Volume 25 — SIX SUNNY MONTHS. BY THE AUTHOR OF “THE HOUSE OF YORKE,” “GRAPES AND THORNS,” ETC. CHAPTER XI. A MORNING WITH ST. PETER. (continued 5)

“Red gold—a hundred purses—yea, and more!

If thou canst make a wholesome use of these

To chink against the Norman, I do believe

My old crook’d spine would bud out two young wings

To fly to heaven straight with.”

Tennyson doubtless considers this very English and spirited. Stigand may have disliked the Normans, and doubtless did. With all our hearts! But this mode of expressing his dislike is, in the mouth of a Catholic and a prelate, surely not in character.

Again he asks:

“... Be there no saints of England

To help us from their brethren yonder?”

As though a Catholic or Christian could dream of the saints warring in heaven or of affixing nationality to sanctity! Tennyson’s Edward, with a solitary gleam of intelligence, rebukes him thus:

“Prelate,

The Saints are one, ...”

yet immediately falls into the absurd blunder he rebukes by adding:

“But those (Saints) of Normanland

Are mightier than our own.”

While witnessing the battle of Hastings Stigand cries out in an ecstasy of admiration at Harold’s prowess: “War-woodman of old Woden!” Could any Christian man, Catholic or non-Catholic, couple a Christian warrior’s name with the detestable deity of the pagan North?

The character of Harold, too, is incongruous. He is represented as a most brave, wise, and honorable man, incapable of fear or falsehood: “broad and honest, breathing an easy gladness.” He weakens in many places. We cannot here go into a historical inquiry respecting the alleged oath of Harold on the relics of saints to help William to the crown of England. Much is made of it by Tennyson; so let us take all the facts for granted. A man such as Harold is here represented to be would rather have died than taken the oath, if he never meant to keep it. On the other hand, once taken, and knowing it to be false, we doubt whether the resolute Saxon soldier would have troubled himself much about the matter. He acts as a coward throughout while in William’s power. A strong man would not rail in secret at William for forcing him to take an oath which the swearer knew to be a lie. He would take it or not take it with the best grace possible. “Horrible!” exclaims Harold when the relics on which he has sworn are exposed. Harold was sufficiently man of the world—a man who had passed his life in camp and court—to have uttered no such weak cry. In the first place, if he swore falsely, such an exclamation showed at once that he never intended to keep his promise. In the second place, it would have been perfectly plain to William that he could place no reliance on the oath of such a poltroon. The same failure to apprehend the character of the man is apparent in the womanish tirade into which Harold breaks after William has left him: “Juggler and bastard—bastard: he hates that most—William the tanner’s bastard! Would he heard me!” A moment before he might have heard him, but Harold dared not speak his thoughts. Certainly the man who never lost a battle save the one in which he lost all—the man who conquered Wales, crushed the 130terrible invasion of Harold Hardrada and Tostig, braved his own sovereign, seized on the English throne with a grasp that only death could shake off, and died so gloriously on Hastings—never “played the woman with his eyes and the braggart with his tongue” in this poor fashion. Here again speaks the reader of modern infidel literature in the mouth of the unspeculative soldier of the eleventh century:

“I cannot help it, but at times

They seem to me too narrow, all the faiths

Of this grown world of ours, whose baby eye

Saw them sufficient.”

“All the faiths!” We wonder how many “faiths” Harold knew of or contemplated. Indeed, it seems to us that Mr. Tennyson here speaks for himself, and in a manner that causes some suspicion of his having lost something of his own earlier and more robust belief. Harold continues:

“But a little light!—

And on it falls the shadow of the priest;

Heaven yield us more! for better Woden, all

Our cancell’d warrior-gods, our grim Walhalla,

Eternal war, than that the Saints at peace;

The Holiest of our Holiest one should be

This William’s fellow-tricksters; better die

Than credit this, for death is death, or else

Lifts us beyond the lie.”

Which is heathenism and atheism beautifully combined. He goes on, still in his atheistic vein, when Edith bids him listen to the nightingales:

“Their anthems of no church, how sweet they are!

Nor kingly priest, nor priestly king to cross

Their billings ere they nest.”

And again, when Gurth brings news of the pope’s favoring William’s cause, Harold laughs and says of it:

“This was old human laughter in old Rome

Before a Pope was born, when that which reign’d

Call’d itself God—a kingly rendering

Of 'Render unto Cæsar.’”

Harold must have lately risen from a perusal of Mr. Gladstone’s pamphlet on Vaticanism when he spoke thus, so we pardon his aberration. That pamphlet is too strong for weak intellects.

“The Lord was God and came as man—the Pope

Is man and comes as God,”

he continues, still in the Gladstonian vein. He reminds Edith that love “remains beyond all chances and all churches”—a dictum and doctrine that would be strange even in a Protestant Harold. “I ever hated monks,” he says in another place, which may account for his having founded Waltham Abbey. He grows more and more Protestant towards the end, and the saintly relics over which he was so terrified at having sworn a false oath he terms the “gilded ark of mummy-saints.” And here is his final legacy to England:

“... And this to England,

My legacy of war against the Pope

From child to child, from Pope to Pope, from age to age,

Till the sea wash her level with her shores,

Or till the Pope be Christ’s.”

