Lambeth to Westminster to organize the revolt from Rome. Neither institutions nor ideas continue in one stay. Both are subject to that mutability which attaches to all terrestrial phenomena. Words change their meanings; doctrines lose their importance; laws are quietly cancelled by desuetude; a creeping paralysis of obsolescence grows over systems; new knowledge alters the perspective of truth; society as it develops gives birth to new ideas and new ideals. All these factors tell silently but potently on the life and worship of the Church. Wordsworth has confessed the fact of mutability in lines of imperishable beauty :

Truth fails not; but her outward forms that bear
The longest date do melt like frosty rime,
That in the morning whiten'd hill and plain
And is no more; drop like the tower sublime
Of yesterday, which royally did wear

His crown of weeds, but could not even sustain
Some casual shout that broke the silent air,
Or the unimaginable touch of Time.

The Great War affected the process of revision very potently, for not only did it discredit every kind of authority in Church and State and create a new and vehement passion for "selfexpression," but it stirred in serious minds a great hunger for religious agreement, and a corresponding dislike of ecclesiastical partisanship. "Reconstruction" was the "blessed word" on men's lips when, on the morrow of the supreme disaster, they contemplated a world in ruins. At least they would have done once for all with the old rotten systems which had failed so grossly! Of this phase of national feeling, at once so natural and so unreasoning, the Enabling Act is a product and a monument. With almost startling complaisance, Parliament alienated from itself its ancient control of ecclesiastical legislation. To the archaic Convocations of Canterbury and York was now added a new body, the " Church Assembly," in which all the members of the Convocations were included as " a House of Clergy." Thus the clergy, sitting in two assemblies and voting in two capacities, acquired a duplicated share in the process of legislation. It was an odd, and probably unintended, consequence of an agitation which had set "the rights of the laity " in the forefront of its programme. Here it suffices to indicate the grave obstacle to effective revision which the new situation has presented.

The narrowness of the legal system and its partial obsoleteness had the effect of fostering disloyalty in that section of the

clergy which may, perhaps, be described not unfairly as the corrupt following" of the Tractarians. They took advantage of the partial paralysis of authority in order to repudiate the pledges under which they were ordained and admitted to benefices, to flout their bishops to whom they had sworn canonical obedience, and to push forward in the parishes where they were appointed to serve a Romanising policy inconsistent with the law, history, and official standards of the Church of England, and extremely offensive to the people. The true tendency of their teaching was significantly disclosed by a series of secessions to the Roman Church, and by an insolent affectation of Roman language and ceremonial. The English Reformation was habitually belittled, derided, and even openly repudiated, and no effort was omitted to drive a wedge between Anglicans and their Christian neighbours. Inevitably these innovating clergy came into collision with the parishioners, whose rights they ignored, whose consciences they offended, and whose legitimate preferences they over-rode. The immediate occasion of the appointment of the Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline was the public indignation provoked by the extravagant proceedings of " Ritualist" clergymen within the parish churches, and fanned to a flame by an organized agitation which, however, was itself neither intellectually distinguished nor morally impressive.

But, along with this immediate occasion went another and more weighty consideration. The scale and persistence of the disorder, the high character of many of the offending clergymen and the eminence of some, the growing indications of popular sympathy which they evoked, and the evident dislike of coercive legal proceedings against men of piety and devotion, raised in many minds the questions whether clerical disorder might not have a deeper and worthier root than individual perverseness, and whether that root might not be removed by deliberate and reasoned concessions. This is the background of the Commission's recommendations, and discloses the main purpose with which the revision of the Prayer Book was undertaken; it also provides the standard by which the bishops' proposals must be judged. The second recommendation of the Report (1906) runs thus:

Letters of Business should be issued to the Convocations with instructions: (a) to consider the preparation of a new rubric regulating

the ornaments (that is to say, the vesture) of the ministers of the Church at the times of their ministrations with a view to its enactment by Parliament; and (b) to frame, with a view to their enactment by Parliament, such modification in the existing law relating to the conduct of Divine Service and to the ornaments and fittings of churches as may tend to secure the greater elasticity which a reasonable recognition of the comprehensiveness of the Church of England and of its present needs seems to demand.

The intention of revision, then, was to terminate lawlessness in the Church of England by removing all legitimate justifications for lawlessness. Some of the rubricks were obsolete; some were obscure; some were inconvenient. Some services were objected against on reasonable grounds because they included elements which conflict with the knowledge or with the conscience of the modern Church. So much explaining away had become necessary for the relief of men of goodwill that it was impossible to resist the process when adopted by men who could not be so described. Moreover, the Prayer Book was felt to be inadequate to many modern requirements. Thus the revision took the form of a complete overhauling, both of the services and of the rubricks. When, at length, the Church Assembly and the Convocations had finished their work, the bishops found themselves confronted by a mass of proposals which amounted in the sum to the recasting of the book.

