the controversy, might interpret it, to mean what it says, although a very different interpretation has been put upon it by legal decisions.' They differ, however, from the plain man in preferring the present conflict of interpretation; and some of them, who seem to be pillars, allow the uncertainty of interpretation to extend to points which to persons with no thesis to serve seem beyond dispute. The Ornaments Rubric prescribes that such Ornaments of the Church, and of the Ministers thereof, at all times of their Ministration. shall be retained, and be in use, as were in this Church of England, by the Authority of Parliament, in the Second Year of the Reign of King Edward the Sixth.' As the first Reformed Prayer Book was not issued until March 1549, i.e. within the third year of Edward, which began on January 29th, it has been found possible to argue that the rubric licenses all ornaments (some contend even all ceremonies) of the preReformation Church. It is satisfactory to learn that this nice historical point has been cleared up by the learning of the Royal Commissioners, and that High Church liturgiologists now profess themselves as on the whole convinced that the ' authority of Parliament' referred to in the rubric is the Act of Uniformity, to which the first Prayer Book was annexed.

1 The chief point in dispute concerns the relation to this rubric of the Advertisements of 1566. The present writer may take leave to say that the view he finds most convincing is that expressed by Mr. Chancellor Chadwyck-Healey before the Royal Commission that the Advertisements only modified the Act of Uniformity to the extent that they allowed the disuse of the vestments provided the surplice was worn in their stead; so that a maximum and minimum use were, and are still, provided by lawful authority.

2

Cf. Royal Commission on Ecclesiastical Discipline, Minutes of Evidence, 11724. 'I am a plain person, and the second year of King Edward VI. means to me a certain 365 days between certain dates. That is a fact which it seems to me no legal interpretation can interfere with.' Plain persons are generally well advised to allow lawyers to interpret their own language, and they tell us that it was the common practice at the time to refer to statutes by the first day of the session, irrespective of the time when they passed the two Houses or received the Royal Assent. The second Act of Uniformity which legalized the Second Prayer Book refers to the Act under which the First Prayer Book was legalized as 'the Act of Parliament made in the Second year of the King's Majesty's reign.'

VOL LXV.-NO. CXXIX,

F

What, then, the great middle party in the Church of England has to consider is whether the claim of the Ritualists, as they are called, to interpret the Ornaments Rubric in its prima facie sense shall not be allowed, and their present practice be regularized by an express recognition that the ornaments prescribed in the First Prayer Book for the Order of Holy Communion are an albe plain with a vestment or cope.' Those who object to such regularization do so on the ground that these vestments imply that mediæval doctrine of the Mass which the Church of England has in her Articles rejected as erroneous; and the plain man would agree that this would be a sufficient ground for refusing to sanction these vestments, if the plea could be sustained. The President of the English Church Union does the rank and file of his party a very ill service by taking every opportunity to disparage the Reformation, so that the Protestant wing is kept well supplied with fuel for its anxieties. The middle party, however, should remember that laymen are seldom theologians, and if they are bent upon doing justice they must confine their attention to the broad requirements of the situation and the real facts of the case. As matter of fact, then, it cannot be held that the vestments are symbolical of doctrine which the Church of England has condemned. They are centuries older than the doctrine of Transubstantiation. They were prescribed by Cranmer for use with a liturgy which he himself had carefully revised. They were again prescribed in the Elizabethan Prayer Book after the repudiation of the Marian Romanism. They were prescribed again at the Restoration, when the Prayer Book was for the last time revised after the Savoy Conference. No doubt on each of these occasions they were objected to by the Puritans, but the Puritans scrupled no less at the surplice, the one as much as the other being held to be 'rags of Rome'; but as the Church theoretically gave in to the Puritan view in neither case, there is no reason in the nature of things why the one should not be revived as much as the other if a large number of the faithful so desire, and if the Church as a whole so determine.

