offering to God the most complete and acceptable 
 offering that could be offered by human hands. 
 But the sacrifice which we offer is not wholly ob- 
 jective. We offer in union with that sacrifice 
 ourselves, our souls and bodies, " to be a reason- 
 able, holy and living sacrifice to God." We offer 
 ourselves in Christ, sanctified by His merits, puri- 
 
208 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 fied by His grace, our imperfections covered by 
 His perfection. The clouds of incense ascending 
 before the ahar symboHze the merits of Christ 
 in this sacrifice covering our sins and ascending to 
 God as a sweet-smelHng savor. 
 
 That is the sacrifice we offer to God whenever 
 we are present at the Holy Eucharist. We are 
 taking part in a great action. We should not 
 think of it so much as a form of words, it is a 
 great action : the offering of ourselves in and with 
 with our Lord Jesus Christ to our Father in 
 heaven. That action is preceded by the rehearsal 
 of the Commandments of God, by the reading of 
 selections from the Epistles and Gospels for our 
 edification, by our profession of our faith in the 
 Creed, by intercessions and prayers for the whole 
 state of Christ's Church, and by the confession 
 of our sinfulness. It is followed by thanksgiving 
 and a great act of praise to God in the Gloria in 
 Excelsis. But the essence of the transaction is 
 to be found in the Prayer of Consecration, when 
 we offer ourselves in and with Christ to the 
 Father. We are thereby fulfilling the injunction 
 of S. Paul : '* I beseech you therefore, brethren, 
 by the mercies of God that ye present your bodies 
 a living sacrifice, holy, acceptable unto God, which 
 is your reasonable service." It does not make 
 any vital difference whether we attend to each 
 
THE EUCHARISTIC SACRIFICE 2O9 
 
 particular word of the service or not; in fact, one 
 may conceivably join in this holy sacrifice of the 
 Eucharist without hearing a word that is spoken 
 from the altar. If we take part in this great ac- 
 tion by offering ourselves to God, our souls and 
 bodies, in union with our Lord's perfect offering 
 of Himself, we are taking part in this service in 
 an edifying way. 
 
 This act of self -consecration should never be 
 absent from our worship. Every time we are 
 present at the Eucharist we should make an effort 
 to detach ourselves from all that is sinful and re- 
 new our consecration to God and all that is good. 
 That is something that we need to do very often 
 if we are trying to Hve earnest Christian lives. 
 We need very often to detach ourselves from 
 everything worldly and sinful, and renew our 
 union with our Lord Jesus Christ; as we offer 
 Him to God we must offer ourselves to God. 
 We should do this at least on every Lord's Day. 
 It was a true instinct in the Church which has 
 made this offering of ourselves in the Eucharist 
 the crowning act of all events in our lives. The 
 burial of some one we love, the marriage of a 
 Christian man and Christian woman, the ordina- 
 tion of a man to the priesthood, the consecration 
 of a Bishop, the opening of a council or a con- 
 vention, the consecration of a King, or any great 
 
210 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 act in our individual, national, or ecclesiastical 
 life, should be crowned and consummated by the 
 great offering of the Holy Sacrifice in which we 
 present Christ and ourselves in union with Him 
 to God 
 
XXI 
 
 THE CHIEF ACT OF WORSHIP 
 
 ^^:^HERE are many churches in the Anglican 
 ^^^ Communion in which the Holy Eucharist 
 is celebrated every Sunday as the chief act of 
 worship. Those who enter such churches for the 
 first time often express surprise at the kind of 
 worship being offered. It does not seem to be 
 like the worship in other Episcopal churches with 
 which they have been familiar. Perhaps they are 
 sufficiently versed in the Prayer Book to under- 
 stand that it is the Holy Communion that is being 
 celebrated; but they do not understand why so 
 few people, or none at all, should receive Com- 
 munion. Perhaps they are not Church people 
 and therefore have not the slightest notion what 
 is going on. Any regular attendant of such a 
 church if asked by those people why they had 
 that sort of worship ought to be able to answer 
 them. Let us now try to see what that answer 
 would be. 
 
 First of all let us get it clear in our minds what 
 this service is. It is the Lord's Service, the one 
 
 211 
 
212 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 act of worship instituted by our Divine Saviour, 
 On the night before He died He took bread and 
 wine and instituted the sacrifice of the New 
 Covenant, as a perpetual memorial of His Body 
 broken and His Blood shed upon the Cross for 
 our redemption. He said to His disciples ** Do 
 this in remembrance of Me." You may call it 
 by any name you like, the Lord's Supper, the Holy 
 Communion, the Holy Eucharist, the Holy Mys- 
 teries, the Holy Sacrifice, or the Mass ; but in any 
 case it is the Lord's Service, — the one kind of 
 worship He commanded us to offer. 
 
 That this was the common act of worship on 
 the Lord's Day among the early Christians is 
 plain from the Acts of the Apostles. In many 
 passages we read that the disciples came together 
 on the first day of the week " for the breaking of 
 bread." That was the name then commonly ap- 
 plied to that service. For example, we read, 
 *' Upon the first day of the week when the disci- 
 ples came together to break bread, Paul preached 
 unto them." This continued to be the chief act 
 of worship everywhere in the Church until the 
 days of the Reformation. The various Protes- 
 tant sects that then arose substituted different 
 forms of man-made worship for the ancient and 
 divinely established worship of the Eucharist. 
 But the Book of Common Prayer is witness that 
 
THE CHIEF ACT OF WORSHIP 213 
 
 the Church of England retained the Lord's Serv- 
 ice as the chief act of worship for every Lord's 
 Day. This is shown by the fact that the Euchar- 
 ist is the only service in which the Prayer Book 
 orders a sermon to be preached, the banns of mar- 
 riage to be published, and other notices to be 
 given to the people, — all of which implied that 
 in the mind of the Church this was the service 
 at which the bulk of the congregation would be 
 present. In addition to this fact the Prayer 
 Book sets forth a collect, epistle and gospel for 
 every Sunday in the year, which implies that the 
 Holy Communion was to be celebrated at least 
 every Sunday. 
 
 How then did it come about that the Com- 
 munion was celebrated so often when the greater 
 part of the congregation were not making their 
 communion, or when no one except the priest re- 
 ceived communion? It was largely the result 
 of the change in the social habits of the people. 
 At first the Holy Communion was celebrated only 
 once on the same day, and then most of those 
 present made their communions. But that was 
 because people did not take the first meal of the 
 day until about noon. Therefore they could 
 easily receive fasting at any hour in the morning, 
 and thereby be obedient to a universal Christian 
 custom. For it was felt from the beginning that 
 
214 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 out of honour to the Holy Sacrament this sacred 
 Food should be received as the first food of the 
 day. Gradually however the social custom 
 arose of breakfasting early in the day. As that 
 custom spread, the Church began to have two 
 celebrations of the Eucharist every Sunday, the 
 early one for communion, and the later one for 
 worship. 
 
 This was a perfectly legitimate development. 
 Our Lord Jesus Christ is present in the Blessed 
 Sacrament for two purposes, to be our Sacrifice 
 and to be our spiritual Food. That is why the 
 Altar, a place on which sacrifice is offered, is also 
 called the Lord's Table, because it is the place 
 where we receive our spiritual food. The 
 Church Catechism puts the sacrificial purpose of 
 this sacrament first, in its answer as to why the 
 Sacrament was ordained : " For the continual 
 remembrance of the vSacrifice of the death of 
 Christ, and of the benefits which we receive 
 thereby." Therefore we are at liberty to empha- 
 size either aspect of this rite. We may use it 
 primarily for making our communions, or we 
 may use it primarily as a means of worship. For 
 that reason the Church was acting within her 
 rights when she began to have two celebrations 
 of the Eucharist every Sunday, the early one for 
 communion, and the later one for worship. 
 
THE CHIEF ACT OF WORSHIP 21 5 
 
 Now just what do we mean by saying that the 
 Eucharist may be used for worship ? Or to put it 
 in another way, what do we mean by the Euchar- 
 istic Sacrifice? We mean that in this service we 
 worship God by offering to Him Christ Crucified 
 as our sacrifice. Through the consecration by 
 the words of the priest the bread and wine become 
 the broken Body and the poured-out Blood of 
 Christ, and we then offer them to God as we say 
 in the Prayer of Consecration, " We do celebrate 
 and make here before Thy Divine Majesty, with 
 these Thy holy gifts, which we now offer unto 
 Thee, the memorial Thy Son hath commanded us 
 to make." We plead the great Sacrifice once for 
 all offered and made upon the Cross for the sins 
 of the world. Just because we are all sinners, 
 this ought to be the key-note of our worship 
 whenever we appear before God. If we were 
 sinless beings, then it is conceivable that some 
 other kind of worship might meet our needs. 
 But being what we are, we cannot ignore the su- 
 preme fact that God has sent His Son into the 
 world, and the world nailed Him to the Cross. 
 That offering determines what is to be our rela- 
 tion to this sinful world. We must be crucified 
 unto the world. And we must not be ashamed 
 to bear the Cross and to hold it up before an un- 
 believing world. We must glory in the Cross. 
 
2l6 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 We can do that best by making it the fundamen- 
 tal element in all our worship. '' God forbid that 
 I should glory save in the Cross of our Lord Jesus 
 Christ, whereby the world is crucified unto me 
 and I unto the world." 
 
 We need have no fear that we are in the minor- 
 ity, that we are doing some strange thing, in 
 taking our share in this kind of worship. It 
 would indeed make little difference whether most 
 Episcopal Churches had this kind of worship or 
 not, for the Episcopal Church is a very small seg- 
 ment compared with the whole Catholic Church 
 of all the ages. We are not in the minority. 
 When we are taking part in the Lord's Service 
 as the chief act of worship on every Lord's Day, 
 we are one with the early Christian disciples and 
 the Apostles, breaking bread from house to house. 
 We are one with all the Christians of the world 
 for the first fifteen centuries. We are one with 
 three-fifths of all the Christians in the world to- 
 day. We are one with that great company " of 
 all nations, and kindreds, and people, and 
 tongues " who stand before the throne of God in 
 Heaven, adoring the Lamb, as it had been slain, 
 and offering the Eucharistic sacrifice. 
 
