the masses, and lead to such riots and insubordination, as would greatly assist the enemy. The Admiralty would naturally be the first object of popular vengeance, and the First Lord of the day, possibly an exceptionally good one, would probably be the first victim. Of all the positions in which a statesman could find himself, his would be the most pitiable if he escaped with his life, for on his head would fall the very natural maledictions of the people. But the mob would most likely hang the First Lord and burn the Admiralty, following up that outrage, after the manner of excited mobs, by attacking the Horse Guards. If the then Commander-in-Chief and War Minister did not anticipate the action of the mob, they would probably be its next victims. But all this would not improve matters or contribute to the national defence. A new First Lord, a landsman of course, and a new War Minister, perhaps a lawyer, would have to be found, and meanwhile the enemy is advancing. The march from Pevensey to London, sixty-five miles, traverses no defiles like the Kyber or Bolan passes, no mountain ranges, gloomy forests, broad rivers, or sandy plains. London once sighted by an enemy is taken, or would be after one shell had hurtled through the air, or one rocket had roared through its murky canopy. Unconditional capitulation would be a necessity, and the idle fancy that the retreat of the occupying army might be cut off' is sufficiently answered by 'J'y suis, j'y reste.' To buy out the enemy, to furnish him with any number of golden bridges, would be our task, but he could neither be fought out nor starved out of the world's wealthiest market. The enemy might perhaps be bribed by the cession of our navy, our Indian and our colonial Empire, and a war indemnity of some 500,000,000l., with free transport for the army, to relinquish our shores; but what would he leave behind? The democracy, justly incensed by the proved incapacity of the governing classes to discharge the first duty of a government, would depose them from power. The complex framework of English society would fall to pieces. Industry would be paralysed and public credit destroyed. L'Angleterre aura vécu:' the one country in Europe that had for eight centuries been free from invasion would have felt the conqueror's heel. A land whose monarchy had been the expression, whose sovereigns the loved guardians, of the popular liberty, would have owned a foreign master, and the fiction of the Silver Streak' have been dispelled by the realities of an iron age.

DUNSANY.

PEACE IN THE CHURCH.

I.

THE PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION ACT.

WHEN I had first agreed to consider the policy of the Public Worship Regulation Act, I felt some misgivings at my temerity. But in the interval all apprehensions have quite disappeared, and I can now buckle to, not, I hope, with a light heart, but in a trustful spirit. The truth is, that meanwhile the question has been raised, and virtually settled, in a sense corresponding with my own conclusions, not by any casual layman, but by the Lord Archbishop of Canterbury and his comProvincials in sacred Synod assembled, as well as by the House of Lords.

When a householder sends for the slater, or the plumber, or the carpenter in a hurry, the reasonable inference is that he suspects something amiss about his dwelling. But when carpenter, plumber, and slater are all commanded to meet over the condition, not of that one mansion only, but of the whole row in which it stands, then, indeed, it may be concluded that extensive repairs are called for to restore the buildings to tenantable condition. The Archbishop of Canterbury's proposal, accepted by the Ministry and House of Lords, for a Royal Commission upon Ecclesiastical Judicature, is more than an excuse for a plain-spoken retrospect of the origin and policy of the Public Worship Regulation Act.

This concession has made the doings of seven years ago ancient history, and justifies me for treating it in the free method appropriate to a retrospective inquiry.

I am apt to become suspicious if I find any writer who embarks upon an historical research too loudly boastful of his impartiality. Industry and accuracy are among the chiefest requisites for a trustworthy historian. But of these good qualities, assuming the honesty of the writer, there can be no more sure guarantee than the consciousness of some message to deliver, some mission to fulfil, some opinion to establish. The student who is indifferent as to the goal to which his researches may lead him lives under a perpetual temptation of preferring the easy, the picturesque, or the popular. Intending then to be scrupulously accurate in my statements, I do not claim the

cold and negative merit of viewing the Public Worship Regulation Act from the neutral position of a disengaged bystander. My place is among the members of that old High Church party, the 'historical High Church party,' which has, for some years past, had abundant cause for astonishment at finding that in proportion as Ritualists and Ritualism are denounced for the capital offence of unpopularity, it is itself being constantly hurried to the edge of that dangerous abyss which, as we know, yawns for those of whom all men speak well.

Accepting for the moment the startling statement of the late Prime Minister, that the Public Worship Bill was brought in to put down Ritualism, I shall attempt to recall the light in which the measure, so explained, presented itself to the members of that historical High Church party of whom, in his subsequent sentence, Mr. Disraeli had nothing but good to say. To speak very plainly, I consider it to be one of the gravest misfortunes of that Public Worship legislation, that it has created a wholly fictitious eidolon of Ritualism, irrespective of the rites which may make it up;' and in providing special machinery of the urgency' class to suppress its own figment, it has cast a slur upon, and done an injury to principles, the disallowance of which would be the dissolution of the actual Church of England. It has embarked Puritanism in a sacred war against ceremonial en bloc, and it has often made it a point of honour with Ritualists to defend en bloc, as if they were inseparable, a variety of usages which might otherwise have been separately considered on their respective merits.

