REMARKS
UPON THE
FIRST REPORT OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON RITUAL,
IN CONNECTION WITH THE INTEGRITY OF THE
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.

The Executive of the Brighton Branch of the English Church Union, through you, sir, their Chairman, have, too rashly, I fear, as well as too kindly, supposed that I might have something to say upon the above subject which may repay this assemblage of Churchmen for their trouble in coming here this evening.  It is certainly not for me to say you have deluded them, but rather, without wasting time in apology, to do my best to save (if it may be so) your credit and my own; and, what is of more consequence, to throw some light upon the very important matter to which my remarks are to be directed.  At any rate, the great importance of the subject itself and the imminent likelihood of some action being taken to disarrange or subvert the present standing of the Church of England by an alteration in her Book of Common Prayer will ensure your deep interest, and, I do not doubt, secure me an indulgent hearing; whilst the very large and influential, and,—I think it will be on all hands allowed,—most successful meeting held last week in London, gives an additional reason for strengthening, if it may be so, the action then taken by diffusing as widely as possible information as to the dangers apprehended, and the means of resistance to be used in order to preserve its integrity.

There seems, too, to be a peculiar and apt propriety in this term crisis, as applied to the present aspect of Church affairs.  It is not merely that there is a great danger, but a danger coming to a head, which, if happily now overcome, will again subside.  Johnson gives as the first sense of crisis, “The point in which the disease kills or changes to the better;” and, as the second, “The point of time at which any affair comes to the height,” according to the exact use of the word by Dryden:—

Now is the very crisis of your fate,
And all the colour of your life depends
On this important Now.

One great means of her maintaining this position is the maintaining untouched her Book of Common Prayer, and therefore there is and must be need of the most careful watchfulness as to every threatening of assault upon it.

Now I affirm without hesitation that the first Report of the Royal Commission, appointed, to use its own terms, “to enquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for regulating the course and conduct of public worship, &c., &c., according to the use of the United Church of England and Ireland,” threatens, and even leads, such an assault.  And this gives the connection of the two parts of my subject as announced to you in the title of this Lecture.

An illustration may possibly help us to estimate the true value of the Commissioners’ argument, or, as I should rather say, their sophism.  And it seems very important to shew that it is a sophism, because the paragraph in question in their Report is the one thing reiterated over and over again by the advocates of legislation or repression.  It is the stock argument, the only argument on which the demand for change is based; and it is often urged as if it were irresistible, and there were no reply to it.  Let us, then, examine it, and try to see its true force.

Now there is, as it seems to me, a very apt illustration of its fallacy in a matter of ceremonial treated of in the 30th Canon, and a matter, too, be it observed, where the ceremonial referred to, and defended, was certainly not an essential of Christianity, and as certainly, at the time, gave grave offence to many.

There is a passage in the answers of the Bishops to the Nonconformist divines at the Savoy Conference, which aptly illustrates this statement of the Canon, and is of the more moment because it shews that the mind of those who managed that controversy in 1661 was entirely in harmony with that of the framers of the Canons in 1603; and as the Savoy Conference was the immediate precursor of the Convocation of the next year, which in substance ratified and adopted its recommendations in the last revision of our Prayer Book, those Episcopalian divines may well be taken as the exponents of the mind of the very Convocation which passed the Rubric upon ornaments.

Perhaps this is all very natural, and it may be very fortunate.  We may be thankful that we have not a scheme devised, to carry out their proposal, as crude as the proposal and the Report itself.  But though these details are not before us, and we have a little respite before they come, we are not without some indication as to what they are likely to be; and we shall do well to use the time we have before they actually take definite shape, in providing as far as possible to thwart any pernicious principles which may be embodied in them.

But we are not even left to our own mere reasoning, or natural anticipations, to guide us to the mode in which the Commissioners must be prepared to carry out their opinion and recommendation.  We have a light thrown upon this, in a lucid commentary upon the bare Report, furnished us by one of the Commissioners.  I have already alluded to it.  The recent Charge of the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol not only deals with the question of Ritual itself, but specifically, in relation to it, with the modes in which the recommendation of the Report may be carried out; and I will venture to affirm, even in the face of his Lordship’s disclaimer as to the mode which he himself advocates being an alteration in the Prayer Book, that there is not one of the courses suggested (except the course of leaving the matter to the decision of the Courts, which he at once rejects,) that does not involve a repeal, direct or indirect, of the rubric upon ornaments.  It will not be alien from, but indeed very much to, our purpose to take his statements in some detail, and see what they indicate as to the likely progress of the Commissioners’ work.  Bishop Ellicott’s Charge in this relation is very important, for it cannot but give us the key to what he at least will press upon his brother Commissioners when again they meet, and perhaps is now pressing upon them.

“Let us now,” he says, “leave the past, and with the past all antagonisms and recriminations, and rather as calm, earnest, and loyal sons of the Reformed Church of England, confer together as to what now remains to be done.  Let us soberly and dispassionately consider what measures seem wisest, what remedies most hopeful, at the present momentous crisis.  Let us clear the ground by considering briefly some courses and remedies that have already been proposed, and that probably will be reiterated with pertinacity.  One proposed remedy is, the simple omission of the Ornaments’ Rubric as in the Irish Book of Common Prayer; or its definite and express repeal by some legislative measure.  This is a prompt remedy, but a dangerous one—dangerous in part from reasons already adduced, in part from the deep and rankling bitterness arising from the thus greatly increased conviction that the law is really in favour of the use of vestments, and being so is to be overridden by an unjust Act of Parliament.  Two courses are always dangerous in this country; one is to leave in the hearts of any party an enduring sense of injustice, a ready political illustration of which is perhaps at once rising in the thoughts of many of us; the other is, to come in direct conflict with that constitutional principle which is embodied in the familiar and traditional ‘Nolumus leges Angliæ mutari.’  We cannot, then, I think, wisely adopt the remedy just mentioned.”

