THE POSITION OF THE ESTABLISHED CHURCH. [To MR EDITOR Or
TRU SPECTATOR."]
Stn,—I have just seen a copy of your issue of June 13th con- taining the first portion of an article on the legal position of the Church by an ecclesiastical lawyer of great authority. With that article, as also with your most excellent leader on the subject, I am in full agreement. There has been a dead set in certain ecclesiastical circles these last ten or twelve years to denationalize the Church. Ecclesiastical law and lawyers have been derided in extreme sacerdotal quarters—a constant demand has been made for the exploitation of dis- used canon law, and for the substitution of episcopal law for the law of the realm. In a word, there is a dead set made towards the reducing of the National Church to a small episcopal sect, and the elevation of diocesan resolutions and episcopal " precepts" into the place of statute law. I main- tain that the Established Church of England is the Church of every man, woman, and child of England. If they do not choose to use the Church, its services, and the ministrations of its clergy, that is their fault and their misfortune, but the Church is "the old home" to which they may return whenever they will. What men like Dr. Gore—and others even higher in position whom I could name—wish is to have a little episcopal sect, controlled and moved entirely by episcopal wish and will. By this road we should return to the old "Uses," and to the existence of little ecclesiastical circles dominated by the Bishop and revolving, in all aspects of their ecclesiastical life, just within themselves.
My idea of the Church, as covering every man, woman, and child—as the religious side of the State—is, perhaps, Breathes, but it is in entire accord with the history, the constitution, and the laws of the Church of England. We may have lost ground, we may have lost hold of a great part of the popula- tion, but it is the noblest ideal of a Church, and it is an ideal to which we should work up to rather than confess our inability to fulfil our mission and fall back into the position of one of a number of competing sects. In my own church at Bridlington—the old Priory—I have for eighteen years acted on the principle that the Church is the great mother for all its inhabitants. During the winter, months I have a men's service in connexion with my Brotherhood every Sunday afternoon. The winter population is under fifteen thousand. I have a registered membership of 1,642, and the men— all over eighteen years of age—are of all political and religious shades of thought. Men who enter no other place of worship come there—Churchman, Dissenter, and those alienated from all religion—and we welcome all. With regard to the attendance of Nonconformists at Communion in the church, just let use say that the late Archbishop of York (Dr. Maclagan) some ten years ago issued a circular to us clergy pointing out the need for co-operation between the Church and Nonconformists, and suggesting to us That at the great Church festivals, especially Christmas and Easter, we should invite Nonconformists to join in Holy Communion in the church. Dr. Idaclagan might not have been one of the modern type of self-assertive ecclesiastics, but he was a good Church. man, and his advice was of the Spirit of Christ.
In all these new-fangled dodges for raising diocesan funds, every man who values the greatness of the National Church should set his face against these insidious methods of de. nationalizing the Church--e.g., meetings of communicants only, and of these, men only, in Easter week, to elect two (who are to sign a document stating that they are members of the Church of England) to join others similarly elected from other parishes, in a ruridecanal meeting, and there elect so many (men and communicants and who have "signed on" only) to form the Diocesan Conference to managethe diocesan funds I By ruling thus they cut out all non-communi- cants, and all women even if communicants. They do, how- ever, kindly say that they are open to receive subscriptions from women and non-communicants. That is how the "new brooms" in the Church would denationalize our National Church, and make a bad copy of the Episcopal Church of Betel Majestic, Vichy.
(Rector of Bridliagton),
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