THE CHURCH AND THE WORLD.—SECOND SERIES. * This is a heavy
book, in every sense of the term. Five hundred and sixty-seven pages of essays in large octavo, closely printed, even if from the pen of "the righteous," are apt to be of those "precious balms" which "break the head," as the Prayer-Book version of the Psalms has it—perhaps not very faithfully to the original Hebrew, but most expressively to the feelings of many a sufferer, including, no doubt, the translators. Nor is the weight of the reader's task lightened when he finds that "the questions of the day" in this busy and momentous year of 1867 are deemed by the writers such as" Greek Rites in the West," "The Three Vows," "The Carats Question," "A Layman's View of Con- fession," &c. ; that the subject of confession alone is deemed to require two essays and nearly 100 pages ; ritual (to say
' nothing of "Church Manic") over another 100; and that the clerical writers' knowledge of the world in which the
• The Church and the World Essays on Questions of the Day in 1807. By Various Writers. Edited by the Bey. Orby Shipley, MA. London: Louginans. I great bulk of their fellow-creatures really live, seems to be in general almost exclusively derived from a few glimpses. through the Pall Mall Gazelle, the Saturday Review, or the Corn- , hill Magazine. it is not the slightest exaggeration to say that these men, most of whom deem themselves the exclusively com- missioned successors of One whom "the multitude" heard gladly, have piled together a huge volume which, although written in their mother-tongue, must be, almost in its entirety, absolutely unintelligible to the vast bulk of Englishmen ;—so empty is it, for the most part, of all that would appeal either to their hearits or to their understandings, of all that would connect itself with their daily life, with its sorrows or with its joys, with its hopes or with its cares. Such a sight is one inexpressibly painful. It is that of men,—all of them probably earnest and sincere,—so shutting' themselves up in a little world of their own as in a manner to quench the Pentecostal Spirit, and whilst speaking, or professing to speak, "the wonderful works of God," doing this in such a manner that men's "own tongues" shall convey no meaning to them.
It would be idle to attempt criticizing these essays in detail. There are many true and excellent things in them. Mr. Eva"ns's paper on "Preachers and Preaching, the Pulpit and the Press," Mr. Arthur Baker's, on "The Curate Question" (though the former is as long again as it should be), are both readable and practical, the latter even containing an interesting piece of auto- biography. There is considerable industry, and often hard hitting (though with generally not a little special pleading) in several papers relating to Church law ; a " Magistrate " writes smartly "On the Court of Final Appeal in Causes Ecclesiastical ; " Mr. Humphrey treats with dangerous seductiveness of style of "The Three Vows ; " Mr. John Walter Lea, amidst much that is fantastic, reaches a deep ground of truth in a paper on "The Sacrament of Marriage," some pages of which form, on the whole, the gem of the volume. We are warned, indeed, that, as in the first series, "the several authors . . . are responsible only for the statements contained in their own contributions . . . and have been left free to express their individual convictions," and as "the name of no writer who was good enough to contribute to the first series appears in the table of contents of the second," the latter claims to be judged on its own exclusive merits: It would, therefore, be unfair even to refer here to the former volume ; unfair to fix any common specific purpose on the authors of the present volume. But the fact must not be blinked. A common temper does run through the volume, which has no doubt brought the writers together in contributing to it ; and in their present temper of mind, these men are simply running counter to the divinely appointed course of the ages, beginning again a round of religious falsehoods which has been already worked out, and on which God's doom has gone forth, ignoring the true meaning'of that Incarnation which they profess to make the centre of their worship. They are not Romanists, and do not wish to be such ; but they are treading step by step the path which has led to every Romish falsehood. Their ideal is that of the restoration of a caste priesthood, the building up again of that middle wall of partition between the few and the many which Christ came to break down, the unhallowing of the common life, the common things, the common duties which He has sancti- fied. Take, for instance, Mr. Le Geit on "The Symbolism of Ritual :"--
" One principal object in the ordering of the Ritual of the Church is to mark off the worship of the Sanctuary from the ordinary actions of the world, and to sever between it and common life. . . The very language of divine worship, lifted in one portion of the Church Catholic above the "vulgar" tongue by the prevalent use of Latin, is' where the vernacular has been restored, as with ourselves, separated from that of common life by the prescribed musical recitation, commonly, but incorrectly, termed "intoning." . . . That it is not unmeaning, but the reverse, is apparent from the fact that it is adopted with special design, viz., to separate the language of God's House from that of common life, by providing a different tone in which to address Almighty God, from that in which we speak with one another."
Is it possible so to set at naught Christ's Gospel ? He, whose life was one long continuous worship of the Father, when did He, in word or life, "separate Himself" from the "common life" of those whom He is "not ashamed" to call brethren, eating and drinking as He did with publicans and sinners, teaching to His disciples a prayer which little children can understand ? Did He on the Cross "intone" those highest words of worship ever uttered by human lips, "Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit ?" Faugh !
To such notions of worship correspond, of course, similar notions of life. The lady who writes on "Sisterhood Life" (and who seems to be profoundly ignorant of all relating to the work of women in the Church, but what has come to her from Romish sources), speaks of sisterhoods as "separated from the world, not for the mere intention of carrying on some work of mercy, but for the higher purpose of treading the narrow path of poverty, obedience, and chastity." Mr. Humphrey, speaking of "the three vows," distinguishes between those who "exhibit some- what to the service and worship of God," and the "man who offers himself a holocaust to God. . . all that he is and all that he has . . . his soul and his body . . . his substance and his surroundings," by the "three vows of chastity, obedience, and of poverty." As if the very essence of Christian obedi- ence were not for the humblest of Christ's servants abso- lute self-sacrifice to God ! as if it could be lawful for any one to withhold aught from his Master's service, or to bestow' on his Lord more than His due ! And these are the men who profess not weekly only, but daily, to use that Eucharistic liturgy of our Church, which puts into the mouth of every communicant, as the expression of all Christian worship, the blessed words, "And here we offer and present unto Thee, 0 Lord, ourselves, our souls and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and lively sacrifice unto Thee." What a mockery, after this, to talk of any human vows as going beyond the common duty of the simplest Christian !
