When we grant or assert that the church in her devotional aspect is adaptive, elastic, or (to return to our term) subjective, what is this but to say that she has life? Life as distinct from machinery, stereotype, or routine. It is saying that she has a living intelligence, spiritual instinct, a faculty to discriminate between essentials and non-essentials in her worship, and a versatility and a resource to apply, to modify, to expand the non-sacramental and therefore accidental channels of grace to her children. Because she is thus alive with the indwelling life of the Paraclete who abides with her for ever, and thus animated with a supernatural wisdom and maternal charity, she is prompt to seize occasions, and to extemporize combinations to the greater glory of God. Hers is an ever quick and energizing power, exerted over man as man, and over all men indifferently. In the inspired words of the wise man: "Being but one, she can do all things; and remaining in herself the same, she reneweth all things, and through nations conveyeth herself into holy souls." Wisd. vii. 27. What the philosopher claimed as being man, she claims as being the church of men: Nihil humanum a me alienum puto. She raises no question on the form of government or previous training, any more than on the clime or color of the "Trojans or Tyrians" within her realm. She translates her prayers, and imparts her indulgences in as many tongues as were found in Jerusalem on the day of Pentecost. In the political sphere she will bless the banners and chant a Te Deum on the triumphs of every righteous cause, whether the tricolor and stripes of a republic or the blazonings of an ancient monarchy. And so in her devotional element, finding more stability of character in some provinces of her kingdom, more versatility and impulse in others, some of her children more given to contemplation, some to a larger amount of vocal prayer, she accepts these differing conditions without disturbance or hesitation. Wise householder and faithful stewardess, as the gospel declares her to be, the church brings out from her treasury things new and old. She adopts and sanctions every new devotion that has been inspired into her saints: the rosary of St. Dominic, the scapular of St. Simon Stock, the discipline of St. Peter Damian, the meditations of St. Benedict, the spiritual exercises of St. Ignatius and his systematized methods of prayer. Nothing is a dangerous novelty, while she has inerrancy of judgment. No dubious expression or practice can spread, or even live, while in her hand is the sword of the Spirit,
No fervor can lead to ill-regulated enthusiasm while she exercises the twofold office, to animate and to control.
In direct contrast with this divine adjustment and harmony stand the arrangements of that communion in the midst of us which has so long claimed the title of a church. England, as represented by her rulers, three hundred years ago, breaking from the centre of unity, and disowning every link with St. Peter's chair, isolated thenceforward and self-contained, had before her a three-fold task. She was to extemporize at once doctrine, discipline, and devotion. The process was in many ways remarkable. But its chief feature for our present purpose is one especial travesty and reversal of the due order of things which was then exhibited. While doctrine, by the necessity of the case, became subjective, the formularies or "common prayer" were stereotyped or frozen into a form that was well named uniformity, and might in a kind of perverse sense be called objective. The Anglican communion is the reed where the Catholic Church is the oak; but en revanche, she is stiff and wooden where the church is pliant and tender. She has bent to every breath of doctrine: then, as if in tribute to the principle of stability, has bound down her children to pray, at least, by rule. She does not pipe to them that they may dance, and mourn to them that they may lament. There is no modulation in her pastoral reed; no change of expression in her fixed uniformity of demeanor. An exception must here be made for the ritualist exhibitions of these later years; but it is an exception which proves the rule. Ritualism is a protest against the cold negations of the Establishment. It is in turn protested against with more energy by the indignant good sense of the country, and, so far as they venture, by the country's bishops. The clergy appear in colored stoles, and are met by a mandate to "take off those ribbons." Decorations must be removed from the communion-table before consecration of the church can take place. Each opening flower is nipped by the breath of episcopal authority,
"'Et mox
Bruma recurrit iners."
Not to speak, then, of ritualism, but of the genuine spirit of the establishment. This holds the even tenor of its way, undisturbed by signs and seasons, and days and years. The established church does not quench her tapers on Good Friday because she does not light them on Easter morning; has no rubric for stripping her altars, and gives no encouragement for their decoration. She sprinkles no ashes on Ash-Wednesday, sings no alleluias for the Resurrection, lights no candles, says no Mass on Candelmas. Like something learned by rote and spoken by a machine, her ministers address their flocks in the self-same language, whether the morning usher in the annual solemn fast or the queen of festivals. Their form most truly styles itself, "The Order for Morning and Evening Prayer, daily to be said and used throughout the year." This is the objectivity of the established church, as "authorized by act of Parliament, holden in the fifth and sixth years of our said late sovereign lord, King Edward the Sixth, … with the alterations and additions therein added and appointed by this statute," "Primo Elizabethae."
