PRAYER BOOK REVISION
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Most of your correspondents have discussed whether certain uses are good in themselves, without much reference to the question whether they are consistent with the doctrine of the Church of England. In 1906 the Royal Commission, which included the Archbishop , of Canterbury, still pro- claimed this teaching to be " declared by the Articles and set forth in the Prayer Book."
Article XXVIII. says : " The Sacrament of the Lord's Supper was not by Christ's ordinance reserved, carried about, lifted up, or worshipped." The plain meaning of these words is that anyone who subscribes these Articles as a condition of being authorized to administer the Sacrament according to the use of the Church of England has pledged himself not to do what they condemn. I do not think it has been explained why the Articles are not printed with the Deposited Book ; not do I know whether the majority Bishops thought that what is out of sight is out of mind, and that their omission would facilitate disregard of them.
But I am not aware that the Articles have been repudiated, or that their subscription will no longer be required of the clergy. It is, of course, possible to give a casuistical explana- tion of the words of the Article, according to which they would not condemn reservation or anything else. But it would hardly be necessary to argue that such an explanation could not be honest, even if the same teaching were not clearly expressed in the Prayer Book. The sixth rubric after the Order of Holy Communion prescribes : " If any remain of that which was consecrated, it shall not be carried out of the Church," and what shall be done with it.
The need of reservation (apart from the real purpose, which the majority Bishops do not venture to assert to be Anglican) is based on (1) the alleged obligation of fasting communion, of which there is no hint in the Prayer Book, and (2) teaching contrary to that of the Prayer Book, which is clearly expressed in the third rubric after the office for the Communion of the Sick : " But if a man, either by reason of extremity of sickness, or for want of warning in due time to the Curate, or for lack of company to receive with him, or by any other just impediment, do not receive the Sacrament of Christ's Body and Blood, the Curate shall instruct him, that if he do truly repent him of his sins, and stedfastly believe," and so on, " he cloth eat and drink the Body and Blood of our Saviour Christ profitably to his soul's health, although he do not receive the Sacrament with his mouth."
But for teaching contrary to this rubric there would have
-been little or no demand for reservation. -
in these rubrics the teaching of the Prayer Book is shown in the clearest possible way, and how it can be maintained that the omission of the first of them, and the legalizing' of What it disallows, makes no difference to the doctrine of the hurch as e4ressed in the Articles and Prayer Book, is iiaiomprehensible. If it is meant that the Deposited Book Makes no change from uses and teaching contrary to the Prayer Book which certain Bishops are said to have encouraged in recent years, that cannot be what the public has been intended to understand.
The period during which there has been any considerable amount of the lawlessness in deference to which it is proposed to jettison the Articles and reverse the teaching of the Prayer Book, is very short in relation to the life of the Prayer Book. Forty years ago there were very few churches in which there were uses or teaching contrary to it. Successors to the Tractarians, in the Universities and elsewhere, founded themselves on Hooker, who is presumably to be thrown overboard with the Prayer Book teaching which he expounds.
It is either unintelligent or disingenuous to put the law- lessness of omitting the long exhortation, or disbelieving the geocentric conception of the world implied in the Articles (which nearly all the Bishops maybe supposed to disbelieve), in the same category as that of teaching doctrine or adopting uses which the Prayer Book expressly condemns.
Englishmen mostly have a respect for law and order, and expect ministers of religion to be law-abiding and honest. Where they find the services wholly inconsistent with the Articles and with the rubrics, to both of which the clergy are pledged in the most solemn way, many of them stay away, take little or no part in Church life, and are practically disfranchised. That is one reason why the Church Assembly is notoriously unrepresentative.
It is probable that a majority of Churchmen are opposed to the surrender to lawlessness which the legalizing of reservation means, and to the profound change in the teaching of the Prayer Book which it involves, and to the conse- quences which would follow. If not a majority, they are a great number, and not the least intelligent or educated of Churchmen. The change is advocated in the interest of comprehensiveness, but if carried it may well lose to the Church a great many more than it will retain.
But if the doctrine of the Church is still declared by the Articles, and they are to be left unaltered, how will it be possible to require men publicly and solemnly to declare their " unfeigned assent" to them, and yet authorize them to use a book containing what they explicitly condemn ?
It is difficult enough already for many of them to assent to those Articles, the literal meaning of which implies a materialism or a cosmogony universally discredited ; but they are comforted by the consideration that these forms under which the principles are expressed are not essential. It is very different to exact a profession of unfeigned assent to the disallowing of a particular use as a condition of being empowered to employ it. It might be added that the Act which requires this assent requires also that the clergy shall conform in all points to what is prescribed in the old book, not in one which reverses its teaching.
It seems hardly possible that the effect of the proposed change, either on those who are still attached to the teaching of the Church, substantially as given in the Articles and Prayer Book, or on those who come to consider whether they can offer themselves for ordination, has been sufficiently
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