Into the question of whether the present House of Commons would be allowed by our Dissenting brethren to consent to our making any alteration in any rubric this article does not enter. Our first business is to make peace in our own borders. And in order to make peace we have to make up our minds whether we are prepared to allow our Christian brethren to worship God in garments which to them are edifying, though we may not find them so. Have we any more real sympathy with toleration to-day than our forefathers had in the seventeenth century? Have we yet learned to distinguish between unity and uniformity? It may be worth while to recall that even in Tudor days, when the same problem had to be solved which confronts us now-for the Puritan and Ritualist represent two ineradicable tendencies of human nature-there was found a statesman wise enough to counsel the toleration of both parties. In the paper Concerning Church Controversies ' which Francis Bacon addressed to Queen Elizabeth occur the following sentences, which are as pertinent to-day as they were then, and deserve more consideration than they then received.

'The present controversies [he says] do not concern the great parts of the worship of God, of which it is true that there will be kept no unity in believing except it be entertained in worshipping; but we contend about ceremonies and things indifferent; in which kind if we would but remember that the ancient and true bonds of unity are "one faith and one baptism," and not one ceremony, one policy; if we would observe the league among Christians penned by our Saviour-" he that is not against us is with us"; if we could but comprehend that saying, "The diversities of ceremonies do set forth the unity of doctrine," and that other, "Religion hath parts which belong to eternity and parts which belong to time" . . our controversies of themselves would close up and grow together.'

And again

...

They think it the true touchstone to try what is good and evil by measuring what is more or less opposite to the institutions of the Church of Rome; that is ever more perfect which is removed most degrees from that Church, that is ever polluted

and blemished which participateth in any appearance with it. This is a subtle and dangerous conceit for men to entertain; apt to delude themselves, more apt to delude the people, and most apt of all to calumniate their adversaries.'

And once more:

The honourable names of sincerity, reformation, and discipline are put in the foreground, so that their contentions and evil zeal cannot be touched except these holy things be first thought to be violated. But howsoever they infer our solicitation for the peace of the Church to proceed from carnal sense, yet I will conclude ever with St. Paul, "While there is among you strife and contention, are ye not carnal?" and howsoever they esteem the compounding of controversies to savour of man's wisdom and human policy, and think themselves led by the wisdom which is from above, yet I say with St. James, "This wisdom descendeth not from above, for where envying and strife is, there is confusion and every evil work.” '

H. C. BEECHING.

ART. IV. THE CHRISTIAN IDEA OF GRACE.

1. Philonis Alexandrini Opera quae supersunt. Ediderunt LEOPOLDUS COHN et PAULUS WENDLAND. Volumina

quinque. (Berolini : typis et impensis Georgii Reimeri, 1896-1906.)

2. S. Aurelii Augustini Hipponensis Episcopi Opera. Tomi XVIII. (Bassani: ex typographia Remondiniana, 1807.)

3. S. Thomac Aquinatis Summa Theologica. Tomi VIII. Editio Decima Quinta. (Parisiis: apud Bloud et Barral, N.D.)

4. A Manual of Theology. By T. B. STRONG, M.A. [now Dean of Christ Church, Oxford]. (London and Edinburgh: A. and C. Black, 1892.)

5. Outlines of Christian Dogma. By DARWELL STONE, M.A. Third edition. (London: Longmans, 1903.)

6. A Manual of Theology. By J. AGAR BEET, D.D. (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1906.)

7. Grace Abounding and The Pilgrim's Progress. By JOHN BUNYAN. The Text edited by JOHN BROWN, D.D. (Cambridge at the University Press, 1907.)

I.

In the early years of the seventeenth century the doctrine of Grace became the subject of an acute controversy which confused the lines of disunion established in Western Christendom. At Rome the Congregation de auxiliis gratiæ was vainly endeavouring to settle the strife between Jesuit and Dominican theologians. The Reformed in Holland were at the same time busy with a similar dispute, which the Synod of Dort and the beheading of Oldenbarnevelt brought to a violent conclusion; its echoes were loud, though vague, in the later activity of English Puritans. The Church of France was next engaged; Molinist and Jansenist worried the same question, with many others, and the substance of the quarrel is not the less dreary for being illuminated by the wit of Pascal. The Borghese