,vr;?-i^A-Vi4..
 
 L I B RAR.Y 
 
 OF THE 
 
 UNIVLRSITY 
 
 or ILLINOIS
 
 m^y
 
 THE YORK CONGRESS AND CHURCH RITES.
 
 <p 
 
 THE 
 
 YORK CONGRESS AND CHURCH RITES. 
 
 \From the "Christian Eemembrancer," January, 1867.] 
 
 BY THE AUTHOR OF 
 "THE CHURCH CAUSE AND THE CHUECH PARTY/' 
 TWO YEARS OF CHURCH PROGRESS," AND ''CHURCH POLITICS 
 AND CHURCH PROSPECTS." 
 
 LONDON: 
 
 JOHN AND CHAELES MOZLEY, PATERNOSTER ROW, 
 
 JOHN MURRAY, ALBEMARLE STREET. 
 
 1867.
 
 LONDON; 
 
 R. CLASr, SON, AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS, 
 
 BREAD STREET HILL.
 
 THE YORK CONGRESS AND CHURCH RITES. 
 
 The York Church Congress — sixth of the series — has followed 
 those of Cambridge, Oxford, Manchester, Bristol, and Norwich to 
 the region of past history, so we may make its memory the stand- 
 ing-point from which to survey some incidents of the Church of 
 England at home. Two years ago, in speaking of the Manchester 
 and Bristol meetings, we pointed out that the real success of 
 the Congress movement would be tested in 1865 by the results 
 of the Norwich gathering. At that time we were not without 
 our apprehensions. The Bishop — himself a resident — was, at the 
 first, confessedly not a very enthusiastic convert to the notion ; 
 Norwich Cathedral was not among the foremost in that reforma- 
 tion which is spreading from minster to minster over the land ; and 
 the occurrence of some difficulties in the chosen residence of Father 
 Ignatius was not a wholly visionary anticipation. The die, 
 however, had been cast, and in due time the event came off. 
 All influences proved propitious. The Bishop of Norwich, re- 
 solved on being a fair, developed into a hearty, president. The 
 Chapter, represented by a Canon of eminent practical ability and 
 energy, was a thoughtful and generous host. Mr. Lyne was 
 absent: good humour was predominant. The papers and dis- 
 cussions were of sterling quality ; and finally, the Congress- 
 book, admirably brought out by Mr. Hinds Howell — who as 
 organizing secretary had won golden opinions — stood in brilliant 
 contrast to the scandalously ill-edited, or rather unedited, volume 
 which professed to be the record of the Bristol meeting. But 
 above all merits the Norwich gathering carried with itself the 
 ratification of Church Congresses as accepted by the Chui'ch of 
 England in its corporate and dignified aspect. The presidency of 
 the Bishop of Oxford at Oxford signified the secured allegiance 
 of one bishop. When the Bishop of Manchester accepted the 
 chair of the congress which was held in his cathedral city, and the 
 dean and chapter opened the cathedral to the initiatory service, 
 the recognition, as far as that diocese went, was made good. 
 A similar recognition at Bristol was a fresh point gained. But 
 at Norwich something more was achieved than securing the 
 countenance of a fourth presiding bishop and a third dean and 
 chapter. In a spiritual aspect the great united communion in 
 
 B
 
 2 The York Congress 
 
 the cathedral (when the bishop celebrated) was to be noted with 
 a white mark ; but in a constitutional point of view this congress 
 was witness to another change in the upward direction which 
 betokened success. At Manchester and Bristol the preachers 
 had been deans — deans of renown, indeed, and pulpit power, but 
 yet deans : at Norwich an archbishop was called in to be the 
 preacher, and it was no secret that this was in preparation 
 for himself taking the chair at the next gathering. To the 
 recluse this might seem a small matter ; but to any one who has 
 cared to study the episcopal thermometer, and to master the 
 freemasonry of caution by which a prelacy, appointed for the 
 most diverse of reasons, under different influences and by different 
 prime-ministers, contrive to keep the peace towards each other, 
 tlie appearance of the Archbishop of York in the pulpit of the 
 solemn minster, preaching to the great church-concourse, after 
 the public Eucharist, was the symbol of the hierarchy descending 
 from the now-imperilled fortresses of class exclusiveness and 
 throwing themselves upon the free zeal, not of a promiscuous 
 herd of dissidents, but of congregated churchmen confederate in 
 the unity of order and church-communion. 
 
 The formal recognition which had been so marked at Norwich 
 was still more pronounced at York. The President was the Metro- 
 politan and Diocesan of the province and the city in which the 
 Congress met — the preacher, the Metropolitan of all England, — 
 while the united worship which the Cathedral, through its corpo- 
 ration, offered, was an embodiment of Catholic feeling, such as we 
 make bold to say no cathedral of England has presented, for we 
 would rather not attempt to guess how long. On the first morning 
 there was a plain early Communion, the Dean celebrating, which 
 was crowded. The great matins service, at which the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury preached, was heralded by a procession winding 
 from the chapter-house and through the nave, in which, after a 
 long file of surpliced choristers, and choirmen, and cathedral 
 clergy, and then of Archdeacons and Deans (invited in virtue of 
 theirdignity to take their part in it), were a dozen Bishops of 
 England, Ireland, the Colonies, and the American States ; and 
 after them the Archbishop of York, who came supported by the 
 A.rchbishop of Canterbury and the Primus of Scotland. On the 
 whole eighteen bishops and archbishops, three times as many as 
 at any previous one, were present at the Congress ; but three of 
 these were not in time for the procession. We dwell on this inci- 
 dent, not because we are weak enough to think that processions 
 could regenerate the world or purify the Church, but because the 
 possibility, and still more the actuality, of such a spectacle, viewed 
 both in its cereroojiial and its practical aspects, as what it was 
 and wherefore it came to be, is a landmark of Church progress 
 
 Z uiuc t
 
 and Church Rites. 3 
 
 which we should not forget to set up for the guidance of the 
 future annalist. 
 
 The Archbishop of Canterbury's sermon was the best com- 
 position of his which we have ever heard. He had evidently 
 appreciated the breadth of the occasion, and had prepared, not 
 the elaboration of some speciiic topic, but that which approached, 
 though of course rid of the monitory element, to a Charge, not, 
 as usually, to his own diocese, but to the entire communion 
 of which he is senior Bishop. The discourse did not attempt 
 high flights of rhetoric, but it was impressive from its simple 
 clearness and the manly good sense with which the preacher 
 talked of things by their own names instead of beating about 
 for oratorical ampliticalions. On preceding occasions, the special 
 and official worship of the Congress as a whole, ended with 
 the sermon. At York, on the contrary, the Dean and Chapter 
 both for the second and third days of the Congress converted 
 the usual ten o'clock matins into an early choral communion, at 
 which the Dean was celebrant. Some 400 communicants availed 
 themselves of this privilege each time, in addition to those who 
 were present at various celebrations in different parish churches. 
 On these occasions the clerks who took part, either in the music 
 or as assistants in the distribution, left the usual stalls and were 
 ranged antiphonaily in the sanctuary, so the choir became prac- 
 tically a nave crowded with devout communicants. To conclude, 
 on the night of that Friday, which was in fact, though not in 
 form, a fourth Congress day, a densely thronged evening service 
 was held in the nave of York Minster, at which the hearty singing 
 of hundreds of voices testified that in one city, at all events, the 
 cathedral, its ways and its privileges, are at last known and 
 prized by the people. At this service an impressive sermon was 
 preached by the Bishop of North Carolina. 
 
 It is not beyond our scope to notice that, within a few days of 
 the close of the Congress, its selected preacher, the Archbishop 
 of Canterbury, was again before the world as the chief func- 
 tionary in another notable ecclesiastical ceremony, when he 
 laid the first stone of the Cathedral at Inverness, for the diocese 
 of that bishop of Moray and Ross, who, as Primus of Scot- 
 land, was walking by his side in the York procession. Grati- 
 fying in itself as the incident was, and useful to the cause of 
 Church progress generally, it has acquired greater importance, 
 and has had its utility enhanced, by the silly outcry which the 
 Times was misguided enough to raise against it, and unscrupulous 
 enough to jumble with the hubbub which it was then beginning 
 to stir up against the new ' ritualism.' So coarsely and ignorantly 
 was the attack made, that the hand of the assailant stood revealed 
 as one who, except in the Times and in his own conventicle, was 
 
 b2
 
 4* The Yor'h Congress 
 
 but little accepted as a prophet: and whose own civil position 
 in London was obviously the exact counterpart of that which he 
 refused to tolerate in Bishop Eden at Inverness. Accordingly, 
 the Times, for once, found itself alone against the world, with 
 only the Record to cheer it on ; while every paper of the most 
 discordant views which valued consistency, applauded the action 
 of the Archbishop, and as many thousands heard of Inverness 
 Cathedral as hundreds might have done had the description of 
 its stone-laying been confined to the religious press. 
 
 The business of the York Congress was, as in preceding years, 
 conducted partly in a central hall, and partly in rooms used for 
 sectional meetings. At Norwich, the Gothic arches of S. Andrew's 
 Hall, in which the gathering took place, greatly augmented the 
 artistic effect of the coup d^ceiL otherwise the acoustic properties 
 of that mediseval rendezvous were very bad. At York, strange 
 to say (although, throughout the eighteenth century, that city 
 reigned as the undoubted social capital of England north of 
 Trent), no room existed large enough to hold a Church Congress, 
 and so a wooden Congress-hall with galleries was erected close to 
 the minster. Picturesque in itself, this structure put on an eccle- 
 siastical aspect when friendly hands had contributed the series of 
 the armorial bearings of all the sees in Great Britain and its 
 dependencies with which the gallery fronts were adorned. 
 
 Of the Archbishop of York's initiatory speech we need not 
 speak at length. It was a very able and judicious address, but 
 one which was rather devoted to ensuring the good conduct and 
 success of the Congress in itself (which on the whole it quite 
 succeeded in doingj, than addressed to the Church at large, 
 beyond and after the meeting. One passage, however, there was 
 stood out, of general value, which brought down the enthusiastic 
 plaudits of the assembhige, in which the Archbishop broadly 
 declared the Church's right to con vocational representation. 
 
 Both before and after the Congress, some persons, who are not 
 the most absolute representatives of the Church peaceable, have 
 been depreciating the York Congress, alleging the incompleteness 
 of the list of subjects treated there, and the method of their 
 treatment. AVe shall best test that charge by inquiring what 
 really were the questions approached in 18G6 and in previous 
 years. We have taken the trouble to tabulate the various sub- 
 jects handled at the four Non-university Congresses, not distin- 
 guishing between those which were treated in full session, and 
 those which were remanded to sections ; and where more than one 
 distinct topic was set down for the same session, we have entered 
 each separately. Of course the managers of each Congress 
 adopted its own nomenclature. But judging foi ourselvei5 as to 
 the subjects which were absolutely or approximately identical,
 
 ayid Church Ritei^. 5 
 
 we find 34 sections of the Ecclesiastical Encyclopaedia travelled 
 over during those 12 days of 4 years. At Manchester, 16 
 several topics were handled, 20 at Bristol, 11 at Norwich, and 
 15 at York. 3 of them in different terms appear at all the occa^ 
 sions, 3 more at three out of the four, 13 at two, while 15 make 
 a single appearance. The questions which have excited sufficient 
 attention to recur virtually on every occasion are : — 
 
 1. — M. Church Extension. B. Parochial Subdivision, Or- 
 ganization, and Action ; Collegiate Churches in great towns. 
 N. Duty of Church to Home Population. Y. Diocesan and 
 Parochial Organization. 
 
 2.— M. B. and N. Church Music. Y. Hymnody. 
 
 3. — M. Supply of Ministers ; and especially native Ministers 
 for Colonial and Missionary Churches. B. Foreign Missions 
 and supply of Missionary Candidates. N. The Duty of the 
 Church towards the Heathen. Y. Colonial Church and Foreign 
 Missions. 
 
 In the second class was one topic which lasted on from 1863 
 to 1865, and then was dropped at York. 
 
 1. — M. Progress of the Church in Ireland. B. Mutual Eela- 
 tions of the Church in England and Ireland. N. Position of 
 Church in Ireland : — 
 
 While there were two which appeared on all the occasions, 
 except the Norwich Congress. 
 
 2. — M. Lay Co-operation. B. Home Missions and Lay 
 Agency. Y. Lay Agency ; and 
 
 3. — M. Huridecanal Meetings, Diocesan Synods, and Convo- 
 cation. B. Synods of the Church. Rural Deans and Decanal 
 Chapters. [Noted at B. as separate subjects.] Y. Diocesan 
 Synods in relation to Convocation and Parliament. 
 
 Of matters which only come twice up, we find at Manchester 
 and Bristol : — 
 
 1. — M. Church Architecture. B. Church Architecture and 
 Decoration. 
 
 2.— M. Free and Open Churches. The Offertory. B. Free 
 and Open Churches. ' . 
 
 3. — M. Augmentation of small Livings, and Tithe Eedemp- 
 tion. B. Augmentation of small Livings. • 
 
 Three that appeared at Manchester, and then slumbered till 
 they were revived at York : — 
 
 4. — M. Management of a large Parish. Y. Best Method of 
 attaching the Poor to the Church of England. 
 