This is Tennyson’s legacy, not Harold’s. It seems strange that it should have fallen into careless hands; not ours, but those of the poet’s coreligionists. The fact is that the world is growing weary of little anti-papal tooters. Great enemies of the papacy it applauds and tries to excuse; but at the mouthings of the little people it yawns. If Tennyson has shown anything in this as in his other anti-Catholic effusions, it is that when moved by rancor he can descend to all the small bitterness of a common and weak order of mind. We cannot go further into an examination of Harold, and, indeed, the task is not worth while. He has failed in the one character which, 131to a true dramatic genius, offered magnificent opportunities—William of Normandy, who was perhaps the greatest and the wisest sovereign that England has as yet known. A gallant soldier; a wary yet bold and successful general; an astute statesman; a lover of learning; a resolute if severe ruler; a man who could bide his opportunity, then move on it with the flash and fatality of the lightning, yet withal a man of almost ungovernable passions, with the old taint running in his blood and through all his successful life—this was a character that it is as great a pity Shakspere did not draw as that Tennyson should have been rash enough to attempt to draw. In what ought to be the chief scene of the play, the battle of Hastings, there is no battle at all. The weak device is resorted to of setting a description of it as it proceeds in the mouth of Stigand, who watches the field from “a tent on a mound.” Norman and Saxon, Harold and William, are not brought together for the final death-grip. Shakspere's battle-scenes are more vivid than those of any painter. They illuminate history and print themselves indelibly on the mind. Cut the battle-scenes out of King John, Henry IV., Henry V., Macbeth, Julius Cæsar, Henry VI., and you mutilate the plays. Stigand’s description of the battle of Hastings might be dropped from Harold and not missed. Why should not Harold die as Hotspur dies, or as Macbeth, or Brutus, or any of the others—his face to the victorious foe, the fitting ending of the tragedy? Mr. Tennyson was not equal to the task, either in this scene or at Stamford Bridge. The last clash and conflict of human passion he can only look at from afar off and reflect upon when it is over. He cannot take it in hand and present it. He would do well to retire from the field where empires, and men and events that make or unmake empires, are the subjects of song, and go back to the pretty scenery, the calm truth, and the graceful verse that have made his name dearly loved and justly honored.

ANGLICANISM IN 1877, AS AFFECTED BY THE PUBLIC WORSHIP REGULATION ACT.

We should feel inclined to apologize to our readers for again introducing the English Establishment to their notice, were it not that since, a year ago, we considered Anglicanism in connection with the “Old Catholic” conference at Bonn, the increasing agitation within the state church cannot but have continued to attract the thoughtful attention of those who, from the bark of Peter, watch the weary tossing of the Anglican craft and the mutinous condition of a portion of her crew.

Since the period to which we allude, the fact that the whole tendency of the Alt-Catholic movement is rationalistic and anti-Christian is beginning to be understood by all really religious Protestants, and we now see the better part of them 132holding aloof from the movement, and even the Ritualist journals condemning whatever advances were made towards it. The cause is now advocated only by the Broad-Church party, which distinguished itself by its emphatic encouragement of the apostate Loyson, one of the apostles of the new sect, who went last summer to London to enlighten the English public on ecclesiastical questions. On the other hand, the High-Church movement is, if anything, in the direction of the Catholic Church, while Alt-Catholicism is a distinct counter-agitation, and thus anything like a cordial fraternization between the two is impossible. The attempts of the High-Church party to obtain at least as much as a recognition of the validity of their orders from the Orientals—attempts which were renewed at the Bonn conference—have again signally failed. One of the “Unionist” leaders himself laments that “the Oriental Church stands entirely aloof from the Church of England, sweepingly and roundly condemns all its members, denies the validity of their baptisms and ordinations, and practically refuses to aid them in any shape or form.”

There is no doubt that at the present moment a tremendous struggle has arisen in the Establishment between the would-be Catholic and the Protestant elements; the latter not only pleading its three centuries’ possession, but also, and truly, declaring itself to be the very basis and raison d’être of the schism. This claim is urged at the present time with a vehemence and jealous irritation aimed ostensibly at the “Romanizing practices” of their brethren, but the venom of which betrays itself to be especially called forth by the ceaseless, active, self-denying energy of these incorrigible early risers—an irritation not difficult to comprehend on the part of those who, with all their professions of Evangelical piety, have, generally speaking, an exceeding shyness of hard work, detest the Counsels of Perfection in general and the practice of self-denial in particular, take up the pen much more readily than the cross, and prefer bridling their neighbor’s tongue rather than their own. Nevertheless, with regard to a certain class among the Evangelicals, and these the more earnest, it is only just to say that their condemnation of Ritualists and their practices is sincerely a matter of principle. They regard the one as the guides and the other as the direct means to “idolatry”—a term which they have all their lives been taught to consider as synonymous with the Catholic religion.

