Alexander James Beresford Beresford Hope

“ With all sympathy for the excellent members of the Association, placed as they are in so disagreeable a dilemma, we really think that the embranglement has its value, and may even help the object they have at heart—the visible reunion of Christendom. It is well that they should learn thus early in their career that, short of an immediate, visible, overruling miracle, the task on which they are embarked is, in its merely human aspect, the most perplexingly difficult undertaking in which the human mind ever engaged itself. ”

“ We beg that we may not be misunderstood, A divided Christendom, or a national Church with variances between its inward and its outward life, are equally misfortunes. But they are misfortunes which must be faced and accepted by the man who holds to the English Church, nothing wavering. When England is on its trial as against Rome, or Greece, or Irvingism, or that ignis fatuus a 'Free Church,' other considerations come in; but 1850 ought to have taught Churchmen the dangers of choosing their physicians from men who are experimenting on the vitality of the body which they are professing to cure. ”

“ Such a ritual as this, so framed in the pile which is consecrated to its use, is a worthy offering of man's devotion to his Lord. Such a ritual shows forth completely, though not elaborately, that Incarnation, of which the Sacraments, in their full significance, fully recognised, are the appointed complement. More than that may be beautiful, may be symbolical, may be touching, may be popular with the few, but it is not essential, nor is it practical towards the conversion or the growth in grace of the millions whom, first of all, we have to look to in our own generation. ”

“ In the meanwhile, as the first and foremost of personal duties, as the simplest and therefore the most efficacious of contributions towards unity, let us quit ourselves like men in that Church in which our own lot has been cast, working out its system in doctrine, in ritual, and in practical usefulness, according to the exemplar of that Prayer-book which, until we become very much better than we ever have been, is likely to continue a sufficient guide to lead us through our present difficulties to the quiet land of everlasting peace. ”

“ The Congress is peripatetic, never meeting twice in the same place. It stands to reason that this sudden vision of the Church of England, in such large numbers and so great bustle, periodically flashing across the eyes of the population of a large town, must tend to exalt the idea of the Church in the place, as a large social and political power (if not also as something better) , in a totally novel way. It comes to them neither in a dignified nor in a polemac guise, but large, loud it may be, brisk and popular. ”

“ It is because we believe that ritualism is the natural law of the English Church's worship, and because we believe that Englishmen are coming round to that conviction far more extensively and far more completely than we could have thought possible some years since, that we regret the blindness of those who would drive back this happy tendency by overlaying the legitimate ritual of our Church with a mass of startling observances, which to the common mind speak nothing but Rome. ”

“ Common sense compels any knot of men, among whom clergy stand in a large proportion, who meet together to debate on the good estate of their own community, under the chairmanship of its magnates, to make the common law of, that community, and not their own crotchets, the rule of action. ”

“ Church architecture and decoration were in their turn downrightly handled as matters which deserved to be treated on their own merits, as topics of solid importance in a Church gathering, not by way of disparaging comparison, never brought in with some shambling excuse about externals, non-essentials, and such other stuff that no man thinks of, and no man vents when planning or extolling his own house. The debate on the Irish Church, which elicited a really eloquent and logical oration from the Dean of Cork, stood in favourable contrast to the parallel discussion at Manchester. ”

“ In no diocese of England, since Exeter in 1851, has a Diocesan Synod been held; but the idea of the necessity of such institutions is steadily gaining ground, and any irregular gathering of Churchmen is a fresh argument in favour of their orderly revival. Only we trust that the Bishop who convokes the next will have duly weighed the various constitutions that he can give to the body, before endowing it with life. A synod of all the clergy of any diocese would probably be too unwieldy for cool deliberation, and so would sink into a machine for registering the Bishop's determinations. ”

“ The Church Institution was the first shape which the experiment took, and the activity of that body soon galvanized the obsolete and obscure office of rural dean into a new line of usefulness, as convener and chairman of little social societies of joint clergy and laymen, periodically meeting to debate on topics of Church interest. Of course, in a system of such novel, not to say hasty introduction, based on so little of precedent, and so much less of positive authority, the amount of talk talked, in proportion to work done, was frequently excessive. ”

