THE CHURCH ASSOCIATION AND THE CHURCH.
MR. MACKONOCHIE has not only been driven from a parish in which, so far as we know, there was not a single worshipper who took obj,, 'ion to his ritual, and in
which it is by no means easy to find such men as Mr. Mac- konochie to work, but, if we may trust the memorial which the Church Association has put forth in relation to the report of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commissioners, that Association will never rest till all who do not call themselves Protestants, —all who do not disown absolutely the whole of the history of the Church for something like twelve centuries,—are driven after him. That, at least, is the only meaning we can attach to the very absurd Memorial to the Queen which the Church Association have put forth. They write as if the Church of England had begun to exist for the first time in the reign of Henry VIII.,—nay,almost as if the Gospel had then first made its appearance. And in truth, they treat almost the whole of the period between the death of the Apostles and the breach with Rome as a period during which the stream of the Gospel was subterranean, invisible to the true Christian. Of course, they are perfectly at liberty to do so, but they are hardly at liberty to attempt to enforce that view on the English Church as the true view of the Reformation. If that had been the view taken of the Reformation at the time of the Reformers, what should we have had in place of the Prayer-book and its Services ? We should have had some manual of devotion of Genevan origin ; we should have had every indication of Abso- lution carefully obliterated ; we should have had a Baptismal Service deliberately excluding any approach to Sacramental conceptions ; we should have had a Communion Service not taking up a doubtful position between two opposite views, but one completely Zwinglian in its whole language. And as for the Form of Absolution contained in the Service for the Visitation of the Sick, it would have been torn out of the Prayer-book with ignominy. Nothing can be plainer than that the Reformers intended to keep within the Church all Catholics who really desired 'to see some of the excesses of Rome retrenched, and the moral corruption of the fifteenth century swept away. That Puritans were to be admitted, if they could accept a certain amount of language very unwelcome and very much condemned at Geneva, is true enough. But that all Catholics were to be retained who were disposed to acquiesce in the retrenchments of ceremonial decided on and the practical reforms imposed, is still more certain. No view of the Anglican Formularies is more utterly ridiculous than the view that they were composed to fit in with the ultra-Protestant notions of the Continental Reformers of that day, or with the Exeter-Hall theory of our own time. It would be quite as rational to affirm that the Treaty of Berlin was intended to wipe out either Russia or Turkey,—no matter which,— from the map of Europe. The intention of the English Reformation was to strike out, as every historian admits, a middle-way between Geneva and Rome. That that middle- way did not go nearly so far as the Tractarians desired to go on the side of Rome, everybody of any authority concedes. That it did not go nearly so far as the Church Association desires to go on the side of Geneva, everybody of the least authority admits also. To ask, as the Memorialists of that Association ask,—in the interests, we suppose, of Disestablish- ment,—that the continuity between the Church of the pre- Reformation period and our own, shall be regarded as abruptly dissolved at the Reformation, is to ask that our Church shall be emptied of more than half her existing Clergy, and possibly of not much less than half her laymen. Yet this is the monstrous complaint of the Church Association,—" That the Report [of the Ecclesiastical Courts Commission] discloses a desire to preserve the continuity of the pre-Reformation Church, with its inherent and subsequently discarded sacer- dotal-caste assumptions," as if any considerable section of either clergy or laity had been childish enough,—with their present Prayer-book in their hands,—even so much as to claim that they had broken that continuity and discarded all those assumptions.
We have said that what the Memorialists of the Church Association seem to us to be aiming at is the Disestablishment of the Church of England, and we can regard no other result as in the least degree consistent with their success. What have we now? We have a Church with very elaborate dog- matic creeds, one of which,—the Athanasian, with damnatory clauses so ill-adapted to the present day, that their heartiest apologists explain them as meaning something quite different from that which the people find in them,—a good many of the clergy, with the hearty assent of the laity, deliberately drop. We have a considerable number of Low Churchmen who would alter the Ordination Service, the Baptismal Service, and the Burial Service, if they could, and who, instead of excess of Ritual, con- stantly omit what the Rubrics of the Church require. We have a
good number, on the contrary, who go into excess, who con- duct processions of which the Rubrics know nothing, wear vest- ments which the latest decisions of the Court of Appeal, in conflict with a previous and apparently less politic decision, forbid, and who bring the Ritual as near to that of the Roman or Greek Church as they dare. There is not one party in the Church which is clear of both offence and defect before the Rubrics of the Church, strictly interpreted ; and not the shadow of one which could not find a great deal that they would like to alter, if they might. This being so, to insist that any one of these large sections should be compelled to go out as a defeated party, is simply to play into the hands of Dis- establishment and Disendowment, and that with so much effect, that Disestablishment and Disendowment would follow any such humiliating defeat of any of them, well within the limits of time occupied by any successful agitation that the last fifty years could produce. For our own parts, we have always asserted that com- prehension in such a Church as ours is both politically and morally right. It is politically right, because to inflict a humiliation on any one of the great sections of which it is composed is to inflame all those internal dissensions through which alone compromises perish. It is morally right, because we want good workers of all schools, and in the present miser- able state of spiritual destitution we cannot afford to lose one good man who heartily contents his flock. Indeed, the position with which the present writer most deeply sympathises,— that of the Broad Churchman who will not repeat the anathemas of the Athanasian Creed,—is by far the least technically tenable ; for he really disobeys a Rubric be- cause it imposes on him what he thinks a false article
of faith. But none the less we are quite sure that when those who omit the Athanasian Creed are prosecuted in the Ecclesiastical Courts, and either compelled to repeat it or deprived of their benefice, the beginning of the end will have come. As for Mr. Mackonochie, though we do not pretend to understand the Ritualistic mania,—excepting only as an enticing spectacle for the eye of those who are caught, like children, by gay sights,—we must say that we think the condition of the law which has forced him to give up a living in which his Bishop placed him, in which his parishioners were absolutely content with him, and in which he was doing a great deal of good, simply monstrous. If he bowed and genuflected where he ought not to have bowed and genuflected, we are very sorry ; but he might have bowed and genuflected to the end of time for us, so long as he was winning back the profligate to God, and cheering the miserable in want and pain and death. If we do not very quickly reform the laws which have deprived East London of Mr. Mackonochie's aid, we shall make a present to the Disestablish- ment Party of that most dangerous of all allies, a friend in the camp which they are besieging. These are the victories which preface defeat, and the completest kind of defeat,—the defeat that elicits a sigh of relief from the vanquished.
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