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THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH

THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH

Its History
Its Prayer Book
Its Ministry

FIVE LECTURES

BY
THOMAS F. GAILOR, S.T.D.
BISHOP OF TENNESSEE

MILWAUKEE
THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO.
1914

Copyright by
THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO.
1914

INTRODUCTORY NOTE
I have consented to the publication of these lec
tures at the request of many people who heard them,
and especially of the members of the Men's Bible Class
of St. Paul's Church, Chattanooga, for whom the lec
tures on the Prayer Book were written.
It is thought that ¦ the information presented in
this brief and popular form may prove useful to per
sons enquiring about the Church, and who may in this
way be led on to wider and fuller investigation.
As the lectures were delivered at various times, and
to different congregations, they necessarily involve
some repetitions; but for the uninstructed reader this
may be an advantage; and therefore they are allowed
to stand as they were originally prepared.
Thomas F. Gailor,
Easter, 1914- Bishop of Tennessee.

TO
THE VEEY EEV. JAMES GKAIK MOEEIS, M.A.,
DEAN OF ST. MABY's CATTIEDEAL, MEMPHIS,
TENNESSEE, THIS LITTLE BOOK IS AFFEC
TIONATELY DEDICATED

CONTENTS
The History of the Church of England . . 1
The Book of Common Prayer  37
The Book of Common Prayer as a Product of
the Eeformation  59
The Book of Common Prayer and the Doc
trinal and Practical Abuses Which it
Superseded  11
The Historic Episcopate: Its Meaning and
Value. A sermon preached at the consecra
tion of the Bev. James B. Winchester, D.D.,
as Bishop Coadjutor of Arkansas ... 95

A Brief List of
BOOKS FOR FURTHER STUDY
I — Historical
The Historimis and the English Reformation. Littell. 1 vol.
Reformation of the Church of England. J. H. Blunt. 2 vols.
History of the Church of England. Canon Dixon. 6 vols.
English Reformation. Bishop Collins. 1 vol.
Introduction to History of Church of England. Rev. H. 0.
Wakeman. 1 vol.
Lectures on Reformation. Aubrey Moore. 1 vol.
Ecclesia Anglicana. Jennings. 1 vol.
The Church in America. Bishop Coleman. 1 vol.
Eighteen Centuries of the Church in England. A. H. Hore.
1 vol. II — Pbayeb Book
History of the Book of Common Prayer. F. Procter, M.A.
1 vol.
The Book of Common Prayer. Samuel Hart, D.D., LL.D.
1 vol.
Annotated Book of Common Prayer. J. H. Blunt, D.D.
1 vol.
The Book of Common Prayer. J. H. Benton. 1 vol.
The Church in the Prayer Book. Temple. 1 vol.
The Holy Spirit and the Prayer Book. Haughton. 1 vol.
Ill — Theology and Ministry
The Body of Christ. Gore. 1 vol.
The Incarnation. Wilberforce. 1 vol.
Foundations of the Creed. Goodwyn. 1 vol.
The Christian Church. Darwell Stone. 1 vol.
Ministerial Priesthood. Moberly. 1 vol.
The Christian Ministry. Gore. 1 vol.

THE HISTORY OF THE CHURCH
OF ENGLAND
HE religion of Christ is Catholic — a
universal religion ; that is to say, it is
not limited in its appeal or consola
tions to any race or age or class or
clime. To every man and woman that is born
upon the earth it says : "You are one people, one
family, one in hope and purpose, one in the Re
demption by the purple blood of Christ."
And the appropriateness of Christianity to the
needs of all races of men is one of the strongest
evidences of its divine origin; although to the
superficial observer, it confuses the history of its
development. As a matter of fact the great insti
tutions and truths of the Gospel are like a stream
flowing through the wilderness of human life and
taking color from the banks through which it has
to pass. The truths, the institutions, remain the
same; but the different races of men have given
them a variety of interpretation and expression.
The brightness and joyousness of tempera
ment, the intellectual subtlety and playful fancy,

¦2 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
of the Greek, demanded and created a type of
Christian thought and worship easily distin
guished from that produced by the less intellectual
and more practical, the more serious and law-
loving Eoman; and the Christianity of the Teu
tonic people has ever differed, in its external ex
pression at least, from that of the Latin or Greek
or Slavonic Eace. We are Teutons. The race to
which we owe our language and our social and
political institutions is the Teutonic Eace; and
therefore the story of the development of these
institutions is full of interest and instruction.
The history of the Church of England, like
the history of the English language and people,
is complicated by the existence of many separate
factors of influence, that from time to time have
checked or retarded or changed the course of its
development. Yet its age, out-dating that of any
national Church in the modern world; its insular
position; its comparative freedom through long
periods from external direction or control; have
afforded it unequalled opportunity for the culti
vation of its own special and peculiar characteris
tics, so that it presents to the student the fairest
example of the National idea in Christianity that
can be found anywhere to-day. Erom the very
first the history of the English Church has been
closely identified with the growth and progress of

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 3
Anglo-Saxon liberties and Anglo-Saxon law; and
the proper understanding of this history will
greatly contribute to the right estimate of both
English and American political institutions. It
cannot be said that our people at large fully ap
preciate the importance of this Church history.
Eeligious and sectional prejudices have both com
bined to misrepresent the facts. Titles, dress,
and social usages have obscured in the popular
mind the real purpose and reason of the Church
of our fathers. Bishops in the House of Lords —
and Clergymen dependent upon their Patrons for
their livings; the collection of tithes (which some
people wrongly think are by act of Parliament),
and the bygone legal disability of Dissent — these
things have made the very name of the State
Church, or the King's Church, unpopular among
many of our American people, and have led them
to forget the real nature and character of that
institution of which these things are only the un
necessary, unfortunate accidents. The object of
this chapter is to sketch, as briefly and simply as
may be, the history of the English Church, and
to show, if possible, what is her due and lawful
position to-day in Christendom.
The history naturally divides itself into dis
tinct periods, well defined and easy to determine.

4 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
They are:
(1) The British period from the Roman Con
quest of Britain to the Mission of Augus
tine, 596 A. D. ;
(2) The Saxon period to the Norman Con
quest, 1066 A. D. ;
(3) The Anglo-Roman period to the Repudia
tion of the Papal Supremacy, A. D.
1534;
(4) The period of Transition and Reconstruc
tion from A. D. 1534 to A. D. 1662 ; and,
(5) The Modern period.
THE BRITISH CHURCH
The early British Period need not detain us
long. The evidence is meagre and comparatively
uninteresting. ISTo less than three theories as to
the manner of the introduction of Christianity
into Britain have been held and advocated by emi
nent scholars. There is strong enough evidence
to make the learned Bishop of Lincoln, Christo
pher Wordsworth, declare that it is probable that
St. Paul himself preached the Gospel in Britain
about A. D. 64. (Wordsworth's "Introduction to
Pastoral Epistles.")
The most favored tradition in England was
that which assigned the preaching of Christ and
the founding of Glastonbury Abbey to Joseph of
Arimathea. Queen Elizabeth and Archbishop

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 5
Parker (see Hore's "Eighteen Centuries" etc.,
p. 10) incidentally appeal to this as received
tradition. The English Bishops at the Council
of Basle, A. D. 1439, successfully claimed prec
edence on account of it.
The Roman Catholic historian, Baronius
(1557), has a curious marginal gloss, in which it
is recorded that Joseph of Arimathea went to
Britain by way of Gaul and founded the Church
there, and that the authority for this statement
is a manuscript in the Vatican library.
There is very strong evidence for the opinion
that the Claudia, wife of Pudens, mentioned by
St. Paul (II Tim. 4), is the same Claudia men
tioned by the Roman poet Martial, and was a
British princess, educated in the Christian Eaith
by Timothy at Rome (see R. H. Cole, "The An
glican Church").
It is sufficient for our purpose to suppose that
Christianity came into Britain through the
Church in Gaul somewhere towards the end of the
first century. TertuUian mentions the fact before
the end of the second century, and we know that
some of the victims of the Diocletian persecution,
St. Alban for example, were members of the
British Church. The names of British Bishops
appear in the records of the Council of Aries
(A. D. 340), Sardica (A. D. 350), and Rimini

6 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
(A. D. 352), at the last of which we are told that
most of them refused to be entertained at the pub
lic expense and provided for their own necessities.
The British Church is specially commended by
Athanasius (A. D. 329) as having been loyal to
the Creed and decisions of the first Council of
Mcea. From the information we can glean from
the writings of Gildas, Nennius, and Bede, and
from statements of Italians and Saxons who were
unfriendly, it appears that the growth of the
British Church was hindered by ignorance and
contention, and by the quick, excitable, and war
like character of the people. Yet the names of
not a few very noble characters still shine out in
her annals that have outlasted the changes of
centuries. British ideas and British institutions for good
or evil were submerged by the Saxon and Danish
invasions. Our inheritance from them may be
more than we can define, but it appears to be
small. As a rule, in our social and political his
tory and in our language there is nothing more
than the survival of some common custom, word,
or phrase to prove that we were Britons. So it
is with the British Church. The very word which
we, as English-speaking people, use to describe
the Christian Society — the word "Church" — we
probably get as an inheritance from ancient Brit-

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 7
ain. It is a Greek word — with Greek associa
tions — connoting a great original conception of
Christianity. It is characteristic of the Teutonic
race that we put the emphasis upon the corporate
relation to our Lord's Person and not upon the
fact that we are "elect" or "called." We say
Kuriake — Kirk — Church — "belonging to the
Lord," and not Ecclesia or Eglise, "called out."
THE SAXON PERIOD
596—1066 A. D.
In the year 596 A. D. the great and good
Bishop Gregory I. of Rome, stirred by the story
of the flood of heathenism brought into Britain
by the Saxon Conquest, sent the monk Augustine
to convert the people if possible and establish the
Church there. It is not certain that Augustine
ever came into personal contact with the British
Bishops. If he did, it is not strange that cordial
relations were not established between them.
Augustine was narrow, supercilious and childish.
But he did his best. He was earnest and sincere.
He contrasts painfully and pathetically in both
wisdom and temper with Pope Gregory. But he
converted Ethelbert, the King of Kent, and
during his lifetime maintained the Christian re
ligion in that Kingdom. Meanwhile the Keltic
missionaries, recovering from their terror of the
Saxons, began to make their way from Scotland

8 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
into the Kingdom of JSTorthumbria ; and there is
no missionary record that surpasses in picturesque
beauty and glorious self-sacrifice the life of Aidan
and Chadd, and the foundation of Lindisfarne.
I believe that the actual statistics can be pro
duced, as Mr. Gladstone says, to show that more
real and permanent work among the Saxons was
accomplished by the Keltic, that is, by the Britons,
than by the Italian missionaries — but that is a
question by itself. It makes no difference whether
we credit the conversion of the Saxons to Augus
tine and his followers or to the Kelts. We need
not fear to give Gregory and Rome the glory.
The Papal Dominion of Hildebrand and Inno
cent had not been founded in the year A. D. 596 ;
and if all the Popes had been like Gregory, and
if Rome had always been the Rome of Gregory,
there would have been no rejection of the Roman
name. In the year 660 A. D. the Saxon Church had
a varying prosperity in the Seven separate King
doms into which England was divided. It was
virtually unorganized and inefficient. Its leaders
were separated by sectional jealousies, and racial
prejudices — Briton against Roman — and individ
ual Bishops yielded themselves naturally to the
whims of the Kings, to whom they happened to
be subject. In 667 A. D., Theodore, a Greek,

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 9
of Tarsus in Cilicia, was consecrated Archbishop
of Canterbury. He came to England in A. D.
668. He went immediately to work to organize
the Church on national lines. He found dioceses
identical with Kingdoms. There were no settled
Clergy and no definite territorial subdivisions.
He reformed all this, subdivided the dioceses, and
consecrated a Bishop for each. He refused to
recognize old British customs as distinct from
Roman, and prohibited their champions from
holding office in the Church. He made some
mistakes, no doubt; but he was a great Arch
bishop, and to him more than to any other man
the English Church owes its organization. Into
every detail of worship and discipline his influ
ence extended. If he did not invent, he certainly
encouraged and extended the Parochial system.
He held two national Councils — one at Hertford
in A. D. 673, and one at Hatfield in A. D. 680 —
at the latter of which the decrees of the four
General Councils were formally accepted. Thus
the English Church became one for all the nation,
with definite organization, at a time when, polit
ically and socially, the people were divided into
several Kingdoms. And thus the State of Eng
land did not originally establish the Church, but
the Church established the State.
As Stubbs, the author of the Constitutional