XXII 
 
 THE RESERVATION OF THE BLESSED 
 SACRAMENT 
 
 fi 
 
 RESERVATION of the Blessed Sacrament 
 has been widely practiced in the Church 
 from the earliest times. The fact is singularly 
 well attested and there is no need here to go into 
 the details of the evidence for it. It will suffice 
 to cite our earliest witness, Justin Martyr, who 
 wrote about the middle of the second century. 
 He is explaining the worship of the Christians to 
 the Roman authorities, and we may assume that 
 the services which he describes as in use in the 
 middle of the second century have been in use for 
 some time preceding that date, and that there- 
 fore the practice of Reservation as he describes 
 it is in fact considerably older than the date of 
 his Apology. This is what he says : — 
 
 " When we have finished our prayer, bread is 
 brought and wine and water, and the president 
 sends up both prayers and Thanksgivings as best 
 he can, and the people express assent by saying 
 
 the Amen. And there is the distribution and the 
 
 217 
 
2l8 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 partaking by each one of those things over which 
 the Thanksgiving has been said, and these are 
 sent to those who are not present by the hands of 
 the deacons." It will be noted that nothing is 
 here said of the sick; the sacrament is sent to 
 those members of the Church who are not able to 
 be present. I notice this because our evidence 
 of primitive practice shows that Reservation was 
 not exclusively for the sick. It was considered 
 of great importance that the sick, and especially 
 those who were in danger of death should re- 
 ceive the Sacrament; but it was also held impor- 
 tant that every one should receive frequently, and 
 it was consequently sent by the hands of the dea- 
 cons to such as were unable to be pr».sent at the 
 public service. But it was not long before this 
 method was, in large measure at least, superseded 
 by private reservation : that is, Christians were 
 permitted to take from the public administration 
 of the sacrament the Sacred Gifts, and to keep 
 them in their own houses and to communicate 
 when they saw fit. This practice was greatly 
 favored by the conditions of the Christian com- 
 munity during the era of persecution, but it sur- 
 vived after the persecution passed away. There 
 is little evidence at any time of the celebration of 
 the Eucharist in private houses for clinical com- 
 munions. After the Church came to have its 
 
RESERVATION OF BLESSED SACRAMENT 2ig 
 
 own buildings and untrammelled worship, cele- 
 brations in private houses for any reasons were 
 discouraged, and reservation preferred. 
 
 During this early period it is certain that reser- 
 vation was almost universally under the single 
 species of bread. 
 
 Later in the history of the Church private res- 
 ervation came to be considered undesirable and 
 was at length prohibited. Reservation now be- 
 came official, and the tendency of the early Mid- 
 dle Ages was to administer under both kinds and 
 commonly by intinction; only under very special 
 circumstances would the species be administered 
 separately. In the West, in the later Middle 
 Ages, there is a reversion to the primitive custom 
 of administration under the species of bread only. 
 This of course was coincident with the with- 
 drawal of the chalice from the laity. 
 
 We may sum up by saying that the evidence 
 at hand shows that it was, from the earliest times, 
 the practice of the Christian Church to reserve 
 the sacrament of the Holy Eucharist for the pur- 
 pose of communicating those who are unable to 
 be present at the public service, and that, with 
 certain exceptions such as the communion of the 
 newly baptized at solemn seasons, there is no evi- 
 dence of the existence of any regular practice of 
 reserving the species of wine. Reservation is 
 
220 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 normally reservation of the species of bread. 
 This is the Western use. In the East reservation 
 has always been practiced, but there the reserva- 
 tion of the intinct species has been maintained. The 
 species of bread is wet with the species of wine 
 and then dried and reserved. Reservation is and 
 always has been the use of the Christian Church. 
 In opposition to this Catholic use, it is main- 
 tained, the Prayer Books of the Church of Eng- 
 land and of the Protestant Episcopal Church for- 
 bid reservation. That, in any case, is too strong 
 a statement of the fact. If the Prayer Book for- 
 bids reservation it forbids it only by implication. 
 The rubric at the end of the Communion Office is 
 as follows : — 
 
 "And if any of the consecrated Bread and Wine 
 remain after the Communion, it shall not be carried 
 out of the Church ; but the Minister and other 
 Communicants shall, immediately after the Bless- 
 ing, reverently eat and drink the same." 
 
 Now there are several things to be said about 
 this: 
 
 In the first place it is not contended by any one, 
 I think, that the intention of the framers of the 
 rubric was to forbid reservation. Some of the 
 clergy who took part in the revision of the Prayer 
 Book in 1661 when this rubric was introduced 
 
RESERVATION OF BLESSED SACRAMENT 221 
 
 believed in reservation; v^e have the evidence of 
 their writings to this fact. But in framing the 
 rubric there was no question of reservation. It 
 was framed to meet an abuse (which we may 
 hope was feared rather than existed) possible 
 under the rubric of 1559 to the effect that "if any 
 of the bread or wine remain, the curate shall have 
 it for his own use." It was feared that in cases 
 of over consecration the curate might '' take for 
 his own use " what was left of the consecrated 
 elements, as well as (what the rubric intended) 
 of the unconsecrated. Hence the 1661 rubric 
 directing the immediate consumption of the con- 
 secrated bread and wine. But, it is maintained, 
 whatever may have been the intention of the 
 framers of the rubric, the rubric as it stands in 
 the Prayer Book to-day does actually forbid 
 reservation. Archbishop Temple in an opinion 
 delivered in 1900, held that reservation was 
 *' quite consistent with the Christian faith, and 
 there was nothing in it that was wrong in itself.'* 
 But nevertheless he held, '' the Church of Eng- 
 land does not allow reservation in any form, and 
 that those who think it ought to be allowed — are 
 not justified in practicing reservation until the law 
 has been altered." ^ 
 
 1 Archbishop Temple had to take into account the 
 XXVIIIth Article, which has not to be considered in our 
 case. 
 
222 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 But is this rigorist interpretation of the rubric 
 necessary? I do not think that it is. If it could 
 be shown that the rubric was intended to prevent 
 reservation, then it might be contended that what 
 I propose is a dishonest attempt to " get round " 
 the rubric. But considering the admitted inten- 
 tion of the rubric, I do not think it is open to that 
 charge. If when the Holy Communion is cele- 
 brated a certain portion of the consecrated ele- 
 ments is administered to the people, and another 
 portion is placed in the ciborium and enclosed in 
 the tabernacle for future use in communicating 
 the sick, what remains after the communion will 
 be so much of the bread and wine as remains on 
 the altar. What has been appropriated to special 
 use cannot be said to remain in the sense of the 
 rubric.^ Believing, as I do, that the rubric does 
 not intend to prevent reservation, I think it quite 
 fair to act on this interpretation of it. 
 
 Failing that, what is one to do about communi- 
 cating the sick? I suppose that many would 
 answer, Why not use what the Prayer Book pro- 
 vides, and celebrate the Holy Communion in the 
 house of the sick person? The answer is that in 
 many cases one cannot — in the majority of cases 
 
 iMacColl, "The Reformation Settlement," p. i68. 
 
RESERVATION OF BLESSED SACRAMENT 22^ 
 
 in the work of a city parish which at all minis- 
 ters to the spiritual needs of the poor one cannot. 
 There are certain conditions of leisure and pros- 
 perity under which the Holy Communion can be 
 with some approximation to reverence celebrated 
 in a private house ; but it cannot be so celebrated 
 at midnight at the bedside of a dying person, or 
 in response to a hurry call to a hospital, or in the 
 bedroom of a tenement house. There are many 
 cases in which neither time nor circumstances per- 
 mit of a celebration. 
 
 Again: what are we to do? Apparently we 
 are to wait until the General Convention of the 
 Church can invent a suitable rubric which will 
 permit the sacrament to be taken to the sick, and 
 at the same time prevent any one from treating 
 it as though they believed what the Prayer Book 
 teaches about the Real Presence. Practically, we 
 are being told that it is better that sick folk should 
 die without the Blessed Sacrament than that pro- 
 vision should be made for communicating them 
 under conditions which will permit of the worship 
 of Jesus Christ present in the sacrament. 
 
 Are we to wait then? No: some of us have 
 ceased to wait long ago. Our action has been 
 taken on the assumption that a practice which is 
 of universal prevalence in the Church in the past, 
 
224 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 and is enforced by unrepealed Canon law ^ in the 
 Anglican Church, does not require any further 
 direction to enable present use. As has been 
 pointed out recently by Dr. Darwell Stone, " The 
 act of reserving the Sacrament may well be re- 
 garded as part of the ordinary method by which 
 the parish priest secures that he can give com- 
 munion to those who need it, so that reservation 
 in a parish church, as distinct from a private 
 chapel, for reservation in which leave is certainly 
 required, does not require any direction or sanc- 
 tion from the bishop." ^ 
 
 I would insist that the Reserved Sacrament is 
 not simply desirable, but necessary to the carry- 
 ing on of a parish work where the Catholic Re- 
 ligion is believed and practiced in its entirety. 
 As a concrete case makes this fact more vivid 
 than many pages of argument, I will tell of a per- 
 sonal experience of a not unusual type. 
 