When St. Edward the Confessor lay on his death-bed in the palace of Westminster, he foretold to his queen, St. Edith, and to Stigand that, in punishment for the sins of the land, God would permit the enemy of mankind to send a mission of wicked spirits into it, who should sever the Green Tree of Old England from its root, and lay it apart for the space of three furlongs; but that the tree should after a due time return to its root and revive, without the help of any man’s hand. The traditional interpretation of this prophecy has been that the English Church would be cut off for the space of three centuries from its parent stem, but that, after that time, the severed church should return to its ancient allegiance.

And what do we now see? Movement, awakening, and life where for three centuries have reigned the gloom and chillness of the tomb.

From the time of Elizabeth 133downwards not only the teaching but the general aspect of what is called the Church of England was intensely anti-Catholic. A brighter day first dawned for England when she hospitably received and succored the exiled priests of France. The precious leaven of their holy teaching and example never has been lost. Later, in 1829, the emancipation of the Catholics of the British Empire, under George IV., marked a fresh epoch in the history of the Catholic Church in England. The discussions which attended the passing of this act helped to increase a knowledge of her tenets, and prepared the way for their better appreciation; besides which, the restoration of some of the most illustrious families of the realm to their ancient and hereditary seats in the House of Lords, together with the admission of Catholics into the Lower House, tended further to the removal of many prejudices. Since Newman and Pusey, in 1833, recalled their brethren to the study of the Fathers of the church, many steps have been taken in the Establishment in the direction of the ancient paths—steps which Catholics have noted with interest and hope, though they perceive that but too often men who have been attracted towards the truth rest apparently contented with a bad imitation of its external manifestations and a garbled or “adapted” representation of its doctrines, forgetting that truth distorted ceases to be truth, and often is a lie. They marvel also that the invariable opposition of the pseudo-episcopate does not help these men, who are the present life of their system, to see that their imaginary “Catholicity” is wholly unauthorized and unrecognized by their ecclesiastical superiors, and that the hierarchy of their church is as consistently and persistently anti-Catholic as the constitution of that body itself. They are resisted and condemned by their bishops, and from their bishops they have no appeal except to a lay tribunal whose interference in sacris they repudiate.

By the terms of a new Appellate Jurisdiction Act, recently passed in both Houses of Parliament, the jurisdiction of the Privy Council has been transferred to a new Court of Appeal. It was then provided that episcopal assessors should in future sit on the bench with the lay judges; and though it is by the latter that the judgment is pronounced, the bishops are allowed to make remarks on what is passing. They are to sit in rotation in the new court. The two archbishops and the Bishop of London are also to sit in turn, ex officio, and the rest in quarternions, beginning with the junior four (Chichester, St. Asaph, Ely, and St. David’s). It is impossible to say what may be the results of this equivocal assessorship, with regard to which the London Morning Post disrespectfully observes that “the plan offers no security whatever that the assessors shall be fit for their office beyond the fact that they are bishops”; calmly adding that “since the purpose for which their presence is required is the imparting to the judges of a certain kind and quality of information when desired, it is a serious defect to the scheme that it provides no guarantee that the prelates who sit shall possess any proper aptitude for their position.”^[21]

134Upon this another journal asks: If it be true that Anglican bishops are corporately incompetent as advisers of lay judges, even on the doctrines of their own particular communion, of what use are they at all? If they cannot, without the aid of civilians, interpret the Articles, why not make bishops of the lay judges, instead of paying thousands a year to each of these gentlemen, who do not apparently know their own business? In any case, how Ritualists can remain, with satisfaction to their consciences, in a communion whose highest arbiter is not even a sub-deacon, is perplexing to any one who regards the church as a divinely-instituted system. We have been reminded by Presbyter Anglicanus that it is a necessary ingredient in any system of discipline that the superior should not be judged by the inferior, the teacher by the taught; and that the twelfth canon of the African Code ordains that, “if a bishop fall under the imputation of any crime, he shall have a second hearing before twelve bishops, if more cannot be had; a priest before six, with his own bishop; a deacon before three—according to the statutes of the ancient canons.” Again: “It was a recognized principle in the primitive church that the deposition of an ecclesiastic required the intervention of more bishops than were needed for his ordination. The Anglican bishops notwithstanding their professions of regard for the primitive church, are content that a presbyter, ordained and instituted by a 'bishop,’ should be deprived by a layman. And they talk of apostolic order!”

The writer just quoted, who is now safe in the Catholic Church, described, just before his conversion, the present condition of ecclesiastical discipline in the Anglican Church as follows: “The ecclesiastical courts which survived the Reformation and the great rebellion have been ... abolished; the bishop of each diocese has ceased to be the ordinary of that diocese, and the whole clergy of the Church of England are rendered amenable to, and are even directed in their conduct of public worship by, a layman, whose office has been created in the year of grace 1874 by the imperial Parliament, and who, besides playing the part of a pseudo-dean of the Arches and principal of the Provincial Court of York, is also to be the national ordinary, the Parliamentary vicar-general of the Establishment, exercising jurisdiction in every parish from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Channel Islands.” And this is the system to which unquestioning, unrepining, absolute submission is required of the clergy by the bishops of the Anglican communion.