10 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
History of England, says, "the Church in this
respect is older that the State and formed the
basis of the National union that followed." (See
"Select Charters," etc., p. 10.)
The history of the Saxon period is little more
than the story of the gradual growth one into the
other of the Church and State of England. The
Bishops were the leaders in both. English
Churchmen became famous on the Continent.
English Missionaries penetrated the German wil
derness and gave their lives for Christ. English
Monks built up great educational institutions at
home from which went forth masters, like Alcuin,
to lay the foundation, in the schools of Charle
magne, for the University system of Europe.
During this three hundred years the Saxon
Church developed its own spirit, its own laws,
customs, doctrine and ritual. It was almost en
tirely free from any foreign influence. One of
its Bishops — Dunstan — on a very public occasion
openly repudiated a Papal sentence. It was in
a wonderful and unique way a National Church,
national in its comprehensiveness, for all English
men were members, as well as in its exclusiveness.
As Stubbs says, "The development of the
Church was free and spontaneous. The use of
the native tongue in prayers and sermons is con
tinuous : the observance of native festivals also

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 11
and the reverenoe paid to Native Saints. If the
stimulating force of foreign intercourse was want
ing, the intensity with which the Church threw
itself into the interest of the nation more than
made up for what was lacking. The Church was
the school and nursery of patriots — the depository
of old traditional glories, and the refuge of the
persecuted. Its liberty was the only form, in the
evil days that followed, in which the traditions
of the ancient freedom lingered, and the Church
had its duty to educate the growing nation for
its distant destiny as the teacher and herald of
freedom to all the world." (Constitut. Hist.
v. I., p. 268.) THE ANGLO-ROMAN PERIOD
1066 A. D.— 1534 A. D.
More than nine generations separate the
Church of Theodore from the Church of Anselm,
and to the steadily strengthening spirit of national
love and pride, the English Church owed much
of her independence, and her restiveness under
foreign dictation and influence during the period
of the Norman rule.
Since the Council of Hatfield in A. D. 680,
when the simple statement of the Ecumenical
Councils was the sufficient standard of faith for
the National Church, a great change had come
over that Church at Rome, which was rightly

12 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
regarded as the Mother Church of Western Chris
tendom. Charlemagne and Leo III. together had
launched the idea of the Holy Roman Empire in
the year 800 A. D., and jealousy for the glory
of this fiction had now for two centuries enlisted
all the efforts in power and craft of Popes and
German Emperors. More and more it seemed
that the Christian religion would itself be lost in
the contest between secular tyranny and Ecclesi
astical adroitness. As the power of the Emperors
increased in material resources and concentration,
the claims of the Bishops of Rome rose to meet
and resist it. The Forged Decretals appeared in
the ninth century. The appeal to the Donation
of Constantine and the Sardican Canon was freely
and recklessly made as early as the tenth century.
And yet Rome declined. The Papacy itself was
threatened with entire secularization and extinc
tion as a spiritual power. The pitiful career of
the debauched and lawless Theophylact, as Pope
Benedict IX., seemed to be the last act in a
tragedy wherein the Church died, and her author
ity went to a half barbarous Emperor and all her
remaining piety to the Monastic Orders.
From this wreck of religion and morals, the
Tuscan Monk, Hildebrand, rescued the Church
on the Continent of Europe. His control of the
Papacy began in 1048 A. D. with Leo IX., and

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 13
lasted through the reigns of four Popes until
1073 A. D., when he, himself, was ready for the
Pontifical Chair. Hildebrand was a strong, eager,
masterful character, wholly in earnest and wholly
consecrated to one idea. On the ruins of the holy
league of Charlemagne and Leo he built up and
organized a great new secular dominion, guarded
by spiritual sanctions, coining its own money,
subsidizing its armies, protecting spiritual in
terests with secular penalties — a dominion com
pact, complete, tremendous, and destined to bring
the whole of Western Christendom under its in
fluence and control.1 In A. D. 1054 the Ancient
Greek Church was driven into schism by the
terms of communion imposed upon it. The youth
of the Emperor Henry encouraged the disregard
of the Imperial authority. The enforced celibacy
of the Clergy and the attack on the national Moz-
arabic liturgy of Spain, were parts of the great
design, which gave the Papacy the unity of or
ganization and the military precision, that sent
legates plenipotentiary to every Court and held
them absolutely subject to the authority at Rome.
These were the conditions under which Wil
liam the Norman made his invasion into England,
under the form of law and with the expressed

1 See Phillimore, International Laic, p. 53.

14 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
sanction of the Pope. The Norman Conquest
extended both to Church and State. Every
Saxon Bishop, with one exception, was deposed
and his See given to a foreigner. The free Saxon
Church of England became in name and govern
ment, not a sister as aforetime, but a subject to
the Roman See. The history of the Anglo-
Norman or Anglo-Roman Church corresponds
almost precisely with the history of the decline
and the revival of national feeling. As long as
the Normans held Saxons in slavery and made
the French language the language of the Court,
and regarded England only as a temporary abiding
place, so long did the Church of England appear
to be a willing vassal of the Papacy. The record
becomes confused with the conflicts of Roman
Archbishops and Norman Sovereigns; and, as in
the time of Theodore, the national idea found
lodgment in the minds of Churchmen before it
was realized by the Kings. King John, for ex
ample, was a foreigner, an alien, who was ready
to surrender his crown and throne to an Italian
Potentate; but Stephen Langton, Archbishop
though he was, with the Papal Pallium — Stephen
Langton, with the patriotic instinct of an Eng
lishman who loved England and the English
Church, was willing to defy, and did defy, a
Papal sentence in order to wrest from John the

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 15
Magna Charta, the Charter of Ecclesiastical as
well as of Civil liberty, and the first sentence in
the Charter asserts the freedom of the Church
of England. As a rule, however, we must look
for the true national spirit in the lower Clergy
and in the lower house of Convocation. The
really Norman Kings and the foreign Ecclesi
astics, who occupied English Bishoprics, repre
senting the Pope, conspired to repress and sub
jugate the parochial Clergy. The new Mendicant
Orders, also, independent emissaries of the Pope,
were a continual menace to the Clergy and their
influence. In many instances the Archbishops,
fighting for the spiritual privileges of the Church
against the royal tyranny, win our reluctant sym
pathy, even when they appeal to Rome to sustain
them. It is hard to choose between Beckett and
King Henry — although we know that Henry's
victory, though temporary, was best for the
Church in the end. We are drawn to Archbishop
Anselm and we are disgusted with King Eufus,
although we know that every advantage that An
selm gained was one more link in the chain that
bound the Church to Rome.
Broadly, however, as we view it now, the
trend of affairs was plain. The Roman rule was
tried in England and it failed. Gradually the
Clergy of England, the Bishops as well as others,

16 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
found that appeal to Rome was fruitless ; that her
power was worthless; that when she had the most
abundant opportunity, the Curia was helpless to
meet, to remedy, the evils of the time. Gradually
the Norman Kings became English Kings, who
spoke the English language and looked on Eng
land as their home. Thus the National spirit
grew and strengthened. And with every increase
of it the interest of the Church of England and
the interest of the crown of England became a
common cause against the foreigner. It was
bound to be only a question of time when the
ancient Saxon liberties and the ancient Saxon in
dependence should reassert themselves, and the
temporary and accidental bondage should be
ended. So weak and politic, so subservient to the
royal authority had the Court of Rome become
in the thirteenth century, that, had it not been
galvanized by the new theological disputes of
that period, it would have ceased to act in Eng
land of its own incompetency. But the awaken
ing hour was coming. Papal appeals and papal
authority in England were doomed. The reign
of Edward III. (1327-1377) marks a distinct
epoch. For the first time the English language
became recognized as the language of the Court.
For the first time the Norman Kings became iden-

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 17
tified, in thought, in ambition, and interest with
their English subjects.
In A. D. 1343 the introduction of Papal bulls
was forbidden. In A. D. 1343 the agents of the
Avignon Court were ignominiously driven out of
England. In A. D. 1351 the act became a per
petual statute. In A. D. 1352 the purchasers of
Papal Provisions were outlawed. In A. D. 1366
John Wiclif began his efforts for reform, which,
whatever their defects, were for the English Bible
and the English language; for the national and
ecclesiastical independence of the English people.
In A. D. 1392 nearly sixty English Prelates,
representatives of both the secular and regular
Clergy, voted unanimously with Parliament for
the Praemunire statute ("Praemunire" — "prae-
monere-facias," i. c, Cause A. B. to be fore
warned to appear and answer, etc.) — a statute
that in its sweeping enactments against Rome, if
strictly enforced, practically abolished the exercise
by the Pope of any jurisdiction in England with
out the consent of the King. The Ecclesiastical
condition of England, as regards the Papacy,
during the thirty years at the close of the four
teenth and the beginning of the fifteenth century
was almost exactly the condition occupied by the
Church during the reign of Henry VIII. after
the fall of Wolsey. And it is an interesting co-

18 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
incidence that two great Masters of English
Poetry flourished when the Church and Nation
were free from foreign control. Chaucer closes
the fourteenth century and Shakespeare the reign
of Elizabeth. Whatever may be said about it, the independ
ence claimed and secured in the fourteenth cen
tury was the entering wedge of that Reform
Movement which we are wont to refer to the
reign of Henry VIII. The statute of Praemunire
was never repealed. For a long period perhaps
it was never used. It meant at least this much:
the standing declaration on the statute book that
the Papal control over England was utterly in
compatible with the spirit, the life, the thought
and hope of the English people. The English
revolt from the Papacy really began in A. D. 1392.
THE PERIOD OF REFORM AND RECONSTRUCTION
The sixteenth century opens upon a new Eng
land. The efforts of the four Councils in the
fourteenth century to reform the Church had been
found fruitless. The only Pope who wanted re
form, Adrian VI., had died suddenly, with sig
nificant mystery, and carried the hope away with
him from the Papal Chair. The Pagan renais
sance, with its classic intellectualism and moral
selfishness, had begun to cultivate the spirit of
Criticism. Martin Luther was studying at Erfurt,

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 19
preparing for his conversion to personal religion.
The Wars of the Roses had destroyed the power
of the Barons and had enlarged and increased the
powers of the Crown. And England had a new
King to wear the Crown — a young man, vigorous,
active, strong, venturesome, courageous — one who
snubbed the great Lords and trusted the people;
who scattered the money in the royal treasury
and kept no standing army; who outrode the
huntsmen, outfenced the guards, and outargued
the theologians; one who was dignified without
effort, and yet who disarmed and defied opposi
tion by the daring, reckless, jesting confidence of
power. The Eighth Henry will fill any canvas.
Modern historians have tried again and again to
reduce him to the measure of some ordinary
human mold, but they have failed egregiously.
Froude loved him to admiration, Stubbs declines
to judge him. Smaller writers make themselves
ridiculous in trying to defame him. In all the
qualities that go to make the natural man, he
towers head and shoulders above his royal con
temporaries. He had no predecessor in England
except the Conqueror and no successor except his
own Elizabeth. As late as 1519 A. D. so keen
a critic as Erasmus does not hesitate to write of
him as "the fine soldier, keen in counsel, strict
in admiration, careful in the choice of his min-

20 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
isters, anxious for the peace of the world — a King
fit to bring back the golden age, the intelligence
of whose country will preserve the memory of his
virtues, and scholars will tell how a King once
reigned there who in his own person revived the
virtues of the ancient heroes." (Letters of Eras
mus.) But his great qualities were the qualities of
the natural man — and he showed all the strength
and all the weakness of Esau's character. His
dominant passion was power — his chief character
istic was inflexible resolution and self-will; his
mortal sin was not lust but pride. He was a
lion, Sir Thomas Moore said, "whose ferocity
would increase with the awakening consciousness
of his power."
What did the English Church owe to Henry
in its effort to reform? Well, Henry found the
laws on the statute book which for more than an
hundred years had repudiated the Papal inter
ference in English affairs and declared the emis
saries of the Pope to be outlaws and felons. He
found the people and the Clergy too, ready to
revolt against Rome. He found the records of
the nation even in Saxon times upholding the
royal power against all foreign interference. He
found the ablest men in England, both laymen
and ecclesiastics, full of the new learning and

