This portion of the liturgy was entitled, "The Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion, commonly called the Mass." It is divided into "the Ordinary," and "the Canon." The first part begins with the Lord's Prayer; and then follow the Collect for purity, the Introit (now omitted), the Kyrie Eleison, the Gloria in Excelsis, Dominus Vobiscum, Collects for the day and for the king, the Epistle, Gospel, and Nicene Creed, the sermon, Exhortation, Offertory, and Oblation; Dominus Vobiscum, Sursum Corda, the Preface, and the Sanctus. The canon now consists of one long prayer of consecration, but in the Prayer-book of 1549 it comprised many other parts copied pretty closely from the missal; and the confession and absolution, which are now transferred to an early part of the ordinary, came in their proper place immediately before the communion. After communion were the Agnus Dei and Post-Communion, the Collects, and other prayers and ceremonies, very much as we have them in the mass. The rubric of 1549 says: "When the clerks have done singing the Sanctus, then shall the priest or deacon turn himself to the people and say, 'Let us pray for the whole state of Christ's church;'" to which the present office adds the words, "militant here on earth." An able paper in a collection of essays by advanced ritualists, published in London last year, [Footnote 11] argues from this that prayers for the dead formerly had place and are still allowable in the English liturgy. If this be not so, the author says, "we shall find ourselves placed in a dilemma which to a Catholic mind is inexpressibly painful. For.... it follows that the liturgy of the English Church is the only living liturgy, the only known extant liturgy which is wanting in remembrance of its faithful departed. From which dilemma we may devoutly say, Good Lord, deliver us."
[Footnote 11: The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day. By various writers. First series. Edited by the Rev. Orby Shipley, M. A. Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyre. 1866.]
In the consecration prayers there is an important part found in the book Of 1549, but now left out, of which the same writer says: "We can scarcely too deeply deplore the loss, or earnestly desire that it may be restored to us." This is the invocation of the Holy Ghost, and it reads as follows: "Hear us, O merciful Father, we beseech thee, and with thy holy spirit and word vouchsafe to bl+ess and sanc+tify these thy gifts and creatures of bread and wine, that they may be to us the body and blood of thy most dearly beloved son Jesus Christ." Here we have not only an authorization but an explicit direction for the use of the sign of the cross, at which many good Episcopalians shudder nervously as at a diabolical popish invention. It was left out of the later Prayer-books, but never prohibited.
Before the communion there is a formula of invitation which the minister is to read to the people, bidding them to the Lord's table. In the present Prayer-book it contains nothing which calls for special remark; but in that of 1549 it embraced the following passage: "And if there be any of you whose conscience is troubled and grieved in anything, lacking comfort or counsel, let him come to me, or to some other discreet and learned priest, taught in the law of God, and confess and open his sin and grief secretly .... that of us he may receive comfort and absolution," etc.
The writer of the essay above quoted favors not only a return to the old Edwardian liturgy, but a revival of various other usages to which we need not more particularly refer than by saying that they all have a genuine Catholic flavor. He sees no reason, apart from prejudice, why Anglicans should not call their communion service by "the old English word 'Mass;" and he deprecates the Protestant custom of consuming at once all the bread and wine which are blessed for the Lord's Supper, without reserving any for the visitation of the sick. "Those who minister among the lowest poor in missionary work," he says, "can bear witness how distressing oftentimes are celebrations in the crowded and sick rooms of a town population." And he quotes an instance in which the Eucharist had to be consecrated for a dying man who occupied one corner of a crowded room tenanted by several other families. In another corner crouched a woman of the vilest class, and during the consecration unclean insects were crawling over the "fair white linen cloth" upon which the elements were laid. Can we wonder that to a minister who believes in the Real Presence, and in his own power to consecrate, a celebration such as this must seem like profanation?