 On a day not long ago the telephone rang in 
 the middle of the afternoon, and I was asked 
 whether the sacrament could be sent at once to a 
 hospital. It appeared that a man had been taken 
 to the hospital, and that the physicians on exami- 
 nation had determined that an immediate opera- 
 tion was necessary. The man was already being 
 
 1 Stone, " The Reserved Sacrament," pp. 24-26. 
 ^Jbid., p. 89. 
 
RESERVATION OF BLESSED SACRAMENT 225 
 
 prepared for the operating room. He did not 
 belong to my parish ; but his own parish was in a 
 distant part of the city and there would be no 
 time for his rector to reach the hospital before 
 the operation, and moreover, the Blessed Sacra- 
 ment was not reserved in the parish to which he 
 belonged. I was called because it was known 
 that the Sacrament was reserved in the church of 
 which I am rector. Within twenty minutes from 
 the call a priest had taken the Sacrament to the 
 hospital and communicated the man. He then 
 went to the operating room and there died. 
 
 In such cases a service for the Communion of 
 the Sick is of no avail. Nor will any rubric 
 that can be invented permitting reservation for 
 known cases help us. The only thing which 
 covers our constant need is perpetual reservation. 
 And inasmuch as there appears to be nothing in 
 the law of the Church of God to prevent res- 
 ervation, why are we anxious about legisla- 
 tion? 
 
 It is said that there would be small difficulty 
 in getting legislation permitting reserv^ation for 
 the sick, if reservation for the sick were all that 
 was wanted by the advocates of such legislation. 
 The demand for reservation for the sick is re- 
 garded, in other words, as a blind to gain the 
 Reserved Sacrament for devotional purposes. 
 
226 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Now this is distinctly not true. Reservation 
 is desired and practiced primarily for the sick. 
 At the same time, speaking of course only for 
 myself, I would say quite frankly that the devo- 
 tional use of the Reserved Sacrament seems to 
 me of great spiritual value. Such devotional 
 uses are, no doubt, of late development in the 
 Church. But devotional practice is one of the 
 things in which we may very well look for con- 
 tinual development. I see no ground for object- 
 ing to a service on the ground that it is modern. 
 Indeed, one cannot very consistently do so when 
 one considers that the services of devotion to our 
 Lord present in the Blessed Sacrament are older 
 than the much esteemed service of matins. We 
 are, too, constantly revising the Book of Common 
 Prayer in answer to a demand for " more flexi- 
 ble " and " popular and attractive " services. All 
 people are not " attracted " to all services : it may 
 be that there are considerable numbers who would 
 be " attracted " by Eucharistic services. If so it 
 would surely be in line with our modern legisla- 
 tion to permit them. Still, I hold no brief for the 
 authorization of such services as Benediction. 
 What I would insist on is the value of devotion 
 to the Reserved Sacrament as a mode of our 
 Lord's self-manifestation. If any one does not 
 believe in the Real Presence, there is nothing 
 
RESERVATION OF BLESSED SACRAMENT 227 
 
 more to be said. But when such belief exists, 
 experience shows the tremendous value of the 
 devotional approach to our Lord present under 
 the forms of bread and wine. Of this devotional 
 use we will not willingly be deprived. 
 
 In conclusion : There is nothing in the formu- 
 laries of the Church to which we belong which 
 forbids the reservation of the Blessed Sacrament. 
 And inasmuch as such reservation has been an 
 universal practice in the Catholic Church at all 
 times, there w^ould seem to be no need of any 
 special legislation concerning it. The danger is 
 lest attempted legislation should contravene Cath- 
 olic practice and, being null from the beginning, 
 simply plunge us into confusion. It is at present 
 within the right of the priest, having cure of 
 souls, to reserve the sacrament under such con- 
 ditions as shall enable him to fulfil his spiritual 
 obhgations to them. As to the permissibility of 
 special services of devotion to our Lord present 
 in the Sacrament, the question ought not to be 
 complicated by importing into it our eucharistic 
 beliefs or disbeliefs, but should be decided on the 
 general ground of the permissibility of any serv- 
 ice not put forth by the Church or licensed by the 
 ordinary. Of course, the ordinary may now li- 
 cense a service of Benediction on the same 
 grounds as those on which he would license a 
 
228 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 service for a Social Service meeting or a meeting 
 of the Brotherhood of S. Andrew. But such 
 private acts of devotion as grow out of the fact 
 of the reservation of the Sacrament in such places 
 that the faithful may approach it, in their very 
 nature as acts of private devotion, need no auth- 
 orization. 
 
 Note. — Two recent books are to be commended. " The 
 Reserved Sacrament," by Darwell Stone, D.D., is a brief 
 but exceedingly able discussion of the whole case of res- 
 ervation. " The Sacrament Reserved," by W. H. Free- 
 stone, M.A. (Alcuin Club Collections), is a thorough sur- 
 vey of the evidence for reservation during the early and 
 middle ages of the history of the Church. It is indispen- 
 sable to any study of the subject. Both books bear the 
 American imprint of the Young Churchman Co. 
 
XXIII 
 
 ESSENTIALS OF CONTINUITY IN THE 
 MINISTRY 
 
 XN this matter of continuity in the Christian 
 Ministry, as in all other matters relating 
 to the Christian religion, it is well for us to re- 
 member that it is not what we think or like that 
 is important, but what are the facts. It is not a 
 question as to what kind of a ministry we would 
 devise if we were founding a church, but what 
 kind of a ministry did Christ institute in the 
 Church that He founded. The story is told of 
 an old man, of liberal theological views, that, 
 after hearing an old-fashioned Presbyterian min- 
 ister preach on a Hell of literal fire and brim- 
 stone, he remonstrated with the preacher on the 
 ground that people would not tolerate such a Hell 
 
 as that. 
 
 The Kingdom of God is not a democracy, but 
 a Kingdom ; and in that Kingdom God is both 
 King and Law-maker. We may not like to have 
 it so, but so it is. The question before us then is : 
 
 229 
 
230 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 what kind of a ministry has God instituted to 
 carry on the work of His Church on earth? 
 
 From the earhest days of the Christian Church, 
 as we learn in the Acts of the Apostles, the fol- 
 lowers of Christ endeavored to continue not only 
 in the " Apostles' doctrine,'* but also in the 
 " Apostles' fellowship." In other words they 
 submitted themselves only to ministers who were 
 in succession from the Apostles of Christ. 
 Apostolic succession is a somewhat formidable 
 phrase, but it expresses a very simple idea. As 
 the Father sent His Son Jesus Christ unto the 
 world, so the Son sent forth His Apostles with 
 Divine authority and promised to be with them 
 " all the days, even to the end of the world." 
 The powers which they exercised, — such as the 
 powers of ordaining to the ministry, consecrating 
 the Eucharist, and absolving from sin, — were 
 bestowed upon them by Christ Himself; and those 
 same powers they conferred upon their suc- 
 cessors, the Bishops and the Presb3^ters or Priests 
 upon whom they laid their hands. No man 
 henceforth might presume to exercise such pow- 
 ers in the Church, unless he were duly ordained 
 by some Bishop in this line of Apostolic Succes- 
 sion, 
 
 Strictly speaking, the Apostolic Succession is 
 not a line but a net. Each Bishop must be con- 
 
CONTINUITY IN THE MINISTRY 23 1 
 
 secrated by at least three other Bishops, just as 
 each loop in a net adjoins several other loops. 
 If the ApostoHc succession were simply a line of 
 Bishops, and it could be proven that one Bishop 
 in the line was an impostor and had never really 
 been consecrated, the whole subsequent line would 
 be invalidated. A net however is very different 
 from a line. Just as one imperfect loop cannot 
 destroy the whole net, so one counterfeit Bishop 
 cannot weaken the authority and powers of the 
 whole succession of Bishops throughout the 
 world. It requires very little historical proof to 
 show that the Bishops of the Catholic Church in 
 the twentieth century are in direct, tactual suc- 
 cession from the original Apostles. 
 
 The fundamental question at issue to-day be- 
 tween the two great groups of Christians, Cath- 
 olic and Protestant, is whether the authority of 
 the Christian ministry is from heaven or of men. 
 Catholics hold that the episcopate and the priest- 
 hood derive their authority from above. The 
 authority to minister has come down from 
 Christ through His Apostles to the clergy of 
 every age. Protestants hold that their ministers 
 derive their authority to preach and administer 
 the sacraments from the congregation of Chris- 
 tian men. According to the Protestant theory it 
 would not be essential that a man should be or- 
 
232 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 dained by the laying on of a Bishop's hands. It 
 would be sufficient if he were set apart and com- 
 missioned by the congregation. 
 
 If we study the early history of the Church as 
 contained in the Acts of the Apostles, we are im- 
 pressed by the fact that the laying on of the 
 hands of Apostles is always insisted on before 
 any man can be allowed to exercise the ministry. 
 
 This Apostolic recognition was regarded as 
 proof that the man had a mission from Christ 
 Himself. The early Christian Fathers, such as 
 S. Clement of Rome, S. Ignatius of Antioch, and 
 S. Irenaeus, bear witness to the continuance of 
 this principle in the age immediately following 
 that of the Apostles. The early heretical sects, — 
 such as the Montanists, the Novationists, the 
 Donatists, and the Arians, — however far they 
 may have departed from the Apostle's doctrine, 
 never permitted any departure from the principle 
 of historic succession from the three-fold Apos- 
 tolic ministry of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons. 
 Throughout the early Christian centuries, — in 
 fact down to the age of the Reformation, — we 
 find everywhere prevalent the same idea as to the 
 essentials of continuity in the Christian ministry. 
 The universality of this idea argues some power- 
 ful authority behind it; either the express com- 
 mands of Christ to His Apostles during the great 
 
CONTINUITY IN THE MINISTRY 233 
 
 Forty Days, or the leading of the Holy Spirit. 
 Otherwise some other kind of ministry would 
 have cropped up here and there, as being equally 
 serviceable to the Church. 
 