Nor is this all; not only is it now the case that secular law 135courts decide what may or may not be taught and practised in the Anglican Church, but they also claim to decide who shall and who shall not be admitted to its rites and sacraments. Lawyers are thus not only the doctors and ceremoniarii of Anglicanism, suspending or depriving ecclesiastics at pleasure, but they are also to be, in the last resort, the stewards of Anglican sacraments.

A case was lately pending before the Judicial Committee in which the action of a “priest” in refusing communion was reviewed and judged by the court. A parishioner of a Ritualist pastor having declared that he did not find in the Bible sufficient evidence for the existence of evil spirits to incline him to believe in the devil, the clergyman prohibited his coming for communion until he did believe in the devil. The parishioner wrote a complaint to the bishop, and the latter took his part against his parish “priest” and for the devil. The matter being referred to the Judicial Committee, the bishop’s verdict was confirmed in favor of the sceptical parishioner and of his Infernal Majesty.

Nor can any individual cases of this kind be matter of surprise when we reflect to what the doctrinal decisions of the supreme courts of the Anglican Establishment have, with the consent of her entire episcopate, as expressed in their famous “allocution” on the Public Worship Act, pledged her clergy. According to the final and irreversible authority acknowledged by that episcopate, the Church of England holds, 1, that the doctrine of baptismal regeneration is an open question; 2, that it is an open question whether every part of every book of Scripture is inspired; 3, that there is no “distinct declaration” in the formularies of that church on the subject of everlasting punishment, and that the words “everlasting death” in the exposition of the Lord’s Prayer given in the catechism “cannot be taken as necessarily declaring anything touching the eternity of punishment after the resurrection”; 4, that Anglican bishops are the creatures of English law and dependent on that law for their existence, rights, and attributes.^[22]

“The Church of England,” said Dr. Stanley, the Protestant Dean of Westminster, in a sermon recently preached at Battersea, “is what she is by the goodness of Almighty God and of his servant Queen Elizabeth.” If he had said, “of Henry VIII. and his daughter, Queen Elizabeth,” we could have agreed with him, particularly as the riper years of the Establishment continue so suitably to fulfil the promise of such parentage; but to Catholics there is a revolting profanity in classing together the goodness of God with that of one of the most implacable persecutors of his church—a persecutor, not from conviction of the justice, but the iniquity, of her cause, and from a persistent determination to extinguish in her realm the ancient faith, whose very existence was a condemnation of the state religion arranged by her father and Cranmer, improved by her brother and his Genevese assistants, and re-fashioned to her own liking by herself. The sentence pronounced by the Protestant historian Chalmers upon this powerful and unprincipled queen is that “she was a woman without chastity, a princess without honor, and a sovereign without 136faith”; and, as if by way of a satanic parody on the vision of the Immaculate Virgin in the Book of Revelations, we see Elizabeth, the offspring of an adulterous union, trampling under her despotic foot the Bride of Christ.

“The Church of England,” continued the dean, “was, it is true, a compromise,” and “he was not a true son thereof who used it as a weapon for promoting this or that doctrine, but, after the example of Elizabeth, and for the interests of the nation, used it as a broad shield under which he might work for good,”^[23] etc., etc. The sense of which, in plain English, appears to be that the said church prefers general indifference to doctrinal truth, the “interests of the nation” to the glory of God, and the “example of Elizabeth” to purity of faith and life.

But Dean Stanley represents one only of the four principal sections into which the Church of England has divided itself; and however complacently the “Broad” and even “Moderate High” Churchmen may regard the marshy nature of the ground in which the foundations of their faith, if faith it can be called, are laid, and congratulate themselves on the fact that it is neither land nor water, but something of both, there are earnest men who have no fancy for being amphibious, and who spare no pains and toil to drain away the stagnant waters from their morass, in the sincere conviction that beneath the miasma-breeding mosses there lies, for those who dig deep enough to find it, the imperishable rock.

Of this number seems to be the Rev. Arthur Tooth, vicar of St. James’, Hatcham, who is now in prison because he chooses to act upon the principle of “no compromise.” We honor a man who is willing to suffer for conscience’ sake, and to uphold the right of the church to decide in ecclesiastical causes, but at the same time we cannot but feel that Mr. Tooth is more conscientious than logical, and that by his present opposition he is breaking the solemn promise and oath which, as a clergyman of the state church, he took, at his ordination, to a state-church bishop.

