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advocates of the new bill desire to change the rubrics while refusing the warnings that can be given by those versed in the study of history, and while despising the checks offered by past experience. The mere introduction of the bill is alarming enough; but our alarm is not diminished when those who wish to see the bill become law tell us that they appeal from the antiquary to the politician; from the man of knowledge to the practical man; from the scholar to the philistine. When the proposal to review the Roman liturgical books was made at the Council of Trent, and the papal party succeeded in their design of giving this commission to the Roman See, it was not, however, until they had been warned by the Bishop of Lerida that in making liturgical corrections there was need of an exquisite knowledge of Antiquity, and of the Customs of all Countries, which will not be found in the Court of Rome; where, though there be Men of exquisite Wit and of great Learning, yet they want skill in this kind, which is necessary to do anything commendably herein.' As at the court of Rome in 1563, there may be excellent theologians, administrators, diplomatists, men of the world, and courtiers in Convocation in 1896. Yet if those with 'an exquisite knowledge of Antiquity' be not allowed to speak, we can expect nothing but disaster from a revision of the rubrics under such circumstances. Instead of the liturgical principles which have guided the Church from the earliest times, and which are best known to the archæologist and historian, we are to consult our convenience; hardly a commendable spring of action, even if it be limited by being convenience 'in the largest and highest sense of the word.' When the Prayer Book was to be revised in 1661, it was not to convenience, but to the ancient liturgies that our fathers turned their minds.2

Churchmen are very grateful to the Bishop of Winchester for the firmness which he displayed under trying circumstances in dealing with a scandalous disregard of the rules of the Prayer Book, but duty compels us to point out that we cannot accept the principles which he would lay down for revising the rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer. Those

1 Sir Nathanael Brent's translation of Father Paul's History of the Council of Trent, London, 1676, p. 747. The reform of the Breviary was done with considerable haste, and the truth of the Bishop's forecast has been verified by the attempts which have been made at amendment. (See Batiffol, Histoire du Bréviaire romain, ch. vi.)

2 The King's commission directs the Bishops 'to advise upon and review the said Book of Common Prayer, comparing the same with the most ancient liturgies which have been used in the Church in the primitive and purest times' (D. Wilkins, Concilia, London, 1737, vol. iv. p. 571).

principles are not, at all events, the lines of the revision of 1662; and a departure from them would be a serious disturbance of the Restoration settlement.

It is a note of the nineteenth century that it is always in a hurry. It is even considered a virtue, a thing one aims at and is proud of, not to have a moment that one can call one's own; never to have any time for reflection or meditation, or an hour in which one can possess one's soul. If such a spirit of haste be allowed to enter into our services, we may be sure that all devotion will be at an end. This fatal desire to save time has brought us the mutilations of the Shortened Services Act, or, if the services be not mutilated, it has caused a rapidity of recitation which is a complete bar to the edification of those that come to church. Mr. Gore, the Canon of Westminster, is not a writer who is given to over much blaming of the methods of the nineteenth century; yet he sees the dangers of our hasty ways. 'Everything in our modern life, in our age of advertisement and journalism, tends to make us prefer publicity to depth, speed to thoroughness, numbers to reality; and to give way to that tendency is to give way to death.'1 It is this desire to save time, to be getting on, even in our most sacred occupations, which has led directly to the liturgical anarchy which every true friend of the Church of England deplores. Mr. Gore sees, as everyone else with the least knowledge of affairs must see, that a return to discipline is inevitable.

'The time is surely come when excrescences weakening to the life of the whole body need to be pared off by the exercise of a moderate but impartial discipline. Every now and then, when hopes are stirred by the deep evidences of a recovering unity amongst us and a fuller sense of corporate life, our hopes are chilled by some utterance or act of what looks like deliberate lawlessness, deliberate repudiation of principles binding on us all, on which very often no corporate or authoritative judgment, in utterance or act, is allowed to fall.'

We must have come indeed to a noteworthy crisis when an advanced Radical asks for measures of repression. Anything like a Coercion Act we should indeed grieve to see necessary; and our sorrow would be the greater because we believe that the remedy is still in the hands of the clergy themselves. The great majority are still true to the principles and order of the Church of England, and we feel sure that they could, by putting out their influence, restrain the

1 Sermon preached before the University of Cambridge upon Quinquagesima, Guardian, p. 271, last three lines of col. iii.

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lawless and the foolish. Let the clergy agree among themselves that they will see the plain directions and rubrics of the Book of Common Prayer impartially kept; and if this were only understood to be the general intention of the great body of the clergy, the number of those who wilfully disregard all rules but their own pleasure ought soon to be reduced to a quantité négligeable. It would very greatly discourage these lawless and foolish ones if they could no longer appeal to the Act which has encouraged their sloth and indevotion. The repeal of the Shortened Services Act would be a notification that the source and original of the clippings, mutilations, and excisions now practised upon the services of the Book of Common Prayer had been taken away, and that the state of anarchy created by this Act was no longer recognized. Instead of the Bill now before Convocation, Churchmen would welcome more warmly a repeal of the schedule of the Act of Uniformity Amendment Act, the mischievous schedule which has set up among us those eviscerated services which are so little credit to the piety, the learning, or the liturgical instincts of the nineteenth century synods of the Church of England.