 The position taken in the Book of Common 
 Prayer ranges us definitely on the Catholic side 
 of this controversy. It cannot be seriously ques- 
 tioned that the Prayer Book provides for the 
 making, ordaining, and consecrating of Deacons, 
 Priests, and Bishops; and that these are the only 
 kinds of ministers who are permitted regularly 
 to minister to our people. The Preface to the 
 Ordinal bears testimony to the Church's convic- 
 tion that these three orders of ministry are no 
 mediaeval nor modern invention, but date from 
 the time of the Apostles : 
 
 " It is evident unto all men diligently reading 
 Holy scripture and ancient Authors, that from the 
 Apostles' time there have been these Orders of 
 Ministers in Christ's Church, — Bishops, Priests, 
 and Deacons. Which offices were evermore had 
 in such reverend estimation that no man might pre- 
 sume to execute any of them, except he were first 
 called, tried, examined, and known to have such 
 qualities as are requisite for the same; and also 
 by public Prayer, with imposition of Hands, were 
 approved and admitted thereunto by lawful Au- 
 thority. And therefore, to the intent that these 
 
234 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Orders may be continued and reverently used and 
 esteemed in this Church, no man shall be accounted 
 or taken to be a lawful Bishop, Priest, or Deacon 
 in this Church, or suffered to execute any of the 
 said Functions except he be called, tried, examined, 
 and admitted thereunto according to the Form here- 
 after following, or hath had Episcopal Consecra- 
 tion or Ordination." 
 
 Article XXIII is equally explicit in forbidding 
 any kind of a minister to officiate in our churches, 
 who has not been properly ordained by lawful 
 Bishops : 
 
 " It is not lawful for any man to take upon him 
 the office of public preaching, or ministering the 
 Sacraments in the Congregation, before he be law- 
 fully called, and sent to execute the same. And 
 those we ought to judge lawfully called and sent, 
 which be chosen and called to this work by men 
 who have public authority given unto them in the 
 Congregation, to call and send Ministers into the 
 Lord's vineyard." 
 
 When a priest is instituted into a new cure, 
 the following is the opening sentence in one of 
 the prayers which the Bishop is authorized to 
 use: 
 
 " O Holy Jesus, who hast purchased to thyself 
 an universal Church, and hast promised to be with 
 
CONTINUITY IN THE MINISTRY 235 
 
 the Ministers of Apostolic Succession to the end 
 of the World." 
 
 A further indication of the Church's teaching 
 on this subject is to be found in the requirement 
 of the General Canons that no person may of- 
 ficiate in any of our congregations without suf- 
 ficient evidence of his being duly licensed or 
 ordained to minister in this Church. Moreover 
 the Canons expressly provide for the admission 
 to our ministry of such ministers as have already 
 been ordained by Bishops not in communion with 
 this Church. Thus the Canons doubly emphasize 
 the necessity of valid ordination to the ministry 
 by lawful Bishops. 
 
 It may surprise some people to learn that the 
 Prayer-Book is so definite and restrictive on this 
 subject of the ministry. The Church's attitude 
 would doubtless appear to them intolerant and 
 bigoted, not to say arrogant. They would be 
 inclined to ask what difference it could make 
 whether a Christian minister had been ordained 
 by a Bishop in succession to the Apostles or not, 
 provided he were a good man. In answer we 
 must say that it is simply a question as to whether 
 a man has or has not been authoritatively com- 
 missioned to represent Christ and His Church. 
 It is not at all a question of moral character nor 
 
236 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 of intellectual ability, nor even of spiritual at- 
 tainments. A Christian minister, who has not 
 been episcopally ordained, may be a better man 
 morally, a wiser and more highly educated man, 
 a more eloquent preacher, and better equipped in 
 spiritual discernment than many priests of the 
 Church. He has not however been given author- 
 ity to make the bread and wine the Body and 
 Blood of Christ, to bless in His name, nor to 
 absolve a penitent sinner. Indeed the ministers 
 of non-episcopal churches do not claim to possess 
 these powers. They claim simply that they have 
 been given by the Holy Spirit the power to 
 preach, to be the spiritual leaders and moral teach- 
 ers of their people, to baptize and to administer a 
 rite which merely commemorates the death of our 
 Saviour. These powers, we should all be willing 
 to admit, have undoubtedly been given to them by 
 the Holy Spirit. Their ministry is often richly 
 blessed, and results in leading many to forsake sin 
 and to be devout and earnest followers of Jesus 
 Christ. 
 
 Our Church retains the historic, three-fold, 
 Apostolic ministry because that has always been 
 the authoritatively commissioned ministry of the 
 Holy Catholic Church. We wish to feel some 
 security that we are connected with the normal 
 
CONTINUITY IN THE MINISTRY 237 
 
 channels of grace and truth flowing from Christ 
 Himself. Our government at Washington is 
 very scrupulous about dealing with foreign na- 
 tions only through their accredited representa- 
 tives. If a man came from London and tried to 
 conduct official business with our President, on 
 the ground that he was quite as good a man as the 
 British Ambassador, and indeed a little wiser and 
 more suited to voice the real sentiment of the 
 British people, it does not require much imagina- 
 tion to picture how that man would be received. 
 The President deals only with the official repre- 
 sentatives of the British government. In like 
 manner we cling to the ministers of Apostolic 
 Succession, because we desire the assurance that 
 our ministers are indeed the ambassadors of 
 Christ. 
 
 This view as to what is essential for the con- 
 tinuity of the Christian ministry is the view that 
 was held throughout Christendom for fifteen 
 centuries after Christ. It may be called the Cath- 
 olic view. There have been two famous attempts 
 to destroy or pervert this view of the ministry. 
 Protestantism in the sixteenth century abolished 
 the Episcopate and taught that Christian minis- 
 ters derived their authority to minister from the 
 congregation. Roman Catholicism in the nine- 
 
238 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 teenth century taught that the Pope is the supreme 
 ruler of the Church, and the source of all minis- 
 terial power and jurisdiction. Both of these the- 
 ories of the ministry are many centuries too late 
 to be true. 
 
XXIV 
 
 THE PRIESTHOOD 
 
 ^y^HATEVER men may think about the 
 \Jy necessity of having priests in the Church, 
 ■ — and there have been many violent controver- 
 sies in the past on this question, — there are 
 probably few modern Christians who would 
 refuse to believe in the Priesthood of our Lord. 
 That He is our great High Priest is a truth so 
 firmly imbedded in the New Testament, and 
 especially in the Epistle to the Hebrews, that one 
 could scarcely deny it without rejecting the au- 
 thority of the New Testament as a whole. 
 
 The main section of the Epistle to the He- 
 brews, which has been called the Epistle of Priest- 
 hood, is concerned with setting forth the univer- 
 sal and sovereign High Priesthood of Christ, and 
 the fulfilment of His priestly work. Bishop 
 Westcott, in his commentary on this Epistle, 
 points out that the characteristic teaching of the 
 Epistle on the Priesthood of Christ, is found in 
 the Lord's words as reported by S. John more 
 distinctly than in the other Gospels. Thus in the 
 
 239 
 
240 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Gospel according to S. John, the Lord reveals 
 His victory through death; and He shows Him- 
 self in a figure as at once Priest and victim. (S. 
 John X, 1-21.) Elsewhere He proclaims that 
 when He is lifted up from the earth, He will 
 draw all men to Himself (XH, 32), that His re- 
 moval from the limitations of our present bodily 
 existence is the condition of His Spiritual gift 
 (XVI, 7), and that He hallows His people in 
 Himself (c. XVH). 
 
 The idea is no less familiar in the New Testa- 
 ment that the Church, the mystical Body of 
 Christ, the blessed company of all faithful people, 
 is a priestly body. Christ is still carrying on His 
 priestly work in Heaven and on earth through the 
 Church, which is His body. Therefore all the 
 faithful share in His priesthood. We are 
 '* Kings and priests to God," " an holy priest- 
 hood," " a royal priesthood," by virtue of our 
 being sacranientally united to the great High 
 Priest of our profession, Jesus Christ. This is 
 what is meant by the " priesthood of the laity," of 
 which we hear so much in some quarters. The 
 laity, because they are members of a priestly 
 body, assist the body in the exercise of its priestly 
 functions. 
 
 The Body of Christ, however, like the human 
 body, must exercise its functions through special 
 
THE PRIESTHOOD 24I 
 
 organs or members. The function of priesthood, 
 the offering of the eucharistic sacrifice, the con- 
 tinual remembrance through re-presentation of 
 the sacrifice of the Cross, is exercised through the 
 ministerial priesthood. Those who have been 
 set apart through prayer and ordination to carry 
 on the priestly functions of the whole priestly 
 body, are quite reasonably designated as priests. 
 They are not priests in the sense that they offer 
 sacrifices of slain animals and of the fruits of 
 the earth on behalf of others separated from 
 them by an impassable gulf, as were the priests 
 of the Jewish dispensation and the various 
 heathen cults. They are simply priests in the 
 sense that the one High Priest of the new cove- 
 nant through their ministry pleads before God 
 the one sacrifice of Himself once offered. They 
 are the hands of the Body of Christ, offering to 
 God the holy gifts which He has commanded us 
 to offer. 
 
 Etymologically, the word priest is merely a 
 modified form of the word presbyter, derived 
 from the Greek word for elder. In Wycliff's 
 Bible, the word priest is used where in Tyndale 
 and the Authorized Version the word elder is 
 used. In pre-Reformation England the word 
 presbyter gradually became abbreviated into the 
 word priest. After the Reformation, there was a 
 
242 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 marked tendency to return to the word presbyter. 
 That explains what Milton meant when he said, 
 '* New Presbyter is but old Priest writ large." 
 In the Book of Common Prayer, both the terms 
 presbyter and priest are used to designate the sec- 
 ond in rank of the clerical orders, between the 
 bishop and the deacon. 
 
