These principles I have endeavoured to set out during the past four Sundays. Mainly there were only three, which were attacked by the upholders of the Reformation doctrines. The Papal Supremacy over the Church, the safeguard of unity of Faith, and a mark of the Church, Christ established in this world; the Christian Sacrifice—the Mass, attacked and swept away by the Reformers; and the Priesthood in its sacrificial character, which was the necessary consequence of the Eucharistic doctrine upheld by the German and English Reformers. There were of course many minor points of Catholic belief and practice which were attacked and destroyed in these days; such, for example, as devotion to the Mother of God and the Saints, and the long established custom of blessed ashes and candles and the creeping to the Cross on Good Friday. But the main lines of departure from the Catholic Faith along which the Reformation moved were the three I have indicated. A return can be contemplated only by frankly facing the issues. To-day we find men of the highest intelligence and good faith claiming to have the same Christian sacrifice and the same sacrificing priests as the Catholic Church, and they are using a Communion Service from which of set purpose every notion of Oblation and Sacrifice has been ruthlessly removed, and their ministers are ordained by an Ordinal, which designedly was composed to express the rejection of the sacrificial character of the Christian priest. The prayer for Christian Unity must go up from every heart, but if it is to be something more than sentiment, the facts must be faced frankly and with courage.
[BOOKS] SUGGESTED FOR READING
Short History of the Church in England. Gasquet.
Henry III and the Church. Gasquet.
Roman Law and Canon Law. Maitland.
Lollardy and the Reformation, 4 vols. Gairdner.
History of the Reformation. Blunt.
History of the English Church in the 16th Century. Gairdner.
The Eve of the Reformation. Gasquet.
England under the Old Religion and Other Essays. Gasquet.
What then happened at the Reformation (in above).
Henry VIII and the English Monasteries. Gasquet.
Henry VI and the Book of Common Prayer. Gasquet and Bishop.
What Edward VI did with the Liturgy (in England under the Old Religion).
Anglican Ordinations (in above).
Anglican Ordinations. Canon Estcourt.
The Pope and the Ordinal. S. Barnes.
The Elizabethan Religious Settlement. H. N. Birt.
Hampshire Recusants. Gasquet.
The Line of Cleavage (C. T. Soc.). H. N. Birt.
Parker Society publications.
Catholic Truth Society—various Historical Papers.
The Ecclesia Anglicana, for what does it Stand? By the Bishop of Tanzibar, and subsequent correspondence in the London Times, December, 1913, and January, 1914.