A PERMISSIVE RUBRIC.
lTo THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."] SIRr-YOU state that there would be a complete division of the Church between the High and Low Church parties were a new Ornaments' Rubric to be made, and you intimate very plainly that the Dean of Peterborough's solution is the only practicable one. Fully aware as I am of the great difficulties of this question, and of the utmost need of tact and charity its complexities involve, and at the same time being unwilling to give a triumph to either of the extreme sections of the Church, I cannot but feel that the Dean's solution is fatal, as it surrenders the whole question, by converting a contested and unsatisfactory condition of action into a distinct recogni- tion of what is, in the eyes of many, a false doctrine. Under the wgis of the Church, two somewhat distinct parties, and another less numerous but very influential, have contrived for a long time to live together. But the tendency of late has been to destroy this working compromise, and, on the part of a small but active section of one party, to force upon the general body the choice of extreme alternatives.
I am a clergyman of forty years' standing, having had large
• ReniniiiA, II, pp. 150.51.
experience of my clerical brethren. I can say truly that our differences, great as they are, are not insuperable, and are much less formidable in practice than they seem to be on paper. Each section of the Church, in these days of good, honest, sympathetic work, has learned much from the others, and they have drawn together in a manner I once never deemed probable, forming an immensely strong body of what in politics would be called the Right and Left Centres, which, in the event of a dissolution of Church and State, would form a very powerful Church in the future.
But, indeed, apart from such a consideration, the great High Church party, as a party, is very far from being extreme, and is almost as averse to advanced Ritualism as is the Evan- gelical, and I fail to see that a new rubric, embodying the simple and familiar dress that has so long prevailed amongst the clergy in. general, would disgust or alienate them, though it might not equally please that extreme section which, how- ever conscientiously, has recently been trying to resuscitate what was not long ago regarded as an obsolete rubric.
Be that as it may, if there be those—not many, I fancy—to whom no settlement, however wisely and charitably drawn, would be acceptable, it is abundantly clear that to infuse new life into a long-neglected and now vehemently contested rubric, and to erect a dogma which is fundamentally opposed, rightly or wrongly, to the ideas of the overwhelming majority of Churchmen, clerical and lay, would be simply to break the Church asunder, even as the present state of conflict, if con- tinued much longer, must have the same result without any help whatever from our many external foes, the members of the Liberation Society and their allies.—I am, Sir, &c.,
A LIBERAL CHURCHMAN.
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