 From the earliest times in the Church, the office 
 of presbyter has been regarded as a sacerdotal 
 office, in that it confers power to consecrate the 
 bread and wine in the Eucharist and to declare 
 absolution. Therefore, taking into cognizance 
 the general European use, we may say that the 
 title presbyter came to be used in all languages 
 as synonymous with sacrificing priest, — in Greek 
 icper?, and in the Latin sacerdos. This has been 
 true of all the great historic Churches of Chris- 
 tendom. To quote from the Centrry Dictionary, 
 under the word priest: 
 
 " The Roman Catholic Church teaches that it is 
 the office of a priest * to offer, bless, rule, preach, 
 and baptize.' These same offices are assigned to 
 priests in the Orthodox Church and other Oriental 
 churches and in the Anglican Church. In the 
 church last named the form of ordination gives au- 
 thority to forgive or retain sins and be a dispenser 
 of the word and sacraments, and only priests (in- 
 cluding bishops as in priest's orders) can give bene- 
 
THE PRIESTHOOD 243 
 
 diction, pronounce absolution, and consecrate the 
 eucharist." 
 
 In popular usage to-day the word priest is used 
 mostly by those who hold the Catholic theory of 
 the ministry, and the word clergyman or minister 
 by those who hold the Protestant theory. 
 Among certain classes of Protestants the word 
 preacher is the one most commonly used. 
 Speaking strictly, however, and without preju- 
 dice, there is no more reason why any one should 
 object to the term priest than to the terms 
 bishop or deacon. And to use the term presbyter 
 is simply to beat the priest around the bush, and 
 meet him again face to face. As for the words 
 clergyman or minister, they are perfectly good 
 words, and no one need be ashamed to apply 
 them, as they are meant to be applied, as compre- 
 hensive terms to designate all the sacred orders, 
 whether bishops, priests or deacons. Even the 
 despised word preacher has its use, when that 
 is precisely what we mean. 
 
 Belief in the priesthood is the characteristic 
 that distinguishes the Catholic theory of the min- 
 istry from the Protestant. We are safe there- 
 fore in laying down the general principle that 
 wherever we find priests we are in a Catholic 
 church, and wherever we do not find them we are 
 
244 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 in a Protestant Church. For some unaccount- 
 able reason Protestants abhor the very idea of 
 priesthood. 
 
 With this distinction in mind we open the Book 
 of Common Prayer, and we at once detect its 
 CathoHc flavor. We find that the second of the 
 ordination services is called "' The Form and 
 Manner of Ordering Priests." Elsewhere in the 
 rubric of the Prayer Book, especially in the Order 
 for Holy Communion, it is frequently directed 
 that the priest shall do or say certain things. It 
 is true that the term minister is also used very 
 freely ; but it is used only for such functions as 
 may be performed by a deacon or a lay-reader as 
 well as by a priest. It is also used in many places 
 as a comprehensive term to include the bishop as 
 well as priests or deacons. There can be no 
 doubt that the Prayer Book sanctions the designa- 
 tion of the second order of the ministry as priests, 
 and therefore ranges itself definitely among the 
 liturgies and service-books and formularies of the 
 Catholic Church. 
 
© 
 
 XXV 
 
 MATRIMONY 
 
 ROADLY speaking, there are two views of 
 marriage current in the modern world : the 
 secular and the religious view. A good many 
 controversies on the subject might be avoided, if 
 people would first state which of these two views 
 they hold. 
 
 According to the secular view marriage is 
 merely a temporary partnership between a man 
 and a woman, with no religious significance and 
 no spiritual implications. They enter into con- 
 tract relations with each other before an officer 
 of the state and two witnesses, just as anyone 
 might make a contract to rent a house. If either 
 or both should fail to live up to the terms of the 
 contract, the contract may be dissolved and each 
 of the parties may be free to marry again. Most 
 advocates of this view naturally see no reason 
 why the marriage relation should be continued 
 when it proves distasteful to either party. When 
 the wife becomes middle-aged and loses her phys- 
 ical charm, the husband need have no compunc- 
 
 245 
 
246 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 tion in throwing her aside and marrying a girl 
 in the freshness of early youth. 
 
 According to the religious view, marriage is a 
 sacramental union of a baptized man and a bap- 
 tized woman, which is dissoluble only by death. 
 It is sacramental in that it is a means of grace. 
 The man and the woman in this case are the min- 
 isters of the sacrament. When they pledge them- 
 selves before witnesses to be loving and faithful 
 to one another until they are parted by death, the 
 Holy Spirit infuses into them the gifts of grace 
 which will enable them, so long as they co-oper- 
 ate with the Holy Spirit, to fulfil their duties to 
 one another and to any children that may be given 
 them. 
 
 S. Paul in his Epistle to the Ephesians speaks 
 of marriage as a great mystery, like the relation 
 of Christ and His Church. The love of hus- 
 bands for their wives should correspond to the 
 love of Christ for the Church. He sacrificed 
 Himself for it, to hallow it, to present it to Him- 
 self, and to keep it holy. Christ's love for His 
 Church is that of a husband for his bride. Just 
 as Christ and the Church are one Body, so hus- 
 band and wife become one flesh. Moreover in an 
 ideal marriage the wife would reverence her hus- 
 band with something of that same reverence 
 which the Church shows towards Christ. 
 
MATRIMONY 247 
 
 The Christian view of marriage is nothing if 
 not idealistic. It presents to the world a high 
 and noble ideal, which obviously cannot be lived 
 up to without the continual help of Divine grace. 
 But the grace is given at the very moment when 
 the vows are taken. The actual results in many a 
 Christian household are sufficient evidence that a 
 superhuman power has operated through sacra- 
 mental marriage to restrain and soften and en- 
 noble and beautify the characters of men and 
 women. Dr. F. W. Foerster has given eloquent 
 expression to this conclusion in his admirable 
 book on '* Marriage and the Sex Problem " 
 (p. 72): 
 
 "Since Christianity develops man's capacity for 
 self-forgetful devotion to the highest extent, it has 
 in every direction enriched and deepened the sexual 
 emotions. What was love in the heathen world 
 compared to the love of Dante, Petrarch, and many 
 another since? The well-de^^eloped soul which 
 confines itself to the Hmits of the loyalty and re- 
 sponsibility of which it knows its need, and restrains 
 the Eros from asserting itself at the expense of 
 Character, receives back again, with thousandfold 
 increase, all which it may have seemed to lose ; nay, 
 it develops its own truest life to its fullest fruit 
 and escapes the emptiness and vanity of the sensu- 
 ous world. It may be said indeed that the responsi- 
 
248 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 bility which reHgion laid upon the sexual relation- 
 ships of men and women became converted into a 
 new tenderness, and the self-denial which it de- 
 manded from unchastened passion turned into a 
 new capacity for love and devotion." 
 
 It is to be regretted that Protestantism has in- 
 creasingly led its adherents away from this ideal- 
 istic, religious view of marriage in the direction 
 of the secular view. Those who have played fast 
 and loose with their marriage vows, and desire 
 to enter again upon the marriage relationship, can 
 always find some kind of a Protestant minister 
 who, for a consideration, will be glad to pro- 
 nounce them man and wife. The Catholic 
 Church, — whether Roman, Orthodox, or Angli- 
 can, — has in the main stood unflinchingly for the 
 stricter ideal of marriage as set forth in the Gos- 
 pel. 
 
 The form for the " Solemnization of Matri- 
 mony," in the Prayer Book tells us that marriage 
 was "instituted of God"; that "it is not to be 
 entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but rever- 
 ently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the 
 fear of God." The persons w^ho are to be mar- 
 ried are solemnly warned " that if any persons 
 are joined together otherwise than as God's Word 
 doth allow, their marriage is not lawful." The 
 
MATRIMONY 249 
 
 VOWS made by the contracting parties are made 
 for life, " so long as ye both shall live." They 
 take each other to have and to hold " till death us 
 do part." After the prayers, the minister is di- 
 rected to join their right hands together, and say, 
 " Those whom God hath joined together let no 
 man put asunder." Can any one seriously doubt 
 that the Prayer Book teaches the indissolubility 
 of marriage? 
 
 It may be said that the clear-cut position of the 
 Prayer Book as to the indissolubility of marriage 
 is inconsistent with the actual practice that we 
 find in the American part of the Church to-day. 
 It is true that the canons of the Church, as passed 
 by the General Convention, now make it possible 
 for the innocent party in a divorce granted by the 
 court on the ground of adultery to marry again, 
 providing it is not within the year after the di- 
 vorce was granted. This canonical law is based 
 upon our Lord's words in St. Matthew, XIX, 9, 
 " Whoever shall put away his wife, except it be 
 for fornication, and shall marry another, com- 
 mitteth adultery ; and whoso marrieth her which 
 is put away doth commit adultery." There 
 has been much controversy as to the inter- 
 pretation of these words. It has been main- 
 tained by many that the clause "except it be 
 
2'50 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 for fornication " applies to sins of the woman 
 that may have been committed before marriage. 
 It has also been maintained that the clause 
 is an interpolation, as it is not found in the 
 other reports of our Lord's words given us in the 
 other Gospels. It is an anomalous situation, that 
 we should find the advocates of modern Biblical 
 criticism claiming that this phrase is an interpo- 
 lation and therefore that there is no authority in 
 our Lord's words for the breaking of the matri- 
 monial bond under any circumstances ; and on the 
 other hand that we should find old-fashioned and 
 orthodox churchmen who object to modern crit- 
 ical methods in the interpretation of the Bible, 
 claiming that this passage should be retained, and 
 therefore opening the way for those who believe 
 that marriage is sometimes dissoluble. Thus we 
 see many Catholic churchmen believing in the in- 
 dissolubility of marriage and adhering to the text 
 that makes their position impossible, and many 
 Broad churchmen reconstructing the passage in 
 a way which entirely condemns their own laxity 
 in sometimes performing the marriages of di- 
 vorced people. 
 