Observe here, before we proceed further, that this power of manipulation, over and above being open to the objection which the Bishop notices of multiplying diversities of practice, is in fact nothing else than setting the bishop above the law as it exists, and is, therefore, as we said all these remedies would be found to be, a repeal of the rubric which is the present law.  But at any rate, here again, the Bishop rejects the proposed mode of action, though, he says, we should “pause” upon it.

“On this remedy it is necessary to pause.  Every clear-headed man among us must see, in the first place, that it is giving to bishops a power which they have never even attempted to exercise, except in the unsettled times which immediately followed the Reformation; secondly, that our dioceses would exhibit varieties of usage dependent on the general views and convictions of the bishop for the time being, and liable to be altered when a successor came into his place; thirdly, that men of advanced opinions would make every effort to get into the diocese of that bishop who might be supposed, rightly or wrongly, most to favour them—and, when there, would exercise a combined pressure which would be very difficult to resist; fourthly, and lastly, that, after all, this is but an ingenious expedient to postpone that settlement of the question which common sense and common foresight now perceive to be inevitable.”

There is much truth in these objections, but the most potent objection of all is, that here, again, as in all other modes proposed by way of remedy, there is the real and tangible repeal of the Rubric; so an alteration of the Prayer Book, and a manifest change in the status of the Church and of Churchmen.

There is much here from which I cannot do other than express most strongly my dissent; for—

1.  Why should the rabid violence of all that is uncatholic and unbelieving in the country be taken to be the voice of the country to which heed is to be given?  The Canon before quoted, when it speaks of offending the minds of men, is careful to say “the minds of sober men;” but here it seems that all which is most violent, unreasoning, and intemperate, is to be accepted as the mind of the country from which there is no appeal.  Nay, more, as is evident, this temper is hounded on to be even more violent and rabid, by such unseemly deference to its clamour, and by the pusillanimous assertion that law and order must be overridden because the impatience of such minds will not be content even to wait till the law courts have spoken.

“Brave words, indeed, as you shall see in a summer’s day,” but as it seems to me wholly misapplied, when it is remembered that the “recklessness, scornfulness, and self-will,” attributed to the Ritualistic clergy have never, so far as I am aware, or as I think is borne out by evidence, gone further than this, that they have temperately and respectfully objected to any “manipulators” being placed above the law, and asked to be allowed in quiet to obey what they believe the law to require; where, too, to speak generally, they have found such obedience to the law to be acceptable to the mass of their people, or even demanded by them; whilst, upon the other hand, the whole violence of opposition and clamour (again to speak generally) has been exhibited by those who have not belonged to the parishes or churches where such ceremonial has been in use, but who have chosen gratuitously to interfere in order to prevent others, with whom really they had nothing at all to do, having such a Ritual, believed to be within the four corners of the law, as by them was desired, and to them was edifying.

Observe here the course proposed, and the marvellous declaration concerning it, that it is “not a repeal of the rubric which has held its place in our Prayer Book from the date of the last settlement.”  Yet the remedy is “a simple and positive enactment (by direct legislation) declaring what shall be, and shall be considered to be, the ministerial dress—until further order be taken.”  This is the remedy; and after details as to what it would prohibit, or at least allow to be prohibited (which would include all now distinctly contended for under the rubric on ornaments), the Bishop says, “the rubric would not be repealed, but placed in abeyance.”  This is the special point to which I desire to draw your attention!  Such a plan to be adopted, such restraint to be put in force and imposed; and the rubric not to be repealed! the Prayer Book not to be altered!  Imagine anyone after this “simple and positive enactment” acting upon the rubric, using the things “prescribed,” or “in use by the authority of Parliament in the second year of King Edward VI.,” and then being proceeded against under the new Act.  Would he not soon learn whether the rubric were not repealed?  What will lawyers say?  What does common-sense say on the matter?  What would those who believed the Bishop (ill-starred mortals), that the rubric was not repealed, find and feel to their cost, when his assurance had led them to believe the law of the Church remains as it is?

I think, sir, I need go no further as to proving that all these schemes, and this last just as much as the rest (all except the letting the courts of law settle what is the law, and then abiding by it), agree fully in this one point that they tamper with and alter our Book of Common Prayer.

And all this, over and above the reason and common-sense of the matter, tells us what the next Report of the Ritual Commission will be, unless the Commissioners be duly impressed with the danger of the course which they are pursuing, and the enormous responsibility of trying to carry it out.

And this brings me to a further practical point, which it is very fitting that I should lay before you.  I mean the resistance proposed to all alteration in the Prayer Book by means of the public meeting so lately held in London; and the action to be taken in connection with the resolutions then passed as to memorializing the Royal Commissioners upon the subject.

There appears to be a curious piece of evidence that the great meeting in St. James’s Hall has even already not been wholly unproductive of results.  That meeting was held on Tuesday, the 19th of November.  The Times was singularly quiescent in relation to it for nearly a week: but yesterday, Nov. 26, in an article upon Lord Portman’s questions in the House of Lords touching the Bishop of Salisbury’s Charge—though not dealing directly with the meeting—it yet introduces the following apposite remarks: