11 JULY 1914, Page 11

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR.

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CONFIRMATION AND COMMUNION.

[To THY EDITOR 07 Ta8 " SPRCTATOR.'']

SIR, —I read with deep interest your correspondent's letter in last week's Spectator, and would be grateful for the oppor- tunity of making a few observations on its argument. He calls himself " Enlisted," and the suggestion is that he is a soldier. Throughout his letter he is clearly governed by the notion of military discipline as giving the key to the right point of view from which to interpret the rubrics of the Prayer Book. I would beg him to remember that the situa- tion is not quite so simple as he imagines, nor does his analogy, though interesting and valuable up to a point, really illuminate the question at stake. Granting that the rubrics, drafted for the most part three hundred and fifty years ago, presume a nation of baptized, confirmed, and communicant people, and are to be read primarily in the light of that pre- sumption, it yet remains the case that they must be interpreted to-day in circumstances which that presumption no longer covers, and that the attempt to go on reading them as if the old situation existed is to immerse oneself in confusion and injustice.

The King's Regulations affect a small professional section of the people; their true ecclesiastical analogue must be sought in the rules laid down for the clergy, not in those which were intended to govern the entire population. The National Church is not merely a denomination with specific differentiating rules for its own members, but also an institu- tion which acknowledges obligations to the whole nation, and still more emphatically a part of the Christian Society or Church with duties to every Christian in the land. The due correlation of these three characters is the problem of Anglican discipline, and the criterion of Anglican statesman- ship. It will not be disputed that both denominational and national claims must be subordinated to the claim of the Christian Society itself. Perhaps it would not be excessive to say that the difference between the Anglicanism of to-day and that of former times consists in the fact that whereas in the past Anglicans subordinated the denomination to the nation, now they are disposed to reverse the order, and to ignore the national claim when it seems to collide with the denominational interest. This is to my thinking a change for the worse, since the national claim is the higher and the more important of the two.

The Church of England as a national institution is a very great and a very beneficent factor of social life; but as a denomination the Church of England is rather surprisingly weak in numbers and influence. It is, moreover, at a serious disadvantage, not being organized on denominational lines, but everywhere tied to larger interests. It owes very much to the nation which it is appointed to serve. Its tenure of the ancient endowments was secured to it by national Acts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, while still the religious unity of the English people seemed the inevitable postulate of sane politics. Its Prayer Book is, significantly enough, "a schedule of an Act of Parliament," and the status of its clergy (a most valuable aid to their spiritual work) is directly con- nected with its legal establishment. If the national character implied any infidelity to Christian principles, it would be the English Churchman's duty to sacrifice it at all costs; but if it imply no more than a surrender of denominational aspirations, I for one hold strongly that such a surrender should be willingly made in the higher interests of national Christianity. Along the lines of denominational self-assertion a National Church cannot be justified, or maintained, in modern England.. Given such a measure of denominational self-suppression as Christian principle permits, nay, requires, and the National Church might again become the effective and frankly recognized instrument of national religion.

Take this case of the Communion of the unconfirmed. Every baptized and right-living Christian, desirous of receiving the Lord's Supper, and of age and knowledge suitable to such reception, would seem to possess a natural right to receive the Sacrament, which discloses and assists, not any denominational profession, but Christian membership itself. The Christian Society, no smaller unit, owns the Sacrament, and ordains the conditions of its reception. And there is no real doubt as to those conditions. Christian history, interpreting the New Testament, has made them

sufficiently clear. The unbaptized, the unbelieving, and the morally unsound are universally forbidden to approach the Table of the Lord. Can it be truly said that confirma- tion is a condition of Communion which can take rank with these ? Is the unconfirmed Christian, as such, properly excluded from the Society of Christians ? The mere fact that confirmation has been inaccessible to large numbers of the baptized may perhaps suffice for the answer. Great sections of the Christian Church have no Bishops. The Eastern Churches, save for the circumstance that they have their oil consecrated by Bishops, refer con- firmation to the priesthood. Both before and after the Reformation the infrequency with which the Bishops adminis- tered the rite compelled many to remain unconfirmed, though legally compelled to communicate. The present form of the Anglican rubric is itself a confession of practical failure. When, therefore, we learn from "A. C." that the law of England does not exclude from Communion the unconfirmed Englishman as such, we must needs acknowledge its essential equity, and we may well remember that the law of Christ is equally tolerant. We may cheerfully accept the necessity of setting aside a denominational rule, wholesome enough in its place, but properly irrelevant to this issue.

The importance now ascribed to confirmation by High Anglicans is unreasonable in itself, and inconsistent with the teaching and practice of the English Church. Our ancestors found it difficult to conceive of a Christian who was not also a communicant, and therefore they treated Communion as the

obvious evidence of Christianity. This assumption underlay their policy (so repugnant to our notions) of making Com- munion a qualification for civil and political functions. Every Englishman must be a Christian: every Christian must be a communicant. So they argued, and their logic was obvious and irresistible. Roman and Protestant were here agreed. But confirmation was on another level of importance : it belonged to the discipline of instruction. Every Church practising infant baptism has to meet the problem of making sure that the baptized shall be properly taught the implica- tions of the membership, which baptism in infancy confers.

The Sacramentalism of the mediaeval Church included con- firmation among the Sacraments ; but this point of view, which tended to rob the rite of all necessary connexion with Christian teaching, was universally repudiated by the Reformers, and they found general agreement in requiring a deliberate and intelligent declaration of belief from the com- municant. This declaration was, in their view, the core of confirmation. The ceremony itself (whether episcopal as with Anglicans, or presbyteral as with Lutherans) was the formal acceptance of the neophyte's declaration by the Christian Society, which thus formally admitted him to Communion. On this point there was general agreement among the Reformed Churches. Baxter could offer confirmation as one of the grounds on which a working unity of English Christians might be built :—

" Here,' he said, "is a medicine so effectual to heal our breaches, and set our disordered societies in joint (being owned in whole by the Episcopal, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Erastian, and in half by the Anabaptist), that nothing but our own self-conceited- aegs, pervereeneas, laziness, or wilful enmity to the peace of the Churches, is able to deprive us of a blessed success."

The excellent man lived to know that the Episcopalian Churchmen of the Restoration were men of another spirit than that which moved the Episcopal Churchmen of an earlier time. Yet even the Restoration divines would have been startled by the language about confirmation now common in

High Anglican" circles. It would perhaps have been a good. thing for the Church of England if eosin's proposed Preface to the Order of Confirmation had been adopted into the revised Prayer Book. It begins thus : " Confirmation is by the Church of Rome, that now is corrupted with many errors and novelties in religion, held to be a Sacrament. But we who by the grace of God are numbered among the Reformed Churches . . . hold it to be none."

The difficulty now is, not with the rubric; but with the new theory of the Church which the Tractarians coined, and which their. disciples have wonderfully perfected, until " the Pro- testant Reformed Religion established by law," which the King promises in his Coronation Oath to "maintain," has been robbed of .every attribute which could be described as either "Protestant" or "Reformed," and the task of the National Church can be spoken of by the Bishop of Oxford as the "conversion " of a "Protestant-minded country " 1 The critical gravity of the verdict on the Kikuyu incident, which

must shortly be pronounced by the Archbishop of Canterbury, emerges when it is realized that the very character of the National Church is really at stake, and with it the right of the Church of England to be the spiritual organ, in any tolerable sense, of a free Protestant people.—I am, Sir, &c.,

[We cannot continue the correspondence on this subject.- En. Spectator.]