THE CHURCH CATECHISM.
Allow me to make the following inquiries through the pages of "N. & Q.," which may possibly elicit valuable information from some of your many correspondents. In the Archbishop of York's questions put to candidates for Holy Orders, Feb. 1850, occurred this Query: "The Church Catechism ... by whom was the latter part added and put into its present form; and whence is it chiefly derived?" The former part of this is readily answered; being, as any one at all read in the history of the Prayer-Book well knows, added at the Hampton Court Conference, 1603; and was drawn up by Bishop Overall, at that time Dean of St. Paul's: but whence is it chiefly derived? That is the question for which I have hitherto sought in vain a satisfactory solution, and fear his grace, or his examining chaplain, must have looked in vain for a correct reply from any of his quasi clergymen, college education though they may have had. It is a point which seems to be passed over entirely unnoticed by all of our liturgical writers and church historians, as I have been at no little pains in searching works at all likely to clear it up, but, hitherto, without success. It may be conjectured that the part referred to, viz., on the Sacraments, was taken from Dean Nowell's Catechism; or, at all events, that Overall borrowed some of the expressions while he changed its meaning, as Nowell's was purely Calvinistic in tendency. He may have had before him the fourth part of Peter Lombard's Liber Sententiarum, or some such work. But all this is mere supposition; and what I want to arrive at, is some correct data or authoritative statement which would settle the point. Another interesting matter upon which I am desirous of information, is, as to the protestation after the rubrics at the end of the Communion Service. In our present Prayer-Book it is in marks of quotation, which we do not find in the second book of King Edward VI., where it originally appears—and the expressions there admit the real presence. It was altogether left out in Elizabeth's Prayer-Book, but again inserted in the last review in 1661, when the inverted commas first appear: the sense being somewhat different, allowing the spiritual but not the actual or bodily presence of Christ. Why are the commas or marks of quotation, if such they be, then inserted? I have written to a well-known Archdeacon, eminent for his works on the Sacraments, but his answer does not convey what is sought by
C. J. Armistead.
Springfield Mount, Leeds.