 5. — M. Parochial Mission Women. Y. Ministration of 
 Women. 
 
 6. — M. Day and Sunday Schools. Y. Sunday Schools and 
 Catechizing.
 
 G The York Gongy^ess \ 
 
 Bristol and Norwich monopolise : — ; 
 
 7. — B. Increase of the Episcopate. N. Division of Sees. ■ 
 
 8. — B. Revised Code and Church Training-colleges. N. Edu- i 
 cation of Poor in relation to Church and State. 
 
 Bristol and York have one common topic : — j 
 
 9. — B. Social Hindrances to the Spread of Christianity. i 
 Y. Social Condition and Recreations of Working Classes. : 
 
 Next come a cluster of subjects wliich have come into promi- • 
 nence at Norwich and York : — 
 
 10.— N. Court of Final Appeal. Y. Ecclesiastical Courts. ; 
 
 11. — N. Cathedrals and Capitular Bodies, Y. Cathedrals — ; 
 their Work and Influence. \ 
 
 12. — N. Duty of Church towards Foreign Christians. Y. The 
 State and Prospects of Western Europe. 
 
 13. — N. Adaptation of Preaching to Present Times, Y. Dog- 
 matic Teaching from the Pulpit. 
 
 Of once handled subjects Manchester gives us: — 
 
 1. — Supply and Training of Ministers. 
 
 2. — Clergy Discipline. 
 
 3. — Growth of Church in Lancashire* 
 
 4. — Law of the Colonial Church. 
 
 Bristol :— 
 
 5. — ^Dilapidations. 
 
 6. — Education of the Clergy. 
 
 7. — Systematic Cultivation of English Composition, Reading 
 and Speaking. 
 
 8. — Associations for Aiding Poor and Disabled Clergy, and 
 their Widows. 
 
 9. — Church Finance. 
 
 10. — Middle-class Education and Bristol Diocesan Trade 
 Schools. 
 
 11. — Adult Education and Night Schools. 
 
 12. — Church in the Workhouses. 
 
 Norwich only offers : — 
 
 13. — Spirit in which the Researches of Learning and Science 
 should be applied to the Bible. 
 
 York has : — 
 
 14. — The Sunday Question. 
 
 15. — Church Rates. 
 
 It will be seen that the three subjects which held their own 
 through the full four years, have been the great questions of 
 the Church at home in its parochial aspect, and of the Colo- 
 nial Church in connexion with foreign missions, togetlier 
 with that special phase of outward worship which has such 
 fascination in different ways, both for high and low, namely 
 Church liymnody, dealt with either in regard to its music or its
 
 and Church Rites. 7 
 
 words. Of those tliat were protracted tlirotigli tlie first three con* 
 gresses, the Irish Church, after producing a very unseemly squabble 
 at Manchester, thanks to Dr. M'Neile's characteristic bitterness 
 against the Romanists, was handled with peculiar ability and 
 elevation of tone, both at Bristol and Norwich. It was, there- 
 fore, well not to risk a breakdown at York, by the fourth appear- 
 ance of a fully-worked topic. Norwich^ on the other hand, 
 was noticeable for omitting the cognate questions of lay-agency 
 and of synodical action, which were well handled at the other 
 gatherings. The introduction of this discussion at York is no 
 weak answer to the charge of shirking brought against that 
 Congress. Our attention — as we turn to topics which only ap- 
 peared twice — is drawn to the fact, that both at Manchester and 
 Bristol, ' Church Architecture ' (' and Adornment ' being added 
 on the second occasion) and ' Free and open Churches ' (in the 
 former place coupled with the ' Offertory ') are prominent topics ; 
 while in the remaining Congresses they totally disappear. Thus 
 at the two earlier assemblies the ecclesiological phase of the 
 Church movement received due attention, while in 1865 and 1866 
 it slipped out. We fancy that we need not go far for the reason 
 of this difference. Since the Bristol Congress the so-called 
 * ritual ' movement had made head, and had indeed appeared at 
 Norwich and York, in the form of an exhibition, and at the latter 
 city also as a simultaneous and separatist congress ; while upon 
 both occasions the formidable Association, which fights the Free 
 Church question with so much fierceness, also held a rival 
 gathering at the same time and place as the regular Congress. 
 The consequence is that, at all events, between 1864 and 1867, 
 the Church movement, in its ecclesiological aspect, will have 
 become apparently separated from the main current of congres- 
 sional deliberation, and turned into somewhat turbulent and rapid 
 by-channels. Some people may hail this diversion as the eman- 
 cipation of honest opinion, for which we ought to thank the ultra- 
 ritualists and the Manchester Free-Church men. We cannot 
 subscribe to the optimism of this conclusion, while, at the same 
 time, we are as little inclined to identify ourselves with the extreme 
 caution which avoided the examination of those topics, rather than 
 allow that open discussion, by moderate men, of such of the inci- 
 dents connected with the worship side of Churchmanship, as 
 would not involve the most thorny points of existing controversy. 
 At the same time, it is fair to notice that the question of ' Cathe- 
 drals,' which makes its appearance in 1865 and 1866, is, to a 
 considerable extent, cognate with the general subject of the 
 theory of formal worship, especially as it was treated in two very 
 able papers of the Dean of Ely. Again, the Catliedral question 
 was heralded in 1864 by a paper and discussion on the collegiate
 
 8 The York Congress 
 
 system in large towns^ as contrasted with that which dealt with 
 Anglicanism as a mainly parocliial organization. Worship may 
 not have been the most prominent consideration on that occasion, 
 but the topic challenged the discussion of the due nature and use 
 of those most important collegiate churches which contain a 
 bishop's cathedra. The increase of the Episcopate was omitted 
 at Manchester, but it had been handled at both of the University 
 Congresses, and was again taken up both at Bristol and Norwich, 
 so that its omission at York was not much to be wondered at, 
 although, as it was so very practical a matter, and as the one 
 Congress in which it had been passed over was the previous one 
 in the Northern province, we regret that it was not formally 
 entertained. Its omission created some disappointment, and 
 elicited independent meetings during Congress days. 
 
 The topic of Ministration of Women ' is an omission in the two 
 middle Congresses, but it had been well worked at Oxford, and 
 we hail its re-appearance at York. A somewhat remarkable 
 group of subjects came exclusively before the two latter Con- 
 gresses. We have already mentioned ' Cathedrals.' The appear- 
 ance at Norwich of the ' Court of Final Appeal,' and at York of 
 ' Ecclesiastical Courts,' is sufficiently explained by the Colenso 
 case and Lord Westbury's infamous judgment. ' Foreign Chris- 
 tians ' and the ' Churches of Western Europe ' re-echo subjects 
 which have most gravely agitated thought at home. The ' adapta- 
 tion,' dealt with at Norwich, of ' Preaching' to ' present times,' and 
 the consideration given to ' dogmatic teaching from the pulpit' at 
 York, were the congruous counterblast to the flippant religious 
 talk of the age. The masterly treatment of the latter consideration 
 by two Irish dignitaries, in the eloquent and sustained argument 
 of the Dean of Emly, and the perhaps even more eloquent and 
 epigrammatic, if not so closely reasoned, speech of the Dean 
 of Cork, placed this sederunt in conspicuous prominence solely 
 from the quality of the oratory which it elicited, and the sjicciality 
 of its having proceeded from a portion of the Church of which 
 English churchmen are a little too apt to ask — Can any good 
 come out of it ? 
 
 Perhaps we ought to have grouped with the first-named of 
 these subjects that session of the Norwich gathering which was 
 pre-eminently the event of the Congress of 1865, — the one whose 
 key-note was ' the spirit in which the researches of learninoj and 
 science should be applied to the Bible.' Dr. Pusey's Essay, 
 deep as anything which he has ever written, more lucid than 
 many of his previous writings, was the paper par excellence of 
 that morning ; a paper which must have comforted many persons, 
 by giving them a rational yet faithful solution of difficulties with 
 which they may hitherto have been sorely troubled ; while
 
 and Church Rites. 9 
 
 it may also have relieved in a lower sense some otliers who, 
 having themselves reached the same conclusion, found that 
 Dr. Pusey's broad segis was raised to shield them from imputa- 
 tions of irreverence from more timid brethren. The tacit con- 
 sent of the Christian orhis terrarum^ Catholic and Protestant 
 alike, has in our own lifetime ratified the concordance of revela- 
 tion and of true science by the recognition of the fact that the 
 days of creation were periods of uncertain, it may be of practically 
 incomprehensible, time. A fresh series of scientific facts has 
 much more recently evolved bewildering difficulties in the literal 
 maintenance of those very few thousand years during which the 
 human race has hitherto been supposed to have existed. A 
 little reflection w^as sufficient to show that no doctrine of the 
 faith, no incident of scriptural history, was at stake in the 
 discussion of the merely arithmetical computation of the probable 
 duration of the human race. In fact, the more years we concede 
 to the Genesiac events, the easier we make it to conceive that 
 the human race in all its diversity, ranging from European to 
 Tasmanian, sprang from a single couple (the one great ethno- 
 logical fact which has a theological value), and therefore that 
 
 ' Adam vetus quod polluit 
 Adam novas restituit.' 
 
 Still, in face of Dr. Colenso, pious people might well not like 
 to be the first to make this acknowledgment. It was accord- 
 ingly true wisdom and true courage in Dr. Pusey to come for- 
 ward, in behalf of all the orthodox, and offer the admission. 
 One fact, which he worked with much power, was conclusive, 
 that by comparison with the genealogies of the Old Testament 
 the consecutive fourteens of the first chapter of S. Matthew were 
 confessedly arranged, for reasons which we cannot grasp, in their 
 symmetrical succession by the omission of actual links. 
 
 It might at first sight seem surprising that ' Clergy-discipline ' 
 and the ' Law of the Colonial Church ' having been taken up at 
 Manchester should afterwards have been dropped — but in fact 
 analogous questions have been discussed at later dates, though 
 we would not quite group the previous subjects as equivalents 
 with any later discussion. The growth of the Church in Lancashire 
 was a local specialty like which we wish there had been more 
 on other occasions. The only similar topic which we can 
 discover is the paper on the Bristol Diocesan Trade School. 
 The practical character of the remaining once-introduced topics 
 at the Bristol Congress, which we need not again recite, is a 
 merit to be noted. The consideration of the relation of learning 
 and science to the Bible was the only solitary topic which 
 distinguished Norwich, while the * Sunday question ' and ' Church
 
 10 The Yorh Congress 
 
 Rates/ which are alone recorded against the York Congress in this 
 class, were not its most felicitous elements. 
 
 An extempore feature was introduced into the York gathering 
 by the invitation from the Working Men's Association for the 
 Congress to meet and address it. In consequence, the Congress 
 Hall was crowded with workmen, accompanied with their wives, 
 who were successively addressed by chosen speakers, such as the 
 Archbishop of York and the Dean of Cork. The attention of 
 the hearers was exemplary, and the speeches of a decidedly 
 good quality. All we wished for was, that there should have 
 been a little more distinct allusion to the Church as such, if only 
 as a social organization. When the working men ask a Church 
 gathering, as such, to address them, the time had surely come to 
 show them inoffensively and tolerantly, but still boldly, that the 
 Church, as such, was in every way an institution which was of 
 great benefit to themselves, and of which they would feel the loss, 
 both temporal and spiritual, were it to be removed. As it was, 
 many of the speeches would have been nearly as appropriate if 
 they had been delivered at a Wesleyan or a Baptist Congress. 
 
 Upon the whole we should say that the Manchester Congress 
 was characterised in its choice of subjects by a bold, though 
 rather unsystematic, grasp of large questions ; that of Bristol 
 by the desire to realize practical points; Norwich by a well- 
 balanced system of carefully adjusted topics ; and York by 
 business-like caution. After all, however, the bill of fare in 
 any case, like that of many a Corporation feast, was more truly 
 comprehended by the retrospective enquirer than the bewildered 
 participant. As we have shown, the feature of the York Congress 
 which will stamp it with individuality, was the fulness of the 
 recognition which it won from the Church itself in its established 
 dignity. As three days cannot cover every thing, it was worth 
 making the list of subjects which secured the Primate of All 
 England as preacher in York Minster, less than five years 
 after the first little Congress gathered at Cambridge in King's 
 College Hall. 
 
 We have called attention to the discussion on the ministration 
 of women. Not many weeks after the discussion, the Bishop 
 of London's Charge, recognising the need and the work of 
 ' Sisters of Mercy,' eo nomine^ was delivered. 
 