Mr. Tooth, on account of certain ritualistic practices—i.e., the use of “Catholic” vestments, conducting the communion service so as to make it resemble as much as possible Holy Mass, having “a crucifix in the chancel, little winged figures on the communion-table, lighted candles on a ledge where he had been ordered not to place them, etc., etc.—was, by order of Lord Penzance and with the approval of his own bishop, Dr. Claughton of Rochester, interdicted from officiating again in the diocese. The writ of inhibition was served him on a Sunday morning before the commencement of the service; he not only took no notice of the writ, but also on the following (Christmas) day publicly resisted his substitute. Canon Gee had been appointed by the bishop to read the service in the place of Mr. Tooth, but, on his arriving at the church, the latter gentleman, backed by about forty of his male parishioners, met him at the door and refused to allow him to enter, upon which Canon Gee, 137after protesting against this insubordinate proceeding on the part of his refractory brother, was forced to retire. Having thus disposed of the episcopal delegate, the vicar proceeded to display an unusual pomp in the ceremonial. Six splendid banners were carried in procession, on one of which was embroidered the monogram of Our Blessed Lady, surrounded by the words, Sancta Dei Genitrix.” The church was crowded to suffocation, partly with worshippers, and also very largely by people who had come from curiosity, as was evident by their behavior no less than by their murmured expressions of ridicule or indignation; a crowd, not only of “roughs,” but numbering many well-dressed people, had assembled outside. On one occasion, the 14th of January, in particular, the scenes both within and without were disgraceful. “Inside,” we are told, “there was a good deal of fighting and scuffling, especially at the lower end,” while outside the crowd, besides breaking down the fences, shouting “No popery,” yelling, and in various ways demonstrating their inclination to break the laws as well as the parson did, had they not been kept in some abeyance by a strong body of three hundred police, joined in singing loudly the national anthem, vociferating with especial emphasis and vigor the line “Confound their knavish tricks”—improved by some to “popish tricks” in honor of the occasion. Some time after the service was over, so as to give the mob time to thin, the sight of Mr. Tooth issuing from the church under the protection of “twenty stout policemen of the F Division” had in it something almost ludicrous to those who reflected that all this commotion arose from the fact of his having spurned the “secular arm.”

When, on the 20th of January, the Rev. R. Chambers, who has been appointed curate in charge of the parish of Hatcham by the Bishop of Rochester, went, accompanied by the bishop’s apparitor, and, producing his license, requested Mr. Tooth to hand over to him through the church-wardens the possession of the church, the vicar replied that he refused to take any notice of the document or the application. He was therefore committed for contempt of court, and is now lodged in Horsemonger Lane jail.

It is not necessary to give more than two portions of the very temperate explanations with which Lord Penzance has accompanied his judgment—namely, those portions which are aimed at the delusions supposed to be most important in the controversy. These delusions are, in brief, 1st, that the new Public Worship Act was an innovation upon Anglican custom, and an invasion of its rights; 2d, that obedience should be rendered to an ecclesiastical and not to a lay superior. The answers of Lord Penzance to these assumptions are, substantially, as follows:

“1. It would be well if those who maintain these propositions were to read the statutes by which the ritual of the Church of England at the time of the Reformation was enforced—I mean the statutes establishing the two successive prayer-books of King Edward VI. and the prayer-book of Queen Elizabeth, which regulated the ritual of the reformed church for the first hundred years after its establishment. They would there find that a clergyman departing in the performance of divine service from the 138ritual prescribed in the prayer-book was liable to be tried at the assizes by a judge and jury (the bishop, if he pleased, assisting the judges), and, if convicted three times, was liable to be imprisoned for life. The intervention, therefore, of a temporal court to enforce obedience in matters of ritual is at least no novelty; the novelty, as far as the Church of England is concerned, is rather in the claim to be exempt from it.

“2. But suppose this claim, for the sake of argument, to be admitted; what, then, are the ecclesiastical courts to whose judgment the Ritualists would be willing to defer? Unless every clergyman is to settle the form of worship for himself, and there are to be as many forms of worship as there are parishes in the land, who is it that, in his opinion, is to determine what the rubrics of the prayer-book enjoin?—for we suppose him to consider himself bound by the directions of the prayer-book. What is the court to which he is willing to render obedience? Is it the court of his bishop? If so, he must surely be aware that by the ecclesiastical law of this country, as well before the Reformation as since, an appeal from the bishop’s court lies, and has always lain, to the court of the archbishop, this Court of Arches, whose jurisdiction he now denies. What question, therefore, is there of a secular court, or an invasion of the rights of the Church of England?^[24]” And the judgment passed by Lord Penzance was contained in the following words: “Applying these powers as I am bound to do, I have no hesitation in pronouncing Mr. Tooth to be contumacious, and in contempt for disobeying the inhibition pronounced by this court, and I direct the same to be signified to the queen in chancery, with a view to his imprisonment.”

And now the strife of tongues which preceded this climax was comparative calm to that which at present rages. All the winds of Æolus, each trying which can blow the hardest, seem let loose at once in the distracted Establishment. By the Ritualist party the confessor for disobedience in Horsemonger Lane jail is already dubbed “the martyr, Tooth”; while another party rejoices that, by the contumacy of this “parson in revolt,” the state church is “forced into a clear, practical assertion of her old and hitherto unquestioned right to restrain and punish disobedient and delinquent 'clerks.’” Further, the London Times, dilating after its own infallible fashion upon Mr. Tooth and “his pranks,” dares to aver that “to parade a banner calling the Virgin Mary the 'Mother of God’ is little less than sheer blasphemy.”

