Anglican liturgy

“ In this recognition of the true functions of the Christian ministry, the true character of the worship which ought to be offered in God's holy temple, we may suppose the ritualists to be pretty well agreed. But doctrinally, they may be divided into two classes. With the one class, a gorgeous ritual is merely the gratification of an aesthetic or antiquarian taste; with the other it is the logical development of an advance in doctrine. The one class would bring back the practice of the Anglican Church to what it used to be in old days ”

“ But none are so suitable to the homely pathos and majesty of the English Liturgy; none are so adapted to the character which the English Church has aimed at forming, the sweet reserve, the quiet thoroughness, the penitence which is continuous without being unhopeful. They are lines which the child may repeat without the painful sense that they are beyond him, and the man without the contemptuous sense that they are below him. They appeal to the man in the child, and the child in the man. They are at once a form of devotion, a rule of life, a breath of prayer, a sigh of aspiration. ”

“ If the Catholic faith be the perfect revelation of Christianity, the Anglican Reformation is a cloud of heresies; if the Catholic Church be the organ of the Holy Ghost, the Anglican Church is not only no part of the Church, but no church of divine foundation. It is a human institution, sustained as it was founded by a human authority, without priesthood, without sacraments, without absolution, without the real presence of Jesus upon its altars. ”

“ The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good sense of its forms, by the manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches, is, `By taste are ye saved.' It keeps the old structures in repair, spends a world of money in music and building ”

“ In the earliest ages we find only the first of these forms of worship exemplified, and it is the only form now retained in the Anglican Ritual; of which, among other examples, the following passage in the prayer for Christ's Church militant on earth supplies a beautiful specimen: "We bless Thy holy name for all Thy servants departed this life in Thy faith and fear; beseeching Thee to give us grace so to follow their good examples, that with them we may be partakers of Thy heavenly kingdom: Grant this, O Father, for Jesus Christ's sake, our only Mediator and Advocate. ”

“ Still, there they are, mindful, at least, of “Sabbath worship,” when the majority of their co-religionists see no necessity for remembering it.
Crowds of Anglican clergymen were also found travelling, on their own account, in the Protestant cantons. Five-and-twenty were together one day at Mürren, of all shades and hues, too; from my Lord Bishop, with his wife and daughters, to the young Ritualist curate, in his Roman collar and otherwise Catholic dress, the highest ambition of whose heart is to be taken—or rather mistaken—for a true Catholic priest. ”

“ The Anglican Church retains only the Biblical symbolism of “the blessing of the hand.” Presbyterians and other Protestant churches have abandoned the use, except the Lutherans. We need not here trace the history of Christian worship, in daily services (Acts ii. 46) , or on the Lord’s Day (Acts xx. 7) , meeting for the Lord’s Supper (1 Cor. xi. 17-34) , or for mutual edification in prayer, praise and prophecy (1 Cor. xiv.) . These things represent the ideal of Christendom. In the words of an eminent Roman Catholic scholar, Monsignor Duchesne, “Faith unites, theology often separates.” ”

“ From those various causes a High Church spirit is showing itself far beyond both sections of the clergy who have identified themselves with Anglican movements, and, in fact, is more or less affecting all parties. ”

“ If, as we are now repeatedly told, the utmost sought by the invocation of saints is that they would intercede for the supplicants; that no more is meant than we of the Anglican Church mean when we earnestly entreat our fellow-Christians on earth to pray for us,—why should not the prayers to the saints be confined exclusively to that form of words which would convey the meaning intended? ”

“ Now, for three hundred years the Anglican clergy have been trained, ordained, and bound by subscriptions to deny not only many Christian truths, but the divine authority of the the living Church of every age. The barrier against infidelity is the divine voice which generates faith. ”

“ The way in which every one reads silently in his prayer-book, while the sublime music elevates the soul, and withdraws it from the earthly and trivial, appears to me far preferable to the loud responses and prayers of the Anglican church. ”

“ But it is needless to multiply these passages; and members of the Church of Rome will say, that they themselves acknowledge, as fully as members of the Anglican Church can do, that there is but one supreme {20} God and Lord, to whom alone they intend to offer the worship due to God; and that the appeals which they offer by way of invocation to saints and angels for their services and intercession, do not militate against this principle. ”

“ But, as We stated at the beginning, there is nothing We so deeply and ardently desire as to be of help to men of good-will by showing them the greatest consideration and charity. Wherefore We ordered that the Anglican Ordinal, which is the essential point of the whole matter, should be once more most carefully examined.
In the examination of any rite for the effecting and administering of a sacrament, distinction is rightly made between the part which is ceremonial and that which is essential, usually called the matter and form. ”

“ Such efforts, We affirm, have been and are made in vain, and for this reason, that any words in the Anglican Ordinal, as it now is, which lend themselves to ambiguity, cannot be taken in the same sense as they possess in the Catholic rite. For once a new rite has been initiated in which, as we have seen, the Sacrament of Orders is adulterated or denied, and from which all idea of consecration and sacrifice has been rejected, the formula "Receive the Holy Ghost, '^ no longer holds good ”

“ But if he comes as close to the missal as he can, by way of testifying that he believes in the doctrines stated and symbolized in the missal; if he imitates the ceremonies of the daily Christian sacrifice, in order to show his belief in the sacrificial character of the Eucharist, that fact becomes of serious importance, and indicates a genuine progress toward truth, at which every good Catholic ought to rejoice. The practice of auricular confession is not new in the Anglican Church ”