 ♦ Time was, and not long ago, when Roman Catholics were supposed to have 
 a monopoly of Sisters of Mercy : when Protestants all held that women might 
 work as true Sisters of Mercy (and thank God they can), one by one, from 
 their own homes, visiting amongst the poor and desolate in their own neigli- 
 bourbood ; but that the system of our Church forbade any organization for a 
 combined effort to use the services of women. The fearful emergency of the 
 Crimean war dispelled this theory. Other efforts were doubtless being made 
 before, but that melancholy time changed public opinion. Tlie heroic spirit
 
 and Chvrch Rites. 11 
 
 who stood forth to guide, and those no less brave who seconded her efforts, 
 told the world that Englisli Churchwomen were ready to combine, where com- 
 bination was needed, for any great Christian v^ork ; and our hospitals will 
 probably always henceforward bear more and more, the better they are admin- 
 istered, the impress of that great example. Now I should be false to all good 
 feeling if I did not publicly testify to the great help which London received, 
 during the late appalling sickness, from the self-denying efforts of Christian 
 women — some acting alone, on the impulse of their own individual generous 
 nature, some living in communities, of which it is the common bond to be 
 ready, for Christ's sake, to tend the poor at whatever risk. . . . But no doubt 
 those Christian women who work in communities are still viewed, by the great 
 majority of the clergy, with considerable suspicion. Would to God they would 
 abstain from all practices which make these suspicions reasonable ! The num- 
 ber of sisterhoods of the Church of England throughout the country is very 
 great. The deaconesses who form themselves on the model of the Protestant 
 Institution of Kaiserswerth are, so far as I can ascertaiu, as yet comparatively 
 few. The time has, I think, come, when the clergy generally and the heads of 
 the Church must enter fully into the question how the help of Christian women 
 living in community, and holding themselves ready to act amongst the sick and 
 poor, is to be best arranged. We have amongst us a large body earnestly 
 desirous of giving themselves to such work. ... If family duties are over- 
 looked, 'God's blessing can never be expected on any efforts which we may 
 make for His Church. Every community, therefore, of sisters or deaconesses 
 ought to consist of persons who have fully satisfied all family obligations. 
 Again all who enter such communities must be at full liberty to leave them so 
 soon as the leadings of God's providence point to another sphere of Christian 
 duty. Hence all vows of continuing in the community, actually taken or 
 mentally implied, are wrong. Again, the rules of the community must be 
 simple and carefully guarded, so as to check all imperiousness in the higher, 
 and all unworthy and unchristian servile submission in the lower, members. 
 Again, great care must be taken to guard against morbid religious feelings and 
 opinions, which all experience shows such communities have a tendency to 
 foster.' 
 
 These are the words of a non- High- Church Bishop, won, un- 
 willingly it may be at first to his convictions, by the pleadings 
 of practical necessity ; every thing therefore which he says in 
 approbation is doubly valuable, while his warnings deserve 
 respect, as the original criticism of an acute bystander. Anxious 
 as we are to attain the general recognition of woman's united 
 action under religious rule, in works of religion and mercy within 
 the Church of England, we feel bound to call attention to the 
 difiiculties attendant on the organization of any system under 
 which female societies can act with usefulness and success. 
 Those who undertake to frame its constitution have, on the one 
 hand, to avoid any occult love of spiritual power, and on the 
 other to beware of that romanticism which is apt to colour the 
 joint action of men and women, even when it is of the purest and 
 most sacred character, if not to permeate the inner daily life of the 
 Sisterhood itself. Accordingly we commend these remarks of the 
 Bishop of London, not to the acceptance, but to the calm consi- 
 deration, of all who are actively engaged in the development of
 
 12 Tke York Congress 
 
 Anglican sisterhoods. On one point we do not hesitate to declare 
 our adhesion to his warnings. So long as the Cliurch of England 
 so emphatically ignores, and the spirit of religious people through- 
 out the land is so unmistakeably opposed to vows, it is suicidal 
 in policy and indefensible in principle, to underlay the recog- 
 nised constitution of sisterhoods with any clandestine obligation 
 of vows, imposed by the stronger upon the weaker side. Between 
 the discijplina arcani, which must be maintained by the imposer 
 over the taker of the vow, and the conflicting external mani- 
 festations of spontaneous partnership which would have to be 
 kept up by the Sisterhood to the u^ninitiated world, those must be 
 feminine minds of the stoutest stuff which would not occasionally 
 be led to feel that the path of straightforward duty within the 
 community was rough and narrow. 
 
 It would be cowardice to take leave of the York Congress with- 
 out referring to a very vigorous force of irregular volunteers who 
 chose that city as the scene, and the Congress days as the time, of 
 their operations. The exhibition of Ecclesiastical Art held in 
 the spacious brick mansion of some Yorkshire magnate of the 
 eighteenth century, with its attendant lectures and discussions, was 
 the sequel of a similar appendage to the Norwich Congress. This 
 year's display was, however, larger and more varied than that of its 
 precursor ; while archaeology supplemented the array of modern 
 chasubles in use, or for sale, with contributions of which not the 
 least important were the Westminster copes, lent by the Dean and 
 Chapter of the Abbey ; and the papers and discussions, which 
 were a novel incident, were carefully reported in the newspapers. 
 As we have hinted already, the growth of the ' Ritual ' movement 
 may have had something to do with the absence of ecclesiology 
 from the more recent congresses. At first sight, the new 
 ceremonial seemed, from its York manifestation, to be carrying 
 the day before it. It had, since the report, on the whole 
 favourable, of the Committee of the Lower House of Convocation, 
 gone on with only a little outside complaint of clerical coteries, 
 and its bold display on the occasion was like a triumphal rejoic- 
 ing. In the few weeks, however, that have intervened, the 
 British lion has fairly been lashed up into a perturbation 
 which, whether the result of genuine deep feeling, or of the 
 strong desire to catch at some counter-excitement to banish the 
 disagreeable images of Bright and Beales, cannot assuredly be 
 dismissed with contempt by any one who desires to see the 
 revival of Catholic principles in the worship, as well as in the 
 doctrine, of the Church of England guarded from molestation 
 during this season of popular agitation. 
 
 We hardly need say that we have never admitted the claims 
 whicli the chiefs of the new ceremonial pertinaciously urge, to be
 
 and Church Rites, 13 
 
 accepted as the leaders of the High Church movement. They 
 may be right or wrong, wise or unwise, scholars or sciolists ; but 
 the allegiance they have a right to is only that which they may 
 win for themselves by the truthfulness, wisdom, and honesty of 
 their principles, while their errors are not to be charged upon 
 that great school of thought whose leaders have during the 
 last thirty-four years conducted the Church revival, through 
 many moving accidents, to its present level of success. At 
 the outset, we protest against the term ' ritual ' as the accepted 
 definition of their peculiarities, and against their naming them- 
 selves as the distinctive ' ritualists,' not only because the word 
 * ritual ' as meaning ' ceremonial ' is a mistake, but because, in 
 the exclusive sense in which it is used by these new cere- 
 monialists, it involves something like a repudiation of those 
 multitudinous labours of love — in recasting Church arrange- 
 ments, and developing choral services and reverential Eucharists 
 -—which have, for nearly thirty years, taxed the intellects and 
 gladdened the hearts of so many loyal children of the Church. 
 
 Upon the abstract points at issue we desire to speak plainly. 
 We never had any doubt that the Rubric of 1662, in its natural 
 and unsophistical meaning, legalized neither more nor less than 
 the vestments ordered in the First Prayer-book of Edward VI. 
 — viz. a white alb, plain, with a vestment or cope, for the priest 
 who celebrates at the Holy Communion, and an alb with tunicle 
 for his assistants. 
 
 The opinions of the nine counsel consulted by the English 
 Church Union, accordingly, sound to us as confirmatory rather of 
 the candour of the Chief Baron, the Chief Justice of the Common 
 Pleas, the Queen's Advocate, the Attorney-General of Lancaster, 
 Mr. Coleridge, and their companions, than as dicta which tell us 
 anything of which we were previously ignorant. They certainly 
 do not help us to understand the greatest of mysteries — the con- 
 trary opinion of Lord Justice Cairns and Sir Roundell Palmer. 
 That these vestments are in themselves popish has always 
 seemed to us a ridiculous calumny, seeing not only that vestments 
 are of universal use in the Eastern Church, which is so antago- 
 nistic to Rome, but that in its Western form the chasuble is the 
 prescribed vesture of the Lutheran communities of Sweden, 
 Norway,^ and Denmark. It stands in this respect in the same 
 
 • Mr. Forester, in his interesting 'Travels in Norway,' published in 1850, de- 
 scribes a Sunday which he passed in tbe summer of 1848, at the village of Lille- 
 hammer, when he was present at the celebration of the Holy Communion according^ 
 to the Norwegian ceremonial. ' The priest having returned to the altar, the prge- 
 centor invested him, over the surplice, with a rich vestment or cope [chasublej 
 of crimson satin, embroidered with a broad cross of silver tissue before and behind.' 
 Mr. Forester adds in a note, ' I had seen them of velvet with gol^l embroidery, but 
 the colour was invariably crimson.' Of course, his journey having been made in
 
 14 The York Congress 
 
 category as the altar crucifix and lighted candles, which are also of 
 obligation in the ' Evangelical Church ' of Prussia, and elsewhere 
 in Germany. As a matter of propriety, we quite agree with the 
 Bishop of Oxford in his late Charge^ that a distinctive dress for the 
 celebrant at the Eucharist is seemly and desirable. Having said all 
 this, not as a concession, but as the expression of convictions which 
 we heldlyears before the recent excitement, we may be allowed, 
 without suspicion, to express our grave apprehensions at the results 
 to which the authors of that excitement may lead the Church of 
 England — results which ought to be as much objects of dread to 
 them as to ourselves. These are not times in which the immuta- 
 bility and irrefragability of any statutable enactment — such as 
 the rubric is in its secular aspect — can safely be assumed by any 
 party as its vantage-ground for straining the application of that 
 enactment, to its utmost legal limit, in the teeth of persons who 
 bear no goodwill to the enactment in itself, and who know that 
 constitutionally the same power which enacted can also repeal. 
 Vestments legal, yet dormant, may not be a satisfactory con- 
 summer, he is not a witness as to, e.g. the Lenten colour. Further on he explains 
 that wafer bread is used, while his own summing-np of the whole question— that 
 of an educated and right-minded, but apparently not peculiarly theological English 
 traveller of eighteen years back, when even S. Barnabas was still non-existent — is : — 
 ' As to the assumption of an additional and peculiar vestment in the celebration 
 of the Eucharist, I believe the cope is recognised, and has been in use in our own 
 Church since the Reforrnation.^ (The italics are the author's.) * The use of the 
 wafei', instead of leavened breads is surely a matter of little importance ; perhaps 
 it is more consonant to the usage of the primitive Church and the original institu- 
 tion of the Sacrament.' It is obvious all through the long description from which 
 we have taken these brief extracts, that any question of the validity of Norwegian 
 orders had never occurred to Mr. Forester, while he confounded the cope and the 
 chasuble. We can give a no less explicit account of the ceremonial of Sweden, a 
 country which, it will be remembered — although since the treaty of Yiemia under 
 the same personal sovereign as Norway — has for centuries had an antagonistic 
 political, and a distinct religious history (with the advantage to Sweden of a pre- 
 sumably valid episcopal succession). The Ecclesioloyist for February, 1852, 
 contains a letter by Mr. G. J. R. Gordon, for some time charge cVaffaires at Stock- 
 holm, and now minister at Stuttgard, describing the organization and ceremonies 
 of the Swedish Church, in which we read : ' The priest is vested in chasuble and 
 albe, on the former of which, consisting of rich velvet or brocaded silk, (and, if of 
 the former, generally red, except in Lenten time, when it is invariably black, 
 with plain embroidery,) is embroidered, on the back, a plain Latin cross, ordinarily 
 occupying the whole-length and breadth of the vestment; whilst on the front is 
 commonly embroidered a large glory, with a triangle, and the sacred name, in 
 Hebrew letters, within it, — also of gold or silver work, according to the season. 
 Beneath this chasuble is worn the albe, of white linen, with a broad embroidered 
 and vandyked, or line lace collar, and sleeves tightened at the wrist, being bound 
 round the waist with a netted blue silk girdle or sash, and having round the 
 bottom a fxinge of broad embroidery or lace. These vestments are put on over the 
 cloth, cassock-like coat worn by the Swedish clergy, and in which, together with 
 the neck-bauds, they are bound always to appear. Swedish episcopal vestments 
 are of far greater splendour ' (including rich miti-e, cope, pastoral staff, and pectoral 
 cross). * The rich vestments just described are worn only at the celebration of the 
 Holy Communion.'
 
 and Church Rites. 15 
 
 dition of things to the man who desires to feel them on his own 
 back ; but vestments abrogated, and for the time to come illegal 
 and irrecoverable, would be still less pleasant in his eyes. More- 
 over, we cannot blind ourselves to the suspicion that the inquiry 
 which has been so peremptorily forced upon us may, after all, 
 establish the fact that, excepting for the three earliest years of 
 reformed vernacular worship, during which the First Prayer- 
 book was in use, the ruling rubric of that Book has never received 
 a more than partial interpretation, even by those prelates and 
 clergy of Elizabeth, James I., and Charles L's reigns, who pushed 
 to the furthest their own ideas of ceremonial grandeur. It must 
 not be forgotten that the continuous formal existence of the non- 
 Roman Church of England dates only from Elizabeth. The First 
 Book contained a certain ceremonial, essentially and unhesitatingly 
 ' Anglo-Catholic ; ' but in the same reign of the same boy, within 
 a space of time to be measured by any one who will take the 
 trouble of thinking what he was about three years ago, and of 
 realising that it was three years since, it was replaced by another 
 Prayer-book, edited under strongly adverse influences, while 
 both books were equally, in another brief space, submerged by 
 Mary's revival of the old system, which^ good or bad in itself, had 
 the 'prestige of far many more years than both the antagonist 
 new rituals could together boast of weeks. It is accordingly but 
 common-sense to own that it was tahula rasa at Elizabeth's 
 accession, and that the actual force of the First Book, contrasted 
 with its moral value, must be measured by the degree to which 
 we can prove that it has been revived by Elizabethan and post- 
 Elizabethan enactments. We believe that the person who duly 
 considered these facts would have to acknowledge that, while 
 copes have been, with more or less frequency, worn as Eucharistic 
 vesture from the days of Queen Elizabeth to these of Queen 
 Victoria, at whose coronation we, with our own eyes, saw the 
 Archbishop of Canterbury celebrating in one, attended by the 
 acting Dean of Westminster, also so vested, no undoubted in- 
 stance after the time of Edward YI. of the use of a chasuble — = 
 however (as we believe it to be) rubrically and statutably legal — • 
 could be established. In fact, we suspect that, in the eyes of the 
 seventeenth-century ceremonialist, the word ' vestment ' had lost 
 its technical meaning of chasuhle, and was concluded to be an 
 alternative or expletive expression for ' cope,' the special Eucha- 
 ristic garb in which Andrewes and Laud, Wren and Cosin, were 
 wont to brave the profane scoffs of the Brownists. 
 
