*

during the prayer of consecration, which they knew would be popularly associated with the Romish doctrine of the mass. But it is objected, There is no direction for the priest to return to the north side; nor was it necessary. With equal reason might it be urged that the sermon should follow at the north side, "the people standing as before," because there is no direction for the preacher to go to the pulpit (there is for his return to the Lord's table), or for the people to change from their posture at the creed.

The objection arises from losing sight of the context. We do not assert that there is an express direction to return to the north side in this particular paragraph of the rubric. The structure of the rubric in general, and the comparison of similar non-insertions in other cases, does not lead us to expect it. Our rubrics do not aim at the precision of a modern missal, nor do we need them to disinter the forgotten details of an obsolete ritual. They are "plain and easy rules" for our living and accustomed worship. For the most part they direct some thing to be done. Even when they abrogate a previous custom, it is by omitting the words relating to it, rather than by inserting a direct prohibition. They enjoin kneeling, for example, without forbidding to stand; they appoint the north side without forbidding to stand "afore the midst of the altar."

Nor is it their habit, so to speak, to reiterate a general direction. The rubric before the first lesson at morning prayer, directs the reader so to stand and turn himself, "as he may best be heard of all such as are present," but this is not repeated before the second lesson, or the evening lessons, or before the epistle and gospel. And so with the communion rubrics. When the priest comes to the Lord's table for the first time, he is directed to stand at the north side. After turning "to the people" for the first time (in reading the commandments) he is directed to stand "as before,”—but these directions are not repeated on every future occasion. A specific direction is no more required in the case before us than for the return of the priest to the north side, after placing the alms and oblations upon the holy table; or―to give one more example, for his return to the "accustomed place" after ministering public baptism, for which he came "to the font." In every case he returns to the place already appointed, when he has done that for which he was directed to leave it.

This view of the revisers' intention, which is evident on the face of the rubric itself, becomes still more clear on comparing it with the Scotch rubric (ante, p. 98).† Both rubrics intend the manual acts to "be done decently and in order,"-the "more readiness and

* See note, p. 99.

"I have for many years had no doubt that our own rubric and that of 1637 are really identical in meaning."-Mr. Walton, "Letter," p. 25.

decency" of the one corresponding with the "more ease and decency of the other, but here the resemblance ends. The " ease and decency" were urged in the Scotch as a reason why the presbyter should change his place, and refer to the ease of his subsequent performance of the manual rites, which the people (who are not mentioned) were not intended to see.* In the English, “readiness and decency" are the reason for ordering (arranging or moving) the elements, and have especial reference to the priest being ready to perform these rites before the people and to their seeing what was done. The wished-for seemliness is secured in the Scotch by the presbyter changing his own place, and in the English, by the priest changing the place of the elements, in the one, the presbyter is the consideration, in the other, the people. The presbyter STOOD "where" he might more easily use both his hands,-in the other, the priest ORDERS the elements "that" he may more readily perform the manual acts before the people. The Scotch rubric expressly prescribed the place of the presbyter "during the time of consecration," the English is silent as to the time of consecration, but points out that "before the people" is the place where the elements are to be consecrated.

One other observation on the wording of the rubric. If the "ordering the bread and wine that with the more readiness and decency he may break the bread before the people," does not mean moving them within more ready reach from the north side of the table, what does it mean? Mr. Walton, writing to Mr. Carter, candidly admits:

"With our present practice I find it impossible to assign any satisfactory meaning to ordered' in the rubric as it now stands. I believe the action intended, whatever it be, is simply superfluous and the word equally so."(P. 29.)

Superfluous it can hardly be, for "ordered" is not a word that has kept its place through inadvertence when changes were being made, rather it is emphatic, being now for the first time inserted in the rubric. But this is the way our author deals with rubrics. The one is discarded as obsolete, though it has been obeyed for three hundred years; and as to the other, of which he claims "the ascertained. meaning," he puts aside the most important word as meaningless.

Archbishop Laud, in answer to the Scottish Commissioners,-"Anything [the presbyter] hath to do about the bread and wine may be done at the north end of the table, and better seen of the people" [Charge (1641), p. 12], answers, "I am not of opinion, that it is any end of the administration of the sacrament to have it better seen of the people."-Troubles (1694), p. 117.

"What we are concerned with in the present day is the ascertained meaning of their documentary instructions, not their own ritual practice, which in some respects was faulty and mistaken, though professing to be decided by those Catholic principles which we alike are bound to respect. If on an entire review of the subject it can be sufficiently shown that a particular meaning undoubtedly attaches to their Rubric, we are not called upon to interpret it in a non-Catholic sense either from the fact of

+

We do not enter upon the question of excellence or expediency.— The old-fashioned way has at all events this to recommend it,-that without any forcing it complies with the written law, and with every word of it; and this too, that it was the "ritual practice "* of those who framed the rubric, and also the construction which was placed on it from the first. We might bring forward a whole catena+ of direct assertions, and then be met by counter-assertions of the "ignorance" and want of "ritual knowledge" of the authors, -we therefore refer for proof to facts. First, the western position does not seem to have been mentioned in the "farewell sermons" and other attacks upon the ceremonies of the prayer-book, by ejected ministers and other nonconformists after the passing of the act of uniformity of 1662: nor was this rubric mentioned among the "alterations" which were proposed by Morton, Baxter, and Bates on the part of the protestant separatists during the negociations for "a comprehension" in 1668. § Secondly,-to pass over the mention of this position, as ordered by the Roman missal in treatises addressed to our own people, learned churchmen, in argument with Roman catholics (more especially in the reign of James II.), mention it in a way they would have been careful to avoid, if they were thereby laying themselves open to a retort from our own services, which their opponents were not slow to adopt in other cases. And thirdly, no question was raised with reference to the western position before the commission for revision after the Revolution, though we may be very sure that no such ceremony would have been allowed to pass unchallenged.

