English Church, and they set Catholic (i.e. Roman Catholic) custom above the authority of English bishops."

As evidence of this intransigent mentality, we may quote a reported utterance of Mr. Arnold Pinchard, Secretary of the English Church Union, who, speaking at Birmingham on December 1st," insisted strongly that it was the duty of a parish priest to reserve the Blessed Sacrament. He stated that the Reservation rubrics in the proposed new Prayer Book gave the bishops a power beyond what they are entitled to by their office. . . He made it quite clear that the E.C.U. would feel bound to give the fullest possible support to any priest who felt unable to abandon the practice of Reservation at the bidding of his bishop."*

.

In point of fact, perhaps the most serious misgivings about the New Book have been misgivings about its disciplinary sanctions. Last September, Dr. Carnegie Simpson, Moderator of the Federal Council of the Evangelical Churches of England, speaking on " The Free Churches and the New Prayer Book," said:

The real danger in this whole matter for reformed doctrine and for evangelical religion lies less in the New Prayer Book itself than in how it will be used and to what it will lead.

The Church is morally bound to be both able and ready to undertake that the safeguards will be maintained as an integral part of an honourable agreement. The bishops should not present the Book unless they can see that its terms are kept especially those terms without which they knew that the nation would not pass it.

Reassurances were subsequently issued from Lambeth "that what is laid down in the New Book will, if the measure receives the Royal Assent, be faithfully administered and that the bishops will act together in the matter."

It need form no part of our present object to examine the evaluations shortly afterwards made of these assurances by the Bishop of Norwich and Sir William Joynson-Hicks, though perhaps the comment of Father Woodlock is relevant :

Over 140 London Churches had the Sacrament reserved before the Revised Book was presented to the Convocations. In many of these Churches it had been the object of public devotions similar to Benediction Service. Such devotions must now cease; so declare the New Book and the Bishops. But there is not much likelihood of this law being generally observed by extreme Anglo-Catholics who will, I imagine, carry on as before.†

*Church Times, December 9, 1927.

+Woodlock, Op. cit., p. 76

It seems evident that the straightforward policy would have been to condemn, not the liturgical practices themselves, but the erroneous doctrines upon which they rest. Such, at any rate, was the view of the Bishop of Birmingham, whose experiences in his own diocese (for which the Church Times solicits our sympathy as "poor, persecuted Birmingham ") would no doubt make him thoroughly alive to the realities of the situation; whereas the Primate may have had fewer opportunities of appreciating the difficulties caused by the existence, within the Church, of a "highly-organized, many-sided pro-Roman propaganda." Dr. Barnes has expressed this opinion in the Preface to his recent book :

In the interests of law and order within the Church of England it is the duty of its bishops to define its sacramental position. .

It was only when I became a Bishop that I fully realized how vast a departure from the traditional Anglican position had taken place. . All the serious administrative difficulties of Anglican Bishops to-day are due to newly-introduced practices which have no sense or meaning unless some erroneous doctrine akin to transubstantiation is held. It is quite certain that we cannot get in the Church either harmony or unity based on a common spiritual understanding, while opposing sacramental beliefs are, as at present, struggling for mastery.†

Holding, as he did, that liturgical law-breaking proceeded from erroneous doctrines which should be denounced, Dr. Barnes delivered a trenchant attack upon the doctrines in question. He preached the now famous dinner-hour sermon in Birmingham Parish Church, on October 6th.

Since much offence, both real and fancied, has been taken at the mode of attack followed by the bishop, it should be observed that it was the only way open to him. To have appealed to the doctrine of the Reformers, whether Cranmer or Hooker, would have been to court derision. The extreme Anglo-Catholics repudiate these authorities. On the other hand, the appeal to Scripture would have been countered by the appeal to "tradition,"

*"Should such a Faith Offend? p. 19.

top. cit., p. 18. Even the Bishop of London is reported to have said "he found the one thing which was in the way of real union in the Church of England, was devotions' in the presence of the Blessed

Sacrament."

a vague and therefore serviceable controversial formula.* There remained only the appeal to experience-i.e., to science and

to common sense.

As long ago as 1925, in a paper read in Oxford on the Eucharist, Dr. Barnes anticipated the line of argument which two years later aroused such a storm: "For the belief that inanimate matter can be endowed with spiritual qualities there is no scientific evidence."t

This, it would be safe to say, is an absolutely sound contention, both from a scientific and from a metaphysical point of view. The word "spirit" conveys to the modern man something that has its basis in conscious mind just as mind has its basis in organic life, and as life has its basis in matter. "Spirit" is as much above mind as mind is above mere life and life above matter. Without conscious behaviour, there can be no moral, still less spiritual, quality. A stone cannot be moral or spiritual; neither can bread nor wine, even after consecration. A formula does not, and cannot, confer spirituality, any more than it can confer life. Ethical behaviour is, as it were, the raw material of spirituality, as the modern man understands it; hence it is absurd to attribute any such thing to inanimate matter. The notion is fantastic.

