less decorative work about them; that is, with less rhetoric or pious comment. If Bishop Abraham refers to these, when he says that he finds no trace of the letter or spirit of the Pauline Statutes, all we can say is that we think he must have read them very cursorily. For there is a good deal of the letter, and although some part of the spirit may have evaporated, the stringency and general completeness and regularity of the system are there.

Of course, in the matter of residence, a somewhat higher standard might not unreasonably be looked for at St. Paul's, so near the Court and seat of Government. The Dean of Lichfield, if a courtier, must break into his Lichfield residence, which the Dean of St. Paul's need not do. Yet the rule for residence of the Dean, given in the Monasticon, p. 1260, is very strict, and has rules about patientia, humilitas, mansuetudo, and benignitas, all right. Doubtless there are passages in this older code which, as well as those of the Pauline Statutes, represent some still older work, or common rule.

Altogether, we are disposed, primâ facie, to believe that Bishop Abraham's criticisms refer to the more recent body of Lichfield Statutes, which were suppressed by Bishop Selwyn, and not to the earlier. For in those earlier Statutes might be found a higher rule for the direction of a Cathedral than is to be discovered in the practice of Cathedrals for some time back, and which seems to have been the standard accepted at Lichfield.

ERRATUM.

6

In the Article upon The Situation,' given in our last number, we quoted, on page 471, the Supplementary Ornaments Rubric, as adopted by the two Houses of the Convocation of Canterbury, without the words now included in brackets: Every priest and deacon shall wear a surplice with a stole or scarf, and the hood of his degree [, and in preaching he shall wear a surplice with stole or scarf and the hood of his degree]; or, if he think fit, a gown with hood and scarf,' &c.

THE

CHURCH QUARTERLY REVIEW.

No XVIII. JANUARY 1880.

ART. I.-REVISION OF THE RUBRICS BY THE RITUAL COMMISSION AND THE CONVOCATIONS.

1. Report of the Ritual Commission. (1870.)

2. Chronicle of Convocation. (1874-1879.)

3. Amendments in the Rubrics adopted provisionally by the Convocation of the Province of York, and reported to Her Majesty. (1876.)

4. York Journal of Convocation. (1875-1879.)

FOR some years the Rubrics in the Book of Common Prayer have been undergoing a large amount of examination and sifting. After peacefully resting for nearly two centuries since the abortive attempt to revise the Prayer-Book in the reign of William III., the Ritual of the Church of England has been summoned to the bar of public opinion to give an account of itself, and to show cause why it should not be altered. The practical results in the way of change are likely to be small, and it seems more than probable that this generation will hand on to its successor the Rubrics as it found them; but nevertheless the examination will have been important, and the literature which this examination has produced will record an eventful chapter in the annals of the Church of England.

For the revision was undertaken with an object, and all that has occurred in connexion with it has served to illustrate the state of opinion in the Church, and the relative force of the opinions and parties to be found within her borders. Extending over a period of more than twelve years, the

attempts at revision have developed tendencies and ripened opinion in the Church to an extent which would have been impossible if there had been only a sharp and sudden attack which had either succeeded or failed. Moreover, the law courts being engaged in determining the interpretation of some of the more disputed Rubrics at the same time that the Ritual Commission and the two Convocations were deliberating as to the form which it was desirable those same Rubrics should eventually assume, there was secured a thoroughness of examination and a definiteness of view on the part of those engaged in the task, which might not otherwise have been obtained. There was much to be said on the side of those who advocated change in the authoritative directions for ordering the public services of the Church; for they could point to the fact that some of them had been altogether overlooked or neglected for nearly two centuries, and that it would cause great offence to many earnest and religious people if there were to be a revival of what had been laid aside so long; whilst those who opposed change had arguments at least as powerful, when they urged that it would be fatal to the life of a Church if custom was to be reckoned as law when that custom was largely the result of apathy, neglect, and indifference, and when they contended that the example of the Early Church, after which the Church of England professed to be modelled, ought to be more considered than the present accidental condition of affairs into which the Church had drifted. Beside these considerations, there arose the practical one, which we believe Bishop Wilberforce was fond of urging, that the authority of all Rubrics, whether new or re-enacted (as the whole body of them would effectively be), would be far more stringent and inelastic than the present Rubrics are, come down to us, as they have done, softened by custom.