If there were nothing in this ritualistic revival but an attempt to borrow the rich robes of faith and dress up in them the shrunken form of heresy, it would hardly be worth our attention. It is little to us whether the human laws of the realm of England permit the ministers of the Established Church to stand with their backs to the congregation or not; whether they may legally burn candles in daylight, or swing censers, or chant their prayers instead of saying them, or wear colored and embroidered vestments instead of the plain surplice and the black gown. Since they have taken the liberty to discard faith and obedience, one would think it of little matter that they should discard ceremonies also. After they have lost the substance, why should they care for the form? If they could abolish, for instance, the celibacy of the clergy, they had surely as good a right to abolish a red or green chasuble. Indeed, to be logical, they ought to ordain, alter, and abolish just what they please. But it is impossible not to see that there is a great deal more in this movement than a mere striving after beautiful and impressive forms. There is first a reawakening of the Catholic idea of public worship, and a rejection of the common Protestant theory. It is the Protestant principle, not always expressly acknowledged, but practically acted upon, that the primary object of a religious service is the edification of the people; it is the Catholic idea that the chief purpose of that service is the worship of Almighty God. The Englishman, Thomas Sampson, whose complaint to Peter Martyr touching lights and crucifixes, we quoted just now, says in the same letter: "What hope is there of any good when our friends are disposed to look for religion in those dumb remnants of idolatry, and not in the preaching of the lively word of God?" And what is it but a recognition of this principle which causes most of the Protestant sects to lay such stress upon sermons as to make them the predominating feature of every service, and often gives their public prayers such a doctrinal and exhortatory character that they can hardly be distinguished from sermons except by the substitution of the phrase "Almighty God" for "Beloved brethren"? Now, the ritualists, whatever their shortcomings, are at any rate free from this absurdity. Sermon-hearing or meditation, says one of their late writers, may be salutary enough in its proper time and place, but it is not worship. Here, no doubt, is a great advance in the right direction. But this is not all. An essay "On the Eucharistic Sacrifice" in The Church and the World gives the Catholic doctrine still more explicitly, and acknowledges "that Christian worship is really the earthly exhibition of Christ's perpetual intercession as the sole high priest of his church, the sole acceptable presenter of the one worship of his one body in heaven and in earth, and that as such it culminates in his own mysterious presence, in and by the sacrament of his most precious body and blood."
In this recognition of the true functions of the Christian ministry, the true character of the worship which ought to be offered in God's holy temple, we may suppose the ritualists to be pretty well agreed. But doctrinally, they may be divided into two classes. With the one class, a gorgeous ritual is merely the gratification of an aesthetic or antiquarian taste; with the other it is the logical development of an advance in doctrine. The one class would bring back the practice of the Anglican Church to what it used to be in old days; the other would imitate the rites and ceremonies which were followed in the Catholic Church ages before Anglicanism was heard of.
The second class is, we believe, the more numerous, as it certainly is by far the more important of the two. Its views are set forth with frankness and decided ability in the volume which we have already quoted; and we are certain that no one can read these essays without feeling that the ritualists are legitimate successors of the tractarians of thirty years ago, and that there is promise of as much good from the agitation which they are leading as came from the great movement of Dr. Newman and Dr. Pusey. "Ritualism," says one of the essayists, "is not employed as a side-wind, by which to bring in certain tenets surreptitiously, but as the natural complement of those tenets after they have been long and sedulously inculcated." The burning of candles and incense is of very little moment, considered as a mere form, but it is of great moment when it is done as the ritualists do it for the sake of rendering honor to the real presence of our Lord. It is of no consequence what order of words or what gestures or what dress the Anglican minister uses in reading the communion office, because he has not the priestly character, and if he followed literally the missal itself, he could not celebrate a valid mass. But if he comes as close to the missal as he can, by way of testifying that he believes in the doctrines stated and symbolized in the missal; if he imitates the ceremonies of the daily Christian sacrifice, in order to show his belief in the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, that fact becomes of serious importance, and indicates a genuine progress toward truth, at which every good Catholic ought to rejoice. The practice of auricular confession is not new in the Anglican Church; but it acquires additional significance when it is spoken of, as it is in the Church and the Word, by the name of "the sacrament of penance," for the Church of England recognizes no sacraments except baptism and the supper of the Lord.
If there is any name which a genuine ritualist really hates it is that of Protestant. The avowed purpose of the advanced school is to unprotestantize the Church of England; and the writer just quoted speaks of having found comfort at a time of spiritual doubt and trial, in the belief that the English Church was still a part of the Catholic Church, "unless she sinned sufficiently at the reformation to justify Rome in cutting her off." "Our place is appointed us," says the same essayist, "among Protestants and in a communion deeply tainted in its practical system by Protestant heresy; but our duty is the expulsion of the evil, and not flight from it, any more than it is a duty for those to leave the Roman Church who become conscious also of abuses within her system." The Church of England indeed, has but a weak hold upon the faith or affection of the ritualists of this school. We find the XXXIX. Articles spoken of as "those Protestant articles tacked on to a Catholic liturgy, those forty stripes save one, as some have called them,