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 21
clamoring for reform. He had heard his own
intimate friend, the great Dean Colet, preach
again and again, deploring the abuses of the time.
Evidently with such conditions and such a King,
all that was needed was a spark to light the fire
to hurl the Church and country into revolution.
The wonder is, and Henry's claim to admiration
is, that the revolution, when it came, was so well
controlled. The immediate cause of Henry's quarrel with
the Pope was the question of the annulment of
his marriage was Katharine. Henry never asked
for a divorce. He maintained that the marriage
from the beginning had been invalid. The sub
ject need not detain us long. The fact that a
King, who had grown tired of his wife, six years
older than himself, after sixteeen years of wed
lock, demanded a release from the contract, on
the ground that the marriage had been at the out
set a direct violation of the Church's law, var
nished over by a Pope's decree — this is not very
wonderful or unusual. The subsequent proceed
ings are less creditable if anything to the Pope
than to Henry. Clement refused to grant the
divorce, not on any religious or moral ground, but
for fear of Katharine's nephew, Charles, Emperor
of Germany. It was an evil and unjust thing,
so to humble a faithful wife and Queen — divorces

22 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
are always evil things ; but when we come to give
our verdict we shall have to nail our sentence at
the door of that Roman Court which first began
to trifle with the Church's law that guarded the
marriage bond.
Henry believed in himself, and in the affec
tions of his people — that new middle class that
made his throne secure. The lion more and more
realized, as he was forced to test his power.
Henry was a playful tyrant. His moral scrupu
losity is striking. He was ever singularly respect
ful to the law. No act of his can be named that
did not at least have the form of precedent. It
was the law of praemunire that he used to ruin
Wolsey and to frighten the reluctant members of
Convocation and Parliament to submission. It
was by legal precedents that the monasteries were
dissolved. It was by law that his wives were put
away or condemned to death. It was by ancient
statute that the title of Supreme Head of the
Church was defended and sustained. Every arti
cle of the Catholic Faith was jealously maintained,
and the very Act that repudiated the Pope's
jurisdiction recited the precedents of the councils
of the Catholic Church. No step was taken in
spiritual matters without the formal consent of
Convocation, the Church's council. And it ought
to be said, that, while the Emperor of Germany

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 23
was busy issuing doctrinal statements and exploit
ing his theological learning, Henry left doctrine
to his Bishops, only taking care that it was not
in conflict with the Roman faith.
For Henry never for one moment thought that
he was less a son of Rome in his spiritual faith and
hope, because he happened to rebel against Papal
jurisdiction. There had been Kings of France
and Germany, and of England too, who had done
as much as he did, e.g., Frederick II. and Philip
IV. He had no sympathy with Lutheranism.
He wanted no new system of religion. He did
not even oppose or deny the spiritual authority
of the Pope. He wanted to have his own way
in his own kingdom, and he got what he wanted.
He invented an impossible regime, that has been
aptly called "Popery without a Pope." Indirectly,
however, and unwittingly, he paved the way for
the reformation that succeeded.
Stubbs' characterization of Henry is the best
that has yet been written. He says, "I do not
believe him to have been a monster of lust and
blood as so many Roman Catholic writers regard
him. He was not abnormally profligate; in this
region of morality he was not better perhaps than
Charles V, but he was much better than Francis I.
and Philip II. and Henry IV. I seem to see in
him a grand, gross figure, very far removed from

24 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
ordinary human sympathies; self-engrossed, self-
confident, self-willed, unscrupulous in act, violent
and crafty, justifying to himself by his belief in
himself, both unscrupulousness, violence and craft.
And with all this, as needs must have been, a very
unhappy man, wretched in his family, wretched
in his loneliness — that awful loneliness in which
a King lives, and which the worst as well as the
best of despots realize. Have I drawn the outline
of a monster ? Well, perhaps ; but not the popular
notion of this particular portent : A strong, high-
spirited, ruthless, disappointed, solitary creature —
a thing to hate, or to pity, or to smile at, or to
shudder at, or to wonder at, but not to judge."
(Lectures, p. 81.)
What then did Henry VIII. do for the Church
of England? Well, he threw the Church on herself, com
pelled her to realize her independence, her auton
omy. He emphasized and accentuated the na
tional idea. He made it possible for English
Bishops and laymen to undertake great changes
in doctrinal and ritual matters without fearing
or regarding foreign approval or disapproval.
Above all, in a time of vast upheavals — of war
and bloodshed, of deadly struggles and savage
riots — Henry VIII. had the judgment, the tact,
the popularity and power with his subjects to hold

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 25
in check partisan and fanatical movements, and
during fifteen years . of religious unrest and
change, to keep the institutions of the Church and
the Church itself from ruin. As Cardinal Man
ning once said, and historical facts do not change
with the change of religion, "The Crown and
Church of England, with a steady opposition, re
sisted the entrance and encroachment of the sec
ularized ecclesiastical power of the Pope in Eng
land. The last rejection of it was no more than
a successful effort after many a failure in struggles
of like kind. And it was an act taken by men
who were sound, according to Roman doctrines,
on all other points." 2
When Henry VIII. died, in 1546, the net
results of the twelve years movement were :
(1) The Papal Power in England was de
stroyed and the Church of England was declared
competent to administer her own affairs. The
Headship of the King was accepted with the quali
fying phrase, "So far as the law of Christ Avill
allow" ;
(2) The continuity of the Episcopate was kept
without a break;
(3) The Bible was printed in English and
commanded to be read in all the churches;

- Manning, Unity of the Church, p. 290.

20 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
(4) The Creed, Lord's Prayer, and Ten Com
mandments were printed in English, and recited
slowly in Church so that the people could mem
orize them, and school-masters had to teach them
to the children ;
(5) Superstitious image- worship and pilgrim
ages were forbidden. And all this was prefaced
by the words of the Statute, "we do not intend
to decline or vary from the Catholic Faith of
Christendom." Thus it happened that the first blow for free
dom was struck in the reign of Henry, but it was
more than an hundred years before the readjust
ment of her doctrinal and ritual system to the
changed conditions of her life was completed.
The history of that readjustment is the history
of constitutional liberty; it is marked by ebbs
and flows, by foreign influence and dissension, by
political complications, by heroisms and martyr
doms, but the result was worth it all. After the
reign of Edward had given the Prayer Book and
had taught the dangerous tendency of foreign in
fluence towards fanatical disintegration, and after
the brief and morbid reaction under Mary had
burnt the hatred of Rome and Roman methods
into the hearts of the people, it would have seemed
that the wise moderation of Elizabeth's policy
would have settled the disputes forever.

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 27
Her accession was marked immediately by
the public assertion of the historic continuity
from the past of the Church of the English peo
ple from the time of Joseph of Arimathea — by
the emphatic definition of the Church's spiritual
character as distinct from state control, and by the
endorsement of that reform in doctrine and prac
tice, for which the Roman Church herself was
striving and which the people at large had come
to understand and approve. Of 9,000 Clergy in
England at her accession only 189 refused to con
form to the revised system of worship. For
eleven years there was peace and harmony and
progress. Robert Parsons, the celebrated Jesuit (1593)
makes one of his characters say, "I do well re
member the first dozen years of her Highness'
reign: how happy, how pleasant, how quiet they
were, with all manner of comfort and consolation.
There was no mention then of factions in relig
ion ; neither was any man much noted or rejected
for that cause, so otherwise his conversation was
civil and courteous. No suspicion of treason, no
talk of bloodshed, no complaint of troubles, mis
eries, or vexations. All was peace, all was love,
all was joy, all was delight."
There was, according to William Watson, the
Roman Catholic priest (1602), one of her bitter-

28 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
est enemies, 'No talk of treasons or conspiracies,
no jealousies nor suspicions, no envy nor supplan-
tations, no fear of murdering, nor massacring, no
question of conscience or religion. But all lived
in great content and right good fellowship was
amongst them." (Ingram "England and Rome,"
p. 250.) That peace was broken by the Pope's Bull,
Pius V., 1570, which excommunicated the Queen,
declared the throne vacant, absolved her subjects
from all allegiance, duty and obedience, and in
cited them to rebellion, and plunged the land into
a storm of plots, conspiracies, homicides, sacrilege,
and assassination, which made Pope Urban VIII.
himself declare in A. D. 1641 that "he bewailed
with 'tears of blood' the conduct of his predeces
sors of the sixteenth century towards England
and her people."
The author of all religious discord in England
was foreign influence. The disciples of Calvin
were not slow to follow the subjects of Pope Pius
into dissent and rebellion. Puritanism, at first
a distinctly personal following of Calvin and
Zwinglius, was quite as much of a foreign move
ment as the Italian influences operating from
Rome. Both were attacks upon the national char
acter and constitution of the Church. Both at
tempted with varying success to destroy the na-

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 29
tional idea, that had been the safeguard and glory
of religion in England since the time of Theodore.
The original puritanism practically died out in
Elizabeth's reign. Cartwright, the founder of
English Presbyterianism, and Browne, the founder
of Congregationalism, returned to and died in the
Communion of the English Church.
The new Puritanism of the seventeenth cen
tury was first of all a political movement in which
good men and loyal Churchmen, fighting for
ancient liberties, found themselves swept away by
the champions of a religious fanaticism, whose
first principle of faith contradicted the very idea
of constitutional liberty. Whatever were the
faults of Laud, and he certainly was human, there
is no doubt, as Professor Rawson Gardiner says
(History of England, v. IL, p. 64), that his
theological position was essentially that of Hooker,
and Cranmer, and there is no doubt that the old
man laid down his life in protest and defiance
against a conception of religion that would have
chained the English Church forever under the
iron yoke of Calvinism — a conception of religion,
which Ave universally repudiate to-day as contra
dictory of the truth, the genuineness, the bright
ness of the English character. The "streak of
intellectual vulgarity," as Matthew Arnold calls
it, which runs through Macaulay's History has

30 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
utterly misrepresented the character and purpose
and life of William Laud.
Into the political movements of the reigns of
James and Charles I. and Cromwell we need not
enter. The Church of England came out of the
furnace of affliction with her continuity unbroken
and her faith defined and her spirit chastened
and purified. The character of the Church in the
early years of Queen Anne's reign vindicated all
her previous history. The learning of her great
divines and the frequency and dignity of her
services, the breadth and freshness and freedom
of her outward life, her missionary zeal, and her
works of charity and education, gained for her
the honor and veneration of Christians of every
name. In A. D. 1717, DuPin, Head of the Theological
College of the Sorbonne, and other leaders of the
Church of France, whose national spirit had
chafed and fretted under the Papal Rule for at
least six hundred years, and who had talked of
reformation before it was begun in England, des
pairing of any self-respecting alliance with Rome,
made overtures for union with the English Church
on the common ground of loyalty to the Catholic
faith and constitution, with reservation of na
tional independence. (See Hore "Eighteen Cen
turies," etc., p. 493.) So, also, in 1706 A.D.