 We do not assert, neither do we deny, that if a compromise 
 had been offered, or asked for, or could now be effected, which 
 should secure the unquestioned revival of the cope simpliciter, 
 as the celebrant's dress alternative, and equally favoured with
 
 16 The York Congress 
 
 the surplice and hood, it might not be well, under existing 
 circumstances, to close with it as the distinctive Eucharistic 
 * vesture ' of the Anglican Church. We shall not be tempted 
 to discuss the possibility of such an arrangement even from 
 recollecting that a writer of eminence in the new 'ritualistic* 
 school has put his name to the assertion that proof exists that 
 in sundry English pre-Reformational Churches the cope was 
 the priest's mass dress. We only point out to the men of un- 
 flinching precedent, what might be the result in wow-Puritan 
 hands of the enquiry which they have been working so very 
 hard to precipitate. 
 
 There are, however, other results, which no dread of ill- 
 omened words ought to lead us to suppress, if happily we may, 
 by pointing them out, win any enthusiastic worshipper of a 
 single idea, viewed from a single stand-point, to a wider com- 
 prehension of the symptoms of the age. The result of a re- 
 opening of the existing understanding might very likely be 
 to place the settlement of the question not in the hands of the 
 non-Puritans, but of the Puritans, who dislike from antagonistic 
 partisan proclivities — or else of the Latitudinarians, who dislike 
 from generic antipathy — both sacramental doctrine in itself, and 
 of course also the external manifestations which exist on account 
 of and in furtherance of that doctrine. Omit a symbolical rite, 
 and you go far to obliterate the popular apprehension of the 
 doctrine of which that rite is the symbol. It would be still more 
 probable that these two classes of thinkers, finding that for the 
 moment they had a common immediate object, would patch up 
 an armistice and unite their forces to crush forms which are alike 
 obnoxious to solifidianism and to pantheism. Would the people 
 who belong to these two classes, and to whom any special Eucha- 
 ristic vesture is especially offensive, agree to legalize and popu- 
 larize the cope because their antagonists claim both cope and 
 chasuble? Would they, with so fair an opportunity offered to 
 them of meddling, be satisfied to leave the English service still 
 capable of all the ceremonial amplification which it now receives, 
 in so many churches where the introduction of vestments has 
 never been thought of? They would have on their side all that 
 peculiar strong feeling — not unmixed with a subtle, but deep- 
 rooted pride — which makes the average Englishman always 
 suspicious of the other Englishman who appears in some dress 
 which he does not see his own way to put on. The surplice 
 has indeed weathered its Symplegades, but after how many 
 storms let the memories, on the one side, of Cartwright and 
 Prynne, and on the other, of Laud and Charles, testify. Cope 
 and chasuble, on the contrary, have not been fought and practi- 
 cally Won on the many battle-fields which have shaped the
 
 and Church Rites, 17 
 
 Church of England, but rather the contrary, and so those who 
 desire to establish them will have to begin at the same beginning 
 at which the wearers of the surplice found themselves in the 
 sixteenth century, without the certainty of the same result, if 
 Exeter Hall and the Pall Mall Gazette should unite forces to 
 their destruction. 
 
 But some of our gravest apprehensions of the result of the so- 
 called ' ritual ' movement, proceed from another cause than fear 
 for the result of a conflict between the world and the hond fide 
 advocates of the full Prayer-book. We have made good our 
 assertion that the attempt to revive the summum jus of the 
 rubric — not so much from an abstract love of conformity for 
 conformity's own sake, as from a liking for the things which that 
 conformity would introduce — while abstractedly defensible, may 
 practically be very impolitic, and provocative of great mischief 
 on the side most disagreeable to its promoters ; viz. on that of the 
 retrenchment of advantages which have already been after an 
 arduous struggle conceded to, and peacefully enjoyed by, the 
 believers in sacramental worship, under a condition of things 
 which has virtually compromised the personal adornment of the 
 men for the embellishment of the fabric, and the regulation of 
 the service. Such a policy, if it is to be pursued at all, must be 
 done under the guidance of the greatest self-restraint, and the 
 most patient caution. In proportion as the object is to reach 
 nothing short of the absolute limit, the obligation must be im- 
 perative on the honest reformer not to transgress that limit. To 
 be impolitic is a dangerous position to find oneself in. To be both 
 impolitic and a trespasser into the fields where the law runneth 
 not, is indeed perilous. Here, then, a new element enters into 
 the consideration of the question as it is presented to us by the 
 extreme wing of those who desire to confine the term ' ritual ' 
 to the ceremonies which they themselves specially patronize. We 
 have begun by saying that as honest men we can personally, 
 irrespective of questions either of policy as to their re-adoption 
 or of intervening usage, give no other interpretation of those 
 ornaments of the ministers, which were in the Church of 
 England by authority of Parliament in the second year of 
 Edward YI. — and are therefore still legal by the Act of Uni- 
 formity of Charles II. of which our present Prayer-book is 
 a part, — than that of their being the much canvassed vest- 
 ments. The nine counsel say the same thing. But the ex- 
 treme ritualists cut the legal ground away from their own feet 
 when they argue, as we have seen them do, with a pertinacity 
 worthy of a more tenable cause, that this reference to the 
 authority of Parliament in a particular year does not imply a 
 certain book set up by a certain act of that year, but all the 
 
 c
 
 18 The York Congress 
 
 collective mass of antecedent usages which that book was in 
 great measure intended to regulate and simplify. We are not 
 now entering on the much wider question of the virtual allowance 
 of that which is not specifically forbidden. We are merely 
 pointing out the impolicy of the attempt to distort what to 
 all plain comprehension is a leading instance of specific enact- 
 ment involving specific limitation, into the recognition of a 
 principle which without such limitation could not be worked as 
 part of the existing English system. The rashness of the pro- 
 ceeding is all the greater when the law which they are dis- 
 crediting gives them specifically so much of that which they are 
 seeking to obtain. We need go no further than this opinion 
 of the same counsel for an instance of the spirit in which the 
 English legal mind in its most friendly mood would deal with 
 the question of virtual permission, by comparing on the one 
 hand the consideration (irrespective of the results which they 
 reached) which these eminent lawyers gave to the questions of 
 wafer-bread, the mixed chalice, and of hymn-singing, and on 
 the other the impatience with which they raised their voice 
 against the legality of incense. 
 
 We are, of course, when we say all this, speaking as Anglicans, 
 as men who live under the Prayer-book of 1662, and whose 
 great ambition is to make that Prayer-book, to a far higher 
 degree than it yet is, the living rule of Christian conversation 
 within the land. We have not the illogical national vanity 
 to say that all perfection is concluded within that service-book. 
 We have on a former occasion stated points on which we should 
 gladly improve it ; and we could now — but will not — name 
 others. But, in face of what it might have been in 1690, 
 or at any moment during the eighteenth century, or even if 
 compiled by the 'old orthodox' of the generation just passed 
 away, or by any set of men in our own time, except that set 
 which is most unlikely to have had the exclusive manipulation 
 of the work confided to it, it is a priceless jewel. Touch it, 
 and it will probably be spoilt — keep it, and the hope remains 
 and grows that its legitimate resources will be further and further 
 developed. 
 
 Plainly, then, we must state that some ultra-members of the 
 extreme 'ritualists' have worked themselves out of the atti- 
 tude of conservators of the Prayer-book as the palladium of 
 our national Catholicity, into that of men whose feelings to- 
 wards the book are identical with those of Mr. W. G. Ward 
 towards the Thirty-nine Articles, viz. that of regarding it as 
 malleable material which, by a series of 'non-natural' mani- 
 pulations, they could work into form_s unthought of by its 
 compilers, but pleasurable to themselves. We seek, of course,
 
 and Church Rites. 19 
 
 the representation of extreme ' ritual ' in the second edition 
 of the ' Directorium Anglicanum ; ' and there, mixed up in 
 inextricable complication with the revived ceremonial of the 
 First Prayer-book of Edward VI. we find a series of usages 
 which claim our assent, not because they were ordered or allowed 
 in the ruling rubric, or in any other one, but because, in the 
 private opinion of some of those who have brought that rubric 
 into vogue again, they are Catiiolic and congruous. Of these 
 we need only for example mention (not as the strongest case, but 
 as one which is now prominently before the public) the revival, 
 not of the sweet smell of incense, but of the overt gesture of 
 incensing, as an integral element of the Communion Service and 
 of other offices, which has just been declared to be illegal by the 
 same consensus of eminent lawyers — who have allowed the vest- 
 ments — with an emphasis of negation as trenchant as that of the 
 affirmation with which they accept chasuble, cope, alb, and 
 tunicle, because they stand written in that rubric, which is 
 silent upon thuribles and frankincense. 
 
 We lay a strong intentional stress upon the overt gesture of 
 incensing as contrasted with the combustion of incense, for there 
 is a wide distinction between the two ideas, which the ultra-cere- 
 monialists have somehow overlooked in their arguments. Incense, 
 they urge, was a prominent element in the Jewish ritual ; but it 
 was found there as a sweet-smelling savour offered to God, and 
 not as a lustration, so to speak, of the officiating ministers. 
 To take up another very different line of defence, incense was 
 occasionally burnt in the chapels of our prelates, and in some 
 churches, and probably cathedrals, during the first century 
 after the Heformation. But that incense, as it is quite clear, was 
 burnt upon a kind of standing brazier, and its ministration 
 was not a running accompaniment of the Communion Service. 
 To come from the higher to the lower class of arguments, 
 incense has an obvious practical value in all rooms, whether 
 secular or religious, which happen to be stuffy : but then this 
 incense need not be swung in a censer. Conformity to pre- 
 Reformational usage is of course an argument of another kind ; 
 and from the standing point of the ritualists has its value in 
 accounting for their practice of incensing. But we were pur- 
 posely regarding the question apart from such considerations. 
 The most complete example of the way in which ' incensing ' 
 can be attached without assimilation to the Anglican ritual, even 
 as founded on the prescriptions of 1549, may be found in the 
 way in which the new school amplifies the Rubric of Evening 
 Prayer, which enacts : * Then shall be said or sung the Psalms 
 ' in order as they are appointed, then a lesson of the Old Testa- 
 ' ment as is appointed. And after that Magnificat (or the song
 
 20 The York Congress 
 
 ' of the Blessed Virgin Mary) in English, as followeth.' The 
 analogous rubrics of all the successive Prayer-books are, we may 
 note, substantially, though not literally, identical. In the earlier 
 days of the Church revival, the battle of the choral service had 
 to be fought in hundreds of places over the ' said or sung.' With 
 the establishment of the natural meaning of the ' said or sung ' 
 came the recognition of a body of clerks to ' sing or say,' and of 
 the surplice to clothe those clerks, while another rubric contri- 
 buted the chancels, which were to ' remain as they have done in 
 times past,' as the places in which those clerks, so dressed, were 
 to ' say or sing.' All this may seem humdrum to the fresh young 
 ritualist curate, who has entered into the harvest which is due to 
 the energy of those who through much tribulation have ploughed 
 8nd sowed for the liberty of choral worship for the Church of 
 England. Such is the reasonable and legal expansion of this 
 and of similar rubrics. Now let us see how it is handled by 
 those who in the * Directorium ' claim to be the leaders of the 
 party of strict conformity. 
 
