THE RIGHTS OF THE NONCONFORMISTS.
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.] SIR,—The phrase opens on a large question, but for the moment I will only take your version : " In law the Non- conformist is not banished from the Church, nor has he forfeited any of his rights therein—the right to attend the services of the Church, including the Communion Service and all other rights." It seems to me that one must close both eyes to very plain facts, historical and contemporary, to let that sentence pass. Your reviewer (p. 1012) asks whether Dr. Horton has read Article XIX. ? Sir, I am sure he has, for that is a primary article of every Free Churchman's creed, but when has it ever functioned in the practice of the Establishment ? The Bishop of Bangor, in reply to a question If mine in the Welsh Church Commission, said that, with the exception of the Wesleyans, other Nonconformists were )utside the pale. His lordship was right. The pale that not io long ago encircled the Univeraities still runs through
the schools ; it fences the Communion Table ; it barricades the pulpit ; it creates a schism and a. scandal in the mission field ; it invades the cemetery, the Churchman is buried in consecrated, the Nonconformist, on the other side of the pale, in unconsecrated, earth, and the dead in their graves are constrained to continue the sorry polemic that divided them in life.
Canon Daustini Cremer eulogizes the Churchman as one who " accepts the established order." But ought any good' man or woman to accept it as it stands ? For example, a devout woman, a member of my own thurch, was recently a patient in a London hospital. She longed for the Com- munion, but though it was celebrated in her ward she was refused. " If thine enemy hunger, give him bread to eat," said a Jew of the Old Covenant, but a priest of the New withholds the Bread, even while breaking it in the sight of one that hungers—and rightly so far as the order of his Church goes, which runs " There shall none be admitted to the Holy Communion until such time as he be confirmed." In a word, the rights of a Nonconformist in the Church of England begin only when he ceases to be one.
The Canon appeals to you to become a champion of his Church as a national institution. Sir, I would be even bolder, and appeal to you and to all widehearted men in all the Churches to champion that Church of the New Testament for whose appeasing the whole creation groaneth and travaileth together in pain until now.—I am, Sir, &c., Stamford Hill Church, N. J. MORGAN GIBBON,
Ex-Chairman of the Congregational Union. [We were dealing not with the practices that have been built up but with the law of the land under which the Church of England was established. The law is as We stated it to be.—En. Spectator.]
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