“ I can say, with a personal and perfect knowledge, that no other feeling has ever arisen in His Eminence's mind, in contemplating the troubles of the Anglican Church, than a sincere desire that God may use these things to open the eyes of men to see the untenableness of their positions; coupled with a very sincere sorrow at the havoc which the advance of unbelief is making among the truths which yet linger in the Church of England. ”

“ We claim for our fathers that they represented on the whole the affirmation of the Gospel; the belief which sets a man's face like a rock against the tide of worldly temptations and seductions, which so few churches find strength to stem, while it nerves his arm to wield effectually that sword of the Spirit which cuts its way most deeply into the camp of the Devil, which the Lord came to storm and to destroy. Apology and exposition have been the main strength of Anglican Church literature and activity. ”

“ There are two noteworthy examples of this in Anglo-Saxon service-books. Every Sunday and festival and almost every votive mass has its proper preface, although the number of such prefaces in the Gregorian sacramentary of the same period had been reduced to eight. There was a large but not quite equal number of triple episcopal benedictions to be pronounced by the bishop after the Lord’s Prayer and before the communion. This custom must either have been perpetuated from the old Celtic liturgy or directly derived from a Gallican source. ”

“ A love of order, seemliness, and good taste has led the Anglican Church along a middle path between what a seventeenth-century divine called 'the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome and the squalid sluttery of fanatic conventicles.' A keen sense of honour and respect for personal uprightness, a hatred of cruelty and treachery, created and long maintained in the English Church an intense repugnance against the priestcraft of the Roman hierarchy, feelings which have only died down because the bitter memories of the sixteenth century have at last become dim. ”

“ The Anglican Church, a fabric of policy compounded of Catholicism without a Pope and Biblical Protestantism, was in the throes of a struggle between those two elements, largely antiquarian and of little importance compared with the vital question as to the evidences of revelation and the divinity of Christ. ”

“ For some time, however, and in these last years especially, a controversy has sprung up as to whether the Sacred Orders conferred according to the Edwardine Ordinal possessed the nature and effect of a sacrament: those in favor of the absolute validity, or of a doubtful validity, being not only certain Anglican writers, but some few Catholics, chiefly non-English. The coasideration of the excellency of the Christian priesthood moved Anglican writers in this matter, de- sirous as they were that their own people should not lack the twofold power over the body of Christ. ”

“ There is in the Church of England an hereditary antipathy to the Catholic Church, which is evinced in its Articles, more fully developed in its Homilies, and sustained in the writings not only of the first reformers, but of all the succession of Anglican divines, with scarcely an exception, no matter how much they may have differed among themselves in their several schools of religious opinion. ”

“ It dates from 1842 and is based on the Anglican, Roman and Greek liturgies. Lights, incense, vestments, holy water, chrism, and other adjuncts of worship are in constant use. The ceremonial in its completeness may be seen in the church in Gordon Square, London, and elsewhere. The daily worship consists of “matins” with “proposition” (or exposition) of the sacrament at 6 a.m., prayers at 9 a.m. and 3 p.m., and “vespers” with “proposition” at 5 p.m. On all Sundays and holy days there is a “solemn celebration of the eucharist” at the high altar ”

“ The declaration of these loyal children declares that "Christ is really present in the Holy Eucharist, and being present, is of course to be adored."
Now, if the bishops of the Anglican communion have any right to decide in litigated questions, they have spoken with sufficient plainness. The "Catholic school" in England has had a hard road to travel while one after another their favorite positions have been condemned. The last decision of the Privy Council is adverse to the ceremonies of Ritualism, and of course to the doctrines which underlie them. ”

“ We recognise fully and cordially rejoice in the progress of belief which the thinkers and writers of the Anglican Church have practically secured, in spite of their bonds. There is no little truth, to our shame be it spoken, in the boast which is often on their lips, that the progress of theology in our generation is due far more largely to the labours of Anglican than of Nonconformist divines. ”

“ Like the Puseyites of the present time, he exceedingly regretted the simplicity of the worship adopted by the Anglican church, and the Calvinistic doctrine which prevailed in it; and was resolved to root out that notion, and restore all the showy rites and ceremonies of the catholic church, so imposing to the imaginations of the vulgar, both high and low, and, therefore, so adapted to both spiritual and political despotism. ”

“ That the Roman Church occupies in England to-day a position more favourable than in almost any nation on the Continent, and better than it occupied in England at the beginning of the nineteenth century, is due in large measure to the general influence of the movement with which we have been dealing. The Anglican Church was at the beginning of the nineteenth century preponderantly evangelical, low-church and conscious of itself as Protestant. ”

“ Compare the amount of higher literature which proceeds from clergymen of the Established Church with the amount which proceeds from the vastly greater body of Catholic priests scattered over the world; compare the place which the English clergy, or laymen deeply imbued with the teaching of the Church, hold in English literature with the place which Catholic priests, or sincere Catholic laymen, hold in the literature of France,—and the contrast will appear sufficiently evident. There is hardly a branch of serious English literature in which Anglican clergy are not conspicuous. ”

“ This doctrine has been made of faith in the Roman communion, but has not yet ecumenical acceptance, and therefore may be doubted without sin by members of the Greek or Anglican Churches. What we need to avoid, as the Lambeth Conference has reminded us, is a purely insular and provincial attitude in relation to doctrines which have not been formally set forth by Anglican authority. The Anglican Church has tried its best to impress upon us that there is no such thing as an Anglican Religion; there is but one Religion--the Religion of God's Catholic Church. ”