139At a large meeting of the “English Church Union” it became evident that the changes in law procedure produced by the Public Worship Regulation Act are producing a murmur in favor of “disestablishment” within the Church of England herself. One of the reverend speakers at this meeting said that “the issue had now merged from one about the color of a stole to a question of church and state,” and the honorable chairman agreed that “establishment might cost too dear.” Archdeacon Denison declared that this case of “dear Arthur Tooth” would prove to be “a life-and-death struggle with Protestantism,” thus making the old mistake of putting mere ritualism in the place of the Catholic Church. Canon Carter moved that “the Church Union denies that the secular power has authority in matters purely spiritual,” upon which a journal reminds him that, from the days of the Reformation, it has been one of the conditions on which the state church enjoyed the emoluments and privileges of establishment that her clergy should perform certain duties in a way laid down by law. Whether, as in the case of Mr. Tooth, they have or have not done so is a matter which the law leaves a particular court to decide. If Mr. Tooth does not relish the action of these tribunals, two courses are open to him, and only two. Either he may give up those practices which they declare obnoxious within the pale of the Established Church, or he may leave the Establishment and continue them elsewhere. The latter step would entail the sacrifice of the endowment, or, as the Ritualists would say, it would involve the guilt of schism; in which case the whole matter resolves itself into a choice of sins: the clergyman must either commit the sin of obeying Lord Penzance, and so retain the endowment, or he must commit the sin of “schism” and fling the endowment away. Thus the Church Unionists are by no means logical in comparing their present position to that of Chalmers, Buchanan, Guthrie, Cunningham, and other leaders of the Free Kirk of Scotland previously to 1843; for these men gave up all thought of state endowment, or even of ministering in buildings dependent on the state, and purchased the independence of their ministrations at the cost of all state temporalities. This is a very different matter from attempting to have the temporalities and the independence together.^[25]

Another observation made by Canon Carter was, though not in itself more true, yet, for him, much more to the point—namely, that “the only persecution now carried on in England is against the High-Church party.” It is on this fact that the Ritualists stand triumphant. They can honestly plead that they, the High-Church party, have done more than all the other parties put together for the revival of faith and devotion in England. They can also plead that they are men of education, of courage and energy and self-denying zeal, and that to them is due whatever residuum is left of Catholic sentiment and tradition in the Establishment. The marvel is that any of these really earnest men should continue so blind to their anomalous position.

140On the same day that the English Church Union held its assembly a meeting of the ultra-Protestant school took place at the Wellington Hall, Islington, where about one hundred and twenty clergymen and laymen partook of breakfast, after which they proceeded to deliver themselves of a large amount of the peculiar and incoherent insipidities with which the readers of the Rock must be painfully familiar. One specimen will suffice, which, as our readers will perceive, is not lacking in the unctuous accusations in which the “Evangelicals” are apt to excel: “As in Germany,” they said, “the Jesuits devoted all their self-denying energies to opposing the spread of the true doctrines, so here in England there was an able and resolute body of men who opposed themselves to the true principles of religion, and who, by services rendered attractive to the eye and ear, appealed by the senses to the understanding. Many of these men were no doubt sincere, and were thus unconsciously doing the work of Satan. This was the powerful opposing force with which the Evangelical body of the Church of England had to contend.”

Now, we must beg leave to observe that for these “Evangelical” gentlemen to talk of Ritualists as unconsciously doing the work of Satan is simply absurd. Did not the “beam in their own eye” blind them, we would ask them to take a glance backward and think of forty years ago, when, through the length and breadth of the land, they locked up their churches from Sunday afternoon to the following Sunday morning, and sometimes even longer; for the writer can recall three villages (there may or may not have been many more) in Leicestershire alone where, less than forty years ago, there was only one service on the Sunday, and that alternately in the morning and afternoon. We have heard of the wag who chalked on the church door of an Evangelical rector, “Le Bon Dieu est sorti: Il ne reviendra que dimanche prochain.” And truly, if the good God did come back, it would not be, in many instances, to find his house “swept and garnished.”

Forty years ago! Sitting in the old family pew in the chancel of A ... stone church, through the long, monotonous sermons of the worthy rector, whose favorite subjects were “saving faith” and abuse of popery, what a help it was to patient endurance to watch the merry, loud-voiced sparrows fluttering in and out of the broken diamond panes of the chancel windows, through which long sprays of ivy crept and clung lovingly up the poor old walls, bare of everything but whitewash, of the once Catholic church—walls that the damp of many an autumn and winter had dyed with streaks of green, deeper and brighter in hue than the faded, ink-stained rag of moth-eaten green baize that covered the rickety wooden table standing where, in old days, the most holy Sacrifice had been offered upon a Catholic altar. Childhood, before opportunities for comparison have been afforded, is not hard to please, and we used to think that that verdant chancel might have been in the mind of the sweet Psalmist of Israel when he sang, “The sparrow hath found her a house, and the swallow a nest, where she may lay her young: even thine altars, O Lord of Hosts!” And yet our worthy rector (a rich pluralist with a large family) was a kind-hearted, easy, amiable man, and not in any 141way addicted to the hunting and drinking practices of certain of his clerical neighbors; his house was the perfection of refined not overloaded luxury, and the well-kept gardens of that most pleasant of rectories were a paradise of smooth lawns, gay parterres, and shady shrubberies sloping down to the banks of the winding Soar. The rector led a mildly studious life when in the country (for half his year was spent in London), visited much among the “county families,” and shyly and rarely entered the cottages of the village; but religion in that village was well-nigh dead. If amiable clergymen of this stamp are not “unconsciously doing the work of Satan” themselves, they at any rate give Satan plenty of time and opportunity to do his own work himself among their flock, and to do it very effectually, too.

