The following pages had been prepared, for the most part, for publication, before it was known that the question of Ritual would be discussed in Convocation, or a Committee of the Lower House appointed, by the direction of the Upper House, to report upon it.
But the suggestions here offered are of so general a character, that it seemed to the writer that they might still without impropriety be put forth as a contribution, of however humble a kind, to the general ventilation of the subject.
It was the writer's hope, as expressed in the original announcement of the Pamphlet, that his Diocesan, the venerable Bishop of Exeter, would have been able to prefix, in an Introduction, his opinion on the leading points, whether of Ritual or Doctrine, involved in the present controversy. And, although that hope has been in part frustrated, he has still been privileged to embody, in an Appendix, his Lordship's deliberate judgment on some of the weightier matters of Eucharistic Doctrine; and to receive an assurance of his warm interest in the subjects dwelt upon in these pages.
The writer has to apologise for having occasionally referred the reader to a larger work of his own. He begs that this may be understood to be merely a guarantee, that detailed proof is forthcoming on points which could only be cursorily treated of in the present publication.
RITES AND RITUAL,
ETC.
The position of affairs in the English Church, at the present moment, is such as may well call forth from her children such counsel as their affection may prompt, or their experience justify. And, whatever be the intrinsic value, if any, of the suggestions about to be offered here, the writer can at least testify that, though called forth by a particular conjuncture of circumstances, they are not the hasty or immature thoughts of the moment, but rather an outpouring of the anxious musing of years over the condition and prospects of a beloved and honoured Mother.
It will be conjectured, from what has now been said, that the writer is not among the number of those who perceive, in the present condition of the English Church, or in her rate of improvement of late years, any grounds for satisfaction, much less for complacency or congratulation. On the contrary, he very humbly conceives—and his reasons for that opinion shall be given presently—that to the spiritual eye, used to rest either on what the Church of God was intended to be, or on what once, for a few centuries, she was, there is, in the practical condition of the English Church one defect of so radical a character, and which has eaten so extensively into her entire system, that until this is, at least in a very great measure, remedied, all else is little better than a palliative, and little else than an illusion. There is surely something deeply saddening in the spectacle (if it indeed be so) of a Church busying herself with "many things"—making much show of practical activity, of self-reparation, of improvement in services and ministries, of extension abroad—when all the while the "one thing," namely, soundness and perfectness in Apostolic faith and practice, is in any serious degree wanting to her. If, while she is manifesting a feverish anxiety about the more or less of Ritual, there is in her Rites (of which Ritual is but the outward clothing) that which demands repair and readjustment on an extensive scale; then it is surely needful to press upon her, in the first instance, the redress of such essentials, before proceeding to speak of the accessories.
And this is what the present writer, with all humility, undertakes to make good. He is indeed far from denying that, "by the good Hand of our God upon us," great things, of a certain kind, have been accomplished in our day.
Our churches have grown to be, to a great extent, the perfection of earthly sanctuaries. Our Services are nobler and heartier. Our church music is more worthy of the name. Better still than this, and more to the present purpose, our communicants have increased in numbers, our Communions in frequency. Our clergy, as a rule, are devoted, beyond the example of former times, to their duty, according to their conception of it. Schools are diligently cared for, and are fairly efficient; foreign missions grow; the home circle of charities is daily widened and rendered more effectual. And this is "progress," or "improvement," undoubtedly. And, were the Church a mere Machine, or a mere System, it would be perfectly reasonable to point with satisfaction to such progress or improvement. But the Church is neither the one nor the other. She is a Divine Body. And what if, while some operations of that Body are being performed with a certain increase of vigour, her very constitution, as divinely organised by God Himself, is being suffered to fall into habitual and chronic unsoundness?
Surely, as it is the first duty of man to do right, and only his second to do good;—as health is the highest of bodily blessings, so that activity, apart from it, is but spurious and imperfect;—so is it the Church's first duty to be sound—primum valere—and only her second to be, if God enables her, active and prosperous.