It was not until towards the end of the reign of Queen Anne that any question as to the interpretation of the rubric appears to have been raised; and then, not suggested by any variation in practice, but more probably by the first book of Edward VI., which was at that time being constantly referred to by certain non-jurors and others in the course of a controversy as to the eucharistic sacrifice. We have no proof that it passed beyond a "query" in the established church,¶

contemporary or subsequent non-usage, or from the long prevalence of contrary custom."-Letter, p. 38.

* See note t, p. 107, ante.

† See Quotations, "Droop," p. 40;

66 Elliott," p. 88.

"Letter," p. 40.

§ Sylvester, "Reliquiæ Baxterianæ," pt. 3, p. 33 (misprinted 39). Baxter expressly says, "This part of the Common Prayer-book is generally approved.”—Christian Directory, 2, xxiv. 41.

|| For example, see Wake's (afterwards Archbishop) "Second Defence." Answer to the Vindicator [of Bossuet's Exposition de la Doctrine Catholique], 1687, p. 71. "Your next charge is that we have been estranged from devotion.' Instead

of reading the service aloud, would you have us turn our backs to the assembly, and whisper they know not what?"

¶ "Tis queried by some, Whether the priest is to say the Consecration-Prayer stand

and we have seen the peculiar rubric by which the authors of the "New Communion Office" anticipated any diversity in their own following.*

Similar doctrinal discussions have had the effect of raising the same inquiry once more, but the masterful spirit of the age has not allowed it to remain a speculative question. Many clergymen in different dioceses have adopted the western position upon their own authority. And it still remains to be seen how this "diversity" shall be dealt with by those, to whom "(if any arise)" the law has given authority to take order for the "appeasing of the same.”

In the absence of an authoritative decision-both now, and in the article on the' North Side in our October number-we have had to dwell upon small facts with a minuteness which must have been wearisome to our readers; but it has enabled us to meet the assertions of those who plead the authority of the rubric for "taking their stand" on the west side of the table; and this whether at the so-called "liturgical north-side" or in the mid-altar position,-whether during the prayer of consecration, or throughout the administration of the Lord's Supper.

We have answered their assertions by showing that the convocation of 1661 were not disposed to restore the western position, if they had been acting independently; and, that, even if they had wished it, no rubric which let in a ceremony so especially obnoxious to the general feeling of the country, could have escaped the scrutiny to which the new prayer-book was subjected in both houses of parliament. We have proved, that the rubric, as drawn by the revisers, very sufficiently guarded against any such misconstruction; and further, that it never was misunderstood in practice, until, as it seems to us, “such men as are given to change" had lost sight of the general structure of rubrics, and were well content arbitrarily to cast aside the traditional interpretation of heretofore unbroken obedience.

T. F. SIMMONS.

ing before the Table, by this Rubric, or Whether after having prepared the Elements so standing, he is to return to the usual place of saying the Communion Service with us, viz., to the North side of the Table?"-Nicholls (edit. 1710), "The Communion," note (p).

*Contemporary Review, iii. 282 (Postscript).

NOTE. The writer uses "Consecration" (ante, p. 99) in the sense in which it is ordinarily to be understood, and in which it is inserted in our present rubrics; but the term often occurs in the works of English divines of the seventeenth century, as including both the oblation of the bread and wine and their subsequent blessing. It will be recollected that there was no direction as to the time or manner of the oblation in the second book of Edward VI., and that the church is beholden to the revisers of 1662 for the existing "set ceremony and form of words."

The Relations of Church and State Historically Considered. Two Public Lectures delivered at Oxford. By MONTAGU BURROWS, Chichele Professor of Modern History. Oxford and London. 1866.

THIS

HIS little work is nota theory of the relations of Church and State as they ought to be in the author's opinion, or as they have been set forth in the opinions of previous theorists. It is rather a statement of facts concerning the actual relations of Church and State as they have existed in this country in past times, and have descended to the present. "Rightly or wrongly," the author says, we are learning to look more to facts than to theories, and to inquire into the history of what we see around us, rather than to rest satisfied with philosophical discussions." We do not mean to say that Professor Burrows has no views of his own as to what should be the relations between Church and State in the present day. He has views, and decided ones; and the reader of his lectures is not long left in ignorance of them; but his opinions crop out from and are closely connected with his facts; and even those readers who do not entirely accept the former may find useful matter of study in the latter.

There is one axiom, indeed, from which the author starts, and which must be conceded by all who would follow either his statements of facts or his arguments; but it is one which is necessarily implied in the recognition of the Church of England as a branch of the Church Catholic, and which will he questioned only by those to whom her catholicity is a matter of denial or of indifference. He says,

"Each branch of the Church owns the same divine Head, refers back to the same original constitution, rejects all notion of any subsequent origin. That view of the Church of England which would degrade her, nay, transform her whole existence, by asserting her to be the mere creature of the State, an invention of the Tudor princes, has been too often refuted to require notice here-it is contrary to the best known facts. She has the same lineaments as her sister churches of the East and West; her connection with the State may be of a different kind, but it leaves her equally possessed with them of all that constitutes a true branch of the Church."-(P. 3.)