THE 1928 PRAYER BOOK
Sm,—Bishop Stepien Neill commits himself to some large affirmations about the Chuch of England in your issue of May 17th. Two of them I take leave to doubt. First, he says : " If, in 1928, the Church authorities had agreed to the omission from the Prayer Book of the revised Com- munion Office, it is probable the rest of the Book would have passed without much controversy." I was present in the Press Gallery at all the debates in the Lords and the Commons, and also in the Church Assembly and Convocation, and. I have not the slightest hesitation in saying that this is a misleading implication. Has the Bishop never heard of-Reservation? In fact, the failure to win assent was much more compli- cated than he supposes.
Second, the Bishop says that every part of the 1928 Book is widely used in the Church. I have not the wide and intimate knowledge of the forty-three dioceses that the Bishop doubtless has. But here my limited experience supports him. When, however, he says that it is doubtful whether there are a dozen churches where the revised Communion Office is used in full, even my limited experience can think of more. It is true, of course, that the use of the Office has been hampered from the first. The excessively cautious attitude of the bishops towards it, as shown for example by the insistence that the Order of 1928 shall not be printed without the Order of 1662, has discouraged many loyal Churchmen, and contributed to the, proliferation of unauthorised missals among the less scrupulous. Yet there is a larger minority by whom the Office has been used for long, and come to be loved—a minority that would, in fact, increase with a little encouragement from authority. Finally, if in fact the 1928 Book is so widely used, can it be said that the authorities of the Church of England (i.e. the Convocations and Church Assembly) misjudged the mind of the Church?—Yours, &c.,
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