The bishops went to their task on the understanding, stated publicly by the Archbishop of Canterbury, that the doctrinal basis of the Church of England should be unaltered. The legal standards were to remain, and nothing was to be proposed which could fairly be held to be inconsistent with the subscriptions exacted from the clergy at their ordination and institution to benefices. In order to remove all suspicion of harshness a pledge was given that the unrevised Prayer Book should continue to be used by all the clergy who preferred it. We may fairly assume that every clergyman who avails himself of this option, and declares his intention to use the unrevised book, will clearly understand that he will no longer be free to explain away its rubricks, to alter or mutilate or omit at will its appointed services— in a word, to perpetuate the old intolerable lawlessness which it was the professed object of revision to terminate.

What must be understood by leaving the doctrinal basis of the Prayer Book unaltered? How far is it possible for the bishops to secure " a reasonable recognition of the comprehensiveness of

the Church of England and of its present needs" without altering in some respects the doctrinal basis or balance of the Church? It must be remembered that the doctrinal basis of the Church of England has been variously understood, that much is passionately insisted upon by some Anglicans which is as passionately repudiated by others, that the justly valued comprehensiveness of the Church of England presupposes deep disagreement among its members, and that the Bishops are particularly required to guard this character of the Church.

This doctrinal dissidence has its roots deep in the past; it gives colour and distinctiveness to Anglican history; it is as inconvenient as it is irremovable. All that can fairly be asked of the bishops is that they shall propose nothing which can reasonably be said to be incongruous with the English system and out of harmony with the principles of the Church, as they are expressed in its formularies and have been disclosed in its history. The bishops cannot reasonably be thought to have undertaken to revise the Prayer Book without regard to the changes of belief and opinion which are distinctive of the present age, and which have necessarily affected the sense in which standards of doctrine composed in the sixteenth century are subscribed by educated men in the twentieth. Not the most vehement of those who denounce the Composite Book as involving a fatal departure from the historic Anglican position can afford to decline for himself this indispensable liberty. Who believes now, as the Reformers generally believed then, that the Bible is verbally inspired, that the pope is anti-Christ, that heresy is deserving of death, that all but a scanty remnant of the elect are divinely destined to hell-fire, that the mass is a soul-destroying idolatry, and a hundred other painful errors of that age? The old standards come to us with the mitigating gloss of four progressive centuries on them, and we understand and subscribe them now in the senses which they cannot but carry. The animus imponentis, clearly indicated by the current and authoritative teaching of the modern Church, determines the meaning which the official formularies convey to those who now subscribe them. It is precisely because there is a wide discrepancy between the legally established system and the present mind of Churchmen that the revision was taken in hand. The situation is well stated by the Commissioners of 1906 :—

The law of public worship in the Church of England is too narrow for the religious life of the present generation. It needlessly condemns

much which a great section of Church people, including many of her most devoted members, value: and modern thought and feeling are characterised by a care for ceremonial, a sense of dignity in worship, and an appreciation of the continuity of the Church, which were not similarly felt at the time when the law took its present shape.-(p. 76.)

The Reformation had the immediate force and the ultimate disadvantage of a revolutionary movement. It was carried through triumphantly on a flood-tide of enthusiasm, which has long since ebbed. Accordingly, whatever in the Reformation settlement of religion had no deeper justifications, than those which the circumstances of the time and the passions which they kindled can furnish, has fallen out of harmony with the general mind, become obsolete, and grown empty of value and validity. When, therefore, the work of the Reformers is reviewed to-day, it is found to be doubly defective. On the one hand, it was too indiscriminating in its destruction of the older system; on the other hand, it was too closely conditioned by the inevitable limitations—intellectual, social, political of its authors. It follows that a revision of the Prayer Book, which was the supreme achievement of sixteenth century Anglicanism, will have both the character of a return to pre-Reformation procedure, and that of a departure from ecclesiastical precedent. The Anglo-Catholick and the Modernist will, from their distinctive positions, advance a legitimate demand for change, but the mere conservative, who idealizes the established system, and the mere partisan, whose only notion of Prayer Book revision is to sharpen the rubricks against opponents, can obviously contribute nothing to the process of revision, and will certainly find no satisfaction in its result.

History has corrected much, but it has also confirmed much. The momentous decisions of the sixteenth century, which determined the present constitution of the Church of England as a reformed and independent national Church, have been brought under the testing of experience, and we hold them to have been fully justified. We stand in line with those who rejected the authority of the Roman Pope, swept away the accumulated abuses and errors of the medieval Church, enthroned the Bible as the sole rule of faith, denied the infallibility of all ecclesiastical authority, whether of Pontiff or of General Council, and claimed for the Church of England, subject only to the Divine Revelation preserved in the scripture, complete spiritual independence. We