DR. KYLE ON COMPREHENSION.
THE Bishop of Liverpool does, at least, make an effort to take a statesmanlike view of the National Church; and for that he should receive credit, even though, when he comes to apply his principles in practice, he shows a considerable portion of human infirmity. His first charge to his Clergy,
delivered on Wednesday, contains the following interesting passage :-
"I have long maintained, and I still maintain, that every well- constituted National Charch ought to be as comprehensive as possible. A sect can afford to be narrow and exclusive ; a National Church ought to be liberal, generous, and as `large-hearted' as Solomon. To secure the greatest happiness and wealth of the greatest number in the State, is the aim of every wise politician. To comprehend and take in, by a well-devised system of Scrip- tural Christianity, the greatest number of Christians in the nation, ought to be the aim of every National Church. To these principles, as an English Bishop, I mean to adhere. But there must be limits to the comprehensiveness of the Church of England. There must be certain boundaries and landmarks. For order is Heaven's first law. A Christian Church utterly destitute of order does not deserve to be called a Church at all. The member of the National Church of England has a just right to expect one general type of teaching and worship, whether he goes into a parish church in Truro or Lincoln, in Canterbury or Carlisle. Different shades of statement in the pulpit he may find himself obliged to tolerate. Bat he may justly complain if the doctrine and ceremonial of one diocese are as utterly unlike those of another as light and darkness, black and white, acids and alkalies, oil and water. The Church which regards Deism, Socinianism, Romanism, and Protestantism with equal favour or equal indifference is a mere Babel, a city of con- fusion,' and not the city of God. Now, I contend that the National Church of England has set up wisely-devised ' to its comprehensiveness. Those limits, I believe, are to be found in the Articles, the Creeds, and the Book of Common Prayer. If, therefore, a minister of the National Church maintains and teaches those distinctive doctrines of the Church of Rome which are plainly named, defined, and repudiated in the Thirty-nine Articles, and ignoring the public declaration which he made on taking a living, deliberately teaches transubstantiation, the sacrifice of the Mass, purgatory, the necessity of auricular confession, and the invocation of saints, or if he administer the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper with such usages and ceremonies that few persons can distinguish it from the Romish Mass,—then in that case I contend that he is trans- greasing the liberty allowed by the Church of England."
Now, no one, of course, denies that there are limits to what a man may teach or do in the National Church ; but the ques- tion which Bishop Ryle evades is, what these limits really are. Mr. Voysey found that there were limits, when he distinctly and categorically denied what the Church of England dis- tinctly and categorically teaches ; but short of this, the ten- dency of the decisions in the Courts of Law has been to stretch
the comprehensiveness of the Church up to the utmost point to which individual -clergymen can be found willing to stretch
the elasticity of their own consciences. It was virtually decided, for instance, that both baptismal regeneration and the falsehood of baptismal regeneration might be held in the National Church. It was decided that both the belief in eternal punishments and the belief in universal redemption might be held in the National Church. It was decided that views of Inspiration of almost any degree of strictness or laxity might be held in the National Church. It was decided that the deposition of Bishop Colenso for heresy was invalid, and that he remains a Bishop of the Church of England. It was decided that Mr. Bennett's teaching with reference to the Real Presence, though on the very verge of heresy, was not heretical for a member of the Church of Eng- land. Now, these decisions seem to us to amount to some- thing very much more than the admission of what Dr. Ryle calls " different shades of statement " into the pulpits of the National Church ; and no reasonable politician can, we venture to say, discover any conceivable reason why, if teaching ranging over such an enormous theological area, is to be pronounced admissible in the National Church, ceremonies ranging over a very much narrower field of suggestion and symbolism should not be equally admissible in the National Church, so long as they do not offend the actual worshippers. And Dr. Ryle has committed himself absolutely as to the authority of these various decisions. "I mean to abide by the decisions of the Courts of Law," he says ; " I see no other safe or satisfac- tory course to adopt. A Bishop who sets himself above the law, and ignores its decrees, is launched on a sea of uncer- tainties, which I, for one, decline to face." Whether that is quite accurate, we are not sure. In a very able and amusing letter from the Dean of Durham, to this week's Guardian, Dean Lake mentions that Bishop Ryle announced his willingness to wear a cope in the celebration of the Communion, if the Archbishop of York required it. But the Courts of Law have decided more than once that in Cathedrals the cope is to be worn in the administration of the Communion, without the slightest reference to the condition imposed by Bishop Ryle, —that his ecclesiastical superior should require it. If a judicial decision be, as he tells us, his final test of what the Church requires, we are at a loss to understand why he waits for the summons of the Archbishop of York before complying with what the law requires in relation to the celebration of the Holy Communion in his pro-cathedral. That, however, is only by the way. We will give the Bishop credit for de- ferring fully to judicial decisions, so soon as he has adequately grasped the drift of their requirements. But can he sin- cerely say that it is the drift of these decisions to comprehend only " different shades " of theological teaching within the limits of the National Church ? We maintain, with- out a shadow of doubt, that the tendency of these decisions is to comprehend within the National Church almost any kind of faith in revealed religion you please to imagine, which is consistent with the willingness of the teachers to employ the usual liturgical forms, and to avoid contradicting in terms the express statements of the Articles, or Creeds, or direct dog- matic assertions of the Rubrics.
