MR. liENSIT AND THE BISHOPS.
MR. KENSIT cannot exactly say that he awoke one morning and found himself famous. At all events, between the awaking and the discovery be had time to visit several churches. But that he is famous no one will dispute. Partly by his own modest efforts, partly by the kindly patronage of the Bishop of Hereford, and still more by mere coincidence, his name has become a word of fear to many of the clergy. Of Mr. Kensit himself we have little to say. We have Lord Halifax's authority for believing him honest, and Lord Halifax is certainly not a prejudiced witness in his favour. For Mr. Kensit's methods we cherish a dislike which is apparently not shared by the ecclesiastical authorities. The position we should ourselves have liked to see the Bishops take up would have been this : We will examine into the matters complained of when order has been restored by the action of the Police Magistrates. Whatever be the nature of the services challenged, however reasonable may be the objections urged against them, brawling in church is an offence against public order which ought to be put down without parley and without conditions.' That the Bishops are slow to enforce the law of the Church may be true, but it is no excuse for breaking the law in another direction. If means exist for compelling the Bishops to do their duty, let those means be used. If no such means exist, let Parliament be asked to create them. When the Bishop of London invites Mr. Kensit to assure him that he will discontinue his protests at divine service he certainly seems to imply that these protests, though inexpedient, are still lawful. Of course he means to imply nothing of the kind, but the important consideration is not so much what he means as what Mr. Kensit understands him to mean. What this is Mr. Kensit has made abundantly clear. "I have no hesitation," he says, "in giving you the desired under- taking that for the next two calendar months I will make no public protests in any church in your diocese ; and, more, I further promise that the arrangements which have been made for public protests in thirteen other dioceses will similarly be suspended." This undertaking is dated May 10th, and it seems to us that if Mr. Kensit feels it necessary to resume his public protests on Sunday, July 10th, he will be able to plead, with some show of reason, that the Bishop of London has admitted his right to make them in the absence of adequate Episcopal action. That the condition of things which has roused Mr. Kensit's wrath requires careful consideration we do not deny for a moment. We have no sympathy for the introduction into the Anglican Church of services and ceremonials which are not the outcome of recognised and legal authority, but are due to the personal fancies of the incumbent of the particular church in which they take place. Still, we should have liked to see the process of restricting the use of an unauthorised ritual postponed until after Mr. Kensit had been made to see that in this, as in most other cases, there is a right and a wrong way of doing things, and that the adoption of the right way is delayed, not furthered, by previous resort to the wrong. The Arch- bishop of Canterbury, we suspect, is very much of our opinion, though circumstances have, in fact, been too strong for him. At least he said in the Upper House of Convocation on Wednesday that the action of the Bishops would have been very much more effective if Mr. Kensit had kept out of the business altogether. We should go further, and add that the action of the Bishops would have been very much more effective if it had been delayed until Mr. Kensit had been put out of the business alto- gether. As this is now impossible, we can but hope that when the two calendar months are over he will be left to be dealt with by the useful but unprosaic constable.
Quite apart, however, from Mr. Kensit, a problem has. undoubtedly presented itself which needs more delicate handling than we can feel quite sure that it will receive. It is, if not an absolutely new problem, at least a very conspicuous variant on an old one. The controversies. which the Public Worship Act was designed to settle, and which were eventually settled by a general agreement to ignore the Public Worship Regulation Act, turned on the manner of conducting the services in the Book of Common Prayer. Where the minister might or might not stand, what clothes he might or might not wear, whether lights and incense were or were not permissible adjuncts to the ceremonial ordinarily in use,— these and the like questions gave much employment to advocates and Judges, and in the end were settled partly by the Lincoln judgments and partly by a rough extension of the principles of those judgments to cognate matters not lying within their four corners. To-day the controversy relates to matters altogether outside the Prayer-book. No one pretends that the ceremonial kiss- ing of a crucifix or the sprinkling the congregation with holy water has any place in the Prayer-book. They have no more connection with it than "after meetings," or " limelight " services, or the " Devotion of the Three Hours" on Good Friday. At the first glance one is dis- posed to say that this distinction makes the situation very much easier to meet. There may be two opinions as to the meaning of every rubric in the Prayer-book, but there cannot be two opinions as to what is and what is not within the two covers of the Prayer-book. What ought to be done, therefore, is plain. It is to allow great latitude of interpretation of the directions given in the Prayer- book, and absolutely to forbid any service whatever which is not in the Prayer-book. Unfortunately this is not so easy as it seems. Side by side with the dislike. that many Churchmen have for additional services of this or that type, there has grown up a strong desire for additional services in the abstract. The two Convocations. have spent much time in the preparation of them, without, so far as we have observed, being able to put forth any that have secured even partial acceptance. The reason, of course, is that a service which has its origin in a Com- mittee of Convocation is of necessity a compromise, and in the case of additional services compromise is just what is not wanted. One set of men are impressed with the liberty, in certain directions, afforded by Nonconformist services. The free choice of such passages of Scripture as. suit the mood of the minister, or are supposed to suit the mood of the congregation, seems to them so much more spiritual than the obligation to use the Psalms and lessons of the day. The room for adaptation to the circumstances of the moment which is given by the use of extempore prayer has in their eyes a decided superiority over the stereotyped regularity of the constantly repeated Matins. and Evensong. Another set of men is equally impressed with the variety of services permitted by the Roman Church, and with the provision thereby made for feelings. and occasions and mental needs of which the Prayer-book takes no account. As regards the Reformation which gave the Church of England her present shape, these two groups stand at opposite poles, but it is very difficult to say that the attitude of one is less legitimate than the attitude of the other. The one thinks that the pro- cess of destruction did not go far enough ; the other- thinks that the process of reconstruction stopped too soon. To the eyes of one group the Prayer-book- bears too close a resemblance to the ancient formularies out of which it was framed. To the eyes of the other group it seems to have abandoned some things which it would have done well to retain. A Bishop may say that both groups have a locus standi in the Church of England, or that neither has ; but he would run dangerously near to erecting his own tastes into a universal law if he de- cided that one has a. locus standi in the Church of England, while the other has not. Up to a certain point all reasonable men can go without difficulty. In an Episcopal Church the ultimate authority must reside in the Bishop. We can all agree with the Archbishop of Canterbury in holding that no innovation the clergy can. introduce, however good in itself, can "atone for the serious mischief done by disobedience to the authority and. the rules of the Church," and in hoping that the Bishops.
will be able ta convince the clergy of this truth. But when we have reached this point we shall find that we have travelled over but a part of the ground. The duty of submission to Episcopal authority is one thing; the right use of Episcopal authority is another. The immediate need may be to preach the duty, and that we are quite ready to do. But close behind this immediate need follows the need of using Episcopal authority rightly, and upon the manner in which the Bishops meet this a great deal will depend. Still, though we see many and great difficulties in regard to the handling of the whole problem, we have little doubt as to what the majority of Anglican laymen wish. They do not desire a new Act of Uniformity, and regard as a most precious possession the elasticity as to ritual which exists in the Church of England. At the same time, they do not want to see strange and fantastic services introduced into our churches at the mere will of the incumbent, or even of the congregation, and would gladly welcome an effective Episcopal veto on all such innovations.
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