There is, it is true, one way in which the modern man can regard an inanimate object as invested with spiritual quality; it is so invested when it has meaning. The notes of a musical score, the type on a page, might serve as examples. Again, the canvas, or the block of marble, can be invested with spiritual quality by the artist who, so to speak, weds mind to matter. In a similar fashion an inanimate object may be associated with certain ideas and ideals, and so come to be a symbol of them-to represent them. But those holding the type of sacramental theory criticized by Dr. Barnes would not be contented to regard the consecrated elements as spiritual only in some such sense as this.

Although modern man finds it impossible to regard inanimate matter as possessing spiritual quality, save in one of the senses indicated, primitive man had no such difficulty. He held that

It is imperfectly realized how little definite doctrinal sacramental teaching goes back beyond the medieval period, which has in consequence become the standard of Catholic orthodoxy in these questions. See Dr. Headlam's "The Church of England," p. 63.

+Barnes, Op. cit., p. 222.

inanimate objects could be infused with what anthropologists now term mana, which would bestow upon that object new and formidable qualities. An example of an object so endowed with mana would be the Ark of the Israelites, which incontinently slew Uzzah who inadvertently touched it. This kind of spirituality has, in early times and among primitive people, been attributed to the consecrated elements of the Mass. Cyprian chronicles stories of their deadly efficacy upon a little girl, who had not reached years of moral discrimination, and upon adults :

One woman who surreptitiously took the elements" received not food, but a sword," causing internal convulsions. A guilty man found that the elements received from the priest turned to cinders in his hand.*

It is hardly likely that extreme Anglo-Catholics would claim this kind of spirituality to inhere in the elements; should they do so, their case would go by default as an example of gross thaumaturgy or magic.

In view of the foregoing considerations, which seem to indicate the impossibility of investing inanimate matter with spiritual properties, or rather the inconceivability of any such process, we may quote Dr. Barnes :

They pretend that a priest, using the right words and acts, can change a piece of bread so that within it there is the real presence of Christ. The idea is absurd and can be disproved by experiment. If there were a physical change in the bread, chemical analysis would enable us to detect it. All are agreed that this type of change does not take place. Yet if there be a spiritual change, it must surely be possible for man to recognize it by his spiritual perception. Now I assert that there is no man living who, if a piece of bread were presented to him, could say whether or not it had been consecrated.†

Dr. Barnes has observed that "the sacraments of our faith should at the very least be not less natural, not less wholesome, than those of nature or art"; and the words imply a philosophy of sacraments which presents a clear contrast to the philosophy lying behind the beliefs criticized by him. The essential difference between the new sacramentalism and the old is that whereas the new discovers the divine in ordinary things, the old discovers

*Angus, "The Mystery Religions and Christianity" (1925), p. 256. Barnes, Op. cit., p. 321. Hugh Benson, on his first communicating after having become a Roman Catholic, claimed to be able to recognize the difference.

it in extraordinary things-things, in a word, which are miraculous. The presence of Christ at the Mass is a miraculous presence, otherwise it would have no religious significance. The Birmingham sermon alluded to what we have called the new sacramentalism; though, indeed, it is as old as Plato :

The idea of a sacrament is simple: it is the outward sign of God's presence. . . . Life is full of sacraments great and small... To a mother her children are true sacraments, signs of God's creative power; and love has always been a sacrament, a symbol of that which is supreme in the eternal realm of spirit.

Such a conception of sacraments is not open to any of the objections capable of being brought against those conceptions which seem to involve the idea of inanimate matter being invested with spiritual qualities—an idea which appears to belong to a pre-scientific stage of thinking.

And this leads us to the real issue at stake in a controversy, which cannot be regarded as a mere quarrel between Protestant and Catholic. The struggle is between the medieval and the scientific points of view. This it is which links the evolutionary controversy to the controversy over sacraments. In his open letters to the Primate, the Bishop of Birmingham pleaded not only for the acceptance of the biological doctrine, but for freedom to explore and proclaim its theological implications. The Primate in his letter seemed to confuse these two things, or at least to ignore the second of them, which is by far the more important. But, whether recognized or not, the issue is one of primary importance for the Church at large, since the theory of evolution involves a new doctrine of man, and a new doctrine of creation. As Professor Bethune-Baker has remarked recently in a most valuable collection of theological essays :

The historical surroundings of to-day are wholly different from those of the fifth century and its Christology. I need not remind you that in our doctrine of Christ we are stating a doctrine both of God and of man. We interpret Christ according to the ideas we have of God and of man, and our ideas to-day of God and of man are very different from those of Christians of the fifth century.*

Yet the task of doctrinal reconstruction facing the Church to-day is of so serious a nature that it is not surprising that a strong plea should be voiced for a return to authority.

*"The Way of Modernism."