I cannot quite abandon the question of i t o'clock
matins as I had intended, for I owe an answer to a courteous letter from a clergyman who prefers the Choral Eucharist at and asks " why the wayfaring man, if he be a Christian, cannot join wholeheartedly in an act of worship which repre- sents, symbolises or commemorates, put it how you will, the great act of redemption in which he professes to believe ? " My reply is that I think " the wayfaring man " would commonly regard the Choral Eucharist as being a service primarily, if not exclusively, for communicants of the Church of England ; he might be a Christian without being that ; he might well hesitate even to call himself a Christian at all and yet desire genuinely to join in such a service as matins and be the better for it. I doubt whether in that case he would feel he had the right to attend the Choral Eucharist. The Church is, of course, perfectly entitled to hold that its duty is exclusively to its own members—one of my corre- spondents declares frankly : " My business is to minister to my parishioners. Outsiders do not come into the picture "- but I should have hoped that as a national Church it would take a wider view than that.
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