ART. V. THE CONSTITUTIONAL HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

The Constitutional History and Constitution of the Church of England. Translated from the German of FELIX MAKOWER, Barrister in Berlin. (London and New York, 1895.)

THE notice of the German edition of this comprehensive work which appeared in the Church Quarterly Review in July 1894 was, we believe, the earliest review of the book in this country. We are not now told who has translated it into English, but the author has taken the opportunity of making several alterations, and a list of them is given in a preliminary note (p. v). The appearance of the work in its English dress at once places it within the reach of a very much larger circle of readers, at a time too which is very favourable for gaining their attention from several points of view.

There is at present a lull in the political storm, which will encourage many Churchmen to give sound lectures on Church history to ignorant people. When the political parties are

really engaged in fighting upon some matter of Church principles there is a marked tendency to be reticent on the part of diffident Churchmen, who know from their reading of history that the Church may harm the cause of Christ if she identifies herself with one political party, or allows herself to fight with worldly weapons instead of a few bright weapons, bathed on high.'1 It may be argued that there seems to be a want of zeal and loyalty in this silence; but those who are silent from prudent motives in times of controversy may perhaps speak with greater probabilities of commanding attention in times of peace. And good work may be done by carefully prepared popular lectures on Church history if such persons as we are describing will deliver them. They will find in Dr. Makower's work just what they want for this

purpose.

Again, it must be a favourable time for the popular study of the constitution of the English Church when the Church of England is sufficiently to the fore to be attacked. She is not ignored, but reckoned with, in all the great undertakings of the day for the social and moral and religious improvement of the people. If there are many hot-headed young Churchmen who have meddled with vast questions of capital and labour, which they have had next to no means at all of really understanding, there are also wise and patient heads among the older Churchmen, like the Bishop of Durham, who have gained a unique place for the Church in great industrial centres of population. In educational matters, when all due praise is given to Nonconformist religious efforts, it is the Church that stands out full in the front as the great preserver of unrestricted Christian education for the poor of the land. It is due to the Church that religious and secular instruction are not divorced in the elementary schools; and it is a matter of history that the Church has taught the State to devote itself to the education of children. In the numerical strength and increase of her ministry the Church of England, according to the official census returns of 1891, has nobly responded to the claims of a larger population. In 1881 there were in round numbers twenty-one thousand clergymen, in 1891 twenty-four thousand. By the same returns it appears that other religious bodies,' excluding the Roman Catholics from that term, have increased the number of their ministers less from 1881 to 1891 than from 1871 to 1881. They have failed, that is to say, to cope with the growing population, and the tendency of religion in England is shown to be, not 1 Lyra Apostolica, No. 64.

towards Nonconformity, but towards the old Church which made the scattered little kingdoms into England. Here is the opportunity for teaching the people what is the history of the constitution of this Church, set on a hill before the people of England, and occupying a position which it may cause a pang to acknowledge, but which cannot be denied. The Church of England is not ashamed of the history of her constitutional growth, and Dr. Makower provides a luminous account of it which makes the study a thorough pleasure.

There is one more topic on which we must dwell as an introduction to Dr. Makower's pages, and it arises from the influence of the Church among the people. It has come to pass in these days that in every parish in England there are one or two men eager about Church history. They are not confined to any one class of life; but so far as our own experience goes, when the artisan or the young clerk is interested in Church history he is more enthusiastic and anxious to learn than people in some other walks of life. In every factory, in every foundry, in every railway centre, and in every great commercial house there is to be found some man nowadays who is a Churchman to the bone. He gets knocked about; his small failings are made more of than the great vices of his fellows; every newspaper report of a clergyman's appearance in a police court is thrust under his notice; he is chaffed or bullied, but never now ignored; he is called a prig, a saint, a hypocrite, a dreamer, all in turn; but he holds on his way, and is the salt of the earth, and one of the parish priest's inner band, who deserves the most loving care that the Church can bestow upon her sons. He does a work for the Church at times and in places where the priest himself can gain no entrance; he hears arguments and objections which the priest can only know about at secondhand; and he is always face to face with assertions about the Church which can only be pardoned because of the gross ignorance of the speaker. Now our friend is as a rule a ravenous reader. He is always asking for books on this and that; and if the pith of such a book as Dr. Makower's Constitutional History can be lodged in his mind, he will redistribute it on countless occasions to the great advantage of the Church. With these introductory remarks, intended to promote the popular study of Church history, we turn to the details of the book before us.

I. Dr. Makower divides the history of the constitution of the Church in the first place into the local divisions of (1) England, (2) Scotland, (3) Ireland, (4) the Colonies and