The inevitable effect of the Oxford Movement upon the Church was to ask increased attention to the externals of public worship. It was impossible for men's thoughts to be seriously turned to the dignity and importance of the sacraments, and to the duty of frequent public prayer, and for them not to feel that the adjuncts of such worship were of real account. It is so notorious that men are greatly influenced by the forms and ceremonial connected with the duties and offices which they have to fulfil, that it would have been unnatural for such accidents long to escape serious attention. So long as preaching was considered the one important ordinance in the Church, it sufficed if provision was made for comfortably listening to the sermons which were delivered.

So long as the Church's prayers were regarded as only a necessary form which had to be borne with before the allimportant sermon was reached, it mattered little whether provision was or was not made for kneeling when such prayers were being recited. So long as the celebration of Holy Communion was so widely looked upon as a mere commemorative rite, to be observed periodically because it had been so ordered by the Founder of Christianity, but to which was attached no higher meaning than of exciting pious thoughts and devout aspirations, it was not to be expected that there would be any great effort made to make the ritual part of the service impressive. Voluntarily or involuntarily people symbolize their own views of all that is connected with Divine worship by their manner of conducting it, and by their behaviour whilst it is proceeding. So long therefore as low views of the sacraments and ordinances of the Church prevailed, such views naturally found expression in the condition of the fabrics of our Churches, in the mean fittings of the chancels, and the expressionless way in which Holy Communion was celebrated.

It was not long after the proclamation of higher doctrine began to be made that the first stirrings of a desire for the more seemly performance of public worship manifested themselves. The leaders of the Oxford School commenced the publication of the Tracts for the Times in 1833. S. Barnabas Church in Pimlico was consecrated in 1850, and it may be regarded as fairly representing the progress made in the interval, during which period the Cambridge Camden, or (as it was afterwards named) the Ecclesiological, Society had been energetically working since its foundation in 1839. This church was not the earliest attempt to give expression to the higher devotional sense that was being aroused, and to revive that more seemly ordering of fabric and worship of which the older churches of the country were the appropriate models, due allowance being made for the changes of the Reformation; but, planted as S. Barnabas was on the outskirts of Belgravia, it arrested public attention, as not even S. Andrew's, Wells Street, consecrated in 1847, nor Margaret Chapel, refitted in the same year, had done. 1850 was an explosive year, for it was that of the Gorham judgment and the Papal Aggression; and therefore the appearance of choristers in surplices at S. Barnabas, which had been peaceably taken elsewhere, drove the favourers of existing stagnation almost frantic, and the malcontentsgentles as well as roughs-could not have been more excited if they had seen a procession with thuribles and gorgeous copes.

But the matter was not allowed to end with rioting and the attempt to control the ritual of the Church of England by mob violence. Indeed, the ritual portion of Bishop Phillpotts' Pastoral of 1850, provoked by the S. Barnabas riots, was no mean gain in the better direction. It was alleged that some of the furniture introduced into the chancel of the church was not according to law, and funds were speedily raised to test the question. Bishop Blomfield, in a fright, had gone over to the rioters, and Mr. Bennett, founder and clergyman of S. Barnabas, foolishly resigned from an overstrained interpretation of an engagement which he had made rashly and without invitation; but his successor was determined to defend what had been done. The opposition in Pimlico and elsewhere was violent and unscrupulous. The spirit exhibited by some of those who opposed the improvement. and decoration of churches, the substitution of free seats for rented pews, the revived observance of such Rubrics as those which regulate the collection of alms in church, not to mention the earlier and not quite satisfactory resuscitation of the prayer for the Church Militant when there is no celebration of Holy Communion, and similar changes, did much to exasperate their opponents, and to make many of them callous to any thoughts of consideration for prejudices which deserved respect or for associations which demanded very tender treatment. A more thoughtful and dispassionate mode of procedure on the part of those who disliked change, and who dreaded the further developments of the men who were bent upon improving the ritual worship of the Church of England, would certainly have been far more likely to secure the end at which they aimed than the tactics adopted by the Belgravian malcontents who found a suitable tool in Mr. Westerton. This notorious churchwarden, we may observe, was, much against his own inclination, a signal benefactor of the Church revival: For, with all its shortcomings, the judgment of the Privy Council in Liddell v. Westerton, and in Liddell v. Beale, delivered in the spring of 1857 may be considered the Magna Charta of ceremonial worship in the Church of England. It would have been more politic in many respects to have laboured to consolidate the gains then secured than, as was so often attempted, to raid over unknown and dangerous ground.

Various circumstances fanned the flame in different places and helped still further to exasperate public opinion against those who were seeking to innovate in matters of ritual. In 1860 there were the riots at S. George's in the East which