“ We feel the inexpediency of touching the Prayer-book so strongly, that we are inclined to stand aghast at the facility with which the Archbishop of Canterbury, generally so cautious, threw on the floor of the House of Lords, without consultation with his brethren, or with the remaining clergy or laity of the Church, a promise to open up the Table of Lessons. We are not afraid to say why we are frightened at this movement. ”

“ But if in God's counsels ultimate unity is decreed while the world is still in its actual attitude of expectation, we might almost dare to say, pax paritur bello. Many debates—general disintegration—man's wickedness working as much as man's religion—country against country, diocese against diocese—must, short of a miracle, be the state of the Christian world before the huge inert masses can be sufficiently broken up to admit of the freed atoms being reunited as a homogeneous whole. ”

“ Now that authority is not universally received, while opinion is everywhere respected, as much by those who revere authority into the bargain as by those who do not care for it, it might have been right to ask whether the side which had hitherto been victorious against 'Essays and Reviews' in the equitable court of opinion, was wise to appeal from their own success to the law court of authority. ”

“ The Scottish Eucharistic Office is, to be sure, deposed from its status of 'primary authority,' which it would have been difficult to have sustained, but it is authorized nevertheless, and thus the Anglican Church still enjoys throughout all its branches the advantage of possessing within its communion, though rarely and locally used, a form of liturgy in which the primitive and Catholic doctrine is so grandly enounced, in words which, from not being identical with those of our own Prayer-book, are on that very account valuable as a support and an explanation of the English Use. ”

“ Some good people have, no doubt, joined the body from impulse rather than logic or learning, and would therefore be the more easily frightened or chilled off when it became necessary to reason or to diplomatise. Others may have persuaded themselves that it only needed a little quiet explanation, to induce the 'Patriarchs' of Rome and Constantinople to sit down with the Archbishop of Canterbury, happy in the joint practice of a developed Anglicanism—acceptable alike to the 'Gesu' and to Exeter Hall. ”

“ Supposing that he could have excited himself up to the conviction that a revival of monasticism tout cru was the likeliest method of working a missionary enterprise in the Church of England, we cannot understand the logical process by which Mr. Lyne persuaded himself that he ought to be, or that he could be, a Benedictine. The Benedictine order is, by many centuries, the oldest existing corporation in the world—at least, if we except the college of Cardinals, who have so far deviated, as the Benedictines have not done, from their primitive constitution. ”

“ The agitation for Prayer-book reform has not always been prompted by any real, simple desire to improve the book in its literary character, to make it more practically sound and useable, or to import into it a deeper and wider learning. Undisguisedly it has, from first to last, been a dodge of the party which is bent upon excising or cutting down the assertion of sacramental doctrine which runs through the formularies of the Church of England. ”

“ We believe that the thing which in some people's eyes most hopelessly stamps the parish priest as 'not going far enough,' is his not lighting the candles at Holy Communion. We have no intention of saying one word on the abstract beauty, significance, or desirableness of the rite; what we have to urge absolves us from handling that topic. The fact is, that those who held the procuration of ritual-loving Churchmen, as managers of the famous Liddell and Westerton suit, early in the case, and with the consent of those they represented, gave up this lighting to save the candlesticks. ”

“ Lyne and his friends are not in a position in which they can claim the silent forbearance of those Churchmen whose wish and whose work is, by patience and prudence, no less than by straightforwardness, to preserve, to strengthen, and transmit the Church of England, with its collective doctrines and Catholic worship, unimpaired. ”

“ Disraeli is not much to be blamed for having taken a very comprehensive view of the opportunity so luckily dropped into his mouth, while he left the poor clergy to the care of the remaining speakers, and made the Oxford Theatre ring with a manifesto of 'Church policy.' The policy itself is, in most particulars, that which we have ourselves consistently advocated, and its adoption by the English politician who, like Louis Napoleon, with all his astuteness, dreams when he thinks, is a proof how strongly the general atmosphere must be charged with the electricity of Church progress. ”