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 31
Frederick I. of Prussia, with the advice and
assistance of many of the ablest men in his King
dom, both Clergymen and laymen, among whom
Leibuitz was conspicuous, formally proposed union
between German Protestants and the Church of
England, practically on the ground proposed in
the so-called Quadrilateral of A. D. 1886. The
Germans expressed their willingness to receive
the Episcopate. The Prayer Book was trans
lated into the German language; and much en
thusiasm was manifested in England over this
great step towards the reunion of Christendom.
Political complications, however, and the deaths
of the prominent leaders prevented either of these
movements from producing any practical results.
Yet the facts may be taken as clear evidence of
the true insight of DeMaistre's prophecy, that if
reunion shall ever be accomplished, it will be
through the mediation of the Church of England.
The eighteenth century proved to be, in some
respects worse for the Church than any she had
before lived through. That very national idea,
which had been her glory from the time of
Theodore, became, in the union of Church and
State under new conditions, a hindrance and men
ace to her life. When the Hanoverian Kings,
who like the early Norman Kings could not even
speak English, found that they could not coerce

32 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
Churchmen into Erastianism, they took away
freedom of speech and suppressed Convocation,
the Church's Council, for over one hundred years.
This was the period of triumphant infidelity,
¦which created the reason for, and in its reaction,
the inspiration of Methodism. Yet the Church
was capable without foreign influence or aid of
renewal and reform within herself. The Evan
gelical revival of A. D. 1780 and the Oxford
Movement (A. D. 1833) have multiplied her
activities and proved her power. Her very trials
and her recovery from them have demonstrated
under God her spiritual claims. Moreover she
has demonstrated that she is a "fruit-tree yielding
fruit, whose seed is in itself" (Gen. 1: 11): for
in A. D. 1784 Samuel Seabury was consecrated
the first Bishop for the Church in the United
States of America, and in the course of one hun
dred and thirty years this American daughter has
grown from a mere handful to more than one
million communicants and quite three million
adherents. So the Church of England has seen the great
principles which she stood for, principles which
have been too often obscured and rendered in
effectual by her misfortune of state connection,
these principles she has seen take root and flourish
in a new land, among a new people, under changed

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 33
conditions, and she has not failed to learn a lesson
from it. It was only a few years ago that the
Archbishop of Canterbury, asserting authority
which had been unused for centuries, at once and
forever repudiated, on behalf of his Order, sec
ular control, by either Crown or Court, over the
discharge of his spiritual office, and set at rest
forever the question as to the meaning of the
Sovereign's relation to the English Church. The
Church of England has learned something from
this American daughter. To-day they stand to
gether — in mutual love and sympathy — in the
bonds of mutual service, holding forth to English-
speaking Christians of every name the ideal of
our Saxon forefathers ; the ideal which is conse
crated to us all by the memories and traditions
of the greatest of our race ; the ideal which shines
dimly and imperfectly perhaps through the mist
of so many tears, so much dissension: and, God
help us, so much disunion among English-speaking
Christians : and yet, the ideal which, in its rough
outline and fundamental principles, is still set
forth in that Church, which preserves the same
faith, the same sacraments, the same ministry,
the same worship, which Theodore maintained at
Hatfield, A. D. 680, and Stephen Langton de
fended at Runnymede, A. D. 1215. She main
tains the constitutional system of free Church

34 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
Government, secured primarily in the succession
of her Bishops, as in the days of Cyprian, A. D.
258, and Athanasius, A. D. 325, and Gregory the
Great, A. D. 596.
She stands to-day a worthy witness to the
truths for which she has contended. She retains
a foremost place in the Reformed Christian world.
Her learning has not diminished, and her resolute
hopefulness has not declined. Her missionary
activities have been enlarged. Her practical
charities are multiplied. Her reverence for the
great past has not checked her outlook for the
greater future. She has kept abreast of liberty
and progress and yet has never for a moment
hesitated in her hold on the Catholic faith. The
principles for which she stands and has stood are
still the permanent safeguards of our Christian
civilization. She holds before men the Church
idea, that is the Social idea, the idea of Plato,
Aristotle, and St. Paul, as the only satisfaction
of the longing for universal brotherhood and the
only hope of Christ's conquest of the world. She
believes in authority as not inconsistent with true
freedom, in liberty without license, and law with
out despotism. She exhorts her people to the
practical duties of the Christian life in a spirit
of confidence, sustained and fostered by sacra
mental and solemn services, and not by emphasis

HISTORY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND 35
put upon feeling at the expense of conscience.
She trusts more to sober training in religion than
to passionate upheavals. She comes to men, not
to court popularity by adapting herself to their
natural instincts and prejudices, but to reform
and uplift them, and to give them something
above the measure of their ordinary taste and
temperament, and to furnish them with an ideal
to follow. She believes in the solemn splendor
of worship, the chaste dignity of her liturgy, the
inspiration of all true art, and the culture of all
true education. Above all she makes little of the
metaphysical doctrinal definitions that have vexed
and divided Christendom during the past three
hundred years, believing that Christianity is first
of all a life, an institution, and that the life is
more than meat and the body is more than raiment.
The maintenance of these principles was worth
the sufferings of Parker and the martyrdom of
Laud. They were great enough to demand and
deserve the patient waiting of our American fore
fathers — so great and fruitful, that in spite of
misconception and distrust, they have taken root
in this new land, and, freed from the restraint
of State connection and Royal interference, they
have become, even to those who at first revolted
from them, a great and growing factor in our
permanent national life.

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
(1) Its History
(2) The Reformation which produced it
(3) The needs which it supplied

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

HE Book of Common Prayer is, in one
aspect of it, the creation of the dawn
ing democracy of the English-speak
ing people. It takes rank with King
James' version of the Bible as one of the two
noblest achievements of English literature. It
enshrines the faith, the hope, the worship which
five generations of Englishmen — through one hun
dred and twenty-five stormy years — planned and
wrought and sacrificed to establish, as the An
glican interpretation of Christianity. For these
reasons, among others, the Prayer Book is the
common inheritance, and should be the pride, of
all English-speaking Christians^as it is certainly
a literary and religious memorial of such surpass
ing interest and value that no true culture can af
ford to neglect it. To be ignorant of the history and
contents of the Book of Common Prayer is hardly
less barbarous than to be unfamiliar with the Eng
lish Bible and the works of Shakespeare.
And, therefore, a body of literature has been
created as to the sources and meaning and pur
pose of the Prayer Book, unsurpassed for learning

40 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
and eloquence, by great writers — lawyers, states
men, and ecclesiastics — and, to quote Dr. J. II.
Benton's admirable monograph,1 "those who know
it best love it best." "It has profoundly influ
enced not only the moral, but the intellectual, so
cial, and political life of -England and of the
world." "It has affected diplomacy and states
manship. It has gone wherever the English lan
guage has gone and has been translated also into
nearly all the written languages of the world. Its
history is part of the warp and woof of the history
of the English people and nation, which no one
can understand who does not know its story." It
has been twice proscribed by law, all copies of it
ordered to be destroyed and its use in public or
private devotions made a crime; but it has, with
few substantial alterations, remained unchanged
in its original English form for three hundred
and sixty years.
The Christian Church has always used a
liturgy. St. Luke describes the first Christians
as continuing in "the prayers," and the New Tes
tament abounds in references to the participation
of the people in the forms of public worship,
many of which they inherited from the Jewish
Church.

1 The Book of Common Prayer. J. H. Benton, LL.D.

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 41
From the beginning the central service was
the service of the Holy Communion, known as
the Liturgy Proper, and the daily offices were
based on that.
The liturgies of Christendom may be grouped
under four heads, viz. : the Liturgy of St. James,
the Liturgy of St. Mark, the Liturgy of St. Peter,
and the Liturgy of St. John — all of which are still
in use in the historic churches of the world — and
all of them are of Eastern origin, because, as you
know, Christianity is an Eastern religion and the
Greek language was its original vehicle for in
tellectual and devotional expression. The Roman
Church, using the Latin language, is a later devel
opment. The Roman Christians of the first cen
tury spoke Greek, and the early Popes were not
Italians but Greeks. The very name "Pope" is
a Greek word — a common title to this day given
to every pastor in the Eastern Church. (Stanley.)2
A combination of circumstances, which I shall
not take the time to explain in this lecture, made
the Mediaeval Church in the West — certainly from
A. D. 1054 to A. D. 1518 — a close corporation,
in which the laity had little part, except to obey
orders and submit. Worship for the layman was
a formal attendance upon a ceremonial conducted

- See Dr. Hart's admirable volume, The Book of Common
Prayer.

42 ' THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
by the priests, in their own way and in a language
virtually unknown to any but themselves. As for
the daily prayers, the clergy had an entire mon
opoly of them, and not all the clergy — only the
regulars, or members of religious orders — observed
them faithfully. The comparative isolation of
England gave to its Church an unique independ
ence of development, and even in the period of
the Pope's most autocratic supremacy, the Ecclesia
Anglicana — i.e., the English Church — was recog
nized in the public law as an independent institu
tion. In 1085 A. D. a great Bishop of Salisbury
put forth a service book peculiarly English and
un-Roman, known as the book of Sarum, but of
course, it was not in English, because at that time
the English language had not reached a literary
form. The Magna Charta, our charter of liberty,
in 1215, which was wrung from King John, and
in open defiance of the Pope, begins with the de
mand that the Church of England shall have her
rights entire and her liberties uninjured. All
through the early history of the Anglo-Saxon
Church there were sporadic attempts to give the
people translations of the Bible in the common
tongue and to popularize the service of the Church
by putting it into a language "understanded of
the people." These service books were called
"Prymers," and have been described as "The Lav

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 43
Folks Prayer Books." They contained some of
the psalms and a litany, but none of the priests'
or Bishops' Offices, nor any of the directions for
the conduct of worship, and they were all in manu
script, because there was no printed book in Eng
land until A. D. 1474.
The last quarter of the fifteenth century is one
of the great epochs in the history of mankind. It
witnessed the revival of Greek learning, and
through Greek learning, the return to the study of
the primitive truth of Christianity. So it was
said, when Erasmus' first edition of the New Tes
tament was published in 1516, "Greece rose from
the dead with the New Testament in her right
hand." It witnessed the invention of printing,
the use of the mariner's compass, the discovery of
America, and, we may say, the birth of Martin
Luther. The whole Western world waked up and
began a revolution, of which the religious move
ment, called the Reformation, was one manifesta
tion. Council after council had met in the fif
teenth century to reform ecclesiastical abuses, but
all of them were dominated and strangled by
Rome. Then in 1517 Luther issued his challenge.
In 1520 he was excommunicated by the Pope, and
one of his fiercest enemies was the young and
popular King of England, Henry VIII. It
looked at first as if Henry would use his extraor-

44 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
dinary popularity and power to stamp out the
new movement in England, for he was a special
friend of Rome. The Pope had over-ridden the
Church's written law and given Henry a special
dispensation to marry his brother's widow. He
had also conferred a new title upon Henry and
proclaimed him as "Defender of the Faith."
It was an astounding event, therefore, to the
men of that time, when this "Pet of the Papacy"
resented the new Pope's refusal to permit him to
put away his wife, as he said, "because of con
scientious scruples," and encouraged the Reforma
tion movement in England, in order to spite the
Pope. Henry played a political game for his own
personal ends, but to the last his religious con
victions Avere hostile to the Reformation. During
the later years of his reign he tried to check the
movement, but it was too late. The independence
of the Church of England had become an accom
plished fact. The Bible had been given to the
people in English, and the Litany and other parts
of the public service, and there Avas a Avidespread
and earnest demand for further reformation.
Henry died January 28, 1547, and his son
succeeded him as Edward VI.
In December of that year a parliamentary
Act was passed authorizing the administration of
the Holy Communion in both kinds, and a ser-

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 45
vice book of the Holy Communion in the Eng
lish language was issued in March, 1548. Arch
bishop Cranmer and "other discreet Bishops and
Divines" were set to work, by order of the king,
to prepare a Book of Common Prayer, and this
book, having been debated and adopted in the
Church Convocation and afterwards in Parliament
after long discussion, was set forth and established
for common use on January 21, 1549.
There can be no doubt that this book— knoAvn
as the First Prayer Book of Edward VI.— repre
sented and expressed the convictions of the vast
majority of clergy and people of the Church of
England. But it was too conservative for the ex
treme reformers, who had meantime been rein
forced by immigrants from the Protestant sections
of Continental Europe, and so in 1552 a revised
Prayer Book was set forth by authority, Avhich
included the Ordinal, that is, the "form and man
ner of making and consecrating Archbishops,
Bishops, Priests, and Deacons," which had existed
before, but was made part of the Prayer Book at
this time. This second Prayer Book of Edward
VI. changed the sentence to be used in the adminis
tration of the Communion from "The Body of
our Lord Jesus Christ which was given for thee
preserve thy body and soul unto everlasting life,"
to "Take and eat this in remembrance that Christ

46 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
died for thee and feed on Him in thy heart by
faith with thanksgiving"; and also inserted the
Black Rubric, as it was called, which explained
that the kneeling posture at the Communion did
not imply worship of the physical elements. The
worst defect of this second Prayer Book was the
omission of the Office for the Anointing of the
Sick, Avhich was part of the First Prayer Book
and was a legitimate return to the practice of the
early Church, as contrasted with the custom of
Extreme Unction, which was not for the purpose
of restoring men to health, but of preparing them
for death. I cannot but believe that Ave would
have been saved from some modern follies of faith-
healing if this old office had been retained in our
Prayer Book.
Queen Mary succeeded Edward VI. and for five
years the Prayer Book was proscribed and every
effort was made to stamp out the reform movement.
But the flames of the three hundred fires that
burned Englishmen for their faith only served to
refine and purify English Churchmanship and
clear men's minds as to the essential and everlast
ing issues.
When Elizabeth succeeded Mary in the autumn
of 1558, the Prayer Book and the Reformation
Avere at once restored, and of 9,400 clergymen in
England only about 189 refused to conform. The

