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PLAY THE GAME

RELIGIOUS toleration is the strong suit of the leading advocates of the Alternative Prayer Book. It is the watchword of the Life and Liberty movement. The appeal which it makes to the ordinary citizen is irresistible. “I don't trouble the Church much, and I don't know that I understand or believe much Church doctrine, but what I do believe is that every one should be free to worship God in his own way." So, when the plain citizen hears that the proposal of the revisers is that those who wish to burn incense should do so, but that no one shall be compelled to burn it and that those who wish to reserve the Sacrament should reserve it, but that no one should be obliged to reserve it, he is delighted to display his sound common sense by assenting to this appeal for fair play all round, and is more than a little satisfied to find himself in the foremost van of modern religious enlightenment. It is true that he is less comfortable when reminded that the new practices approximate to the uses of the Roman Church, for he has always understood that the Church of Rome is not tolerant. He may even have practical experience of the exceeding straitness of its marriage laws in the Ne Temere decree. But he is reassured by being told that the bishops, having once accepted the principle of toleration, will be very careful to set strict fences on the Romeward side. Like many men who have a repute for common sense, he hates to discuss or examine principles; he does not ask why, if toleration is such a good thing, there should be any limits to it at all. He has gone far enough into theology for one day. If he went further he might become "bigoted," a fate hardly less terrible than bankruptcy.

Before discussing toleration or its limits one might ask why there should be any talk about toleration at all. Toleration implies an authority which possesses and exercises authority. The most conspicuous feature in the Church of England to-day is the prevailing absence of authority. A young priest, if he is challenged on the question of authority, will probably reply that it does not interest him in the least. No corporate answer has been offered to the demand made in the "Call to Action," that the Anglo-Catholics should define the authority to which they are prepared to submit. Bishop Gore has made his own suggestions, but they have not been supported by any Anglo-Catholic

organization of which we are aware. On the one hand are clergy whose most solemn service is the offering of a propitiatory sacrifice. On the other are clergy who denounce such sacrifice as a pagan superstition. On the one hand the Virgin Mary is worshipped as the Mother of God. On the other are clergy who seem to question the Divinity of Jesus Christ. There are probably few churches in which the whole Morning Prayer, Litany, and Ante-Communion Service are said each Sunday in accordance with the rubrics. In some churches wafers are used for the Holy Communion instead of bread; in others unfermented grape juice is used instead of wine. Here are vestments, there surplices : here incense, there magic lanterns. Here are Children's Eucharists, there "Pleasant Sunday Afternoons." In and out among all these varieties of ritual and modes of worship move bishops smiling approval on zeal whatever form it may take, collecting funds from all sources-duplex envelopes, bazaars, whist-drives, and dances: conforming without scruple to the "custom" of the Church in which they happen to find themselves but exercising very little authority. In this abdication of discipline it seems to be a work of supererogation to discuss the merits of tolerance. Can toleration go further than it has already gone?

There is one direction in which it can be extended, and in that direction extension is at present contemplated. Toleration can be turned into sanction. In the Book of Common Prayer the Church of England possesses a mode of worship which was intended to be uniform for the whole Church, and to exhibit in public prayer and administration of the Sacraments the expression of its doctrinal faith. Enormous ingenuity has been expended in trying to prove that the orders which it gives are ambiguous, and that the creed behind them is inconsistent. The surest proof that these efforts have failed is the demand now made for an Alternative Book of Common Prayer. If the Prayer Book were really ambiguous the required sanction would be already there. But it is not, and it has to be embodied in an alternative book. Here we have something quite different from any mere enrichment of the contents, or modernizing of the phraseology, of the Prayer Book. Even this process had its difficulties, for that book has unique merits as a book of devotion, and it is not always easy to draw the line between modernizing and vulgarizing. Still, it may safely be said that the opposition to mere modernizing of the Prayer Book is not serious. The difficulties that have raised the question of toleration are those over which it has been alleged

that the Prayer Book is ambiguous, defective or inconsistent. Had the Prayer Book been truly and, in fact, patient of the constructions that were forced upon it, there would have been no need to alter it. For instance, if it had really taught that the Eucharist was a sacrifice to God offered by the priest upon the altar, there would have been no occasion to change the Ornaments Rubric, or the Prayer of Consecration. Had it allowed reservation of the Sacrament for any purpose whatever, no directions as to reservation would have been necessary. The Prayer Book would have told its own tale. But, as an instrument for restoring mediæval devotions and doctrines, it cannot be used without explanations which manifestly explain away its real meaning. In these circumstances two courses were possible: one was to rewrite the book so that it might plainly say what in its present form it plainly was not intended to say, and to make the new book the Book of Common Prayer. This course would not have failed to lead to instant disruption of the Church. The other course, and that which has been adopted, is to compose alternative rubrics and prayers allowing that which the Prayer Book now forbids. It is here that the new question of toleration arises. Hitherto the Church has been tolerant through negligence of discipline. In future she will be tolerant by giving her sanction and authority to divergent practices and doctrines. This toleration will, it is hoped, make discipline more easy to enforce. To borrow a metaphor from games, the playground has been in wild confusion through a simultaneous game supposed to be Rugby football, in which each player has played his own rules. In future there will be two games, one Rugby and one Association, going on side by side. The zealots of each will play their own game, and no other, and will play according to rule.