 The whole problem is by no means a simple 
 one. Undeniably in the early Church there was a 
 very free use of the power of dispensation, which 
 made possible in many cases the remarriage of 
 
MATRIMONY 25 1 
 
 divorced people. Origen, though condemning 
 such laxity, recognized the fact that some bishops 
 in his time would allow a divorced husband or 
 wife to remarry while the separated party was 
 still living. The Ninth Canon of Illiberris allows 
 a woman who has left an adulterous husband and 
 married another to be restored to communion, 
 after the death of her first husband; and even 
 sooner in case of necessity, without requiring her 
 to break with her new partner. The modern 
 Roman Church uses the power of dispensation 
 very freely, annulling many marriages for a vast 
 number of causes, and thus practically giving 
 consent to many divorced people to remarry. 
 
 Perhaps the simplest way out of the difficulty 
 would be to return to the practice of the early 
 Christian centuries, by which all marriages were 
 performed by the state, and then the parties 
 united in matrimony went to the Church to receive 
 a blessing upon their union. This would obviate 
 the necessity of any ecclesiastical disciplinary 
 regulations as to who should be permitted to 
 marry, and the Church could give her blessing 
 merely to those who were baptized, and living in 
 a state of grace, and had not violated the precepts 
 of the Gospel in regard to marriage. 
 
XXVI 
 CEREMONIAL 
 
 XT is quite possible to over-estimate the place 
 and value of ceremonial in the services of 
 the Church ; it is equally possible and much more 
 common to assume that ceremonial is a matter of 
 taste, the outcome of a love for the archaic, to 
 which a normal, healthy-minded modern person 
 will naturally feel no attraction and in which he 
 will see no use. People who are ruled by what 
 they call common sense class the ceremonialist 
 (whom, by the way, they usually miscall the ritu- 
 alist) with the harmless faddists who collect 
 snuff-boxes or fans or uncut editions. But one 
 cannot get rid of ceremonial quite so easily. 
 In conducting the services of the Church, or any 
 other public function for that matter, it is never a 
 question of ceremonial or no ceremonial, but of a 
 choice between good ceremonial and bad. The 
 most extreme opponent of '' ritualism," when he 
 conducts matins or celebrates the Lord's Supper 
 is compelled to use ceremonial. It will no doubt 
 
 be atrocious, but it will be all the more obtrusive. 
 
 252 
 
CEREMONIAL 253 
 
 The solemn vespers of a '' ritualistic " parish will 
 be simplicity itself compared with the weird gyra- 
 tions of a " popular vespers " in some " broad " 
 parish. Go to certain well-known churches and 
 watch the elaborate ceremonial which accom- 
 panies the process of getting the collection taken 
 up and placed upon the altar and you will realize 
 how much ingenuity can be expended in the per- 
 formance of a very simple act in an utterly 
 meretricious way. The attitude of the cere- 
 monialist is that there are certain appropriate and 
 certain inappropriate ways of performing the 
 services of the Church, and that you have not 
 avoided being *' a ritualist " when you have care- 
 fully performed them all in the wrong way. 
 
 Nor have you achieved the much misunder- 
 stood quality of simplicity. Simplicity in a serv- 
 ice is not the absence in a service of ceremonial, 
 but the absence of *' fussiness." Services which 
 we are all familiar with, in which several persons 
 in the church or sanctuary are clearly quite uncer- 
 tain as to how the services are to be conducted, 
 or who is going to perform this or that part, 
 where there is endless moving about and whisper- 
 ing, are not simple whatever else they may be. 
 It is no doubt a popular superstition that one is 
 conducting a service simply if one is conducting 
 it as though it were something quite new, that as 
 
254 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 yet has no precedent in the manner of its per- 
 formance. This is not new in the Christian 
 Church. Tertullian, a good many centuries ago, 
 pointed out for the behoof of certain anti-cere- 
 moniahsts of his day, that disorder and simpHcity 
 are not the same thing. 
 
 All public services are necessarily ceremonious. 
 They consist of certain acts that have to be per- 
 formed by certain people in co-operation. Sim- 
 plicity is attained when there are understood ways 
 of performing these acts which are known to the 
 people who are taking part in them. I was never 
 more impressed with the need and the value of 
 ceremonial than in watching a dress parade at 
 West Point. One felt that the difference be- 
 tween a mob and an army was greatly a matter 
 of ceremonial. The elaborate rehearsal which 
 takes place before a " fashionable '' wedding in 
 places where ceremonial is abhorred emphasizes 
 the fact that if any public act is to be done de- 
 cently it must be settled beforehand hozv it is to 
 be done. The simplicity of a service consists not 
 in there being few and simple acts done, but in 
 whatever is done being done with such ease and 
 smoothness that the actual way of the doing of 
 them may be as little obtrusive as possible. 
 
 However, simplicity is not the chief quality to 
 be aimed at in the performance of public worship. 
 
CEREMONIAL 255 
 
 Worship needs to be rendered with decency and 
 dignity and with such ceremonial adjuncts as will 
 emphasize and impress its meaning. What these 
 shall be will naturally be determined by the cere- 
 monial tradition of the Church, that tradition be- 
 ing the outcome of centuries of experience. Any 
 one even slightly familiar with the matter of 
 ceremonial in its historical development under- 
 stands that the ceremonies of, say, a solemn mass 
 are as far as possible from being the " whims " 
 and '* fads " of " rituaHsts," but are the result 
 of centuries of thought and experience, and that 
 they aim at the setting forth of the service of God 
 in a manner that is at once glorious and signifi- 
 cant. Back of the ceremonial development is the 
 conviction that the appeal of worship is not ex- 
 clusively to an intelligence, but to a human being 
 in all his complexity ; that it is the function of a 
 public act of worship, not only to impress, but to 
 arouse and to move to action. Therefore the 
 appeal of worship is to the emotions and will, as 
 well as to the intellect. Ceremonial services ad- 
 dress the eye as well as the ear. There is no 
 reason why the sense of beauty should not be 
 appealed to by means of color or music or rhyth- 
 mic motion as well as the intellect by words. 
 Worship is an act a human being directs to God ; 
 public worship is the corporate act of the Body 
 
256 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 of Christ in a certain place, and as a corporate 
 act must have been agreed upon beforehand, 
 that is, must be ceremonial; and the ceremonial 
 should be such as will express the nature of an 
 approach to the divine Majesty, and such as will 
 stir us to a better appreciation of our dependence 
 upon God and our obligation to Him. 
 
 There are those who contend that the rubrics 
 of the Prayer Book furnish a sufficient guide to 
 the performance of the services; but one has only 
 to try to conduct any service on the basis of the 
 sufficiency of the rubrics to find that this is not 
 true. Open the Prayer Book at the " Order for 
 daily Morning Prayer." What is the officiant to 
 wear ? Where is he to read the office ? What is 
 to be his position? What is the position of the 
 congregation? It is needless to go on to prove 
 what is so obvious as that it is impossible to con- 
 duct any Prayer Book service if the rubrics are 
 to be our sole guide. The classical instance of 
 rubrical failure is found in the Baptismal Office 
 where the minister is directed to *' take the child 
 into his hands " ; — what is the subsequent fate 
 of the baby? 
 
 Of course it will be said that such difficulties 
 are purely imaginary; that the minister does as 
 matter of fact say Morning Prayer somewhere, 
 and that he does not continue to hold the baby be- 
 
CEREMONIAL 257 
 
 cause the rubrics fail of exhaustive direction. 
 Such matters are left to the discretion of the min- 
 ister. It was thoroughly impressed upon me in the 
 seminary by the late bishop of Connecticut that 
 " what was left to the discretion of the minister 
 was left to the indiscretion of the man." It is no 
 doubt true that if the rubrics fail to tell you what 
 to do you will still do something. My point is 
 not at all that action will be arrested where ru- 
 brics fail. I am merely interested to demonstrate 
 the impossibility of the position that the rubrics 
 of the Prayer Book are sufficient guide to the ren- 
 dering of its services and that we need nothing 
 more. 
 
 Plainly we do need something more than that ; 
 what shall be the source of it? Are we just to 
 supply what we need out of our own heads? 
 Are we to wear what we please, stand where we 
 please, kneel or stand or sit when we please? 
 That, of course, is a conceivable attitude — the 
 attitude of individual anarchy — but it is hardly 
 worth while arguing about it. I fancy that there 
 are many who would describe themselves as not 
 caring for much or for *' advanced " ceremonial, 
 who would hold that there is, as matter of fact, 
 a traditional way of performing services which, 
 while it does not govern all details, does ensure 
 a certain uniformity and dignity. I believe the 
 
258 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 extent of this uniformity can be easily exag- 
 gerated; but aside from that this attitude is feel- 
 ing after a true principle, the principle that the 
 rubrics are not a maximum of direction, but a 
 minimum, and that the reason that they do not 
 attempt fully to direct the performance of the 
 services is that the clergy are assumed to know 
 how to perform them. 
 
 Fifty years ago in the American Church there 
 was no doubt a fair amount of uniformity in 
 the rendering of the services. An irreducible 
 minimum had been arrived at by the gradual 
 abandonment of ceremonial acts and practices for 
 the last three centuries. This minimum of cere- 
 monial had become settled into a tradition which 
 it has proved rather difficult to displace. Why 
 then displace it ? For two reasons. ( i ) Because 
 it is inadequate as an expression of the meaning 
 of the services. (2) Because it is not the cere- 
 monial tradition which is back of the Book of 
 Common Prayer, but the tattered remnant of it 
 after three centuries of imported Protestantism 
 has done its worst. 
 
