Remarks upon the First Report of the Royal Commission on Ritual in connection with the integrity of the Book of Common Prayer: A lecture delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Brighton Branch of the English Church Union, Nov. 27, 1867 — John Shaqi
Remarks upon the First Report of the Royal Commission on Ritual in connection with the integrity of the Book of Common Prayer: A lecture delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Brighton Branch of the English Church Union, Nov. 27, 1867Mayow, Mayow Wynell
Religion
Remarks upon the First Report of the Royal Commission on Ritual in connection with the integrity of the Book of Common Prayer: A lecture delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Brighton Branch of the English Church Union, Nov. 27, 1867
Mayow, Mayow Wynell
Church of England. Book of common prayer; Great Britain. Commissioners Appointed to Inquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for Regulating the Course and Conduct of Public Worship, &c, According to the Use of the United Church of England and Ireland; Ritualism -- History -- 19th century
1. Why should the rabid violence of all that is uncatholic and
unbelieving in the country be taken to be the voice of the country to
which heed is to be given? The Canon before quoted, when it speaks of
offending the minds of men, is careful to say “the minds of sober men;”
but here it seems that all which is most violent, unreasoning, and
intemperate, is to be accepted as the mind of the country from which
there is no appeal. Nay, more, as is evident, this temper is hounded on
to be even more violent and rabid, by such unseemly deference to its
clamour, and by the pusillanimous assertion that law and order must be
overridden because the impatience of such minds will not be content even
to wait till the law courts have spoken.
2. Why should we not wait, if it be needful to wait, in order to
determine with all due care and deliberation what the law is upon the
main points brought into controversy—what it allows and what it
disallows? This tremendous impatience, this overwhelming desire for
exterminating obnoxious Ritual and Ritualists, this awe-struck terror
that if these men, and their practices, and their teaching be only given
fair play, their opponents of the uncatholic school will be defeated, and
be found to have clamoured for illegal restraints—all this is surely the
most wonderful admission against themselves and their cause, which men
even pretending to seek truth and right could possibly make, and one
least likely to commend their cause and mode of action to any just and
honest mind. Hear a few words upon this head from a venerable Archdeacon
(_venerabilis_ not merely by station and age, but by learning and
Christian wisdom also), one of whom England may well be proud. In the
_Guardian_ of November 6 you will find a letter from Archdeacon Churton,
enforcing with very great weight Gamaliel’s advice, “Let these men
alone,” at the present momentous crisis. Allow me to read a few lines
from it. He says:—“The advice which alone can save the Church from a new
schism is plainly Gamaliel’s advice. I am very sorry that so many of our
present bishops, younger men than myself, are averse from it, or uttering
uncertain sounds which I could never adopt without suspecting my own
magnanimity. It is to be regretted that they do not rather seek to guide
a movement which has in it too many elements of good to be rudely
condemned; and that they do not speak first of vindicating the law before
they alter it. On the contrary, however, they seem to contemplate a new
statute to establish, as if of perpetual obligation, certain vestments
invented by clerical tailors of the last century, at which S. Ambrose
would have stood aghast. . . . One of our sacred legislators has
declared himself above all things anxious not to allow the Ritualists
time to plead their cause with the public. It was the praise of Bishop
Henry Spencer in King Richard’s time, according to Walsingham, that he
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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