 * On Sundays and festivals incense should be used at Evensong during the 
 singing of the Magnificat, and additional tapers may be lighted. This canticle 
 — a daily memorial of the Incarnation — being its special feature; some of those 
 who are taking part in the service should indicate this by gathering together iu 
 front of the altar while it is being chanted, taking up, for the time being, such 
 a position as that described here ' : — [A diagram follows] * the officiating priest 
 liaving had the thurible and incense-boat brought to him by two Acolytes, may 
 silently bless the incense in the following terms : "Vouchsafe we beseech Thee, 
 O Almighty God, to bless >^ and sanctify * this incense, and grant that we 
 who are permitted to worship Thee in Thy courts on earth may hereafter adore 
 Thee for ever in heaven. Amen.'' He then incenses the altar from end to end, 
 beginning at the Epistle corner, going on to the Gospel corner, and returning 
 to the centre, where, swinging the thurible from side to side for a few 
 moments, he again incenses the cross, and then returns the thurible to the 
 thurifer, who will proceed to incense (1) the priest officiant at vespers, 
 (2) the assistant clergy, and (3) each side of the choir, and lastly (4) the con- 
 gregation, first towards the north, and finally towards the south side.' 
 
 We must add that in the preceding page of the ' Directorium * 
 the dress of the priest officiating at this ceremony is laid down as 
 cassock, surplice, and cope, and that of the assistants albs and 
 dalmatics — all of them, except the surplice, dresses only autho- 
 rized in 1549 for the Communion Service. 
 
 We venture no observation, favourable or unfavourable, upon 
 the intrinsic dignity or unction of this service — for such it really 
 is, and not a mere episode — constructed out of the elements of the 
 Magnificat, which the Prayer-book orders as an incident of its 
 Evensong. We should strongly repudiate affixing any imputation 
 of Romanising disloyalty upon the clergy who practise it because 
 of their so doing. But we may ask what kind of strategists they 
 be who have adventured to make good the practical realisation of
 
 and Church Riles. 21 
 
 the entire rubric to its extreme extent, and who encumber them- 
 selves upon their sufficiently difficult march with such impedi- 
 menta — so bulky, so unassimilative, so provocative of suspicion 
 on the side upon which the Englishman is most suspicious and 
 most unreasonable. But, as we have already pointed out, it is 
 possible that there may be persons who do not particularly care 
 lor the resuscitation of the full English ritual as it is written 
 in the English rubric ; but who are determined to realise certain 
 practices because they think them Catholic, and because they like 
 them. This position, if honestly avowed, is intelligible and con- 
 sistent in itself. It explains many other peculiarities of the 
 so-called ritualists. For example, it is the clue to the energy 
 with which some of them attempt what the Puritans used to call 
 * fencing the tables,' by changing the great Sunday celebration 
 from a grand common Eucharist of the faithful communicants, 
 both clergy and laity, into a High Mass to be attended, but not 
 participated in, by the laity. 
 
 But in proportion to the intelligibility of this policy so is its 
 danger. It is perfectly idle to contend that this class of ritual- 
 ists is conservative of the Prayer-book. It is infatuation to put 
 them forward in the forefront of the battle against Puritan in- 
 novators, for they are, in their way, as complete ' revisionists ' as 
 Lord Ebury and his set, with the difference that the latter only 
 talk, and the former enact, innovation. We do these ritualists 
 the justice of supposing that they really desire to strengthen 
 the whole Church of England, from their point of view, by 
 effecting changes in the Prayer-book, which they have argued 
 themselves into imagining the general Church will accept, while 
 we are aghast at the blindness to the tendencies of the age which 
 can have misguided them into the belief that a change in the 
 formularies of the Establishment, provoked, as any such revision 
 must be, by the joint agency of themselves and of the Eburyites, 
 would tend to the advantage of any section but that one which 
 desires to uncatholicise the Prayer-book. Perhaps there may 
 even be a few among them who would not be staggered at such 
 a result, but who would look upon the contingency as the open- 
 ing of the Red Sea, which would lead them to the tangled 
 wilderness of a ritualistic Free Church, regulated by the free will 
 of the ceremonialists themselves, uncontrolled by pope or public 
 opinion. This would undoubtedly be a most logical consum- 
 mation of the ' Directorium,' but it would be most disastrous to 
 the cause of God's Truth throughout the land. 
 
 Here, then, we pause to appeal to the genuine and moderate 
 men who have embraced the full ceremonial of 1549, because 
 they think it their duty to show an example of strict conformity. 
 We make this appeal, believing that they only want to make
 
 22 The York Congress 
 
 good in their own case the liberty of the Church of England to 
 use legal vestments, under the conviction that the English people 
 have only to be convinced of their legality to accept them rather 
 than try to change the law upon whicli the sanction rests. We 
 further appeal to them, under the conviction that they may perhaps 
 have also taken up incense, or some other unusual rite, as a corol- 
 lary of the vestments, without much consideration of the difference 
 of the respective bases on which the two innovations really rest. 
 Are these excellent people certain in what company they are 
 marching? Have they considered that the 'plusquam ritualist 
 who looks on the English Rubric as no better than a row of pegs 
 on which to hang his own imaginings, is in reality the most 
 dangerous antagonist of their position of absolute conformity? 
 Have they ever looked on their guides as men who have gone 
 the furthest in actively shaking confidence in the stability of the 
 liter a scripta of the rubric ? Those who have made good their 
 recognition of choral worship, and of the due appointments 
 of the Eucharistic office, including the all-essential eastward 
 posture of the celebrant, have so far travelled along the same 
 road, although, from motives of policy and of charity, they may 
 be stopping short of their companions who think the time has 
 come for the revival of the vestments. But the men who organize 
 Magnificats with incense and varied attitudes, who add Corpus 
 Christi Day to the great festivals, and who strain all their ener- 
 gies to the converting of Sunday worship into non-communicant 
 gazing on a high mass, are travelling along quite a different 
 way, which may tend to the indulgence of their own tastes, either 
 within the spacious park of Rome, or else the little back-yard of 
 a private conventicle, but which will, if allowed unlimited swing, 
 undoubtedly arrest the healthy growth of external worship within 
 the great old Church of England. 
 
 One instance of the practical working of these notions which has 
 lately come to light is so characteristic that, at the risk of being 
 lengthy, we must pause upon it. 
 
 There have been from time to time incidents in the Church 
 movement over which we have sorrowed as the indiscretions of 
 earnest and simple-minded, but unworldly men, who rushed into 
 predicaments, or were entrapped into admissions, calculated to 
 provoke the ridicule of a cynical world. Many of the proceed- 
 ings of good hot-headed Mr. Lyne, for instance, were incom- 
 mensurable with any theory of current common sense. But in 
 all our experience we never recollect a circumstance which more 
 clearly shows that religious enthusiasm may exist, and yet the 
 perception of the possible and the congruous be absent, than the 
 reception which has been accorded to that erratic Frenchman, 
 M. Jules Ferrete, ex-Dominican, cx-head of a Romanist college,
 
 and Church Rites. 23 
 
 ex-Presbyterian Missionary in Syria, ex-curate of Mr. Marcli- 
 mont, and now soi-disant Bishop of lona, by virtue of an alleged 
 consecration by the hands of one 'Julius, Metropolitan of the 
 World, who is Peter the Humble.' 
 
 For M. Ferrette we do not pretend to care. He is clever, and 
 he is versatile, as other Frenchmen have been before him, and 
 Syrians too, long ere the Franks had overrun Gaul — so these 
 qualities are natural to a Syrianised Frenchman. We do, how- 
 ever, care for the credit of the Church of England, and inasmuch 
 as a certain section of our own clergy have publicly identified 
 themselves with his preposterous claims, we feel ourselves bound 
 to show by his own confession what manner of man this Bishop 
 of lona who has come to rectify the catholicity of Western 
 Europe noio is. We say emphatically now, for his backers, at a 
 certain recent meeting in Jermyn Street, where he was exhibited 
 to those who chose to go and see the spectacle, vociferously 
 asserted that the question was not what the bishop might for- 
 merly have been, but what he now was. We protest most roundly 
 against the principle involved in this assertion ; but in the present 
 instance we are quite content to abide by its results. M. Ferrette 
 as he now is, painted by himself, is quite enough for our present 
 purpose, of seriously appealing to that portion of the Church of 
 England, which desires to strengthen and extend the ceremonial 
 appointments of our services, to consider whether they do wisely 
 to repose confidence in any guides who are making themselves 
 conspicuous as M. Ferrette's supporters. 
 
 We cannot deal more fairly by that gentleman than by 
 taking him at his own estimate of himself, given to the public 
 in a letter dated December 17, and published in the Church 
 Times of the 2 2d, with the signature ' Julius, Bishop of lona.' 
 Accepting, for the purpose of our present argument, the state- 
 ments of this letter, we are willing to acknowledge that he is as 
 much of an ' orthodox bishop ' — his own definition — as can be 
 predicated of a French Roman Catholic priest, who after some 
 thirteen years' conformity to Irish Presbyterianism has received, 
 under unexplained and obviously irregular, if not clandestine, 
 circumstances, the single imposition of hands of an ill-identified 
 Bishop in Syria, who, by a process of reduction, must, if at all 
 in rerum naturd, be a bishop of that Syrian branch of the 
 Eutychian sect which has vegetated on for so many ages as the 
 Jacobites. M. Ferrette in fact, himself acknowledges as much in 
 that letter, clouded as the confession is by a flight of incompre- 
 hensible words and unproven assertions. 
 
 Now, whatever may be thought of the virtual soundness of 
 the faith of these Jacobites, they are tenacious, like all Orientals, 
 of canonical prescriptions when not coerced by force majeure ;
 
 24 The York Congress 
 
 and as Syrians tell us in the newspapers, one of their regulations 
 is that a ' Syrian ' or Jacobite bishop must be elected by three- 
 fourths of the male inhabitants of his diocese, and then conse- 
 crated by the patriarch and two bishops. It is certain that 
 three-fourths of the male inhabitants of that interesting but 
 remote portion of the county of Argyll, Tona, did not elect M. 
 Ferrette to be their bishop, never having heard of him ; and it is 
 nearly as certain that lona is equally unknown to the ' Syrian ' 
 episcopate ; while in the third place, there is not only an absence 
 of proof, but even a lack of assertion, amounting to proof on the 
 other side — that ' Peter the Humble ' was not the recognised 
 Jacobite Patriarch whose residence is Mardin in the province of 
 Diarbeker, in spite of his self-assumed pompous title of Metropo- 
 litan of the World ; while, as M. Ferrette even ostentatiously 
 proclaims, this strange consecration was a single-handed one. 
 Finally, it is indisputable that at Homs (the ancient Emessa) 
 there is no resident Jacobite bishop at all, whether Metropolitan 
 of the World or of anything else ; the nearest see of that sect 
 being that of the village of Kurytein, on the borders of the 
 desert, about two days' journey, or sixty miles, from Homs, — of 
 which, by the way, the diocesan is credibly reported to have been 
 in Rome some few years since, and to have engaged to conform 
 with his flock to the Papal Supremacy. 
 
 Still we let M. Ferrette's statement, in which there is nothing 
 materially impossible, pass ; and we assume that some Jacobite 
 prelate, of Kurytein or elsewhere, was induced to go to Homs, 
 and there, under the turgid pseudonym of Metropolitan of the 
 World, to violate the canons of his Church by a consecration, 
 single-handed and clandestine, of M. Ferrette to a see in the 
 remote Hebrides, long extinct by name, and already included in 
 a diocese of the Anglo-, and a ' district ' of the Roman-, Catholic 
 Church, prompted and enlightened as he must have been in this 
 grotesque performance by the urgency and instructions of the 
 adventurous European priest, ordained in the Latin Church. 
 
 Such — to take the touchstone of what he is, and not what he 
 was, either as Romanist, Presbyterian, or assistant in London 
 to Mr. Marchmont, the dissenting sham clergyman — is the 
 Bishop of lona, who has been thrust upon us by the creme de la 
 creme of ritualists, as a chosen instrument in the restoration of 
 Western Christendom to the purity of catholic faith and prac- 
 tice. Happily this suffragan of the World has not been slow in 
 publishing to the West what privileges he has in store for those 
 whom he may be happy enough to gather into his own most 
 sacred fold. Modestly putting liimself on the level of * S. Basil 
 and S. Chrysostom' in his letter of December 17, M. Ferrette 
 observes, * unless the Apostolic succession has been interrupted
 
 and Church Rites. 25 
 
 ' or the nature of the episcopate changed, the '' sacred bishops '* 
 
 * of our day have just the same authority of setting forth litur- 
 
 * gies for themselves and their clergy as they had in the fourth 
 
 * century. If so, my publishing a liturgy is a legitimate episcopal 
 
 * act, fully warranted by ecclesiastical precedent as well as hy 
 ' present necessity ' (these italics are our). This Liturgy might 
 have been, and we suppose was, in the hands of the Jermyn 
 Street Conference ; for it was not published at Homs, nor yet in 
 lona, but at ' Oxford and London/ by ' James Parker and Co. 
 1866,' in the form of a thin book, of 12 mo. size and 81 pages, 
 with the title : ' ¥AV')(p\6<yLov. The Eastern Liturgy of the Holy, 
 
 * Catholic, Apostolic, and Orthodox Church, simplified and sup- 
 
 * plemented ; containing Forms deemed valid and orthodox by 
 
 * all Churches for the worship of God daily throughout the year, 
 
 * and for the administration of all public ordinances, including 
 
 * Ordination. By the E-ev. Jules Ferrette, of Damascus. Trans- 
 
 * lated by the Author from his Greek Manuscript.^ ' 
 
 A smaller forecast had been published, also in 1866, by 
 Messrs. Parker, entitled ' The Damascus Eitual, a complete 
 *■ Liturgy, extracted from the Greek Euchologium, and supple- 
 ' mented from the English Prayer-book,' also by ' the Rev. Jules 
 Ferrette, of Damascus,' and professing to be a translation of 'his 
 Greek Manuscript' There is besides a preface to the second 
 book, printed as a small separate tract, in which the professions 
 of the title-page are expounded, and the assertion ventured that 
 M. Ferrette is the one single person who has renounced Roman- 
 ism without losing favour with his former superiors and brethren. 
 It will be sufficient for our present purpose to take the second 
 book, while, at the risk of being tedious, we repeat that the 
 person exhibited by advanced ritualists in Jermyn Street, and 
 admiringly upheld by the Secretary of the Association for the 
 Promotion of the Unity of Christendom, and editor of the second 
 edition of the ' Directorium Anglicanum,' was at the time author 
 of this Liturgy, which, as late as the 17th of December, he defends 
 in the columns of the newspaper which is especially regarded as 
 the organ of the most extreme ritualistic party. 
 
