DR. TAIT'S BILL AND CONVOCATION.
RCHBISHOP TAIT is not likely to elicit from Convocation 11 any very favourable opinion of his Bill. But he is likely to do the Church a service, nevertheless, by bringing it to a
clear consciousness of its divided condition, and of the absolute necessity of large mutual concessions to make the comprehen- siveness of the Church a reality. Nothing can prove this better than that it has already provoked from the Archdeacon of Sudbury, the very admirable gravamen which stands in his name, and which runs thus :—
” That whereas the ancient laws of the Church of England by which the services in our parish churches were designed to be regulated are, by the progress of time, by disuse and by the conflicting decisions of the Law Courts, become so uncertain in their expression and administra- tion that both clergy and laity are grievously perplexed as to what is and what is not lawful; and whereas it is now proposed to establish a multitude of new Courts for the more speedy enforcement of these uncertain laws : the undersigned humbly submits to the wisdom of the Fathers of the Church that the time is now come for an open and honest recognition of the fact that the ancient laws on this subject are inade- quate to the needs of the Church of to-day, and that a new promulga- tion of ordinances or rubrics is imperatively required in the interests of the clergy and laity alike. Therefore the undersigned humbly prayeth that your Right Rev. House will take steps to re-edit the laws of the Church which relate to the conduct of divine service in our churches, not on a narrow basis, for the benefit of any one party, but in the spirit of a wise and charitable concordat between the various schools of thought which exist in the Church, so that by enlarging the boundaries of the law' if need be, and by a clear definition of its limits, the con- science of the clergy may be enlightened and relieved, and the trans- gressions of the self-willed restrained."
We have no objection even to the closing sentence,.provided it be frankly meant, in which Archdeacon Chapman expresses his belief that "there will be less danger to the Church of England through a speedy reformation of these laws once foi all, under the promised guidance of the Holy Spirit, than by the continuance of these internecine hostilities which are impairing the Church's life." That it will be a genuine fruit of divine influence to get the various parties in the Church to recog- nise that, even though they mean different and sometimes opposite things, they may all be equally guided by God through their temporary phase of truth or error to something deeper and more permanent, we- cordially admit. But if Arch- deacon Chapman supposes that the reconsidered rubrics are to be expressions of absolute divine truth, he is of course guilty of the same kind of superstition of which- we have all been accusing Rome. We should hope, however, that his frank admission of the very great difference between the "various schools of thought in the Church," implies that he dreams of no infallibility about the decisions to be arrived at, but only of a wisdom corresponding in degree to the genuineness of the attempt to conform to the highest spirit in considering these differences.
While, however, we heartily agree that the solution of the difficulty is to be found in some such direction as the Archdeacon of Sudbury indicates, we must point out that what is needed in
this re-editing of the ordinances and rubrics of the Church, is not so much the means of adapting them to the varying creeds of the clergy, as the means of ensuring to the laity, who, after all, are the vast mass of the worshippers, the power of modifying the externals of worship so as to suit their wants. It is a far harder thing, as we have often pointed out, for the laity to be either compelled to acquiesce in the use of symbols which to them are false, and perhaps even something like impieties, or to stay away from public worship altogether, than for the officiating
clergyman to be compelled, as Dr. Pusey said, to find some private mode of expressing to God a faith, the traditional language of which is denied him. It will be necessary and well to recognise • as lawful within certain moderate limits, both the soberest and most rationalising forms of worship on the one hand, and the richer and more symbolic on the other ; but what will not do will be to give the clergyman, without relation to his congregation, the right of choosing what the external rites shall be. What is needed is to make the Church service as nearly as may be the highest expression of the religious belief and the religious feeling of the worshippers. If this is to be attained, you must give the people, in a much greater degree than the officiating clergyman, the right to judge what in- creases and what reduces or destroys, especially what seriously reduces or destroys, the religious effect of the service to their hearts. If the reading of the Athanasian Creed drives men away from Church on great Christian anniversaries, and shuts the mouths and oppresses the hearts even of those who go,—clearly it is as necessary that an option should be given to the congregation to have it omitted, as that the individual clergyman who reads it should be able to liberate his own conscience by passing it over. The question might be made one of ritual, by merely giving permission to the clergy, instead of imposing on them the duty, to read it on certain days ; but in addition a measure must be carried prohibiting the clergy from availing themselves of their option to use any optional rite or formula against the wish of a given majority of the people, and pro- hibiting in like manner even a majority of the people from im- posing on areluctant clergyman any such optional rite or formula. And so also of the moot points of ritual. If it should ultimately be decided,—as we think it probably will be,—that our Church service never contemplated forbidding the clergyman from turning towards the altar during the prayer of conse- cration, let that posture be admissible, but let it not be admis- sible without the concurrence both of the officiating clergyman himself and of a given majority of the parish Council which re- presents his people. Again, let either the Geneva gown or the surplice, or even, if our clergy can show any case for it, those more gaudy and giddy vestments by which it is strangely sup- posed that special sacredness and reverence are conveyed, be admissible ; but let it be necessary that both the officiating clergy and a decisive majority of the laity shall unite to desire any deviation from the usual custom, before such a deviation shall be admitted. By all means let the rubrics of the Church be re-edited, but let the re-editing be accompanied by a specific grant of power to the laity to veto the use of any optional rite or formula which would diminish the religious efficacy of the service to their minds and hearts.