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 47
methods of Cardinal Pole and Queen Mary had
cured the English people forever of any love for
the Italian ecclesiastical dominion.
The Prayer Book set forth under Elizabeth
Avas substantially the second Book of Edward VI.
with the omission of the Black Rubric and the
addition of the form of administration in the first
Book, giving us the double sentence which we use
to-day. And this Book was the common devo
tional handbook of Englishmen during that long
reign of forty-five years.
Unfortunately two classes of obstructionists
had arisen. First, the Puritans, and second, the
Sectarians or Dissenters. The first dissenters
were the Roman Catholics, who had used the
Prayer Book and enjoyed it with all its offices
for baptism, burial, and Holy Communion for
eleven years, but were forced by the Pope's excom
munication of Elizabeth (A. D. 1569) to form
themselves into a separate sect. Then some of the
Puritans organized under a Presbyterian polity,
and the Independents or Congregationalists fol
lowed their example. The great majority of the
Puritans remained in the Church, conforming
with more or less fidelity to the order of service,
but desiring what we would call a "converted
membership" and a nearer approach to the Cal-
vinistic conception of religion. It was in defer-

48 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
ence to the Puritan demands for change that King
James I. held a conference Avith men of all parties
at Hampton Court, 1604 ; but the discussion for
the most part was on technical and trivial issues
and the Prayer Book was unchanged, except by
the addition of the questions on the Sacraments
in the Catechism. One great result of the confer
ence, however, was that an order was issued by
the King for the translation of the Bible from the
original tongues, and this gave us the version
of 1611. King James died in 1625 and was succeeded
by his son Charles I. during whose troublous reign
the Puritans and Presbyterians succeeded in over-
throAving the Church of England. Archbishop
Laud and King Charles were both beheaded, and
on January 3, 1645, the Book of Common Prayer
Avas proscribed by Act of Parliament, all copies
of it were ordered to be burnt, and the use of it,
in public or in private, in the Church or at family
prayers, was punished by fine and imprisonment.
A so-called directory was substituted for it, in
Avhich, among other things, it was ordered that
Avhen persons died their bodies should be buried
without any ceremony whatever, without either
prayer or music.
For sixteen years this gloomy and terrible re
ligion prevailed, and the clergy and laity, who had

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 49
learned to love the Prayer Book and its services,
were hunted and persecuted. How they learned
the Book by heart and kept up the prayers is de
lightfully told by Isaak Walton in his life of
Bishop Sanderson.
Charles II. came to the throne in 1660, and
immediately the Prayer Book was restored to use.
The next year, at the Savoy Conference, the Puri
tans and the leaders of the Church had their final
discussion as to the changes in the Prayer Book
that Avere deemed absolutely necessary by the non
conformists ; but it was found that the system of the
Church and that of the Puritans were so irrecon
cilable that one communion could not hold them
both. A thorough review of the Prayer Book was
made at this time; it Avas carefully edited; in the
prayer for the Church in the Communion Office,
as Dr. Hart says, an explicit oblation and a com
memoration of the departed were inserted; the
Black Rubric was restored with an important
change in its phraseology — "corporal" being sub
stituted for "real and essential" in the description
of the Presence — a few concessions to the Puritans,
such as giving the Epistles and Gospels in the last
translation, were made. The other changes were
merely editorial, and the Prayer Book of 1662
has been the standard for two hundred and fifty
years.

50 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
In order to understand the situation more
clearly I shall mention a few of the other changes
desired by the Puritans. They made three pre
liminary declarations, viz :
(1) They agreed to the Episcopal government
of the Church, provided it was not too autocratic ;
(2) They strongly asserted the necessity of a
written Liturgy for public worship ;
(3) They objected to all ceremonies because
they were not acceptable to the Continental Protes
tants. As to the Prayer Book they objected :
(1) To the whole practice of responsive wor
ship, whether in prayers or chants or litanies, and
to the recitation of the Confession by the people
or any other prayer. They held that one long
prayer by the minister Avas more edifying, and
that "amen" said by the people was enough — the
minister being their spokesman or mouth-piece.
They opposed the idea of a Common Prayer in
which the laity took part. They objected to the
delivery of the elements to the people one by one.
(2) They objected to the sign of the cross, the
use of the ring and the surplice, and all such ritual
accessories. (3) They objected to the liberality of the

1 See Cardwell's Conferences, pp. 303-335.

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 51
Prayer Book in praying for "all who travel" ; in
saying that all baptized infants dying before Con
firmation and Communion are undoubtedly saved ;
calling all baptized children "regenerate" ; to the
generalities of the Confession which ought to go
more into particulars ; to the prayer in the Burial
Office that "when we depart this life, we may rest
in Him, as our hope is this our brother doth" ;
and to the use of the word "Sunday" instead of
Lord's Day.
(4) They objected to Sponsors in Baptism on
the ground that any profession of faith on the part
of the child, even through its parents or guardians,
might encourage the heresy of the Anabaptists, who
insisted on faith before Baptism.
The replies of the Bishops to these objections
were at considerable length, and the substance was :
(1) We do not propose to surrender our whole
liturgical inheritance from the Catholic Church
of history, nor the immemorial traditions of Cath
olic usage, in order to please the new, individual
tastes and preferences of a certain extreme party
of people in this age.
(2) If any phrase or use of custom authorized
in the Prayer Book can be shown to be contrary
to Holy Scripture or the teaching of the primitive
Church, we shall gladly change it, but not other
wise.

52 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
The first use of the Prayer Book within the
present limits of the United States appears to have
been in 1579, when the chaplain of Sir Francis
Drake read prayers at the time of a landing on the
Pacific Coast near San Francisco, and a Prayer
Book Cross has been erected to mark the spot. The
first permanent settlement of English Churchmen
Avas at Jamestown, Virginia, in 1607, thirteen
years before the Puritans landed on Plymouth
Rock. The services of the Prayer Book were
regularly used at Jamestown at the beginning, and
have been continuous ever since, although for 177
years the colonists had no Bishops to minister to
them, and the offices for ordination and confirma
tion were practically unknown. It is amazing,
Avhen we think of it, that such a maimed and head
less Church could ever have survived, and yet it
Avas the Prayer Book — -the sane and noble and
lofty spiritual idealism of the Prayer Book —
Avhich held the allegiance and moulded the char
acter of the majority of those great Americans
Avho accomplished the Revolution and founded
the Republic. TAvo-thirds of the signers of the
Declaration of Independence, and quite two-thirds
of the men who adopted the Constitution, had been
brought up in the use of the Book of Common
Prayer. As soon as the Revolution had been accom-

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 53
plished Churchmen met together for complete or
ganization. The people of Connecticut elected
Samuel Seabury Bishop and sent him across the
sea to be consecrated ; and he, finding that the legal
changes necessary to his consecration in England,
had not yet been made, went to Scotland and re
ceived his Episcopal authority from the Scotch
Bishops. Meanwhile there had been meetings in
various places; and a Convention from seven
States, held in Philadelphia, had appointed a
Committee on the Prayer Book, which, of course,
had to be adapted to the new political conditions.
This committee prepared and reported a Revised
Prayer Book, which was so radical in its conces
sions to extreme Protestantism and to infidelitj',
that it was generally obnoxious to Churchmen
everywhere, and was virtually ignored in the pro
ceedings of the first General Convention of the
Avhole Church, which met in Philadelphia in the
fall of 1789. The American Prayer Book was
adopted at that Convention, and it contained a
very dignified and thoughtful Preface, in which
the general reasons, political and other, are given
for the changes that seemed expedient, and the
principle is stated that in these ch'anges, "this
Church is far from intending to depart from the
Church of England in any essential point of doc
trine, discipline, or Avorship : or further than local

54 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
circumstances require." Some concessions Avere
made in the American Book to local conditions and
prejudices, which may seem to us to have been
unnecessary, as for example, the permission to omit
the sign of the cross in Baptism, but they did no
harm. Every man, who knows the history of it,
is glad that the Athanasian Creed (so-called) was
omitted, and the Black Rubric with it. In recent
years we have restored the Magnificat and the lon
ger Benedictus, and have made ample provision
for shortened services. But incomparably the
greatest gain of the American Revision — which
reduces all other changes to insignificance — was
the adoption, with a single modification, of the
Scotch form of the Prayer of Consecration, with
an explicit Oblation and an explicit Invocation of
the Holy Spirit — which allies us with the Greek
Church and conforms to the most ancient liturgies
of Christendom. I venture to give, in conclusion, tAvo quotations
from writers on the Prayer Book, which seem to
be of exceptional interest and value. The first
is from the late Professor Shields of Princeton
University, professor in the Presbyterian Theo
logical Seminary. He says:
"The English Liturgy, next to the English
Bible, is the most wonderful product of the
Reformation. The verv fortunes of the book

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 55
are the romance of history. As we trace its
development, its rubrics seem dyed in the blood
of martyrs ; its offices echo with polemic phrases ;
its canticles mingle with the battle-cries of
armed sects and factions; and its successive re
visions mark the career of dynasties, states, and
churches. Cavalier, Covenanter, and Puritan
have crossed their swords over it; scholars and
soldiers, statesmen and Churchmen, Kings and
Commoners, have united in defending it. Eng
land, Germany, Geneva, Scotland, and America
have by turns been the scene of its conflicts.
Far beyond the little island which was its birth
place, its influence has been silently spreading
in connection with great political and religious
changes, generation after generation, from land
to land, even where its name was never heard.
... It would be strange if a work which thus
has its roots in the past, should not be sending
forth its branches into the whole Church of the
future; and anyone who will take the pains to
study its present adaptations, whatever may
have been his prejudices, must admit that there
is no other extant formulary which is so well
fitted to become the rallying-point and standard
of modern Christendom. In it are to be found
the means — possibly the germs — of a just reor
ganization of Protestantism, as well as an ulti-

56 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
mate reconciliation with true Catholicism —
such a Catholicism as shall have shed everything
sectarian and national, and retained only what
is common to the whole Church of Christ in all
ages and countries. Whilst to the true Protes
tant it offers Evangelical doctrine, worship, and
unity, on the terms of the Reformation, it still
preserves for the true Catholic, the choicest for
mulas of antiquity, and to all Christians of every
name opens a liturgical system at once scriptural
and reasonable, doctrinal and devotional, learned
and vernacular, artistic and spiritual. It is
not too much to say, that were the problem
given, to frame out of the imperfectly organ
ized and sectarian Christianity of our times a
liturgical model for the Communion of Saints
in the one universal Church, the result might
be expressed in some such compilation as the
English Book of Common Prayer."
The second quotation is from Edmund Clar
ence Stedman's Nature of Poetry, pp. 281-283.
He says :
"Upon its literary and constructive side, I
regard the venerable Liturgy of the Historic
Christian Church as one of the few World-
Poems — Poems Universal. I care not Avhich
of its rituals you follow, the Oriental, the Alex
andrian, the Latin, or the Anglican. The lat-

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 57
ter, that of the Episcopal Prayer Book, is a
version familiar to you of what seems to me the
most Avonderful symphonic idealization of
human faith — certainly the most inclusive —
blending in harmonic succession all the cries
and longings of the universal human heart in
voking a paternal Creator. ... I have in mind
its human quality; the mystic tide of human
hope, imagination, prayer, sorrows, and pas
sionate expression, upon which it bears the wor
shipper along, and wherewith it has sustained
men's souls with conceptions of Deity and im
mortality through hundreds, yes thousands, of
undoubting years. ... It has been a growth,
an exhalation, an apocalyptic cloud arisen, with
the prayer of the Saints, from the climes of the
HebreAV, the Greek, the Roman, the Goth, to
spread in time over half the world. It is the
voice of human brotherhood, the blended voice
of rich and poor, old and young, the wise and
the simple, the statesman and the clown; the
brotherhood of an age, which knowing little,
comprehended little, and could have no refuge
save trust in the oracles, through which a just
and merciful Protector, a Pervading Spirit, a
Living Mediator and Consoler, had been re
vealed. ... Its prayers are not only for all
sorts and conditions of men, but for every stress

58 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
of life in which mankind must feel in common
— in the household or isolated, or in tribal or
national effort, and in calamity and repentance
and thanksgiving. Its wisdom is forever old
and perpetually new; its calendar celebrates all
seasons of the rolling year; its narrative is of
the simplest, the most pathetic, the most rap
turous and ennobling life, the world has ever
known. There is no malefactor so wretched,
no just man so perfect, as not to find his hope,
his consolation, his lesson, in this poem of
poems. I have called it lyrical ; it is dramatic
in structure and effect; it is an epic of the age
of faith; but in fact as a piece of inclusive lit
erature, it has no counterpart and can have no
successor."

