THE BROAD CHURCH ON RITUALISM.

THE controversy between Mr. Llewelyn Davies and our- selves seems to us to be pretty well exhausted. He has declined to notice more than one piece of new evidence which we offered for his consideration, and has dealt chiefly with what, he insists, is not new evidence at all. Under these cir- cumstances, we propose in this article to summarise the general argument on our side, meeting the objections of Mr. Davies's last two letters as we go along. But we have one or two prelimi- nary observations to make. There is a disposition on the part of Mr. Davies and others to endow the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council with a sort of Pontifical infallibility. Instead of scrutinising arguments on their merits, they think it enough to reply, "That was before the Court, and the Court decided against your view of the case." Of course, the decision of a Court of Final Appeal is binding in law till it is reversed. But that is no reason at all for withdrawing the decision from the ordeal of public criticism. Nor is it any answer to criticism of a damaging character to say, " Are you likely to be better informed than a Court of eminent lawyers ?" That entirely depends upon circumstances. In the opinion of all rational persons Mr. Freeman's judgment on a moot point connected with the Norman Conquest would outweigh the unanimous opinion of all the Judges in England. So would Sir Alexander Grant's judgment on the mutual bearings of the " Eudemian " and "Nicomachean Ethics." Now the questions in debate be- tween Mr. Davies and ourselves are not questions of law at all, but of history and archwology. It is almost as irrelevant, therefore, to appeal to the authority of the Ridsdale Court on the ground of its members being eminent lawyers, as it would be to appeal to it on the ground of their being eminent hymnologists or classical scholars. What we want to know is whether the mem- bers of the Court were familiar with the history of the period on which they adjudicated, and with the technical details of the subject-matter of controversy. And what we find is an abundance of evidence to the contrary. In our view as his- torical critics, the Ridsdale judgment is simply an opinion ex- pressed by seven eminent lawyers on certain points of eccle- siastical history, in which, to quote Mr. Davies's phrase, they were "not at home."

And now let us look at the facts. The First Prayer-book of Edward VI. (1549) prescribed all the Eucharistic vestments. The Second Prayer-book (1552) abolished them all in express terms, except the rochet for bishops and the surplice for the rest of the clergy. Both the Prayer-books of Edward were abolished under Queen Mary. Elizabeth repealed the ecclesiastical legislation of Queen Mary, and restored the Second Prayer- book of Edward, with some alterations. One of these altera- tions was the omission of the rubric which prohibited the cope and chasuble, and the substitution for it of another rubric which restored all the vestments of Edward's First Book, including, of course, the cope and chasuble. This rubric was ratified by the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity ; and the clause of the Act which gave this ratification empowered the Queen, with the advice of her Ecclesiastical Commissioners, or of the Archbishop of Canterbury alone, to take other order" in the matter. The question is as to the nature of the power thus bestowed upon the Queen. According to the Ridsdale judgment, it enabled her, on the solitary advice of the Metropolitan, to repeal a fundamental clause of an Act of Parliament, and make obedience to it highly penal. It enabled her to abolish not only cope, and alb, and chasuble, but also surplices, and altar-cloths, and altars, and pulpits and organ3, and chalices and patens. Nay, more : if the Ridsdale judgment is good law, the Act of Uniformity empowered Elizabeth, on the advice of the Metropolitan, to abolish the English Prayer-book altogether, and to reintroduce the Latin Service of the Mass. The Judicial Committee, in "Liddell r. Westerton," ruled that the word " ornament " in the rubric includes the books used in divine service. So that if the power to take "other order" enabled the Queen to impose the use of the surplice, in place of the chasuble, it also enabled her to substitute the Missal for the Book of Common Prayer. The Ridsdale judgment is good for all that, or it is good for nothing at all. But a legal interpretation which involves a manifest and preposterous paradox can hardly be good law.

But we are not left to inferential reasoning in this matter. There is positive evidence that the power conferred upon the

Queen to take "other order" meant power to add to the

prescribed ceremonial of public worship. The evidence on this point is abundant. Two examples must suffice here. George

Withers, one of the ablest leaders of the Puritans, says,

—" Power, moreover, was given to the Queen and the Archbishop to introduce whatever additional ceremonies they might think proper ; and they immediately after- wards both discontinued the ordinary bread heretofore used in the administration of the Lord's Supper, and for the sake of a new Reformation adopted the round wafer, after the pattern

of that used by the Papists." In Strype's "Life of Parker" (iii., 46-8, 65-9), there are two letters from the Queen, which