Yet it is the descendants of men like these who are foremost in groaning down and persecuting the self-denying, hard-working clergy who are always at their posts! The preachers of sentiment are furious against the upholders of the necessity of dogmatic truth. The idlers in family and social circles are desperate against enthusiasts who at least try to hear confessions and to be priests. We cannot admire the consistency of the Ritualists—for unhappily it does not exist—but the inconsistency of their “Evangelical” accusers is simply “the impeachment of energy by twaddle.”

A correspondent of the London Times calls attention to the fact that while Mr. Tooth, who is perfectly orthodox as regards the creeds of the church, is prosecuted for extremes in ritual, a brother clergyman is allowed to preach open infidelity from the pulpit unmolested. “The Public Worship Bill,” he writes, “has been passed to repress crimes so grave as over-magnificence in the services, but does not deign to meddle in so small a matter as that of vindicating the Divinity of our Saviour, which is fearlessly impugned in a pulpit which the Bishop of London himself has condescended to occupy.”

It is much to be doubted whether the Anglican bishops, when they obtained from Parliament the Public Worship Regulation Act, had the remotest idea of the tempest which, Prospero-like, they were summoning around them, but which, unlike Shakspere’s magician, they would be powerless to allay. And if this is the result obtained by the act just mentioned, a still more recent one, the “Scotch Church Patronage Act,” another measure intended by Lord Beaconsfield as an additional buttress to ecclesiastical establishments, has produced similar storms in the North. It has led to proceedings in connection with the “settlement” of a parish clergyman at New Deer in Aberdeenshire which recall the furious battles between the “intrusion” and non-intrusion parties that split the Established Church of Scotland into fragments thirty-four years ago, and has besides almost succeeded in uniting three-fourths of Scotland into a solid disestablishment phalanx. The Presbyterian Kirk, moreover, in addition to subjects of contention presented from without, has certain characteristic squabbles of its own. A question having recently arisen on the subject of unfermented wines in the celebration of what is called communion, the session has maintained that it “has a right to change the elements of 142communion, and in so doing is discharging its proper functions.” Why not? If local churches can make their own doctrines, what, we should like to know, is to hinder them from making their own sacraments as well?

Our object in this article has been merely to sketch the present condition of affairs in the English Establishment; but as we have in concluding taken a momentary glance at Scotland also, we cannot leave unnamed the Green Isle of the West, whose centuries of suffering and oppression have at last, we earnestly trust, given place to times of peace and long prosperity.

Should the reviving hopes of many hearts be realized, and the Green Tree of England’s ancient church again spread its vigorous branches over the land that was once “Our Lady’s Dowry”; and should the grand old northern abbeys, Melrose, Jedburgh, Paisley, and even, it may be, Iona, receive again as in past ages their cowled and consecrated sons, still England and Scotland will have but returned to the faith which Ireland has never lost, and which no human or Satanic power has been able to wrench from her. No! For, rather than let the cross be torn from her bleeding embrace, she suffered herself to be nailed upon it.

THE ASHES OF THE PALMS.

The Disciple.

“Are ashes scarce that palms must burn,

Those sweet memorials of the only day

Of triumph that thou hadst, my Prince,

Upon this woeful earth?”

The Master.

“All glory unto ashes, child, must turn,

Of which this deathly world can make display.

These ashes on proud heads convince

Proud hearts of glory’s worth.”

The Disciple.

“If palms to ashes must,

So be 't. I still will live to praise,

Though glory’s gage should burn.”

The Master.

“E’en thou art naught but dust.

The mark thy forehead bears betrays

To what thou shalt return.”

Ash Wednesday

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NEW PUBLICATIONS.

An Old World as Seen through Young Eyes; or, Travels Around the World. By Ellen H. Walworth. New York: Sadlier & Co. 1877.

Every school-girl who reads this book will wish that she had an uncle who would send for her one day, while she is dreaming over her lesson-book, and invite her to accompany him around the world. This is what happened to Miss Ellen Walworth in June, 1873, and the volume before us is composed of the letters which she wrote home during her tour, and which were published as they were received in an Albany newspaper, attracting at the time considerable attention. They are the production of a school-girl of fifteen, but slightly altered from their original form, and this makes their peculiarity and their special interest. The course of her travels was through Scotland, Ireland, England, Belgium, the country of the Rhine, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, China, Japan, and home by way of San Francisco. The letters are just what they should be—natural, lively, juvenile descriptions of the little incidents of travel and the scenes witnessed, with the freshness and vividness of letters written at the time and on the spot to which each one successively belongs. Two extremely interesting letters of Father Walworth, written with his well-known charm of style and minute accuracy of statement, are included in the collection. One of these contains a description of the Coptic rite, the other an account of the present state of the mission in Japan, with many interesting historical particulars. Our young folk will find this a very entertaining volume, and older people may read it with pleasure. It is a book very creditable to the young author, and also an evidence of the kind of culture which is given to young girls by the accomplished ladies at Kenwood. We subjoin one specimen of the style in which the letters are written, not at all childish, although suffused with a childlike gayety:

