PRAYER-BOOK REVISION—AN UNDOUBTED CHURCH PRINCIPLE.
[TO Till EDITOR OP 'TUB "SPEOTATOR."J
Sin,—How different would have been the history of the Christian Church in England if the compilers of the nation's "Book of Common Prayer" had definitely fixed some date, such as the first year of every century, for its revision ! They made no secret of the fact that their work would periodically need to be brought up to date. Were they not themsehtes revising venerated liturgies banded down to them, in order that they might be better adapted to the knowledge and the needs of the people of England in their own day ? Would not the arguments which they used in their Preface to convince gainsayers be equally applicable to future genera- tions ? They both knew and foreknew the hold of customary forms and phrases over men's minds. They had seen, and must have foreseen, the danger "lest one good custom should corrupt the world."
It is painful to notice the assumption too often made in the arguments of both sides about the Education Bill. They seem to take for granted that loyalty to the national Church means loyalty to antiquated forms and phrases in the Prayer- book as they stand, just as if they were stereotyped for all time. But the loyalty which animates us is rather confidence in the authority of a Christian Church alive and alert, and in close relation to a Christian nation, with the best knowledge and enthusiasm of the day at its disposal. We have had some three centuries of growth since our Service-book was last in the crucible, and we have been growing so fast, especially during the last quarter of a century, that our clothes (? wine- skins) need to be "let out" in all directions, for they nc longer fit us. Some think that those who are not willing to wear the "regulation" garments (words are a kind of clothes !) at their devotions are only those who would refuse to wear any uniform " on principle,"—in a word, those who deliberately prefer sect life (in which one is only expected to worship with those who share one's opinions and tastes in religious matters) to Church life. But it is not so. The half of the nation that ranki as Nonconformist at present includes very many who believe in the principle of allowing the outward side of religious life to be regulated by authority—who really, that is, believe in conformity—and only refuse the regulation services of the Prayer-book because they feel that they are out of date and need the revising hand of the living Church of to-day.
Does any one seriously think that the power of compiling formularies and services to meet the religious wants of the nation as a whole (see Article XX.) belonged to the times of the Stuarts or the Tudors only, or that it has become atrophied by want of use ? Who can doubt that as goodly a body of men of piety and learning will be found for the task to-day as at any period of the Church's history? Even " Church doctrine," which is spoken of sometimes as if it were a petrified tradition, means neither more nor less than the teaching of the living Church of the day, as expressed in authorised formularies, by the help of the living Spirit.- Such formularies must be kept in constant refreshing touch with the heart and mind of the nation if the national Church is to be worthy of its name, and not to decline and fall into a mere denomination among denominations. The sense in which the compilers of our Prayer-book meant Church doctrine to be " distinctive "—a much-abused word, surely—was chiefly, if I mistake not, in its simple, broad, and therefore comprehensive character. It was their ambition that all Christian people should be able to use the services supplied with comfort and profit, whether their family tradition and personal leaning inclined them to Rome or Geneva.
Such, we may surely take for granted, will be the ambition of our twentieth-century Prayer-book revisers. They are far more likely to err—as the authors of the Revised Version of Holy Scripture have confessedly erred—in the direction of timidity than in that of reckless innovation.
Suffer me to use the Church Catechism as a closing illus- tration. It was not only intended to be acceptable to moderate men at both poles of thought It was so. NO one loved and admired it more fervently than Richard Baxter, the Puritan.' It has been brought about by the whirligig of time that the Church Catechism is disliked by the Puritan of to-day,—owing, probably, to the persistency with which men of the opposite school of religious taste and thought have read into it their own opinions and claimed it as their -own. It should surely be possible in the Revised Prayer-book so to phrase it as to
avoid " offence " to either school. We shall thus do for our own day what its compilers so successfully accomplished for theirs. Stumbling-blocks there must needs be, but none the less over the heads of those responsible for their 'retention hangs our Lord's Wei, while He describes the getting them out of the way as angels' work.—I am, Sir, &c., Eccles Vicarage. F. DAIISTINI CREMES.
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