And the Church being, as I have said, a Divine Body—the Body of Christ—it is plain that the first condition of her soundness is full as well as vital union with Christ through the appointed medium, the Sacraments. Upon these are absolutely suspended her existence in the first instance, and her preservation and growth afterwards. What then, I would ask, can possibly be of more importance than that these sacred and wonderful ministries should be performed, in all respects, according to the Ordinance of Christ, such as he delivered it to the apostles?
And if it be asked, How are we to know what it was that Christ delivered to the apostles on this subject, seeing that Holy Scripture is confessedly brief and unsystematic in its teaching respecting it? the answer manifestly is, By looking at the universal practice of the Church in the time of the apostles, and during the earliest ages after them. We know, with sufficient accuracy, what that practice was. Their customs as to the administration of Baptism are known to us; their Liturgies or Communion Offices are in our hands. And, though diversities of practice, outside of certain limits, are found existing in those ages, within certain limits there is none.
Now, among the points thus defined for us by universal early usage, is the ordained frequency of celebration of both Sacraments. The law of Holy Baptism, viz. that it should be administered once only, was universally received. This is confessed on all hands.
And when we come to the Holy Eucharist, here, too, the degree of frequency, as a law and as a minimum, of celebration, is defined for us no less certainly. That this was, by universal consent and practice, weekly—namely, on every Lord's Day or Sunday—cannot be gainsaid. That it was on occasion administered more frequently still; that in some churches it became, we will not define how early, even daily; that, according to some, the apostles, at the very first, used it daily—is beside the present question. The point before us is, that there was no Church throughout the world which failed, for the first three or four hundred years, to have everywhere a weekly celebration on the Sunday, and to expect the attendance of all Christians at that ordinance. Of this, I say, there is no doubt. The custom of apostolic days is perfectly clear from Acts xx. 7, and other passages. The testimony of Pliny, at the beginning of the second century, is that the first Christians met "on a stated day" for the Eucharist; while Justin Martyr (an. 150) makes it certain that that day was Sunday. And the testimony of various subsequent writers proves that the practice continued unbroken for three centuries. The Council of Elvira,[1] A.D. 305, first inflicted the penalty of suspension from church privileges on all who failed to be present for three successive Sundays; and we know from our own Archbishop Theodore of Tarsus, A.D. 668, that in the East that rule was still adhered to, though in the West the penalty had ceased to be inflicted.
Now the ground which I venture to take up, as absolutely irrefragable, is that it must needs be of most dangerous consequence to depart from the apostolic and primitive eucharistic practice, in any of those things which were ancient and universal, and, as such, we cannot doubt, ordained features of the Ordinance. Thus, we rightly view with the utmost repugnance, and even sickness of heart, the practice of the Western Church in later ages in respect of the Elements; viz. her refusing to the laity, and to all but the Celebrant himself, one half of the Holy Eucharist. We pity or marvel at the flimsy pretences by which the fearful and cruel decree, originating in the bestowal of exclusive privileges upon the higher clergy,[2] is attempted to be justified, and its effects to be explained away. The Western Church, we feel, must answer for that to God as she can. But what right have we, I would ask, to choose, among the essentials of the mysterious Ordinance, one which, as we conceive, we may dispense with, while we condemn others who select for themselves another? And yet, what do we? what is our practice? the practice so universally adopted throughout our Church, that the exceptions are few, and but of yesterday; so that those who contend for and practise the contrary are deemed visionary and righteous over much? Alas! our practice may be stated in few and fatally condemnatory words. The number of clergy in England may be roundly stated at 20,000. Now, it was lately affirmed in a Church Review of high standing, that the number who celebrate the Holy Communion weekly in England is 200: that is to say, if this estimate be correct, that one in a hundred of our clergy conforms to the apostolic and ecclesiastical law of the first centuries. This statement, it is true, proves to be somewhat of an exaggeration. But to what extent? The real number of churches where there is Holy Communion every Sunday is, by recent returns, about 430.[3] The number of churches in England is at least 12,000. That is to say, that there are in England at this moment more than eleven thousand parishes which, judged by the rule of the apostles, are false to their Lord's dying command in a particular from which He left no dispensation. It will be said, the Holy Eucharist is celebrated in these parishes from time to time, only less frequently than of old. But who has told us that we may safely celebrate it less frequently? How can we possibly know but that such infrequency is direfully injurious? Take the analogy of the human body, which ever serves to illustrate so well the nature of the Church's life. Take pulsation, take respiration, or even food. Is not the frequency of every one of these mysterious conditions of life as certainly fixed, as their necessity to life at all? Let pulsation or respiration be suspended for a few minutes, or food for a few days, and what follows but death, or trance at the best? And what know we, I ask, of the appointed intervals for the awful systole and diastole of the Church's heart—of the appointed times of her inbreathing and expiration of the afflatus of the Divine Spirit—of the laws regulating the frequency of her mysterious nourishment? What know we, I say, of these things, but what we learn from the wondrous Twelve, who taught us all we know of the kingdom of God?