6

I am not a Ritualist. Long before Ritualism eo nomine was heard of, I had matured my ceremonial convictions, and taken my stand as an ecclesiologist upon certain principles of English Church worship, which I find in the Prayer Book of 1549, and also in that of 1552, and for ourselves most authoritatively in the actual statutable book of 1661, and which I recognise expounded, exemplified, and illustrated in the writings and in the doings of Andrewes, Wren, and Cosin, of Sparrow and Sancroft, and of Wilson and William Palmer. Secure in this position, I can look with equanimity upon that miscellaneous muster of phenomena which are ignorantly classed together as Ritualism.

While I find in that fluctuating array of actions and theories things which make me grave and sorry, I add with gratitude that I recognise much which lifts up my heart in thankfulness at toil, discomfort, and privation, faced and borne for the glory of God and the salvation of mankind.

To pass from Church to Forum, I am driven to conclude that any general definition of Ritualism, so framed as to be cognisable as an offence by Act of Parliament, is an absurdity, so long as the Prayer Book exists as a schedule to a statute. To create an indiscriminate

moral offence of Ritualism is equally absurd, when so many incidents which pass under that name are the inevitable and meritorious results of that great revival during the last half-century of holiness and zeal in the Church of England, in which-outside of the regulated oppositions of parties—every writer has found something to praise, with the eccentric exception of an historian who finds his way to the ear of cultured Englishmen by his exquisite style. Owing, as we do, to this revival,' in the words of the Archbishop of Canterbury's recent Charge, a more reverent appreciation of the value of the outward forms of religion,' we find, as must always be the case in payments in full of debts long contracted, that all the coin will not pass current at the bank. To say that a movement is rapid, popular, and unexpected, is to say that such must be the result, and the enemies of High Church ceremonial have no more right to be jubilant on the fact than its supporters have need to be downcast.

'Movement' is a noun of multitude, and when you have a number of men in movement, some of them must, from physical causes, always occupy an extreme position.

Such, as I venture to lay down with much fear of contradiction, but with no fear of refutation, is the truth about Ritualism.' But what was the theory about it which lay under, and invited that attempt to put it down with which we are concerned? I shall best make my explanation clear by borrowing an illustration from modern medical science. All who are familiar with contemporary therapeutics must be familiar with the great and increasing attention which is being paid to the phenomenon of blood-poisoning as the key to many maladies, the results of which had hitherto been so deadly because their origin was not appreciated.

Many a blood-poisoned patient has been cured by being treated for blood poisoning. But obstinately to assume that the man who has dislocated his shoulder is victim to the vicious condition of his circulation, and to substitute alkaloids for splints, may sometimes kill the patient. I should be sorry to think that there had ever been any risk of this calamity having been reached from riding hard the theory which appears to me to underlie the policy of the Public Worship Act, that Ritualism was the poison which had infected the life-blood of the English Church. Still, no other supposition can account for the peculiarities of the measure. Of course, if such was the case, the results which followed were the mishaps inevitably incident to all mistreatment, even by the ablest practitioners.

I may note in passing, that I have seen a statement by an authority which we are bound to respect, that the Public Worship Act was the natural growth of the recommendations of that Ritual Commission which sat from 1868 to 1872, and in particular of the recommendations of its first report, which called to life the 'aggrieved parishioners.' As a member of that Commission, and one who, in

signing that report, had to add an explanation in the sense of my present remarks, I must very distinctly contend that the recollections of my respected friend are not quite clear. The report dealt specifically with vestments as markedly distinct from the general body of rubrical observances, and pronounced that these dresses ought to be "restrained.' This word was intentionally suggested by the High Church members of the Commission in preference to any other, as not involving definite abolition, but some elastic machinery of regulation. The same High Church members wisely or unwisely suggested restraining, through the machinery of a plurality of aggrieved parishioners,' as an improvement on the single delator provided by the Church Discipline Act.

This recommendation of the Commission, I repeat, was one having reference to some process of restraining' in contrast to forbidding,' and that in regard to one particular ceremonial usage which was far more strange in 1868 than it is in 1881.

Every argument of policy which might have recommended it within this limited range was its condemnation, if applied to the unlimited uses of the Public Worship Regulation Act. The true fulfilment of the spirit of the recommendation would not have been the introduction of that measure, but a concordat on the Eucharistic dress. If the concordat had failed, still the Public Worship Bill would stand in no logical relation to the attempt to make it.

The lay memorial against ceremonial, presented during the summer of 1873 to the Archbishops assembled at Lambeth, was, no doubt, the public incentive to legislation, and unhappily that emanated neither from the Right nor the Left Centre, but from the pure Left. A better form of pastoral-something more grave and ecclesiastical-might, I venture to think, have been devised for revealing the coming event than the leading article which appeared in the Times on the 10th of March, 1874, with the effect of diverting some portion of that public attention which was at the moment concentrated on the just past general election and the incoming administration.

In due time the Archbishop of Canterbury brought into the House of Lords the Public Worship Regulation Bill, in a speech evidently intended to be moderate, but which was dashed by an unhappy oversight. The Archbishop was led in his exposure of motives to refer, in illustration of the necessity of such legislation, to some proceedings which had recently occurred in the diocese of Durham, then presided over by Bishop Baring. But when persons asked what were the Ritualistic enormities which had produced that stir, the discovery was made that his Grace had placed in his hands the case against a clergyman as moderate as he was eminent, the late Dr. Dykes, for doing no more than taking the Eastward position. This incident seemed to imply that the menaced men were not the Ritualists so called, but the whole High Church party-the great phalanx of the