The discussions in Convocation have already brought out two very important sets of facts bearing on Archbishop Tait's Bill,—on one of which we insisted as a moral cer- tainty last week,—namely, that a Bill the effect of which will be to punish all excesses of ritual, even those which the lay wor- shippers desire, must produce retaliation, by the use of the very same machinery for the punishment of all deficiencies of ritual in the Low-Church and Broad-Church Churches. Canon Gregory mentioned in his speech, speaking of it with regret, that an Association for prosecuting all clergymen who are guilty of such deficiencies in carrying out the rubrics of the
Church, has already been formed. The result is obvious. Our churches will be turned into scenes of espionage and party warfare. People will go to church to avenge their clerical friends by finding out the weak points in the armour of those friends' opponents. We shall have less prayer and more passion ; less peace and more "watchful jealousy ;" less forgiveness and more revenge. We shall have High-Church corps of observa- tion formed to keep Liberal Churchmen in terror, Evangelical bodies of volunteers to attack the Ritualists, and Rationalistic raids to make reprisals on both the other schools. In a word, the forms under which we ought to find our way to God will be used as the arena for irritating and justifying human passions. We can fancy no result more mischievous.
And another result has yielded itself clearly from the discus- sion in Convocation,—the Bishop's Court of each diocese will be a far less trustworthy tribunal than any central tribunal consisting of great State lawyers. In the first place, the Bishop is given under the Bill the very remarkable power of dismissing a complaint without a formal hearing, whether it is really founded in law or not. In other words, a High-Church Bishop may simply ignore all parishioners' complaints of over- ritual ; a Broad-Church Bishop may ignore all such complaints of under-ritual; and an Evangelical Bishop all complaints of omissions calculated to give the services of the Church a more Evangelical tone. Not only so, but the Bishops may make such orders as to "costs "as they please, and the effect of this may be, that a partial Bishop may render all suits by persons opposed to his school of thought costly, and all suits by persons of his own way of thinking cheap and easy. And though appeals are allowed, as the Bishop is to have the power of enforcing the ad interim, decision till the appeal is decided, and as he is also to have so much power of rendering the original suit costly to the party with which he has least sympathy, the result will often amount to the infliction of a heavy fine on the defeated party, as well as his prompt defeat by the Bishop, and the grant of a summary power to enforce the law against him. Now it cannot be denied that our Bishops are by no means universally men of judicial minds. Dean Stanley quite failed, we think, in making out the merits of the Bishops as Judges. There are some of them from whom we should really expect unjust judgment, not because they would intend or wish to be unjust, but because they have hardly the manliness and lucidity needed for impartial justice. To substitute for the administration of the law by a Court of tried and practised lawyers, more than a score of separate Courts, in none of which need the Bishop ever call his Assessors into counsel unless he pleases, nor indeed have efficient Assessors to call into counsel unless he pleases, would, we believe, be one of the greatest blunders of modern times. We must candidly say that there are only a few of our Bishops who have a trace of the judicial mind, and that even those few—and we say it without implying any reproach—could no more be compared with our greater Judges in their command of legal principles, than the Judges could be compared with them in their command of divinity. Archbishop Tait's Bill will not be welcome to any school amongst the clergy. Nay, for once its unpopularity in Convo- cation will be a fair index not of its merits but of its faults. What we really need is a revision of the Church's Rubrics, in the interest not only of the different schools of theology, but still more of the laity. But if that be impossible, let us have the law of the Church laid down,—cheaply and rapidly if you will,—but still not locally, by a Court of trained lawyers, who decide not on the principle of making things easy in a particular diocese, but on the principle of keeping the best guarantees for the impartiality and comprehensiveness of the Church.
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