What may be the exact injury of such intermittent celebration of the Divine Mysteries—of such scanty and self-chosen measures of obedience to the commands of Christ—I pretend not by these analogies to decide. But surely it may well be that continuous and unbroken weekly Eucharist is as a ring of magic power, if I may use the comparison, binding in and rendering safe the Church's mysterious life; and that any rupture in that continuity is exceedingly dangerous to her.
Or if it be contended, as not unnaturally it may, that this particular circumstance of frequency, and of weekly recurrence may, notwithstanding the apostolic testimony to its importance, be subject to variation, then I would desire to put the matter from another point of view. One way of judging of the degree of importance to be attached by us to any given religious element or feature, is to observe what degree of divine care Almighty God has bestowed in inculcating it upon the world. Thus, the Unity of God, and again the necessity of sacrifice to atone for sin, or procure admission to His favour, were attested throughout the whole pre-evangelic history by special training, imparted, in the one instance, to the Jews, in the other to all mankind.
But each of these instances of training is even surpassed by that which God was pleased to impart respecting the mysterious Ordinance of the WEEK. Creation, Redemption, Sanctification—the three great phenomena of man's religious history—were all visibly based upon the Week. About the Creation, and its septenary commemoration as a religious ordinance, there is no real doubt whatever. In the Jewish system the sabbath, or week, is the basis upon which the whole structure rests.[4] And when the awful mystery of Redemption itself was to be consummated, it was once more within the limits of a single week that the mighty drama was wrought out. From the early morning of Palm Sunday, when our Lord entered Jerusalem as the Lamb of God, Incarnate in order that He might suffer, to the early morning of Easter Day, when He rose from the dead, a measured week, rich in divine incident, ran out. Seven weeks, or a week of weeks, again elapses, and the Spirit is sent down from on high for the completion of the Church. All this indicates some deep mystery of blessedness as attaching to the seven-days period in the matter of man's relations to God. It cannot be alleged, indeed, as an absolute proof that the celebration of the Eucharist was also meant to be of weekly recurrence, or that such recurrence would be the proper and indefeasible law of its rightful administration. But it surely renders that conclusion highly probable. For what purpose else, we may ask, was all this training given? Why was the Jewish nation, who were to be the first to receive the Gospel ordinances, and to transmit them to mankind, carefully habituated to a seventh-day rendering up of themselves to God? As regards the general principle involved, it was doubtless because it is good that man should keep with God these "short reckonings," which "make long" and eternal "friends." But besides this, it was, as the ancient Jewish services testify,[5] that they might keep in remembrance two very wonderful weeks of divine operation on their behalf, the week of Creation, and the week of their own deliverance out of Egypt. What more likely than that a seventh-day observance was to be perpetuated still, only with reference to that antitypical Redemption, which itself also was ordained to take place, as if for this very purpose, within the compass of a week?
continual remembrancecontinual