clearly show that she understood the "other order' in the sense in which Withers, and, indeed, everybody else at the time, understood it. There is also in the first of these letters (p. 48) a passage which proves that the Queen wished, where- ever it was possible, that the same ritual which was prescribed in Collegiate and Cathedral churches should also be used in parish churches. In the former the ritual was to be rich and splendid, because "cost may be more probably allowed." But "in all parish churches, also, either the same, or at the least the like," ritual as that of the Cathedrals was to be in use. This is in direct antagonism to the Ridsdale judgment, which makes the ritual of Cathedrals illegal and penal in parish churches. On the other hand, we challenge the production of one single scrap of positive evidence in the reign of Elizabeth to show that the Queen was empowered, with the advice of the Metro- politan, to repeal and make illegal anything which the Act of Uniformity had sanctioned. We challenge, further, the pro- duction of any legally authoritative condemnation of the Vestments in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Denunciations of them by Puritan Bishops prove nothing ; for they denounced things which were undoubtedly legal. We see instances of this in our own day. Bishop Fraser's predecessor in the See of Manchester refused to license curates in his diocese who would not pledge themselves to preach in the black gown, be- cause he believed that the use of the surplice in the pulpit was illegal. The Advertisements of 1566, even assuming their validity, do not condemn the vestments, either expressly or by implication ; and the Royal Letter to which they owed their origin makes it as clear as daylight that they were not intended to do anything of the kind.

So much for the reign of Elizabeth. Skipping over the reign of James, which offers no evidence of importance either way, we come to the year 1611, when a Committee of the House of Lords suggested "whether the rubric should not be mended, where all vestments in time of divine service are now [i.e., in 1641] commanded which were used 2 Edward VI." The Committee which made this suggestion consisted of ten earls, ten bishops (including the learned Ussher), and ten barons, and were assisted by some of the most distinguished divines of the day. Surely no one who is not dominated by a foregone conclusion will believe that the Bench of Bishops in 1641, and the most learned men in the kingdom,could have been under the delusion that " all " the vestments of Edward's First Book were then" commanded," if they had all, except the surplice, been notoriously illegal since 1566. The thing is incredible. In 1644 the suggestion of 1641 was carried into effect by an Act of Parliament, which ordained that "no copes, surplices, superstitious vestments, roods or rood-lofts, or holy-water font, shall be or be any more used in any church or chapel within this realm." But the "superstitious vestments " here mentioned, says Mr. Davies, did not mean the chasuble, but the square cap and tippet. Is Mr. Davies serious ? Or is he

really ignorant of the fact that the cap and tippet were pre- scribed for out-door wear, not for use "in any church or chapel?" The "copes, surplices, superstitious vestments" of the Act of 1644 clearly mean, and are convertible with, the suggestion of 1641, which embraced "all vestments which were used 2 Edward VI."

But the plain truth is that all that happened between 1559 and 1662 i8 entirely beside the question. Equally irrelevant

are the intentions of the Revisers of 1662, though we have ourselves no doubt that they intended to revive the legality of all the vestments of Edward's First Book. " A verbis legis non eat recedendum " is a settled maxim in the inter- pretation of statutes, and every Judge of repute, from Coke down to the Ridsdale Judges, has laid it down as an in- variable rule that a court of law, as the judges expressed it in

Edrick's case," ought not to make any construction against the express letter of the statute." But "the express letter"

of the statutory rubric of 1662 is admitted by the Ridsdale judgment to enjoin all the vestments of Edward's First Book. Yet the Court deliberately reversed the plain meaning of the statute on the strength of a document a hundred years older than the statute, and which, to put it mildly, has not been proved to have ever had any legal authority at all.

The exigencies of space will not enable us to do more than touch on the principal points of Mr. Davies's previous letter. The Bodmin inventory declares, a year after the publication of the Advertisements, that certain sets of chasubles were used in the parish church, and were to be used "from that

year forward." That must be an error, replies Mr. Davies, for the inventory mentions at the same time the use of "Jesus cotes, tormentor's cotes, and devil's cotes," and those garments can hardly have been used in church. Why not ? They belonged to the wardrobe of the Miracle Plays, which were undoubtedly acted, sometimes in the church and sometimes in the churchyard, down to the Great Rebellion, and in some parts of England even later. The evidence of the Bodmin inventory, therefore, remains intact. Some other important portions of our evidence, like the trial of De Laune, in the eighteenth century, Mr. Davies has passed by without a re- mark. To clear up Mr. Davies's difficulty about Bishop Horn would require more space than we can spare. But if he will look at Strype's "Life of Parker" (Vol. I., p. 344), he will find a key to the interpretation of Horn's letter. Our ex- planation fits the facts ; Mr. Davies's does not,—it reduces Horn's letter to sheer nonsense. We hold, therefore, to our opinion that Horn, one of the authors of the Advertisements, believed—after the Advertisements were drawn up, with his signature attached—that only an act of Parliament, and there- -fore not the Advertisements, could repeal the Ornaments Rubric. And Horn's opinion is confirmed by Archbishop Grindal five years after the publication of the Advertisements. Grindal says expressly that "nothing of the law [of the Orna- ments Rubric] was either altered or diminished." If this explicit declaration of one of the authors of the Advertise- ments as to the non-repealing power of the Advertisements is to be contemptuously rejected, it seems to us useless to offer Mr. Davies any further evidence.