 What, then, is the new and true Eirenicon ? Of what quality 
 is that elixir of love which this spiritual Dulcamara vends as the 
 infallible cure for the fifteen-hundred-years-old quarrels of the 
 Universal Church ? First let us see how the Scottish suffragan 
 of the Metropolitan of the World * simplifies and supplements ' 
 the Eucharistic Office. The book contains a * Liturgy of the 
 Lord's Supper,' according to S. Basil, for Sundays, and one 
 according to S. John Chrysostom for week days. We will 
 examine the former, which comes first, and has the fuller rubrics. 
 The office is headed with a general rubric, which commences by
 
 26 The York Congress 
 
 asserting that ' it is proper that the Lord's Supper be administered 
 every Sunday at the end of the day.' No doubt this sentence 
 has received the cordial approbation of those friends of M. Ferrette 
 who make themselves conspicuous by the zeal with which they 
 vituperate their fellow Churchmen who do not make it an 
 obligation to enforce fasting communion. But then his Hebri- 
 dean lordship goes on graciously to concede the ' lawfulness ' 
 not only of ' more ' but also of ' less ' frequent adminstration, 
 *and at another hour, if there be some special reason for it.' 
 The ceremonial appointments may not be very gorgeous, but 
 there is a fine simplicity about them : ' before the administration 
 ' of the Lord's Supper there should be prepared in the church a 
 
 * table covered with a clean white linen cloth, upon which table 
 ' is placed a plate, with a loaf of ordinary bread, and a cup of 
 
 * wine.' No ' pernicious nonsense ' here, it must be owned — no 
 stone altar, no frontal, crosses, or candles, no wafer-bread, nor 
 yet mixed chalice, nor indeed altar, paten, or chalice at all ; but 
 table, tablecloth, plate, bread in the loaf, and wine already 
 poured out in the cup. But we have not yet reached the end of 
 this notable rubric. There is the apparatus — but what of the 
 communicants and the celebrant ? ' The communicants stand 
 ' before the table, and the bishop behind it, the face of the bishop 
 ' being turned towards the communicants, and the faces of the 
 ' communicants towards the bishop.' 
 
 After this mutual introspection, we reach the Office itself, after 
 the remark, ' the bishop says.' It must be noted, in reference to 
 this office, that M. Ferrette's ' simplification ' of Eastern Liturgies 
 has resulted in his shaking up what he calls * Public Service on 
 Sundays ' out of our own ordinary dry Sunday morning office, 
 beginning with the ' One or more sentences,' and the ' Dearly 
 beloved,' and ending with the prayer for the Church Militant 
 (the Oblation being omitted) — the ' Gloria in Excelsis,' which is 
 changed from the Western (without being converted into the 
 Eastern) form, being tacked on. Accordingly, after the Versicles 
 and Reponses, ' Let us lift up, &c.,' and ' Let us give thanks, &c.,' 
 we are introduced straight to an edited version of the ' Anaphora,' 
 said by a 'bishop' — how dressed appeareth not — across a table, 
 with a ' plate ' and a ' cup ' on it, to a cluster of standing ' com- 
 municants,' so managed, from the omission of any order of mani- 
 pulation, that it may either be taken as containing a consecration 
 of the elements or a mere historical recital of the Last Supper. 
 This concludes with the Lord's Prayer, after which the ' sacred 
 bishop ' orders that ' the communicants sit down if there he accom- 
 modation for it^ but ' the bishop remains standing ' (why he 
 should be compelled to put himself to so much trouble is not 
 explained). After this, ' the bishop says — '' The holy things to
 
 and Church Rites. 27 
 
 those who are holy ;" ' — (and sitting, he might have added) ; and 
 continues — ' '' God, be merciful to me, a sinner." The bishop 
 
 * then takes the bread, and blesses it, saying, ^' Blessed Be 
 ' God ! " ' — how this pious ejaculation is a benediction of the 
 bread being left obscure. ' The bisbop then breaks the bread, 
 
 * saying, '* Christ says : Take, eat, this is my body which is 
 ' broken for you. Do this in remembrance of me." 
 
 The Order of Administration stands as follows : — ' The bishop 
 ' then, with great reverence and solemnity, distributes the bread 
 
 * to the communicants. And if there be one or more deacons 
 ' present, they help him in the distribution. The bishop com- 
 
 * municates last of all, as the Servant of the Servants of God.' 
 We shall not waste words by commenting on the parody of 
 humility which characterizes the impudent inversion of all 
 Christian tradition contained in the last order ; we simply place 
 in contrast to it the following extract from M. Ferrette's letter 
 of December 1 : — 
 
 " My episcopal charccter cannot be said to have * nothing obligatory,' for 
 the priest Belorosoff [the Russian chaplain at Brussels], and for co-religion- 
 ists. They are bound to recognise me as au orthodox bishop, though not as 
 their own bishop ; and it would be a grave sin for any of them to act, speak, or 
 write so as to impede my work. But it is just that I should bear in mind my 
 own weakness as well as theirs. When Romulus, after much difficulty, had 
 contrived at last to surround his so-called city with a mud wall, Bemus, his 
 brother, thought it a good joke to leap over it, and Romulus killed him on the 
 spot. I will be more patient than that, and continue my work nevertheless." 
 
 We thank M. Ferrette for the minute acuracy of his parallel. 
 We thoroughly agree with him that Ms ' city ' of God is but a 
 
 * so-called ' one, and that its * wall ' is composed of ' mud.' We 
 do not thank him for his patience, for, in truth, we do not care 
 how impatient he may be, while we do not entertain the slightest 
 doubt that he will ' continue ' 'the work' in which he has shown 
 himself so successful, of dabbling in mud. But in the mean- 
 while we are forgetting the Liturgy : — 
 
 ' All having partaken of the bread, the bishop and people con- 
 
 * tinue engaged in silent prayer for some time ; after which the 
 
 * bishop takes the cup, and gives thanks, saying, '' Thanks be 
 
 * given unto God ! ^' ' 
 
 We call special attention to this passage to ask what it is 
 which the consecrated of the Metropolitan of the World proffers 
 to the Catholic Church by way of a consecration of the element 
 of wine ? As we said, he travels over the words of institution in 
 his Anaphora, but excising, as he does in that connexion, any 
 rubric of action, they may stand there merely as narrative, other- 
 wise we should have a double consecration of the bread. The 
 words of adminstration are ours with a prefatory ' Christ says,' 
 after which follows a rubric, parallel to the one above quoted which
 
 28 The York Congress 
 
 orders the bishop to receive last of all. Then follows a short 
 prayer adapted from the Greek Liturgy, after which ' the com- 
 
 * municants then stand up, if they were sitting, and the people 
 ' sing, or the bishop says,' the Nunc Dimittis. * The bishop then 
 
 * raises his hands and dismisses the people with the blessing, 
 
 * saying ' — no formal blessing at all, but the normal ascription of 
 grace from the second Epistle to the Corinthians. Such is the 
 Eucharistic service tendered by this upstart wanderer for the 
 acceptance of universal Christendom in exchange for its existing 
 offices and rites. It is not our business to test it by comparison 
 with the elaborate rituals of the East or unreformed West. 
 Seeing the company in which we find Bishop Julius, we are 
 driven to ask if it be so very superior to our own order of Holy 
 Communion, even when most drily administered. In order to 
 be quite fair to M. Ferrette we throw in his anomalous * Public 
 Service on Sundays,' as its earlier portion, and even then we 
 find that, waiving minor points, (1) M. Ferrette never gives us 
 any special Collect at all, and except on the Sunday before 
 Easter, Maunday Thursday, Good Friday, Easter Eve, Easter 
 Sunday, Ascension Day, and Wliitsunday, no proper Epistle and 
 Gospel — Christmas Day being wholly ignored in the Ferrettian 
 use, as a Holy-day at all — and the 'bishop' having the choice of 
 readings on other days. (2) That he omits the special confession, 
 solemn absolution, and the authoritative blessing ; in (3) That 
 he orders the communicants to sit during reception, and the cele- 
 brant to receive last, and (4), That he throws the very conse- 
 cration of the elements into inextricable confusion. The only 
 Catholic increment which can be set off against this astounding 
 list of defects, is the insertion of a prayer of Anaphora. 
 
 Our readers will not be surprised to be told that while in the 
 order of * Administration of Baptism,' the words are turned into 
 the third person : ' The servant of God (N) is baptised in the name 
 of,' &c., all mention of regeneration is excised ; sponsors, other 
 than as parents or guardians, are ignored, and the Lord's Prayer 
 omitted — and that a prayer in which the ' bishop lays both his 
 hands on the head of the baptised person,' appears to be the 
 substitute for confirmation either as understood by East or West ; 
 while no ring is to be found in the ' Solemnization of Matrimony.' 
 But w^e shall be asked by those who believe in M. Ferette, 
 What are his ordination and consecration services ? Surely 
 the prelate who is so wrathfully contemptuous towards Mr. 
 Skinner because no drop of holy oil had touched his head, and 
 who, according to uncontradicted report, is kindly ready to supply 
 all that is wanting in the Archbishop of Canterbury's orders, 
 and whose consecration, according to his own boastful account, 
 took a good hour, will offer something very grand, imposing, and
 
 and Church Rites. 29 
 
 full, not to say Catholic and Apostolic, on this head, though 
 possibly rather lengthy. We are always glad to begin with praise, 
 and so we freely and entirely acquit these portions of M. Ferette's 
 book of circumlocution. By way of measuring the length of 
 the offices, we have tested the length of each in comparison with 
 a single exhortation (the first) in our own Communion office, and 
 we find that while that contains 547 words, the entire form of 
 the ' Ordination of Deacons or Ministers,' from the first word of 
 the presentation to the * welcome' with which it concludes, is dis- 
 posed of in 343 words ; the ordination of ' Presbyters or Elders' in 
 252, and the ' Ordination of Bishops or Overseers ' in 463, neither 
 Lord's Prayer nor lection of Scripture being ordered in any of 
 themi The Deacon's office, according to the Lord of lona, is to 
 ' take care of the poor; to administer the property of the Church; 
 ' and to relieve the bishop of all those matters generally which 
 
 * do not exclusively belong to the episcopal order;' and accor- 
 dingly, while the poor Protestantized Church of England orders 
 the Bishop to place his hands on the head of the postulant, and 
 say : ' Take thou authority to execute the office of a Deacon 
 in the Church of God committed unto thee ; in the name of,' 
 &c. the founder of the 'Orthodox Western Church' revealed 
 to the Union Revieio Almanack substitutes this ample form of 
 words : 
 
 ' The divine grace, ever healing that which is infirm, and 
 
 * supplying the defects of that which is imperfect, promotes the 
 
 * servant of God (N) to the order of deacon. Let us therefore 
 
 * pray for him, that the grace of the All-Holy Spirit may come 
 ' upon him. Let us pray the Lord.' 
 
 The * Presbyter or Elder' is ordained with a similar form of 
 words, ' Order of the Elder of his people' being substituted for 
 ' Order of Deacon ; ' only — as the deacon has had every duty attri- 
 buted to him 'which does not exclusively belong to the Episcopal 
 Order' — the suffragan of the Metropolitan of the World judiciously 
 omits any recital at all of what the ' Presbyter or Elder' has to 
 do. Who that loves his ' Directorium Anglicanum ' will not 
 confess to the superiority of this office over the meagre formu- 
 laries of the old English Establishment, which actually makes 
 the bishop bid the new priest ' receive the Holy Ghost for the 
 ' office and work of a Priest in the Church of God, now com- 
 
 * mitted unto thee by the imposition of hands,' and continues to 
 give the authority of binding and of loosing sins ? The similar 
 words mutatis mutandis in M. Ferrette's ' Ordination of Bishops 
 or Overseers,' contrast as decidedly with the competing expres- 
 sions in the old-fashioned Prayer-book. The office of a bishop 
 being, we are told, ' to teach ; to baptize ; to administer the 
 ' Lord's Supper ; to read the public prayers ; to bless ; to
 
 30 The York Congress 
 
 'govern; to bind and to loose; and to ordain deacons, elders, 
 ' and other bishops.' 
 
