In order to support their claim, they find it necessary to distort the meaning of their formularies in the vain endeavor to coax or to force them into some resemblance to the teaching of the Council of Trent, those which are hopelessly irreconcilable being left out of the account as little differences which it is inconvenient to remember. In numerous cases they are practically set aside, or contradicted, notwithstanding the fact that at their “ordination” the ministers of the Church of England solemnly bind themselves to teach in accordance with these very formularies.
Moreover, finding their own mutilated communion service insufficient, and yet claiming and professing to “say Mass,” which they were never intended to say, and which in their present position they are utterly incapable of celebrating, the ritualistic ministers are in the habit of supplementing the deficiencies of their own liturgy by private interpolations from the Roman Missal, which, in case they are questioned on the subject, they designate as “prayers from ancient sources,” a statement less honest than true. One thing after another do they imitate or claim as their own, now a doctrine, now a practice, which for three hundred years their communion has emphatically disowned: vestments, lights, prayers for the dead, confession, transubstantiation, in some “extreme” quarters intercession of the saints; here a gesture and there a decoration, which only has its fitness and meaning in the ancient church and her venerable ritual, but which with them can claim no title but that of doctrinal, disciplinary, and decorative disobedience—however great may be the pains they take to force the false to simulate the true, and however pertinaciously they may dare, as they do, to appropriate to themselves and to their chaotic schism the very name of the Catholic Church, out of whose fold they are content to remain in hereditary apostasy.
Among the four principal sections of “High,” “Low,” “Broad,” and “No” church, into which the Anglican communion is divided, the “Low” or (so-called) “Evangelical” school is the sternest opponent of the new “Extreme” or “Ritualistic” party, which it very mistakenly honors with the name of Romanizers. We say mistakenly, because, however they may imitate according to their various shades of opinion the outward ceremonial of the church, or adopt, at choice, more or less of her doctrines, yet all this in their case is but a double development of Protestantism (to say nothing of the effect it produces of making them rest satisfied with the shadow instead of seeking the substance);[12] for none are so bitter as they against the church they are so desirous to resemble, and also none are so practically disobedient to their own ecclesiastical superiors, in spite of reiterated professions to the contrary. It is this persistent disobedience which has brought about the present crisis.
In the Evangelical party there exists a society calling itself the [pg 043] “Church Association,” of which one principal object is to watch over the principles of the reformation,[13] and to keep a jealous eye upon the movements of tractarianism in all its varied developments.
Chiefly in consequence of the representations of this society, and also of the determination of the High-Church clergy not to obey the decision that has been given against various of their practices in the “Purchas judgment,” until they should have obtained a redecision from another court to which they had appealed, Dr. Tait, Archbishop of Canterbury, laid before the Houses of Parliament a bill entitled the “Public Worship Regulation Bill,” of which the object is to secure the suppression of all the illegal practices in which Ritualists habitually indulge, and also to secure obedience to their legally and ecclesiastically constituted authorities. Rightly or wrongly, all the innovations or changes that have been gradually rousing “the Protestant feeling of the country,” and which are in fact, if not in intention, imitations of Catholic ritual, were to be put down. The bill requires that in each diocese a local court should be established, before which any church-warden, or three parishioners, “having cause of complaint against the incumbent, as failing to observe the directions contained in the Book of Common Prayer, relating to the performance of the services, rites, and ceremonies of the said book, or as having made or permitted unlawful addition to, alteration of, or omission from such services,” etc., etc., shall be empowered to lay their complaint against the said incumbent, who is to be allowed the space of fourteen days in which to give his answer. Should no answer be given, it will be considered that the charges laid against him are true, and proceedings will be taken accordingly. Should an unsatisfactory answer be given, “the bishop may, if he think fit, within six months after he has received a representation in the manner aforesaid, proceed to consider the same in public, with the assistance of the chancellor of the diocese or his substitute, ... and the bishop shall, after due consideration, pronounce judgment in regard to such representation.”
To this an amendment was suggested by Lord Shaftesbury, which was adopted, namely, that instead of a local bishop, a secular judge, to be selected by the two Archbishops of Canterbury and York, should be appointed, under the title of “Judge of Public Worship,” and whose office it should be to assist the bishop of any diocese where his services might be required for the hearing of cases, after which not the bishop, but the judge, should, in conclusion, pronounce sentence according to law.
Upon this, the Spectator, a leading periodical of the Broad Church party, observes: “So far as the bill is intended to ascertain and enforce the existing law of the church in relation to public worship, the change (namely, from a bishop to a secular judge) makes the whole difference between a tribunal which Englishmen will respect and trust and one which they would hardly have taken the trouble even to consult, so deep would have been, in general, their distrust of the oracle [pg 044] consulted.... Lord Shaftesbury having provided a genuine judge, the complainant who prefers a bishop will not often get his antagonist to agree with him, and such complainants will be few.”
Of this general mistrust of the Anglican bishops we have more to say, but for the present we keep to the consideration of the bill.
Lord Shaftesbury's suggestion was followed by one from Dr. Magee, Bishop of Peterborough, which, although not adopted, is too remarkable a specimen of Episcopal counsel to be unnoticed. (The Church Times respectfully designates it as “one of the prettiest bits of log-rolling ever seen”!) Bishop Magee proposed, and his proposal was “powerfully seconded by the Lord Chancellor,” that there should be “neutral regions of ritual laid down by the bill, within which a variety of usages as practised in many churches at the present time should all be admissible, even though the actual directions of the rubric against some of them be explicit.” Whereupon the Spectator goes on to suggest that a varied selection of “concessions” should be made, suitable to the divergent or opposite tastes of Extreme, High, Low, Broad, and No Churchmen; such as, for instance, the optional reading or omission of the words as to the regeneration of the child by the act of baptism, as a concession acceptable to the Evangelicals. For its own part it would like an optional reading or omission of the Athanasian Creed, and so on, and, “to make the compromise a thoroughly sound one,” the laity of each parish, it considers, ought to be consulted as to the usage to be adopted. It is hard to imagine anything better calculated to make “confusion worse confounded” than plans like these, at a time, too, when all the Anglican parties alike confess that “in no day has there been so wide a variety of tendency, opinion, and belief in the Church of England as now.”
One of the great features in the checkered progress of this bill has been the speech of the late premier, the negative and destructive character of which it is difficult adequately to estimate, and which, upon its delivery, to quote the words of the Westminster Gazette, “produced an ecclesiastical conflagration.” Even Mr. Gladstone's late colleagues hold aloof from his propositions, and the outcry that was raised soon indisposed his humbler followers to agree with him; yet he laid bare many real difficulties and told many plain truths which might make the friends of the archbishop's bill reasonably hesitate. But as it is, this speech has only fired the zealous determination of the great majority of the House, both liberal and conservative, to strike a blow at the external manifestations of ritualism, come what may, and has set the “Protestant feeling of the country” on horseback.