THE PRAYER BOOK
AS A PRODUCT OF THE REFORMATION
HAVE shown in the previous lecture,
that the Book of Common Prayer was
a product of the Reformation move
ment, and that this movement in Eng
land extended over a long period of one hundred
and twenty-seven years — from the abolition of the
Papal Supremacy in 1534 to the Savoy Conference
in 1661. In this present lecture I shall try to show what
the Reformation movement Avas, what caused it,
and how in the largest perspective it ought to be
judged. As the whole organization of human
society was affected, and the civilized human race
itself changed its point of view, during those years
of controversy and tumult, we must be prepared
to find the subject complicated and difficult to
analyze. However, by studying the Reformation under
three aspects — Political, Intellectual, and Reli
gious — we may reach a more comprehensive and
a wiser and fairer understanding of it.
I. Politically, the Reformation may be said lo

00 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
have been the revolt of the National spirit against
the programme of Universal Empire, which
Charlemagne and Pope Leo had launched in the
year 800. For six hundred and fifty years the
people of Europe had been treated as pawns in the
great game which the German Emperor played
with the Roman Popes, each claiming superiority.
The Pope conceived of himself as the only Vicar of
Christ on earth and of all other earthly sovereigns
as related to himself, as the moon to the sun, shin
ing by reflected light. The Emperor was supposed
to be an advocate or defender of the Papacy, whose
duty it was to keep peace, to hold the clergy and
people in obedience, and to punish heretics and
schismatics. The Emperor's power, analogous to
that of the Pope's, was universal, and his quasi-
ecclesiastical character entitled him to be arrayed
on occasion in ecclesiastical vestments; for as
Bryce says, "The Holy Roman Church and the
Holy Roman Empire were one and the same thing,
in tAvo aspects." a For about two hundred years
the Crusades furnished at least the appearance of
a common work, which checked the growth of the
national consciousness, but little by little different
languages, different temperaments, different geo
graphical boundaries, asserted themselves and the

1 Holy Roman Empire, p. 201.

THE PRAYER BOOK 61
various groups became specialized with peculiar
habits and institutions. By the end of the fif
teenth century these nationalities had grown,
through war and commerce, into strong monarchi
cal governments, which refused even a nominal
recognition of the Holy Roman Empire. Spain
was united under Ferdinand and Isabella. In
France the concentration of all power in the king,
the creation of a compact and solid kingdom out
of a number of rival and hostile provinces, signi
fied not only territorial union, but administrative
autocracy, and indicated that France had come to
manhood under Francis I. Just at the same time
England emerged from the terrible wars of the
barons, which left the power of the nobility weak
ened and its numbers greatly diminished ; the Com
mons wearied with the long struggle; and "the
great monarchical administrative unity towering
high over the prostrate estates," embodied in two
kings — one Henry VII. "who was a tyrant in self-
defense," and the other, his son, Henry VIII.
"who was a tyrant from sheer self-will." In Ger
many, Maximilian had concentrated in his own
hands the territorial possessions of the Hapsburgs
and had united Austria and her outlying states.
All over the world the national spirit was awake
and was ready to rebel against the old Imperial
Order with which the Church was identified.

62 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
II. When Ave come to the Intellectual view
point, we note that the scholastic philosophy, which
represented the intellectual activity of the Middle
Ages, reached its climax in the thirteenth century,
and the characteristic of scholasticism was that it
undertook to settle all questions in heaven and
earth, and settled them dogmatically Avithout ap
peal. All possible religious questions were solved
by reference to the Church's decisions, and ques
tions Avhich fell altogether outside of ecclesiastical
limits — questions for example of observation and
physical science — Avere decided by an appeal to
Aristotle, who was called "the Philosopher" par
excellence, or were determined a priori. The in
ductive method, by which judgments are derived
from ascertained facts, was practically unknown.
Against this kind of dogmatism the human mind
was asserting in every direction its impatience and
intolerance. The artistic and literary revival began with
the canvas and fresco painting of Cimabue and
Giotto, and the writings of Dante, Petrarch, and
Boccaccio in the thirteenth and fourteenth cen
turies. In all this movement there was a mani
fest desire to go back to old classic models. Pope
Julius II. tore down the venerable Basilica of St.
Peter in order to rebuild it in the style of a classi
cal heathen temple. Men were intoxicated with

THE PRAYER BOOK 63
the new learning, i.e., with the study of Latin and
Greek, and the art and literature of the Greeks,
and this received a tremendous impetus by the fall
of Constantinople in 1453, when so many Greek
scholars came into the West for residence. And
in this classical revival — this Renaissance as it is
called — its devotees swallowed the ancient litera
ture, dregs and all, and became paganized. Of
Pope Leo X. who succeeded Julius and was a
friend of Ariosto, of Machiavelli, of Raphael —
Sarpi, in his History of the Council of Trent, says :
"He would have been a Pope absolutely complete
if, Avith his love of music and his gentle kindness,
he had joined some knowledge in things concern
ing religion." And this was the Pope who ex
communicated Martin Luther and set the fire of
the Reformation ablaze. Blatant skepticism and
gross immorality characterized the Pagan Renais
sance in Italy: but that same intellectual awaken
ing among the Teutonic races — in Germany and
England — drove scholars to the study of the New
Testament in the original and to fierce rejection
of teachings that were inconsistent with it. It is
easy to see how such a movement, once started,
could lead to crass individualism exploiting a thou
sand vagaries and rebelling against all authority.
At the same time let us remember, as Aubrey
Moore said, "Real liberty may always become li-

64 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
cense, but that is not an argument in favor of
bondage." 2
It is profoundly true, that the Reformation
was the revelation of a new branch of the human
race to the world. The Teutonic peoples had been
brought under a Roman civilization as early as the
fourth century, and they had been steadily grow
ing in weight and importance; but they had not
occupied a position of supremacy like that of Italy
or France or Spain. In God's Providence they
made the intellectual awakening of the sixteenth
century religious, and by sound learning and a
certain native reverence and serious-mindedness,
saved the moral ideals of Christendom and gave
the movement of mere intellectual revolt a positive
spiritual value. From the sixteenth century the
Teutonic peoples begin to take the leading place
in the world's progress and the centre of gravity
of European politics is transferred forever to the
north of the Alps.3
III. From the aspect of Religion and Morals,
the Reformation was a revolt of faith and con
science and reason against unreality: against the
substitution of the trappings of religion for re
ligion itself. Every religion sooner or later tends
to fixity and rigidity of form, and there is always

• Lectures on the Reformation.
1 See Collins, The Reformation.

THE PRAYER BOOK 65
danger of treating the form as though it were the
religion — that was the condition of Jewish religion
in the time of Christ. Deep feelings express them
selves in acts ; then the acts rightly become sacred ;
and then perhaps the good act degenerates into
mere mechanical routine. What roused the Re
formers was St. Paul's clarion appeal in the Epis
tle to the Galatians for the recognition of the su
preme importance of the individual human soul,
and its sacred right of direct communion with God.
Whatever mistakes he made, and like all dar
ing human spirits he did make some tremendous
mistakes, Martin Luther was a man of great
genius, of lofty purpose and passionate earnest
ness ; and when he went to Rome to visit the Holy
City of his Faith, the spectacle of the pomp of
formal and frequent religious observances, con
ducted by men whose daily lives were a by-word
and a hissing for their iniquities, stunned and
appalled him; and what was true of the leaders
of the Italian Renaissance was true to a degree
elsewhere. The fact was that the organization of the Me
diaeval Church had become unwieldy. Institu
tions, once useful, had outlived their usefulness.
Monasticism fostered an idle and lazy class of men.
There were too many clergy, and many of them
led unworthy lives. Ecclesiastical discipline, as

66 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
Creighton says, from the Court of Rome down to
every diocesan court, was a vexatious means of
exacting money; and justice was too often a mat
ter of bargain and sale. And while this seems
terrible to us, let it be understood that it is only
part of the story — one side of the picture, though
a very conspicuous side. There were many
thousands of men and women in the Church — even
in the Italian section of the Church — whose spir
itual life and enthusiasm were as high and beauti
ful as any age could boast of, and who found in
these very forms and ceremonies the reality of the
Presence and Power of the Living Christ. "The
Oratory of Divine Love," to cite only one in
stance, produced characters and taught doctrines
as pure and as evangelical as were ever produced
in the world. It was the influence of spirits like
these in the previous century which had created
the reform movement, sixty years before Luther
Avas born, and had groaned over the failure of
council after council to accomplish anything, be
cause the ecclesiastical politicians were ahvays in
control. Certainly the fair-minded student of history
must admit, that the Roman Hierarchy had re
ceived notice one hundred years before the break
came, and it was at last their persistent and in
vincible blindness and bigotry that drove many of

THE PRAYER BOOK 67
the Church's noblest and most loyal children into
a revolt, which they deeply deplored. It wasi
simply a case of driving and forcing men's souls,
and he who tries to force the souls of men, "tilts
with a straw against a champion cased in ada
mant." THE REFORMATION IN ENGLAND IN THESE
THREE ASPECTS
When we come to study the Reformation in
England as a Political, Intellectual, and Religious
Movement, we are able at once to account for its
peculiarities — peculiarities that differentiate it
from the movement on the Continent and give to
the English Church, the Ecclesia Anglicana, a
mediating position in Christendom. As Dr.
Beard, the learned Unitarian Hibbert lecturer,
says: "When a laborious German compiler enu
merates the English among the Reformed
Churches, which own a Genevan origin, ... an
Anglican Churchman can only be amused. And
in truth such a procedure is conspicuously unfaith
ful to historical fact. Lutheran, Calvinistic, per
haps even Zwinglian lines of influence upon the
English Reformation may be traced without diffi
culty; but there was a native element, stronger
than any of them, which at once assimilated them
and gave its own character to the result."

1 Hibbert Lectures, p. 301.

08 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
(1) First, then, considered as a Political
Movement, the Reformation appealed to the mind
and heart of a very powerful king, who had al
ready dreamed of supplanting the so-called Roman
Emperor and of assuming the imperial title him
self. Professor Freeman, in the article on Eng
land in the ninth edition of the Encyclopedia Bril-
annica, stresses this fact as necessary to the under
standing of Henry's attitude. Moreover, during
the years of Henry VII's reign England had groAvn
tremendously in power and wealth, and her pros
perous middle class of merchant people wanted
freedom from any foreign dominion. When
therefore the king, whose popularity with all
classes was enormous, who was extolled by for
eigners like Erasmus for his learning and culture,
and by his subjects for his lavish generosity and
robust manliness ; when this King Henry declared
that the foreign Pope had violated the law in per
mitting him to marry his brother's widoAv; when
it was whispered that she could never bear a son
to succeed the king, and that this might lead to
more confusion and possible Avarfare, his subjects
sympathized with his purpose to have the marriage
Avith Katharine annulled. Moreover, every mod
ern writer admits that the Pope's policy as to this
annulment was not straightforward. The facts
seem to justify the conclusion that if Katharine

THE PRAYER BOOK 69
had not been the aunt of Charles V. Emperor of
Germany, who had the Pope in his power, the
annulment of the marriage would have been
granted easily "for a consideration." When at
last Henry, in 1534 vaulted, as it were, into the
Reformation Movement, he immediately asserted
aggressively his royal prerogative, and demanded
that he be recognized as Head of the Church and
be paid a fine from the clergy of two million
pounds, or ten million dollars. The terrified
clergy paid the fine and they also acknowledged the
title, with the proviso "as far as the law of Christ
Avill allow." Technically, King Henry had all the
law and precedent on his side. Other kings had
done the same thing. He was in the exact posi
tion that Philip IV. of France had been. You
will all recall the words, which Shakespeare puts
into the mouth of King John — just three hundred
years before Henry's time :
"Tell the Pope this tale; and from the mouth of England
Add thus much more, that no Italian Priest
Shall tithe or toll in our Dominions;
But as we, under Heaven are Supreme Head,
So under Him that great Supremacy,
Where Ave do reign, we will alone uphold,
Without the assistance of a mortal hand:
So tell the Pope, all reverence set apart
To him and his usurped authority." (K. John, III, i.)
Doubtless Henry argued thus with himself, for
at heart he was a loyal son of Rome. But he had