 We have, we venture to think, exonerated a great and good 
 man from the grievous calumnies of the unrighteous and scorn- 
 ful. Author of such a prajer-book as the first-fruits of his 
 Episcopate, M. Jules Ferrette was not traitorous to his old 
 Presbyterian employers — nor yet a very dangerous foe to his 
 still older friends of the Papal Church — when he sought clan- 
 destine consecration as the pretending bishop of a sham see of 
 lona, from the schismatic hands of a dubious Metropolitan of 
 the WorldJ 
 
 Our readers will have had enough — certainly we have had — 
 of M. Ferrette's liturgy. We should never have dreamed of 
 rescuing the trashy hrochure from its predestined obscurity for 
 its own worthless sake ; but it demands notice on account of 
 those who are the backers of its compiler. Are they Jacob or 
 are they Esau? Is it venison or kid with which they desire 
 to nurture the English Church? They are professedly and 
 ostentatiously members of the same school which has brought out 
 the second exaggerated edition of the 'Directorium Anglicanum,' 
 and yet we now have them supporting, in the person of its author, 
 this eviscerated Presbyterian caricature of the Catholic Liturgy. 
 With what service do they mean to leave us after all — with the 
 High Mass of the ' Directorium,' or the ' Liturgy of the Lord's 
 Supper' of the Bishop of lona ? 
 
 This folly has its serious side, or we should not have gone out 
 of our way to expose it, in the encouragement which it offers to 
 those who see the surest way to working a Puritan or Latitu- 
 dinarian change in the Prayer-book by bringing into contempt the 
 men who seem to be parading themselves as Reformers in an op- 
 posite direction, with whom of course the standard-bearers of the 
 Catholic status in quo are popularly confounded. We greatly regret 
 that in his Charge (which contains so much that is good) the 
 Bishop of London should have dropped some expression which 
 might be taken advantage of by the men who are bonded to^'ether 
 to un-catholicize the Church by altering the Prayer-book. It is 
 true that the Bishop guards himself against seeming to favour any 
 change which tended to affect the doctrine contained in the book ; 
 and appears in what he said to have his attention chiefly directed 
 to an authoritative explanation of the vestment rubric, or to 
 meddling (a thing gravely to be deprecated) with the Burial 
 Service. — We will test the policy of such an alteration upon 
 
 ^ A new edition of this book has since been published by Messrs. Simpkin and 
 Marshall. The compiler not only proves his episcopal pretensions in it, but 
 professes to have made some verbal alterations at the instance of his ' brethren ' 
 of the Eastern Church.
 
 and Church Rites. 31 
 
 the principles enunciated by the Bishop himself. The rubric of 
 which it is sought to relieve us — an attempt which never would 
 have been thought of but for the precipitancy of the self-entitled 
 ritualists — confers a theoretic legality by the Church of England 
 upon the adoption at the great crowning act of worship of certain 
 rich and distinctive dresses different from those which are worn 
 at the less important services. These dresses are derived, it may 
 be, immediately by that Church of England from the unre- 
 formed mediaeval Churches, but they descended to them from 
 the primitive Church. These are dresses which, with more or 
 less of 'similarity, the Episcopal Churches of East and West, 
 with which, thank God, we are still connected by the links of 
 Apostolic orders, have from earliest times agreed in employing, 
 and which are also employed from feelings of reverence by vari- 
 ous Lutheran communities abroad. True it is that the permis- 
 sion to wear these dresses at all has, except in isolated instances, 
 been a merely paper one. But is it not the instinct of all old 
 and great institutions to be wary of abolishing prescriptions, even 
 if apparently obsolete in practice, if they are conservative of some 
 tradition which it would be wrong to formally abandon and 
 explicitly to condemn, or which at some other time may show 
 themselves suited for the occasion, and therefore spring again 
 into wholesome life ? 
 
 But would it then be wrong to abandon, and in abandoning 
 to condemn, the tradition of these vestments within the English 
 Church, and to make it impossible that they should ever again 
 become a popular usage ? 
 
 Let the Bishop of London answer this question. 
 
 * To review, then, our present position. We are ministers of a Churcli which 
 adheres to au ancient Apostolical form of government, not with the tenacity of 
 a narrow exclusiveness, forcing us to look with suspicion and coldness on the 
 great Protestant communities abroad, or on Nonconformists at home. We prize 
 and thank God for this outward bond which — while it is some sort of link, 
 however slight, with the unreformed Churches of our own day, whose errors 
 we deplore and would gladly help in mending— ties us also to the great 
 mediaeval Churches, and the noble spirits who in them spread light in the 
 midst of the thickly-gathering darkness of gross error : we feel, too, that it 
 carries us up in outward relationship to the struggling Churches of the fourth 
 and earlier centuries, and the great Fathers, whose writings formed in those 
 days the best literature, not of the Church alone, but of the Empire. It is 
 thus we prize the Catholic element in our own government.' 
 
 Memorable words these ! especially uttered as they were by 
 one of Bishop Tait^s school. But if the endangered rubric were 
 put out of the way, they would be less true and, therefore, less 
 memorable. In a great incident of worship, ' a link, however 
 ' slight,' which connects us ' with the unreformed Churches of 
 ' our own day,' would have been snapped — and our attitude to
 
 32 The York Congress 
 
 * the great Protestant communities ' of Scandinavia would become 
 one of * coldness and suspicion;' one 'outward bond which ties 
 
 * us also to the great Mediaeval Churches' would have been riven, 
 and a prescription ' which carries us up in outward relationship 
 ' to the struggling Churches of the fourth and fifth centuries,' 
 would have been annulled. Why this havoc? Because a few 
 men may have striven to put this dormant enactment in use at 
 a moment when they should have recollected that ' Charity was 
 better then rubrics ; ' to quote the manly acknowledgment 
 of the author of the earlier and more temperate ' Directoriura 
 Angllcanura,' and because a still smaller set had tried to use 
 the obsoleteness of the vestments as an argument to introduce 
 all other things that happened to please them, if only those too 
 were also obsolete. 
 
 No doubt the attempt was made to let these vestments down 
 easily, but rather contemptuously, by the argument used by the 
 Dean of Westminster, that, after all, they were immaterial, in- 
 asmuch as they were but the crystallized dress of an ancient 
 Eoman peasant. This observation (into the archaeological cor- 
 rectness of which we are not entering), so far as it was intended 
 to discredit them, seems to us eminently unphilosophical, for the 
 whole history of the Christian economy abounds with instances 
 of the Church adopting common things, making them her own, 
 modifying them to her needs, and then, when the fashion of the 
 world changes, retaining them with a now hallowed monopoly. 
 As well might the sacredness of the buildings in which we wor- 
 ship be impugned, because they were only the imitations of 
 disused praetors' courts. As well might the Sacraments them- 
 selves be disparaged, because ' sacrament ' was a word which at 
 first only meant a soldier's oath of fidelity. We can readily 
 believe that some such feelings as those with which we have 
 analysed the Bishop of London's declaration, prompted the 
 Bishops of 1661 to retain the rubric, although we see that tlie 
 Bishop of S. David's, in his recently published Charge, goes far 
 to charge them with disingenuity for so doing. Besides, the 
 Bishop forgets that in settling the Prayer-book they had to do 
 so not only for parish churches, but also for cathedrals and 
 royal chapels, under one and the same rubric — a rubric propped, 
 in their eyes, by the Canon which orders the cope in collegiate 
 churches, and can only by a forced interpretation forbid it any- 
 where. At that moment any abandonment of the litera scripta 
 would have emperilled that more grandiose cathedral service to 
 which they had been accustomed before the Civil War, and which 
 they might have reasonably hoped to see restored. Had Charles II. 
 been even moderately fond of the public devotions of the English 
 Church, it can hardly be doubted that his chapel would have been
 
 and Church Bites. '6'^ 
 
 regulated with a solemnity which would probably have at least 
 re-established the cope and other enrichments identified with the 
 'Chapel E-oyal' of the Reformation: as it was, his selfish pro- 
 fligacy, followed by the perversion of his brother, had, even 
 before the Eevolution of 1688, extinguished that ceremonialist 
 influence which in so marked a way flowed from the Sovereign's 
 chapels during the reigns of Elizabeth and the first two Stuarts. 
 But how could the Bishops of 1661, at the moment when Church 
 and King had come back together, foresee the course of future 
 history ? 
 
 That with the increasing appreciation of external beauty in the 
 minds of all educated men, with the growth of art in form and 
 colour in all our buildings, the Church of England, if she holds 
 firmly to that improved system of her worship, of which cathedrals 
 like Ely, Lichfield, and Llandaflf, and churches like S. Barnabas 
 and All Souls', Halifax, give the tone, will not do something 
 at the right time to glorify, in accordance with the rubric, the 
 Eucharistic dress, we cannot for a moment doubt, if only she is 
 left in peace to work out her own improvement. We are, as we 
 have already said, very glad to see that the Bishop of Oxford, in 
 his late Charge, speaks to this efi'ect. Perhaps the present time 
 might have been the opportune one if those who started the 
 development had been as cautious, and law-loving, and genially 
 English in their ways, as some of them are unhappily the con- 
 trary. If the development is checked, the reason of the check 
 must be sought at the hands of those who drove it on so reck- 
 lessly. 
 
 A testimony singularly opportune and weighty to this view of 
 the question has reached us from across the Atlantic. The 
 ' ritualistic ' controversy has reached the United States, and 
 seems to be agitating those cities in the North in which the 
 Church is powerful. Accordingly, some clergy and laymen, 
 headed by Dr. Dix, rector of the large, w^eathly, and influential 
 Trinity Church, New York, memorialised the ' Presiding Bishop,' 
 asking for his ' views of the subject in full : especially as to 
 ' whether an increase of Ritualism would be advisable among 
 ' us, or whether the ordinary average of present parochial 
 ' practice ' — which in Dr. Dix's own case is, we believe, the 
 moderate High Church, that for example of S. PauPs, Knights- 
 bridge — ' would besl carry forward the great work of the Church 
 ' in such a country as ours.' The Presiding Bishop to whom 
 this memorial was addressed is an old man, seventy-five years of 
 age. Dr. Hopkins, diocesan of the hard Puritan New England 
 State of Vermont, conspicuous of yore for the strengtii of his 
 anti-Eoman feelings and language. Bishop Hopkins, in reply, 
 set himseii to write a book, entitled ' The Law of Ritualism, 
 
 D
 
 34 The Yorh Congress 
 
 * examined in its relation to the Word of God, to the Primitive 
 
 * Church, to the Church of England, and to the Protestant Epi- 
 ' scopal Church in the United States,' in which, with many strong 
 recognitions of the benefits of the Reformation and of the corrup- 
 tions of J^ome, he examines the question of ritual in the aspects 
 of the descent of the Christian from the Jewish Church, the 
 practice of the Primitive age, and the written law of the actual 
 rubrics of the Anglican and Anglo-American Churches ; and the 
 result is, that in behalf of the latter and a fortiori of the former — 
 while owning his own individual preference for simpler forms — he 
 sums up in favour of the lawfulness, and of the edifying tendency 
 in cases where it is acceptable, of a ritualism involving not only 
 vestments, but incense; and even prophesies that it will ulti- 
 mately prove the winning side in our communion. We quote 
 the concluding paragraph of the book : 
 
 'Enough has been written, however, and perhaps more than enough, to be a 
 satisfactory answer to the application of my respected brethren. I have only 
 to state in conclusion, that I am an advocate for Ritualism, so far as it is 
 fairly warranted by the Bible and the law of the Church, and can make its way 
 with the free choice of Ministers and people. It is not likely that I shall bear 
 any active part in it, as my age is too advanced for my habits to be changed. 
 But I have little doubt that my children will behold the "glory and the 
 beauty " of our public worship brought back to the first stage in the Reforma- 
 tion, in accordance with the rule which has never been formally renounced, 
 and still remains in the rubric of the English Prayer-book. And I trust that 
 the work, conducted, as it should be, in the spirit of a pure and living Eaitb, 
 and with the Christian grace of peace and charity, will add attractiveness to 
 the cause of truth, and increase the influence of the glorious Gospel.' 
 