 The meaning of ceremonial is that it should 
 interpret and beautify the acts of worship with 
 which it is joined. Evening Prayer said plain 
 is one thing; solemn evensong with proper, that 
 is, traditional ceremonial adjuncts, — cope, lights, 
 
CEREMONIAL 259 
 
 incense, — is another : this is quite obvious, all 
 question of liking or disliking aside. The Eu- 
 charist as celebrated in some of our churches, the 
 priest in surplice and stole and his acts and move- 
 ments governed by no ascertainable principle, 
 makes a very different impression from even a 
 low celebration with traditional vestments and 
 ceremonial. There are those, no doubt, who are 
 indifferent to such things; but those who value 
 them, value them because they seem to them to 
 enhance the dignity and solemnity of the acts in 
 which they are participating and enable them to 
 express their own attitude toward God in the act 
 of worship. The business of a service, among 
 other things, is to teach; and it is found that the 
 teaching power of a solemn celebration is in fact 
 very great. 
 
 The advocate of ceremonial believes that there 
 was a perfectly definite system of ceremonial 
 back of the Book of Common Prayer when it was 
 first issued, and that the insufficiency of the ru- 
 brics is accounted for by the fact that every priest 
 was supposed to have sufficient knowledge of 
 ceremonial to enable him to render the services 
 as they had been rendered. Those who put forth 
 the first Book of Edward VI undoubtedly in- 
 tended the old ceremonies to be continued because 
 they did not direct that any other should be tised, 
 
26o THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 and something had to be done. The Ornaments 
 Rubric of the Enghsh Book directs the retention 
 of ancient and customary ceremonial; this gov- 
 erns the use of the Church of England. The 
 fact that no equivalent was put in the American 
 Book does not mean that the old ceremonies are 
 forbidden; it means rather that they had been 
 forgotten, and that the new minimum ceremonial 
 of the eighteenth century was assumed as of 
 common knowledge. 
 
 Does this assumption of the American Prayer 
 Book rule out the revival of the ceremonial usages 
 of the past? Not if we take the Church's own 
 appeal to the past seriously. The contention of 
 the Anglican Communion has always been that all 
 particular Churches must be constantly criticised 
 in the light of Holy Scripture as interpreted by 
 the old Catholic Doctors. When you apply that 
 test to the Churches of the Anglican communion 
 of the eighteenth and the first half of the 
 twentieth centuries you find that the reduction 
 of ceremonial was the reflection of a correspond- 
 ing reduction of Catholic belief and practice in 
 other respects. To mention but one instance: 
 you find a very insufficient grasp on the meaning 
 of the Incarnation and its application to life 
 through the sacraments. When you watch the 
 history of the Catholic movement in England in 
 
CEREMONIAL 26 1 
 
 the nineteenth century you speedily become aware 
 that the ceremonial revival which accompanied 
 it was not the work of faddists and sentimental- 
 ists or the imitation of a foreign religious sys- 
 tem, but that it was inspired by the new appre- 
 ciation of the meaning of the Incarnation and of 
 its application through the sacraments, and, in- 
 deed, of a growing appreciation of CathoHc the- 
 ology as a whole. Men did not introduce cere- 
 monial because they happened to fancy it, but be- 
 cause they had become possessed of certain truths 
 which demanded not simply intellectual but also 
 emotional expression. They found this expres- 
 sion in the beauty and symbolism of ceremonial. 
 
 And they found it not as a thing newly in- 
 vented; but just as they discovered Catholic the- 
 ology in the formularies of the Church the mean- 
 ing of which had been to a great extent ignored, 
 so they found that the appropriate symbolic and 
 ceremonial comment on doctrine was embodied 
 in the ancient ceremonial of the Church — that 
 ceremonial which the compilers of the Book of 
 Common Prayer had assumed as the common 
 knowledge of all the clergy. The services of the 
 Church as they were rendered in the middle of 
 the nineteenth century were like a jewel which 
 had been torn out of its setting; the new school 
 of churchmen sought to recover the old setting 
 
262 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 and replace the jewel. The result has been a 
 gain in significance and splendor. 
 
 A system of ceremonial is not something in- 
 vented off-hand; it is the product of the experi- 
 ence of centuries. It has grown and is contin- 
 ually being modified. This fact is stated as fol- 
 lows in the preface of the Book of Common 
 Prayer. " The Church of England . . . hath, 
 in the Preface of her Book of Common Prayer, 
 laid it down as a rule, that ' The particular forms 
 of Divine Worship, and the Rites and Ceremonies 
 appointed to be used therein, being things in their 
 own nature indifferent and alterable, and so ac- 
 knowledged, it is but reasonable that upon 
 weighty and important considerations, according 
 to the various exigencies of times and occasions, 
 such changes and alterations should be made 
 therein, as to those who are in the place of au- 
 thority should, from time to time, seem either 
 necessary or expedient.' " The desire for uni- 
 formity in ceremonial is a quite modern thing. 
 The Middle Ages show a great variety of cere- 
 monial, and at the time of the Reformation there 
 were still a variety of ** uses " in England which 
 no doubt represented a considerable variety of 
 ceremonial. The gradual disuse of the tradi- 
 tional ceremonial during the seventeenth and 
 and eighteenth centuries was governed by no prin- 
 
CEREMONIAL 263 
 
 ciple of the right of particular churches to alter 
 ceremonies — it was not a thing authorised by 
 authority at all — it was simply the result of 
 growing laxity and indifference in religion. 
 Ceremonies were in fact dropped, not because 
 people thought them ** Romish," or because they 
 preferred " a simple service," but because they 
 disbelieved or were indifferent to all that the 
 ceremonies symbolised. 
 
 When in the nineteenth century the Catholic 
 Revival brought in its train a revived interest in 
 ceremonial there was unfortunately no proper 
 guidance in the matter of the restoration of the 
 the lost ceremonies. As ceremonies had been 
 dropped on individual initiative, so were they 
 now restored. This had its unfortunate features 
 and led to a chaotic state of things, ceremonially 
 speaking. But it was inevitable. It is the ordi- 
 nary human way of doing things. Leaders very 
 rarely lead. They are usually pushed. In fact, 
 changes in the ceremonial of the Church, the in- 
 troduction of new services, festivals, etc., have 
 very rarely been done from the initiative of au- 
 thority. They have originated in local needs and 
 circumstances, and when containing a popular 
 appeal have spread and prospered until authority 
 has been compelled to recognise them. It was 
 so with the ceremonial restoration of the nine- 
 
264 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 teenth century. It began because men here and 
 there, recognising the deep meaning of the offices 
 of the Prayer Book, felt the need of emphasising 
 and objectifying that meaning through symboHc 
 action. A deep conception of the meaning of 
 priesthood and sacrifice leads inevitably to the 
 need to express one's belief in the ceremonial ad- 
 juncts of the Eucharist. 
 
 But after two centuries and more of the disuse 
 of ceremonial what was to guide the revival? 
 At that time no one really knew the details of 
 ancient English use. They did know that the 
 fundamental principles of ceremonial are the 
 same in all times, and they selected from ancient 
 and contemporary use such things as seemed to 
 them apposite. Hence a good deal of diversity 
 in detail in the ceremonial in use in various par- 
 ishes to-day. I am not sure that the tears which 
 are shed over this are not wasted. " Different 
 forms and usages may without offence be al- 
 lowed, provided the substance of the Faith be 
 kept entire," the Preface of the Prayer Book 
 says. The assumption of many minds that all 
 things ought to be utterly alike in all places seems 
 to rest on nothing but the temper of the said 
 minds — as they are made that way we need not 
 quarrel with them. In the course of time no 
 doubt authority will recognise that something 
 
CEREMONIAL 265 
 
 has taken place and will regulate it. I do not 
 know that we need regret the continued delay in 
 the coming of that time. The longer those who 
 do not know keep their hands off, the more op- 
 portunity there will be for those who try to know 
 to arrive at an intelligent agreement. In the 
 meantime those of us who rejoice" in that blessed 
 liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free " view 
 the existence of a certain variety in worship 
 " without offence," ** provided the substance of 
 the Faith be kept entire." 
 
XXVII 
 
 FASTING AND ABSTINENCE 
 
 ^^5^ HE progress of which we hear so much as 
 ^^y having marked the last century was mainly 
 a progress in the mastery of the material world. 
 As it affects the life of the average man it does 
 so by putting within his reach a great number of 
 appliances which minister to the ease and comfort 
 of his life. Things which in the beginning are 
 luxuries soon end in becoming necessities in the 
 sense that the lack of them is sorely felt. Our 
 ancestors got on very well without ice-boxes; to 
 us the lack of them would be intolerable. 
 Twenty years ago the automobile was the luxury 
 of the select few; to-day, high and low, rich and 
 poor, find it indispensable to the comfortable con- 
 duct of life. From the standpoint of the padded 
 life we look back and shudder at the sufferings 
 and deprivation of our ancestors. Those suffer- 
 ings exist largely in our imaginations. Born to 
 a certain kind of life they led it with at least as 
 much joy as we lead ours. What has actually 
 
 happened is that for the last century the world 
 
 266 
 
FASTING AND ABSTINENCE 267 
 
 has been becoming more and more enslaved; for 
 we are the slaves of whatever is to us indispens- 
 able. 
 
 With all the modern appliances for comfort 
 and convenience within reach it has become in- 
 creasingly inconceivable to the modern man that 
 discomfort or inconvenience or pain of any sort 
 can be other than an injustice or a nuisance. 
 Comfort, not to say self-indulgence and luxury, 
 has become the primary aim of life. It is an aim 
 that has gained the support of many of our mod- 
 ern religious and moral guides. To be sure 
 these guides still denounce " luxury "of some 
 sort ; but mainly, it turns out, of a sort that is not 
 practiced in circles where they move. They are 
 all quite agreed that '' asceticism " is a thing to 
 be abhorred. They may not denounce fasting; 
 they may go no farther than the English bishop 
 who lately spoke of it as " innocuous." 
 