But the truth is that, with all his profession of zeal for the judicial decisions of the Ecclesiastical Courts, Bishop Ryle has shown us incidentally that he has made no attempt to grasp the spirit of these decisions ; that he has never for a moment asked himself what view of any particular word or act the various decisions of the Ecclesiastical Courts of England would favour. For instance, he says," Shall we try to compel every clergyman in the Church of England to use the chasuble and its accompaniments in the Lord's Supper, or to turn the Sacra- ment into a sacrifice ?" Now, if the Bishop had attempted to understand the spirit of the long series of judicial decisions to which we have referred, would he not have understood at once that their tendency is, as far as possible, to compel nothing, but to leave all possible alternatives open to different ministers ; and that even if it had been needful to compel the wearing of any particular vestment in a particular service, the Court would have still left it entirely to the particular minister to interpret the rationale attaching to the use of that vestment, as freely as he is allowed to interpret to himself the meaning of the Creeds and Articles. The law, for in- stance, undoubtedly requires Bishop Ryle to wear a cope when celebrating the Holy Communion, but it does not require him to regard that cope as a sacrificial vestment, and yet there is every bit as much excuse for connecting the cope originally with the idea of sacrifice, as there is for connecting the chasuble with the idea of sacrifice. If Bishop Ryle had got the least ink- ling of the judicial conception of comprehension, he would have known that the Judges—up to the time of the Purchas judgment — endeavoured to interpret all the doctrines and rules of the Church in a sense as elastic as possible, seeing that any other mode of interpretation would involve the hard- ship of condemning a clergyman, and depriving him of his profession and means of usefulness, for a somewhat dubious and questionable matter of opinion. One reason why we, amongst many others, do not regard the Ridsdale judgment as sound law—though, of course, while it is law it ought to be obeyed—is that it has reversed so completely the whole tendency and drift of these decisions. On a basis of question- able fact—which has since been shown to be much more than questionable, positively imaginary—it erected a most strained and artificial interpretation of the Ornaments Rubric, the effect of which was to diminish liberty, instead of increasing it ; to exclude from the Church a class of men who, up to that time, had been declared by the Ecclesiastical Courts themselves to be complying literally with the directions of the Ornaments Rubric. All we wish is that that decision should be fairly and fully reconsidered by the light of the remarkable evidence since brought to light. We greatly doubt whether Lord Selborne himself would not admit that his confidence in the soundness of his own judgment has been upset by the new evidence.
Bishop Ryle would do well, if, as he says, and as we sin- cerely believe, he wishes to do justice to the Ritualist com- plaints, to read Mr. MacColl's very remarkable paper, reprinted from Fraser•'s Magazine,• on " Tractarianism and Ritualism." We do not hesitate to say that that paper sheds a flood of light on the perversity with which popular opinion fastens on a particular practice or rite, and insists on attaching to it a perfectly false significance, of the people's own making. Between thirty and forty years ago, everybody was making as much fuss about the use of the surplice in the pulpit as Bishop Ryle now makes about the use of the chasuble in the Communion Service ; it excited riots in many Churches; it was denounced in the Press as pure and unmitigated Roman- ism ; it was, in fact, regarded as the " mark of the beast." Now, Bishop Ryle himself, we have no doubt, preaches in his surplice, and no one imagines that he is a Romanist for so doing. If he and those who think with him choose to celebrate the Holy Communion in a cope, the cope would soon be regarded as as harmless as the surplice. And if High Churchmen who are not Bishops or Deans, or Canons, are allowed to use a chasuble, we venture to say that, before twenty years are over, the chasuble will be thought as harmless as the surplice is now ; and that the Ritualists, indeed, will no longer be able to treat it as the proper symbol of exclusively sacrificial doctrine. The true way to take the sting out of Ritualism is to be lenient to the Ritualists. Let them wear freely whatever the Reformation left them at liberty to wear. The Bishops will soon find that all sorts of teachers attach to their vestments all sorts of varieties of meaning; and that the Church of England becomes no more Romanist than it is at present, though a certain amount of new ceremonial may have been adopted, just as a certain amount of new ceremonial was adopted thirty years ago, with advantage, rather than disadvantage, to the earnestness and attractiveness of the church service, and without bringing with it any substantial change in the theological groundwork of the Anglican Church.
Previous page