70 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
poured oil on the fire and the conflagration was
complete, and not to be extinguished, until the
barnacles of a thousand years' growth, and possi
bly something of the ship itself had been burned
away. It was the natural result of historical cir
cumstance and tradition, that the Reformation in
the English Church should take on a political com
plexion. The Church and State in England had
been inextricably interlaced and interrelated by
the growth of centuries. It was through the unity
of the Church, as Stubbs shows in his Constitu
tional History, that the people in the separate
kingdoms in England gradually waked up to the
sense of a common political destiny; and under
King Alfred the formal organization of the King
dom of England really grew out of, and was
created by, the antecedent unity of the Church.
The Bishops of the Church became leaders in
parliamentary affairs and until the sixteenth cen
tury there never had been a Lay Lord Chancellor.
The King's relation to the Church was in his
Kingdom something like that of the Holy Roman
Emperor and he was accorded a quasi-ecclesias
tical, a quasi-spiritual authority. He could not
make a Bishop, Priest, or Deacon — that was a
spiritual and ecclesiastical function — but he could
grant or withhold the right to officiate. When the
Pope's supremacy over England was repudiated,

THE PRAYER BOOK 71
all jurisdiction of State and Church was trans
ferred to the King and he assumed the title Su
preme Head of the Church ; and while in his later
years he took great liberties, yet he never pre
sumed to perform any spiritual function. He
had to exercise his authority through Convocation
and Parliament. It is evident, however, and for
the above reasons, that through the whole process
of Reformation in England, for a century and a
quarter, political considerations and political
changes had a peculiar and unparalleled influence
upon the Church.
(2) When we consider the Reformation as an
Intellectual Movement in England we are at once
impressed by the manifestations of the English
habit of mind. Englishmen, as a class, have been
practical people and not metaphysicians. The
French philosopher said: "I think, therefore I
am," but a great Englishman said: "I act, there
fore I am." (Westcott.) That expresses the point.
There were from the beginning of the Reforma
tion the three tendencies — one towards extreme
Continental Protestantism, one towards extreme
Papalism, or what we call Mediaevalism, and then
there was the conservative attitude of most influ
ential Englishmen, who were not compromisers
but harmonizers. . This last class won the day after
a long struggle and the English Church finally

72 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
emerged with a clearly defined policy, which may
be expressed in three propositions, viz. :
1. The integrity and continuity of the
Church, with the primitive institution of the sac
raments, must be maintained at all costs.
2. The Holy Scriptures must be frankly ac
cepted as the sole basis of doctrine and Church
government; and whatever may be clearly shown
by sound learning to have been the facts of the
Gospel and of the foundation of the Church,
must be honestly admitted whether they seem to
fit in with pre-conceived theories or not. The
chief concern is not to get a logical system but
to get at the truth ; and the Church is the keeper
and witness of Holy Scripture and not the infalli
ble interpreter of it.
3. The Book of Common Prayer is the prac
tical and concrete expression of this intellectual
attitude. It is interesting and instructive to note in this
connection, that, while from time to time Ex
planatory Articles of Religion were set forth in
England, they were never meant nor understood
to be Creedal statements, like the Apostles or Ni-
cene Creeds.
At the very outset of the Reform Movement it
was declared by law (25 Henry VIII. c. 21, A. D.
1533), "That the King and Parliament did not

THE PRAYER BOOK 73
by it (i. e., by repudiating the Pope's Supremacy)
intend to decline or vary from the congregation
of Christ's Church in anything concerning the
very articles of the Catholic Faith of Christendom,
and in any other things declared by Scripture and
the Word of God necessary for salvation."
And Queen Elizabeth took care to write to
the Catholic princes of Europe, "No new religion
has been set up in England, but that which was
commanded by Our Saviour, practised by the
primitive church and approved by the fathers of
the best antiquity." (See Benton, XXIII.)
The three Creeds, viz. : The Creed called the
Apostles Creed, the Creed called the Nicene Creed,
and the Creed, or rather hymn, called the Athana-
sian Creed (still recited on special days in the
Church of England) were regarded as sufficient
statements of the faith. But no less than eight
explanations or statements of Christian Doctrine
were set forth between the years 1536 and 1571.
The last of these statements, called the XXXIX
Articles of Religion, has still to be subscribed to
by the Clergy in the English Church, and they
contain a very judicious and carefully worded
declaration of the position of the Church of Eng
land on the fundamental truths of religion and on
the controverted questions of that time. They do
not cover all points of Christian Doctrine and

74 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
they claim to be only "articles agreed upon by the
Archbishops, Bishops, and Clergy, of the year
1562, for the avoiding of diversities of opinions,
and for the establishing of consent touching true
religion": and, in order, as the "Declaration"
says, that "the disputes may be shut up in God's
promises as they be generally set forth to us in
the Holy Scriptures and the general meaning of
the Articles of the Church." The articles, al
though printed at the end of the American Prayer
Book are not really a part of it, and we use them
only as a basis to furnish an outline for the in
struction of our students in Theology and as an
interesting memorial of past controversy.
4. The English Reformation, as a moral and
religious movement, which I hope to discuss at
more length in my last lecture, is well described
by John Colet, Dean of St. Paul's Cathedral,
London, in a sermon which he preached in 1511,
and which has come down to us as good contem
porary evidence.
The whole sermon is an earnest appeal for the
reform of abuses which are destroying the influ
ence of the Church and turning men's minds away
from religion. He speaks of worldly pomp and
ambition, of feasting and babbling and carnal con
cupiscence, among the clergy, of their greed and
avarice, and the corresponding effect upon the

THE PRAYER BOOK 75
laity. He laments the existence of nepotism and
simony and non-residence and pluralities — "boys
for old men, fools for wise men, evil for good, do
reign and rule." Bishops absent from their dio
ceses, curates and vicars and parish priests, hold
ing many livings, and drawing their salaries, and
living away from home, and all this with the
knowledge and consent of the highest authority.
No wonder that religious doctrine was corrupt
and religious practices debased with superstition.
No wonder that there was popular unrest and the
wide-spread desire for change.
Political, intellectual, moral, ecclesiastical,
conditions — all were gathering force to precipi
tate the storm. The only thing that was needed
was a clash, a jolt, an explosion, and that was fur
nished by the King's quarrel.
The results were far off and were to be accom
plished only after much trial and suffering and
bitter misunderstandings and mistrust. But when
the equilibrium was reached, the Church of Eng
land, like a storm-tossed ship, found herself, at
least not wrecked nor seriously disfigured, but
manned by stout hearts — free men in a free
Church — on an even keel and in an open sea.

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER
AND THE DOCTRINAL AND PRACTICAL ABUSES
WHICH IT SUPERSEDED
HAVE given in the previous lectures
a sketch of the history of the Prayer
Book and of the causes, both in Eng
land and on the Continent, which
brought about that Reformation of Religion, which
constituted one of the most influential epochs in
the history of mankind. According to the most
recent statistics there are about 500 million Chris
tians in the world, of whom about 250 millions
reject, and quite 150 millions, in one way or an
other, appeal to the principles that were declared
at the Reformation. The other 100 millions rep
resent a portion of Christendom not affected by
the movement. According to the judgment of the
best modern scholars (of Professor Beard, Unitar
ian, Hibbert Lecturer) the Reformation in Eng
land was sui generis and must be studied apart

78 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
from the similar movements on the continent of
Europe. The task, therefore, which I have set for my
self in this lecture is the description of the changes
which took place in the doctrine, discipline and
worship of the Church of England (and, therefore,
in our OAvn Episcopal Church) during the period
which we have been considering. I shall try to
give a brief but intelligible account of the un-
Catholic (and by this I mean the unhistorical and
un-primitive) teaching and practice which pre
vailed in England at the beginning of the sixteenth
century, and the reformation of this doctrine and
practice which took place and is embodied in the
Book of Common Prayer.
The most conspicuous abuses in Doctrinal
teaching were connected with the two great sub
jects, viz. : the State of the Dead and the Sacra
ment of the Holy Eucharist.
It is easy to understand Avhat a hold on the
imaginations of men, in that fierce and Avarring
time, when human life was cheap, was the doc
trine of Purgatory. It was a comparatively new
doctrine — but it suited human needs. In prac
tice it meant simply that no soul, however wicked,
ever went straight to hell, but to an intermediate
state of torture, from Avhich it could be delivered
by the prayers of the Church, and more especially

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 79
by the offering of the Mass. Thus Purgatory
took the place of Hell and encouraged men to
sin with a royal gusto, provided they left enough
money to pay for the masses that would shorten
their time in this material underworld of remedial
punishment. The applications for these special
masses for the dead became so numerous and fre
quent that a special order of Priests had to be
provided for this purpose; and chantries, with
special altars, were arranged in or added to the
churches for their accommodation. As the Mass
could not be celebrated after noon, laws had to be
passed prescribing how many masses could rev
erently be said by a Priest on the same day. It
was a common saying that "there are no rich peo
ple in Purgatory — only the poor and the fools."
(See Bp. Hall, IX., 18.)
Thus one abuse led to another, and the Holy
Communion practically ceased to be a Communion
at all; comparatively few laymen received the
sacrament more than once a year and this custom
prevailed even in many monastic establishments.
When they did receive it, it was administered
only in one kind, and this custom of refusing the
chalice to the laity had an extraordinary history.
It was condemned by Pope Urban II. at the
Council of Clermont in 1095, and although the
Council of Constance (1439) finally authorized

80 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
it, some parishes in the diocese of Durham, Eng
land, ignored it as late as 1515. This illustrates
the independent spirit in the Church of Eng
land — which crops out persistently during the
Avhole Mediaeval period.
It must be remembered that we are writing
about an age when the masses of the people were
rude and ignorant and credulous beyond our com
prehension, and unfortunately the men in high
position, who knew better, permitted their greed of
poAver to take advantage of the popular weakness
and credulity. For example, the doctrine of trans-
substantiation was a purely metaphysical and al
most unintelligible effort to reconcile the plain fact
of the existence of the bread and wine after they
were consecrated by the Priest, with the theory
that they did not exist ; but the popular application
of this doctrine, and the legends that arose reciting
incidents of the consecrated bread seen bleeding
on the altar, are almost appalling in their gross-
ness. When a personage as great as Pope Urban
V. could and did send a piece of mixed wax and
balsam to an Emperor, with the solemn assurance
that it would protect him from lightning and fire
and shipAvreek, etc., we cannot wonder at the
popular use of charms, the reverence for relics
and images, and the silly and vicious superstitions
that prevailed. The practice of indulgences made

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 81
salvation, to use the language of the time, a matter
of money, or, as Ave say, a matter of dollars and
cents. It began with the crusades, when knights
leaving their homes for this foreign war were
assured by Papal decree, that they would be clear
from all consequences of sin in case of death.
(See Blunt, v. I., p. 37.)
In the sixteenth century, Pope Leo X., in
order to raise money to build St. Peter's Cathe
dral in Rome, sold indulgences by wholesale to
the Archbishop Albert of Brandenburg and he
in turn farmed them out to agents, who sold them
on commission. One of these agents, John Tetzel,
came into collision with Martin Luther, and that
started the Reformation in Germany. These in
dulgences really represented the practical result
of compulsory auricular confession, before Com
munion, which had been decreed for the first time
in the Later an Council of 1215. When a man
or woman confessed sins to a Priest, absolution
had to be accompanied, if not conditioned, by an
act of penance. This penance after a while took
the form of a fine in money. Thus the indul
gence, or remission of penance, could be bought
beforehand. Some fine distinctions have been at
tempted by authors in dealing with this subject;
for example, that remitting the penalty for sin
beforehand is not the same thing as giving permis-

82 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
sion to sin; but you must consider the average
ignorance and superstition of the age and draw
your own conclusions. It is evident from the
controversies of the time (and we have an abun
dant literature to inform us) that another popular
objection to the obligatory confessional was that
it too was made an instrument of tyranny. As a
learned writer of the sixteenth century declares
(Hall, v. IX, p. 19) : "The virtue of absolution
depends on the fulness of confession: and that
upon examination: and the sufficiency of exami
nation is so full of scruples, besides those infinite
cases of unresolved doubts, that the poor soul
never knows when it is clear." And on top of
all this was the doctrine of intention commonly
taught and set forth by the Reforming Council
of Trent, that unless the ministers of the sacra
ments really intend to administer the grace ac
cording to the order of the Church, their spoken
words and external acts count for nothing, and
the sacrament is not valid. According to this it
Avould seem, certainly, that a man could never
know whether he has ever been baptized or con
firmed or married or absolved or communicated.
No magnifying of the popularity and power of
Elizabeth (I do not mention Henry VIII., because
he was in favor of most of these abuses) will ac
count for the rapid spread of the Reformed opin-