The controversy with these men is as old as the Church itself. It is not only that of the Reformers with the Romanists ; it is that of the Apostles with the Jews, of our Blessed Lord Himself with Pharisees and Scribes. Their gospel is one of "Touch not, taste not, handle not." They bid us again exchange "the body" for the "shadow of things to come." Their "commandments and doctrines" have precisely that "show of wisdom in will worship, and humility, and neglecting of the body," which St. Paul warned the Colossians not to be beguiled by. They build up an elaborate symbolism of ritual, to show forth Christ in outward things to the initiated by artificial mysteries, which the many must utterly fail in apprehending. The incense, for instance, we are told by Mr. Bennett, "is the mediation of Jesus ascending from the altar to plead for the sins of man." But the divine mystery of the Christ in every man,— " Insomuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me," is for them an open secret. They may teach their people of a Christ in bread, and a Christ in wine (or rather wine and water), but the "Christ in you, the hope of glory," whom St. Paul preached to the Colossians, after it had "pleased God" to reveal Him in the Apostle himself, stands among them, and they know Him not. Though there may come to them flashes of better, things, yet substantially their Christ is a separate and separating Christ, not the Unites and Head of all things. And hence their priesthood, their worship, their Church, are all separate and exclusive, instead of being typical and inclusive ; whilst the divine purity and unity of the Church are set at naught by that deadly figment of the marriage of the individual soul to Christ, which trans- forms the one eternal wedding of the One Bridegroom with the One Bride into the spiritual polygamy of Krishna and his Gopis ; whilst the very Sacrament which forms the centre of their reli- gious system is robbed of its worth as the divinest bond of human fellowship, by the pernicious doctrine that the whole body and blood of Christ are present in every fragment and drop, instead of being (as the 28th and 29th Articles, after St. Paul, truly phrase it) "partaken of" by all true communicants, who thereby become, "being many, one body."
For the only true ground of a distinct priesthood since the coming of Christ lies in the universal priesthood of mankind in Christ, its Head. Because we have been all made in Him " a chosen generation, a royal priesthood, an holy nation, a peculiar people," therefore it is meet that, —just as soldiers are set apart to exercise the common human function of defending one's country, judges and policemen to exercise the common human function of determining between right and wrong, punishing and preventing offences,—so should priests be set apart to exercise that highest common function of humanity, the worship of God. In like manner, the only true ground of a distinct worship lies in the duty to "do all things to the glory of God," the only true ground of the special offering up of self in Holy Communion in the perpetual self-surrender to God which is enjoined on every man, that of the special union with God through the elements of the Eucharist, in the blessed truth that in Him "we live, and move, and have our being." And so, finally, with the Church. It puts on a visible shape, not to stand apart in Pharisaic exclusiveness from that world which God loved, and for which Christ died,—for whose sake it exists,—but because it is truly Christ's "body, the fullness of Him that &Hear all in all."
With minds thus perverted by false conceptions of Christ's Gospel, there is no wonder if these writers' views of men and things are often ludicrously oblique. Mr. Bennett of Frome, for instance, can actually speak of one whose works have followed him in an almost general renovation of our educational system, in the noble lives of so many of his pupils,—the mere record of whose life has been to more than one a trumpet-call to duty, —as "Dr. Arnold, a schoolmaster of great repute among Latitudi- narians ;"-whilst the writer's Christian charity, after the lapse of not far from twenty years, will allow him to use no terms respecting Lord Russell but those of "crafty Prime Minister," "insidious and unscrupulous man," the author of " an infamously notorious letter." Of the ignorance of matters relating to their own immediate subjects which some of the authors display, it may be sufficient to quote one instance, from the essay on "Church Music," which tells us that "Christmas, as a season of good cheer, retained a strong hold on the Puritan mind," and that "Good Friday called for little opposition from them." Let the author of this essay, if he has not the opportu- nity of realizing in the study of the controversial works of the seventeenth century the feelings of the Puritans on the subject, address himself simply to the first Scotch Presbyterian or English Independent, as their present representatives, and he will find that the observance of both days has remained abolished with them till now ; although, indeed, sought to be restored at the present day, by some minister of the larger modern school.
One observation remains to be made, which may be singular to some, but is really quite in conformity with the necessary tenden- cies of the movement of which these essays are the expression.
Three of the writers at least are laymen. 'With the exception of the smart "Magistrate," their essays contain certainly greater extravagancies of assertion, greater fallacies of reasoning, than those of most of their clerical coadjutors. No passage in the whole volume is perhaps so utterly beyond all argument as this of the Hon. Colin Lindsay :—
" The devout student of Holy Scripture can hardly fail at once to acknowledge that Christ did provide a liturgy, which He designed to be continually celebrated by priests of His own appointment, and he may reasonably believe that He meant it to be accompanied with an ornate and splendid ritual."
Evidently, the clerics are here far stronger men than their lay- allies. Can it be otherwise? From the moment that the idea of a caste priesthood creeps in, must not the mind of the laity become emasculated, if it do not revolt from the deadly falsehood ?
J. M. L.
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