 We commend the whole work to that knot of the clergy ' in 
 the diocese of London ' who have found time to contribute their 
 little share to the cause of dispute and suspicion, by circulating 
 an address in which, while 'not insensible to the objections 
 ' which may be urged against such voluntary declarations on the 
 ' part of clergymen who have already made the subscriptions 
 
 * voluntarily imposed upon them,' they announce that they 
 yet ' are convinced in their consciences that the time is fully 
 
 * come ' (to whom ?) ' when, for the satisfaction of the great 
 
 * majority of the lay members of the Church of England ' (when 
 and by whom polled ?) ' and for the vindication of our Church 
 ' in the eyes of others,' (what others, Romanists, Greeks, scep- 
 tics, Jews, or Zulus ?) * some authoritative check should be put 
 
 * to practices,' &c. The memorialists are wisely vague as to the 
 stringency of the check, and the authority from which it is to 
 come : a box on the ear is ' some check,' so is hanging a man ; 
 but any body of laymen who should set about exposing some 
 brother layman to popular contempt or odium by formally urging 
 tliat some check should be put on his proceedings, and leaving
 
 and Church Rites. 35 
 
 it obscure whether they implied a snub, a slap, or capital punish- 
 ment, would be considered more anxious for their own notoriety 
 or advantage, than zealous for the repression of the evil-doer. 
 The memorialists continue — that the aforesaid indefinite check 
 'should be put to practices which are confessedly introduced 
 'and maintained as symbolical of doctrines against which our 
 ' Keformers protested, and in protesting against which many of 
 'the ''noble army of Martyrs" "loved not their lives unto the 
 'death.'" 
 
 How can these gentlemen have the effrontery to say that such 
 practices are confessedly introduced and maintained as ' symbo- 
 lical of doctrines ' against which Cranmer, Ridley, &c. died, and 
 yet shirk recapitulating any one of them? We have already, not 
 many pages back, given our reasons for thinking that sundry 
 pratices which may or may not be used, but which we speak of 
 only as recommended in a certain book, are very unwise, nay, 
 possibly in some cases, more or fewer, alien to the spirit of the 
 Church of England — as alien to it as preaching in a black gown, 
 administering' Communion to whole railfuls, ignoring daily ser- 
 vices. Saints' days, and weekly Communions, and fraternising in 
 public halls and Evangelical Alliances with omnigenous dis- 
 senters, confessedly are. But we never dreamed of saying that 
 they were ^confessedly' introduced and maintained as symbo- 
 lical of that for which Cranmer and Ridley were burnt, for 
 if we had made any such statement we hope some avenger 
 would have risen up to put us to open shame for daring to bring 
 a charge so sweeping, so vague, and yet so damnatory, against 
 the revival — opportune or not — of usages of which the most 
 prominent are urged on the authority of a rubric in a Prayer- 
 book put forth when the two foremost leaders of this 'noble 
 army of Martyrs,' who 'loved not their lives unto the death,' in 
 protesting against them, were respectively Archbishop of Can- 
 terbury and Bishop of London. We have no patience to follow 
 this protest through its next paragraph (a useless amplification 
 of the preamble), which is simply a 'solemn protest' against all 
 ' doctrine and ritual ' of which ' the tendency is to assimilate the 
 ' teaching of the United Church of England and Ireland to the 
 teaching and worship of a Church which we have declared to be 
 idolatrous."' 'We have declared' — let the memorialists, as 
 Dr. Parr said, mind their pronouns and speak for themselves. 
 When have we done so? We have no doubt asserted that a 
 certain doctrine of adoration of the Sacramental Presence ^ was 
 'idolatry,' not however even saying that it was a necessary 
 
 1 It might clear the minds of the memorialists on this point to recur to certain - 
 observations of the Bishop of St. David's in his recent Charge, on the term 
 * Penance. ' 
 
 i a
 
 36 The York Congress 
 
 lionian doctrine, but of the Cliurcli of Kome itself we had, we 
 thought, only said what we also said of the Churches of Jeru- 
 salem, Antioch, and Alexandria {i.e. the three primitive Eastern 
 Patriarchates), viz. that it (the Western Patriarchate), with them, 
 
 * hath erred not only in theii living and manner of ceremonies, 
 ' but also in matters of Faith.' (Article XIV.) Finally, the 
 declaration, having disposed of the Church in its spiritual aspect, 
 settles its political standing in a brief and pregnant sentence : 
 ' And we declare our conviction that the claim of our Church to 
 ' be the Established Church of the realm rests mainly upon 
 ' her fidelity to the principles of the Reformation.' In our 
 ignorance ive imagined that these claims rested upon the common 
 law of the land, shaped centuries before there was either a Hefor- 
 mation to check the excesses of Pome, or before these excesses 
 had reached such a height as to create that Reformation ; con- 
 firmed by the Great Charter ; and recognised by Acts of Parlia- 
 ment more than we can count, passed before, during, and after 
 that Reformation. 
 
 We have not cast in our lot with the so-called 'ritualists.' 
 On the contrary, we were taken severely to task by their organs 
 for the plainness with which we have expressed our dissent from 
 their aberrations. We feel accordingly more free to make our pro- 
 test now, not against them, but against their accusers, as a body 
 of men who have taken advantage of the follies of those persons 
 and of the clamour of the journals against them, to bind together 
 
 * High-and-dry ' with 'Low,' in a protest which might swamp 
 chasuble and censer, but equally, in the vagueness of its vitupe- 
 ration, * secretly strike at ' any ' established doctrine, or laud- 
 ' able practice of the Church of England, or indeed of the whole 
 ' Catholick Church of Clirist,' which happened to displease the 
 Moniing Advertiser, or any other ' organ of public opinion.' 
 
 To persons other than these memorialists, who think that 
 excessive ritualism ought not only to be checked, but thrown 
 back, we would venture to recall the little damage which was 
 done to the Church of England by that ultra-ritual movement 
 in the early days of tlie Church revival, of which the foundation 
 was the excessive study which the leaders of the advance-guard 
 at that time bestowed upon the Breviary, of which the key- 
 note was struck in the service for Bishop Ken's day, contri- 
 buted by Mr. Newman to the ' Tracts for the Times.' It would 
 carry us much too far out of our way now to give a minute 
 account of this peculiar and interesting — and, we believe, now 
 very much forgotten — phase of the movement. It is enough to 
 say, that to us, who happened to have seen, without being impli- 
 cated in, something of its internal working, the present mani- 
 festation sounds like the eclio of a long-dropped strain. The
 
 and Church Rites. 37 
 
 same extravagant adulation of the foreign and pre-Eeforma- 
 tional — the same faith in the sentimental — characterised the two 
 epochs ; while in the men who ruled the earlier one, poetry, intel- 
 lect, and unwavering faith in the virtue of their enterprise stood 
 revealed. Well, that laborious pursuit of devotions whose ruling 
 principle was the bountiful use of the Psalter, coloured by sugges- 
 tive antiphons and said with accessories of assthetic excitement, 
 has died away — some of its most eminent promoters are lost to 
 us ; others, with sobered energies, are earnest labourers in our own 
 Church ; while, in the general spread of the daily service, we find 
 the good seed saved from that too luxuriant harvest. Bear, then, 
 we say to all sound Churchmen, with the present commotion, 
 which may in its turn ripen into an expansion of weekly Com- 
 munions. A change now will be a change produced, not by con- 
 viction, but by force, and therefore worthless, even if it be one 
 which merely restricts the liberty of the present rubric to forms 
 most generally familiar. We make little distinction between a 
 change by judgment of the Privy Council, or one by Act of Par- 
 liament. Neither can be compassed under circumstances which 
 can command abiding respect. The 'ritualist' will be exasperated, 
 the advocate of moderate conformity and sober dignity will be 
 indignant that the opportunity should not have been taken advan- 
 tage of for screwing up the Puritan, while the Puritan will storm 
 because the general level had not been beaten down, and tlie 
 Latitudinarian will be generally disgusted by the entire tarmoil. 
 To the ritualist, on the other hand, we say as emphatically — be 
 advised in time, and show the truest coarage, that of daring to 
 retrieve a mistake, and in the cause of peace not flinching from 
 the unmeaning reproach of inconsistency.^ 
 
 In strong contrast to that of 1866, the Church Congress of 
 1867 will not even be held in a cathedral city. Birmingham was 
 first thought of, but the cold unwillingness of the Bishop of Wor- 
 cester defeated the proposal ; so Wolverhampton, in the more 
 genial diocese of Lichfield, was chosen, upon the invitation of 
 the mayor, and with the promise of the bishop to preside. 
 This large town is so near Birmingham that it will virtually 
 sweep in the same body of local attendants. Wolverhampton, 
 itself in the main the creation of its subterranean treasures of coal 
 and iron developed by modern science and enterprise, will have 
 nothing about it of that antiquarian pictures queness which formed 
 so powerful an attraction at Bristol, Norwich, and York. The 
 
 1 The writer takes this opportunity of acknowledging, with much satisfaction, 
 the conciliatory animus manifested since the publication of this article by Mr. 
 Mackonochie and by the English Church Union, The resolution adopted by the 
 Upper House of Convocation and substantially repeated by the Lower one will, it is 
 hoped, restore the threatened p ^ v K ey of the Church.
 
 38 The York Congress 
 
 persons who go there from a distance will be people who wish 
 for a Church Congress in itself, and desire, at some little trouble 
 to themselves, to help it on. This will very probably thin the 
 attendant numbers, but the change will be tonic, because the 
 benefits of such a gathering are those emphatically of influence 
 and information, so long as at a congress formal resolutions are 
 forbidden. Care must be taken, in the long run, not to let the 
 easy and social, nor even the arch geological, aspect of the affair 
 become too prominent. Deliberation with action is one thing ; 
 without it, it is another ; but still it is deliberation, and should 
 be respected in its graver aspects, such as we may expect in the 
 coming instance, for it could not be expected that churchmen 
 would make a three days' residence in Wolverhampton for any 
 other end than that of mutual counsel. 
 
 There is one special aspect in which we think that the choice 
 of Wolverhampton is peculiarly fortunate. There is no cathedral 
 there. York, as we have seen, exhibited the cathedral element 
 in our Church in an aspect of spiritual usefulness and majesty 
 which must have surprised many of those who were present 
 The time had naturally come for the experiment to be tried how 
 much could be done with a parish church in supplying the 
 worship element of a general gathering. Eor this trial Wolver- 
 hampton is peculiarly well adapted. The church there had of 
 old been collegiate, and till lately, while practically only that of a 
 parish, had possessed that titular rank, the Dean of Windsor being 
 ex officio also Dean of Wolverhampton. Now, in the course of 
 ecclesiastical reform this harmless distinction has been blotted 
 out, and it is only as other spacious town churches. The fabric 
 was rather larger than the average of parish churches, but the 
 choir had been replaced by some hideous abortion of deteriorated 
 Italian architecture. As the church, however, lost in dignity, it 
 regained in beauty ; for a restoration of, we believe, a very satis- 
 factory character, including the rebuilding in more seemly form of 
 the choir, was not very long since consummated, under an incum- 
 bent who knows well how to work the church which he possesses. 
 So it would be a strange thing if the solemn celebrations and 
 public services, which ought to form essential elements of every 
 Church Congress, could not be provided in this old collegiate 
 church. The question of how to work the parochial system for 
 the best benefit of the people was debated at York, in a dis- 
 cussion where the worship question received due prominence, a 
 most friendly hearing being accorded, among others, to a clergy- 
 man well known for his extremely advanced 'ritualism.' At 
 Wolverhampton practice may supplant theory. We venture to 
 suggest that it might be \vorth while at this, the first congress 
 not held in a university or cathedral city, to superadd, in some
 
 and Church Rites. 39 
 
 form, the choral festival to the congress. The diocese of Lichfield 
 has, since the institution of the Church-music Congresses — as we 
 may well style them — been prominent for the zeal with which it 
 has encouraged them, both in the cathedral and in various parish 
 churches. Here, then, at Wolverhampton, when on the occa- 
 sions of these public days the worship ought to be made all- 
 glorious in a place destitute of capitular resources, the diocese 
 might combine to furnish the means. One special introductory 
 Service, and at least one specially solemn Communion, would, we 
 have no doubt, be provided. But even on the other mornings, 
 and in the evenings, something might be done to honour God in 
 His sanctuary, and withal promote the study of Church Psalmody 
 by strongly sustained Choral Services of a scientific character. 
 
 In this union of the outward manifestation of Anglican wor- 
 ship, and in deliberations not inferior, we hope, to those of 
 previous congresses, the usefulness of such gatherings would 
 make itself felt in a region where, from all we know of the 
 growth of Church feeling in the populous towns of great and 
 active Staffordshire, men's minds are very open to wholesome 
 impressions. The Wolverhampton Church Congress might thus be 
 made a pattern of that which we believe the ideal advantages 
 of the institution to be. These are, in brief, the building up of 
 the members of the Church of England, in no fanatical or exclu- 
 sive sense, but with all their national characteristics preserved, 
 into a holy people, attached to, understanding, and zealous for 
 that Church to which they belong ; not prone to take the offensive ; 
 tolerant and tender of the consciences and rights of others, but 
 ready, at the faintest sound of danger, to stand to her defence ; 
 appreciating that, with a very wide liberty of individual 
 opinion, the topics on which all who call themselves Churchmen 
 ought to take unanimous counsel together, are as numerous as 
 they are important ; convinced, above all, that in the Prayer- 
 book, as a record of things to be believed and an exponent of 
 things to be done in God's honour and for man's salvation, is to 
 be found for them the common bond of Christian union, and 
 the common law of the acceptable service due to Almighty 
 God.
 
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