As a policy for solving a difficulty about games this device of toleration is wholly commendable. If religious truth were a football, or rather two footballs, what scheme could be wiser? But it raises two questions: (1) Are the points at issue in the two Prayer Books as indifferent as football rules? (2) Is there really room for the two games side by side? The first question is obviously the more serious.

(1) Strenuous efforts are made to minimize the difference between the doctrine of the Mass and the doctrine of our Communion Service. It is suggested that "the two are different sides of a truth so rich that no individual and no group can appreciate it fully." Bishop Talbot suggested

that the apparent contradictions were comparable to those which are found in the doctrine of the Trinity in unity, or of the dual nature in the Person of our Lord Jesus Christ. Dr. Goudge, the Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford, goes so far as to say that "Mass is simply a word for Holy Communion," and that the "Roman Church before the Reformation had no authoritative doctrine on the subject of the Mass." It has also been asserted that "the doctrine of Transubstantiation was a most deliberate, a most genuine, and, for the time partially successful, effort to spiritualize the very gross conception of the Presence of the Lord in the Sacrament which was then prevalent." From such statements as these it might be readily inferred that there was no serious doctrinal difference between the intention of the Missal and the intention of the Prayer Book. But no one who reads the Roman Ordinal in the Sarum use, or the Mass, as there set forth for celebration, can doubt that the intention of the Pre-Reformation Church was to ordain priests for the special object of offering the sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ on behalf of the living and the dead. No one who reads our Ordinal and Communion Service, remembering that they were drawn up to correct prevailing error by competent liturgiologists, can seriously believe that any such intention was present in the minds of the composers. They knew perfectly well that they did what they were doing at the risk of martyrdom; for what they did they suffered martyrdom. Yet we are asked to believe that the Roman Church which put them to death had no authoritative doctrine of the Mass, and that the Mass is simply a word for the Communion. Outside the realm of theology no one would dare to offer such travesties of history for public consumption. The object of our Communion Service is to administer Communion to the congregation assembled to receive it: the object of the Mass is to offer a sacrifice-and all that it has to say of Communion is " sequitur Communio "-for which neither prayer nor ritual is prescribed.

Granting, however, the intention of the Roman and English composers to construct two different services, is it not possible that the two are mutually complementary? Is not the Communion a feast upon a Sacrifice? Have not many English divines, who declared themselves to be Protestants, taught that the Eucharist is the presenting of a sacrifice to God? Have not prayers implying the double aspect of the service been adopted by the Scottish Episcopal Church, the Protestant Episcopal Church of America, and

the South African Church? Why should not the Church of England adopt the use of Churches that are after all only her own daughters ?

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The soundest answer for all these questions would seem to be this. The question of altering services with a view to sanction something not already sanctioned must depend largely on the limits which the circumstances of the time impose. Thus, the First Prayer Book of Edward VI made room for a doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice, while the essential end of the office was Communion. But the circumstances of the time proved that the "mistakers," mistakers," as they were called, Bishop Gardiner and others, were able so to distort the conduct of the service that had been constructed as to make it a Mass. Consequently it was necessary to make such further changes as would render the mistaking impossible, and they were made. The Mass disappeared, the Communion remained. There is not room here to discuss Laud's Scottish Office, and the outgrowths from it in Scotland and America. It is enough to say that the abovenamed Churches, which have worked on Laud's lines, have never received anything like a national following. They have been Churches of "sections," distrusted by Protestants. The only Anglican Episcopal Church which has had any approach to a national following is the Church of England, which, by its service, provides for a Communion administered by the priest, and a sacrifice of praise and thanksgiving offered by the people. There is nothing in that service that associates the Presence of the Lord in the Sacrament with the consecration of the elements or suggests sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ. The proposal to alter the service, so as to stress the element of sacrifice, does not find the Church in a mood of harmony or of submission to authority. It comes at a time when a powerful section of the clergy is confessedly aiming at the reversal of the Reformation, and at the restoration in our Church of Roman worship and doctrine. It is impossible, therefore, to discuss the alternative Communion Service as though it were being proposed by Andrewes or by Laud, or even as if it were on the lines of the earlier Tractarian movement. The restoration of the Mass is not intended to be simply an exposition of an Anglican doctrine of Eucharistic sacrifice. It is before us as the keystone of the Counter-Reformation movement, and as involving the wiping out in time of all traces of Protestantism. The wiping out in time. For a time the Protestant use will retain its sanction, but as the use of bigoted diehards. But since that service implies the falsity

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