“I remember what dispute arose among the passengers the day we went down Lake Zurich. There were mountains all around us, but from the end of the lake towards which we were steering rose quite a high range. Over their summits the clouds extended up some distance, and, strange to say, a succession of peaks were to be seen above the clouds, suspended, as it were, in the sky, and having no connection with the peaks below, except a close resemblance in form. Their outlines were distinctly marked against the clear blue sky, but they had a strange, chalky, light appearance, as if they could be blown away by a breath. Some of the passengers said they were merely unusual forms taken by the clouds; others insisted that they were a reflection of the peaks below—a species of Fata Morgana. A few old Alp frequenters, among them our friend of the gravel acquaintance, ventured to assert that they were real mountains, but their idea was laughed down as ridiculous. While the dispute was the hottest, the wind, by a strange freak, dispersed the clouds almost in an instant, and we had before us one of the mighty ranges of Switzerland, beside which our mountains of the lake shore were mere hillocks.

“From the foot of Lake Zurich we took the railroad carriages for Ragatz and Chur. This journey is among my most vivid recollections of Switzerland: for we were following the courses of the valleys and streams through that wonderful range of mountains that we had seen from the lake. We twisted ourselves into every possible position to see the snow-capped summits directly above us, and our fellow-travellers—English, French, and Germans—became so excited over the scenery that they would call out to each other—for, though the language might not be understood, the gestures were unmistakable—and they would rush from one side of the cars to the other, even dropping down on the floor, to get a sight from the car-windows of the very tip-top of the mountains. The enthusiasm seemed contagious; there were haughty Englishmen, stolid Germans, fashionable young ladies, 144and confirmed dandies equally forgetful of appearances. Indeed, as we passed peak after peak, now clustered together, now opening and showing beautiful valleys between, or dark, shaded chasms, the jagged rocks taking new shapes and hues every instant, it was like watching a grand and ever-varying kaleidoscope.”

Musica Ecclesiastica. A collection of Masses, Vespers, Hymns, Motets, etc., for the service of the Catholic Church. New York: J. Fischer & Bro.

Of this publication the Part 16 sent us, containing motets for singing at the Benediction of the Blessed Sacrament, is a collection well suited for use at that function. But we must object to the title of the general work, as neither this nor any figured music can be sung by ecclesiastics, as such, officiating in any service of the Catholic Church. The only melody properly styled musica ecclesiastica is the Gregorian chant. Definitions are always of grave moment. Suppose that some one of our enterprising publishers should present the public with a manual of prayers such as the St. John’s Manual, the Key of Heaven, or the Mission Book under the title of “Manual for the Clergy, consisting of prayers, litanies, hymns, and other devotions for the service of the Catholic Church”; it is plain that it would not receive the imprimatur of a Catholic school-boy.

Under a proper title we give our hearty encouragement to the work which our German Catholic brethren abroad and here in the United States have within the last few years pursued with such praiseworthy zeal in the composition of music for the use of our choirs, which, if we do not think it to be the most suitable and most consistent in tone with the letter and spirit of the Catholic ritual, is decidedly a vast improvement upon the sensual, operatic style of music whose melodies and harmonies have emasculated the devotion and vitiated the taste of, we regret to say, almost the majority of Catholics in modern times.

The Comprehensive Geography. Nos. 1, 2, and 3. New York: P. O’Shea, 37 Barclay St. 1876.

We are inclined to think that this series is the best of the many which have of late years been presented to the public, and certainly do not know of any which are superior to it in any respect except in the department of physical geography; and it is as complete even in this as it could well be without an additional volume specially devoted to that subject.

The feature which should particularly recommend it to Catholics is the prominence which it gives to facts connected with religion. There is no branch of study for the young in which it is so important that religion should be prominent as geography, with the exception, of course, of history. Even the best text-books hitherto published are perhaps a little too reticent in this respect. The desire to accomplish this object has in the present work led to the introduction of some rather unnecessary details; but this is a fault on the right side.

We hope that this series will become popular, as it deserves to be, in Catholic schools.

The Complete Office of Holy Week according to the Roman Missal and Breviary. In Latin and English. New edition. Revised and enlarged. 18mo, pp. 563. New York: The Catholic Publication Society. 1877.

This edition of Holy Week is a new and corrected one; it is printed from large type on good paper, and is well and substantially bound. Moreover, it is complete, containing all the offices of the church from Palm Sunday to Easter Tuesday, inclusive. This edition is the only correct one now published in this country. It has been carefully read by persons competent to guarantee against the gross blunders that are apt to disfigure Catholic works of the greatest importance. The price is so low that the book is within the reach of every one, thus enabling them to follow easily the services of the church during Holy Week.

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