Nor was this stereotyped, unelastic method optional with them. It was a necessity of the position of the establishment from its beginning. Having torn down the altar and set up the reading-desk, abolished the daily sacrifice, and made the lion and unicorn stand in the holy place, converted the priest into a minister, and succeeded, under the hydraulic pressure of royal mandates, in forcing two sets of doctrines to coexist within the space of one communion, the framers of the new order of things had, as a chief part of it, to invent a form of prayer. This form must be comprehensive as to doctrine, uniform as to expression; subjective in the first, quasi-objective in the latter. It was to provide for Catholics in heart who had not fortitude for martyrdom, and for honest sacramentarians kneeling with them at the same communion-rail. After several alterations, therefore, in which the presence of the Most High was affirmed or denied, and, as far as man could affect it, was restored or taken away, as now a higher, now a lower school prevailed, the new religion welded together two forms of administration—the Catholic and the Zwinglian—and simply left the choice of doctrine to the receiver. It was a process that brings to mind the ancient punishment of chaining the living prisoner to the corpse of his dead comrade; and the language ever since of those in the Anglican communion who have aspired after something nearer to God than a memorial rite has been: "Unhappy man that I am, who shall deliver me from the body of this death?"
Want of space prevents our drawing out a contrast which here naturally presents itself. It would be, on one side, the solemn and heart-stirring functions of the church during her round of fast and festival: the day that ushers in her Lent, the Gloria hushed, organ and alleluias silent, the wailing Tenebrae, the strange, disjointed Mass of the pre-sanctified on Good Friday, which is Calvary, with the rocks rent and the sun hidden; then the burst of Easter morning, when all is light and triumph; or again, the three Masses of Christmas, symbols of our Lord's triple nativity. These, and much that might be added, would form an epitome of Durandus, and writers who have followed him, on the symbolism of the church's functions. What would appear on the other side? Silence is perhaps its best description, lest a thing in its own nature so fearful to contemplate as man's attempts to create in opposition to his Creator should present too forcibly its ludicrous aspect. It does not appear to have been very attractive, even in its cradle, to judge from the act, which sets forth that "all and every person and persons … shall diligently and faithfully … endeavor themselves to resort to their parish church, … where common prayer and such service shall be used, … and then and there to abide orderly and soberly during the time of common prayer, preachings, or other service of God there to be used and ministered, upon pain of punishment by the censures of the church, and also upon pain that every person so offending shall forfeit for every such offence twelve pence, to be levied by the church-wardens of the parish where such offence shall be done, … of the goods, lands, and tenements of such offender, by way of distress."
No wonder they who love the established church should fix their special admiration on the feature of her simplicity. The act of uniformity enforced by Procrustes was as simple a process, and with as simple a result. In both cases, it was a cutting down, paring away, shortening, disjointing, dislocating. Only, as they who decreed the form and measurements of the new religion, unlike Procrustes, had to reconstruct as well as simply to wrench and amputate, they added that other process to their labor; and under difficulties which have excited the compassion of their disciples in all later time for a system of theology and theological devotion is as complex and delicate, to say the least, as the human frame: you cannot give back the sinews and organs you have removed, nor restore action to the joints you have sundered. We have lived to see the result of such simplifying as went on in the sixteenth century. After a career which has given time for irreconcilable schools to exhibit their full divergence, the communion so arranged seems likely to fall to pieces on the very question of ritualism. "We never, sir," says a popular clerical writer to the Times newspaper, "we never shall have peace again in the church until some plain order of conducting the service is made more or less imperative, confused rubrics relaid down in clear language, and some court established, easy of access, cheap, and speedy in process, by which it may be adjudged, as well in the case of clergy as of bishops, whether the parties accused of false teaching or false practice are guilty according to a rational, legal interpretation of our formularies in the spirit in which for three centuries they have been conducted." [Footnote 29]