 Such an attitude toward fasting draws a sharp 
 line between the ancient and the modern world. 
 Fasting has been an universal element in the 
 religious practice of the past. Back of it, I sup- 
 pose, lies the sense of sin, a sense of being out 
 of harmony with whatever power or person was 
 conceived to be responsible for human life, and to 
 whom human life is accountable. This lack of 
 harmony, this disorder of nature, was felt to have 
 
268 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 its seat to a great degree in the passions, and 
 their unruliness and tendency to revolt against 
 accepted principles of life were the plain evidence 
 of the power of sin. Dealing with sin, then, 
 meant dealing with our unruly passions. 
 
 But the analysis went deeper than that, ivlan, 
 so it was held, was a spiritual being, but the pow- 
 ers of his spiritual nature must express them- 
 selves through his physical nature. Thought, 
 meditation, prayer are spiritual acts, but their 
 successful operation depends on the state of our 
 physical nature. Extreme indulgence of physical 
 passions and appetites unfits a man for the life 
 of the spirit — his spiritual nature is hindered in 
 its efforts at expression. But this inhibition of 
 the spirit does not arise solely in cases of what 
 we should call abuse of our physical nature; it 
 arises in some degree under circumstances which 
 we should consider quite normal and innocent. 
 Every one knows that the time immediately after 
 a hearty meal is not favorable to mental or spir- 
 itual effort. On the other hand, any one knows, 
 or may know by trying, that a carefully reduced 
 diet makes mental and spiritual work easy. A 
 proper discipline of the physical nature, so it is 
 held, has a twofold object: (i) By withholding 
 the fuel whereon passion is nourished it tends to 
 diminish sin. (2) It does this ultimately because 
 
FASTING AND ABSTINENCE 269 
 
 It removes or reduces the inhibitions to spiritual 
 activity, and enables the will to control the pas- 
 sions, which, if highly stimulated, would prove 
 too strong for it. 
 
 That, roughly enough expressed, is, I take it, a 
 fair account of the theory underlying the uni- 
 versal custom of fasting. This practice Chris- 
 tianity found rooted in the Jewish system and 
 took over as a part of the practice of the Church. 
 I am not aware that the Church initiated any new 
 theory of fasting; it accepted it as current prac- 
 tice and added to it. Our Lord assumed that His 
 followers would fast " when the Bridegroom was 
 taken from them " ; the Epistles of the New Tes- 
 tament show us the new-born Church engaged in 
 fasting and prayer. Church history shows us an 
 application of the principle of fasting in the grad- 
 ual development of a whole calendar of fasts 
 covering the entire Christian Year ; Wednesdays, 
 Fridays, and to some extent Saturdays were set 
 apart as fasts. Fasts were established before 
 Christmas and Easter. Vigils were kept in prep- 
 aration for feasts. Men fasted as a preparation 
 for the reception of the sacraments. And in 
 addition to all this was the prevalence of volun- 
 tary fasting as a method of self-discipline. Fast- 
 ing from the beginning was rooted in the Chris- 
 tian devotional system, and nothing better indi- 
 
270 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 cates the utterly self-willed character of the reli- 
 gious systems which claim to be in a special sense 
 " biblical " than their repudiation of a practice so 
 completely biblical in its character. 
 
 " We have outgrown such mediaeval practices," 
 is the usual account of modern laxity in the mat- 
 ter of fasting. To call it mediaeval is, of course, 
 only a rhetorical trick to discredit it in the mind 
 of the unthinking. It is not in the least a true 
 characterization of fasting as it is a universal 
 custom from early times. But it is more impor- 
 tant to challenge the assumption that we have out- 
 grown the need of fasting. Is it true that the 
 spiritual level of the twentieth century is such as 
 to indicate that it can dispense with fasting, with 
 asceticism and all spiritual discipline? Is the 
 flesh so subdued to the Spirit in the average 
 church-member that he can lay fasting aside as 
 a remedy no longer needed? Have the sins of 
 the flesh died out or become so infrequent as to 
 be negligible? Have spiritual activities become 
 easy and unhindered by passion or appetite ? The 
 student of modern literature or the observer of 
 modern life would not be likely to draw such 
 conclusions. 
 
 Indeed, I suppose no one would answer these 
 questions in the afiirmative ; what would be said 
 is that fasting is no remedy for the ills complained 
 
FASTING AND ABSTINENCE 27I 
 
 of. I am content to appeal to the assertion of 
 the past, and especially of the Christian past (as- 
 sertions which embody an age-long experience) 
 that fasting is one — of course not the only one 
 — but one of the remedies and a very effectual 
 remedy. My purpose does not really carry me 
 further than this. I am simply insisting that the 
 religion of the Prayer Book is a religion which 
 takes the view of human nature that I have been 
 trying to expound — the view that being sinful 
 and inordinate it needs discipline and control, and 
 that one of the means for attaining such disci- 
 pHne and control is in the regular practice of fast- 
 ing and abstinence; and that as a guide in this 
 matter, and that the individual shall not be left 
 in uncertainty and irregularity of self-choosing, 
 the Church has set forth a certain table of days 
 and seasons of fasting and abstinence. 
 
 These can be read in the Book of Common 
 Prayer. That they are not always read appears 
 from the surprise which is not infrequently 
 aroused by an attempt to teach the obligation of 
 fasting. It is within the experience of every one 
 who is accustomed to observe the law of the 
 Church in this matter, that the practice of absti- 
 nence is attended with some difficulty in the 
 houses of those who are commonly denominated 
 " good churchmen." But there it stands in the 
 
2^2 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 Book of Common Prayer — " A Table of Fasts " 
 ' — designating Ash Wednesday and Good Friday 
 as days of fasting ; and going on to specify ** other 
 days of fasting, on which the Church requires 
 such a measure of abstinence as is more especially 
 suited to extraordinary acts and exercises of de- 
 votion." 
 
 It is interesting to hear from time to time the 
 explanations which are proffered from the pul- 
 pit and elsewhere as to the meaning of fasting 
 and abstinence. Of course when the table in the 
 Prayer Book was drawn up there was no doubt 
 in any man's mind what is meant and therefore 
 no need of any explanation. Fasting meant go- 
 ing without food. It did not mean ** fasting 
 from sin," which really is not a special obliga- 
 tion of Ash Wednesday and Good Friday. Ab- 
 stinence meant abstinence from flesh food ; it did 
 not mean abstaining from amusements, though 
 such abstinence is quite congruous with the per- 
 formance of extraordinary acts of devotion. 
 Fasting and abstinence mean to-day precisely 
 what they did when the table in the Prayer Book 
 was drawn up. It is not permitted to substitute 
 some other observance which we think '* more 
 suitable to our modern conditions " and keep the 
 law of the Church to which we belong. 
 
 Aside from those who just brush the obliga- 
 
FASTING AND ABSTINENCE 273 
 
 tion of fasting away as a survival of a religious 
 system with which they have no sympathy and 
 do not conceive that they are at all bound by the 
 laws of the Church, there are several other classes 
 of persons in the Church, whose questioning 
 about fasting shows perplexity rather than dis- 
 loyalty. There are those who *' cannot fast " — 
 those, that is, whom fasting makes more or less 
 uncomfortable. That would not seem to be a 
 reason for declining the practice. One of the 
 ends of fasting is the discipline of the appetite 
 which is usually attended with some discomfort; 
 and there is good medical authority for the as- 
 sertion that such discipline is ordinarily beneficial 
 to the health. Moreover, the assumption that 
 we ought to do nothing which will interfere with 
 our comfort is hardly well grounded. 
 
 There are those who object to abstinence on the 
 contrary ground that it does minister to comfort. 
 These are they who " like fish," or to whom it is 
 no hardship to go without meat. It has to be 
 explained to such that the obligation of a day of 
 abstinence is not to eat fish or any other kind of 
 food, but to go without flesh food. There are 
 many other kinds of food beside fish which can 
 be eaten on such days. An all-wise Providence 
 has provided that the string bean should bear 
 abundantly in all seasons. 
 
274 THE RELIGION OF THE PRAYER BOOK 
 
 In general, we may say in reply to the question, 
 What is the use of fasting? that obedience to the 
 law of the Church of which we are members 
 must always be a good thing, and that having 
 obeyed a law we are much more likely to find the 
 use of it than while we persist in disobedience. 
 If there were nothing else to be gained than the 
 eliciting of an act of obedience, I should think 
 fasting altogether justified. In a time when self- 
 will and self-assertion are rampant the subjuga- 
 tion of ourselves to an obligation of this sort is 
 most desirable. It is an important element in our 
 education that we should be brought up to respect 
 authority and to act because we are told to act. 
 
 But the law of fasting is not a meaningless 
 demand on obedience. It is in itself disciplinary. 
 It is probably true that as a whole the modern 
 world is more abstemious than the ancient; but 
 there is still room for improvement. It is still 
 true that gluttony is a widespread sin. It is also 
 true that many common sins have their roots in 
 the indulgence of the appetite. It is well to dem- 
 onstrate our self-control in the matter of appetite, 
 that we may overcome the temptations which have 
 their seat in the flesh. 
 
 Lastly, we must face the ascetic principle that 
 self-control is not ultimately for the negative rea- 
 son of repression of appetite but for the positive 
 
FASTING AND ABSTINENCE 27$ 
 
 reason of the release of spiritual power. If it is 
 our individual experience that this does not hap- 
 pen in our case there is something the matter 
 with us; we have not mastered nor properly di- 
 rected the discipline. The experience of the 
 saints in all the Christian centuries is that fasting 
 and abstinence are aids to devotion; and the 
 Prayer Book in prescribing such acts is wholly in 
 line with the experience of the past. 
 
 THE END 
 

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