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 83
ions in England. The people at large were glad
to have a change. Many of the abuses, above de
scribed — abuses of doctrine and authority — af
fected very intimately the religious life of the
laity ; and so long as they were persuaded that these
practices were authorized by the Scriptures, they
had to submit; but when the Bible was made an
open book for every man to read and study for him
self, they joined eagerly in the revolt. Moreover,
the Monastic ideal, which had become the supreme
Christian ideal, exalted asceticism and disparaged
the common life of people — treating it as some
thing inferior, if not worthless. When, therefore,
the monasteries were abolished and the clergy
were permitted to marry ; and the Christian family
and the Christian home — for both clergy and
laity — became the training ground for piety and
the exemplification of true religion, the entire
everyday social life of the people was consecrated
and every activity — political, economic, educa
tional and recreative — took on a new meaning and
value. Really, when we read the story and con
sider how many and strong were the appeals which
the movement made to the average mind, we can
not be surprised at excesses of individualism, but
only astonished at the conservatism, that finally
triumphed. The Reform movement in the reigns of Henry

84 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
VIII. and Edward VI., we may say was but the
first step taken by the Church of England in
reaching the position, which Avas finally taken,
for weal or woe, in 1662. The movement in
Henry's reign was dominated by the King him
self, who hated the Pope, plundered the monas
teries, and disapproved of the most important of
the Reformation principles ; and Edward VI. was
a boy, ruled by the Protectors, Somerset and North
umberland, who seized the opportunity to con
fiscate more of the Church property and were en
couraged, for ulterior purposes, by the disciples
of Calvin in Switzerland to make the Church more
and more a mere department of the State. The
reign lasted only six years, and from the reforms
that were proposed, it would appear that the
ancient Church of England was drifting to ship
wreck and complete ruin. Mary and Elizabeth
together saved the Church — Mary by permitting
the Spanish Inquisitors to make the anti-Reforma
tion movement odious, and Elizabeth by her
splendid and patriotic intelligence, that put men
of great ability and learning at the head of affairs
and gave the real esprit de corps of Churchmen
a chance to grow and assert itself. Her Arch
bishop, Parker, Avas an historian of proved learn
ing, and during her reign men like Jewell and
Hooker and Andrewes and Bancroft more than

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 85
held their ground against the Roman and Puritan
controversialists. Hooker appealed to reason, and
Andrewes appealed to history, and the fair-minded
reader must admit that the arguments they mar
shalled, whether they were valid or not, certainly
were not answered. They declared and defended
the principles which the Book of Common Prayer
embodies and illustrates, and which the Anglican
Communion has stood for ever since. They
proved the integrity and organic continuity of the
Church, its ministry and sacraments, and shoAved
that her doctrinal liberality, her refusal to go be
yond the great historic Creeds in her requirements
for Baptism and Communion, was in conformity
with the use and practice of the earliest and
purest age of the Church. They swept aside the
accumulated superstitions of centuries and ap
pealed to the Scriptures and to the facts of prim
itive Christian customs and ideals. They agreed,
however, upon the fundamental and characteristic
principles and usages of historical Christianity,
viz. : the supreme solemnity and value of the ser
vice of the Holy Communion and upon the nec
essity of Episcopal ordination. The reverent re
gard for the Sacrament implied the care for the
ordination of the ministry, and the jealous con
servation of the Ministerial Succession implied
the reverence for the Sacrament. They accepted

86 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
and approved the ancient truth, that, as the Holy
Communion was a supreme Ceremonial Action
of the whole Church, the vestments of the clergy
should be retained and other rites and ceremonies,
not directly contrary to God's word, such as the
use of the sign of the Cross, the ring in the Mar
riage service, the throwing of earth upon the cof
fin at burials, and other accessories of the service,
which the experience of centuries had approved.
This attitude aroused, of course, vehement and
violent opposition from the extremists, who be
lieved, as he himself claimed, that John Calvin,
at Geneva, Switzerland, was inspired of God, and
that no order of service or Church Government
ought to be permitted except that which he had
originated, viz. : the Presbyterian Polity, with his
Book of Holy Discipline and his peculiar forms
of prayer. It was at once the misfortune and the privi
lege of William Laud, Archbishop of Canterbury,
from 1625 to 1647, to bear the brunt of this op
position of the Puritans. Laud Avas a man of
sound learning, great ability, absolutely sincere;
and his idea of the Church of England, as Creigh-
ton says, was higher and truer than that of any
other man of his time.; but there was about him
the coldness Avhich comes of a strictly logical in
telligence, which was sure of its own ground and

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 87
cared little for conciliation. Therefore, he had
little magnetism and few friends. His real fight
Avas for intellectual freedom in the Church. His
failure was due to the method and manner in
Avhich he sought to accomplish it.
I have always thought that there was a de
cided likeness of disposition and intellect between
Laud and Calvin. Both had logical minds and
powerful intellects, but neither one of them had
the sense of humor, without which there is no
capacity to see things in right perspective. Arch
bishop Laud, however, died a martyr to the
Church's cause, which, at that time, was the cause
of intellectual liberty, and no man ever lived to
whom the people who love the Book of Common
Prayer, owe more than they do to him.
On nearly every page of the Prayer Book you
Avill find the marks of the conflict, through which
as through a crucible, it has come down to us.
Its very Title Page is a declaration of historical
continuity with the past and of modest toleration.
"The Book of Common Prayer and Administra
tion of the Sacraments, and other Rites and Cere
monies of the Church, according to the use of the
Church of England" or "of the Protestant Epis
copal Church." So also the Preface to the Ordinal
asserts the facts of history, without criticism of
any other form of Church Government. "It is

88 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
evident unto all men, reading Holy Scripture and
Ancient Authors, that from the Apostles' time
there have been these Orders of Ministers in
Christ's Church — Bishops, Priests, and Deacons
. . . and no man shall be accounted or taken to be
a lawful Bishop, Priest, or Deacon in this Church
. . . except he hath had Episcopal consecration or
ordination." So the general Preface to the whole
Book, published after the last Revision in 1661,
is as follows, viz. : "Of the sundry alterations
proposed unto us, we have rejected all such as
Avere either of dangerous consequence (as secretly
striking some established doctrine or laudable
practice of the Church of England, or indeed of
the AA'hole Catholic Church of Christ) or else of
no consequence at all, but utterly frivolous and
vain. But such alterations as were tendered to us
as seemed to us in any Avay requisite and expedient
we have Avillingly assented unto. . . . Our general
aim was not to gratify this or that party . . . but
to do that, which to our best understandings might
most tend to the preservation of Peace and Unity
in the Church: the procuring of reverence and
exciting of Piety and Devotion in the Public
Worship of God."
The Office for the Administration of the Holy
Communion with its rubrics will furnish us Avith
a good example of the Avise conservatism Avhich

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 89
characterized the Reformed Church of England
in making the changes, which seemed absolutely
necessary. Our Communion Service is substan
tially a translation of the Salisbury Missal, Avhich
had been used in England for five hundred
years. This Missal was in its structure peculiar
to the Church of England because Avhen St. Augus
tine came to England in 596 he found the British
Church already existing and organized, and Avas
specially authorized by Pope Gregory to continue
the use of the native liturgy with a few modifica
tions. For this reason the Communion Office of
the Church of England is closer kin to the East
ern Liturgy of Ephesus than to that of Rome,
and this is particularly true of the Communion
Service of the Episcopal Church, which, as I
have said elsewhere, has features derived from
the Scotch Service Book taken directly from the
East. It is a noteworthy and characteristic feature
of this English Office that alone of all the liturgies
it virtually begins with the recitation of the Ten
Commandments. No other Communion Service
in Christendom has this provision; and it is re
ported of the Duke of Wellington, that he said
on one occasion, when the disestablishment of the
English Church was being discussed, that "it
Avould be worth while to maintain the status of

90 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
the Church, if for nothing else, just to have the
Ten Commandments of the Moral Law recited
every Sunday in every parish in the Kingdom."
This provision, however, illustrates the learn
ing of the translators of our Communion Office;
because it is well known to scholars, that some
such lesson from the Old Testament was common
in Eastern Liturgies. It was the religious genius
of the English Reformers that selected the Ten
Commandments from various readings of the Old
Testament. The Office was deliberately constructed so as
to be a Communion Service and not a solitary
Mass to be repeated by the Priest Avith rapid
enunciation many times a day, without regard to
Avhether there were any persons present to re
ceive the sacrament, after the manner of the
"Chantry Priests." In the first Prayer Book, the
name "Mass" was referred to in the title "The
Supper of the Lord and the Holy Communion,
commonly called The Mass" ; but this latter name
Avas dropped in subsequent revisions of the Prayer
Book, because it was not a primitive name for
the Holy Communion; it had no special signifi
cance,1 being a barbarous Latin designation for
any kind of religious service; it was never heard

lyide, Catholic (Roman) Dictionary, p. 562.

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 91
of before the end of the fourth century; and be
cause it was connected in the popular mind with
so many mediaeval abuses as to be liable to be
misunderstood. The same cautious attitude was
observed with regard to the practice of compulsory
auricular confession, which had been so inti
mately associated with the Holy Communion and
out of which the whole system of Indulgences —
the burning question of the German Reforma
tion — had grown. For four hundred years there
was a custom prevalent in the Church of open
confession of sins, in more or less minute detail,
before the congregation, and this naturally led to
scandals and to the relegation of such self-dis
closures to the privacy of the closet; but it was
not until 1215 A. D. that the Pope decreed that
every Christian man and woman was solemnly
obligated to make Confession to the Priest at
least once a year. The practical result of this
decree was to encourage reliance upon the mere
formal obedience to an ecclesiastical rule, and
weaken the sense of individual responsibility.
On this whole subject, bristling with difficul
ties as it was, the Church of England took what
it seems to me was a brave as well as a wise
position. She did not yield to the Puritan
clamor and repudiate a practice which had a very
real foundation in human nature's needs (for

92 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
the Wesleyans had to revive it), but declared that
this method of seeking pardon for one's sins was
purely voluntary and for exceptional cases. The
language in the Communion Office is: "If there
be any of you Avho by this means (?'. e., by ordinary
repentance and confession and readiness to make
restitution) cannot quiet his OAvn conscience here
in, but requireth further comfort or counsel, let
him come to me or some other discreet and learned
Minister of God's Word and open his grief;
that by the ministry of God's Holy Word he may
receive the benefit of absolution, together with
ghostly counsel and advice, to the quieting of his
conscience and the avoiding of all scruple and
doubtfulness." The same wise moderation permits the use of
either leavened or unleavened bread, and allows
but does not compel the use of the special Euchar-
istic Vestments. The Reservation of the Sacra
ment, in any way Avhatever, is not mentioned in
the Prayer Book and certainly is not authorized.
The first Prayer Book did provide for the carry
ing of the Sacrament on days, when there Avas
a stated Communion, to sick folk who could not
get to Church, and this was a most ancient and
precious custom of the early Church; but even
this "Reservation for the sick" had to be dis
continued, because it was taken advantage of by

THE BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER 93
party men and made the excuse for Reserving
the Sacrament as an object of Divine Worship
(Latreia), a very modern and misleading custom,
unknown to-day to the churches of Eastern Chris
tendom. We may fitly conclude this lecture with a quo
tation from the late Dr. Brooke Foss Westcott,
Bishop of Durham, one of the greatest scholars
and most philosophical thinkers that the English-
speaking world has produced : 2
"Our island home," he said, "has profoundly
affected our history and character. . . . With
us State and Church have from the first grown
side by side. Each has acted on the other. . . .
In the Great Charter of English Liberties the
Church of England (Ecclesia Anglicana) holds
the foremost place. . . . The intimate intercourse
of the spiritual and temporal powers of England
has at once guarded the freedom of Churchmen
and increased their responsibility. It has checked
the inclination of theological students to multiply
the definitions of dogma, which, even when cor
rect, tend to mar the simplicity and breadth of
that with which they deal. In this respect the
English Reformation differed essentially from
the typical Reformations on the Continent. It

! Lessons from. Work, p. 52.

94 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
was a Reformation and not a reconstruction. It
made no attempt to do away with the past. . . .
It showed the greatest respect to antiquity, but
its final appeal was to Scripture. It accepted no
formulary in itself of absolute authority. The
Creeds are 'to be received and believed, for they
may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy
Scripture,' and, 'whatever is not read therein nor
may be proved thereby, is not to be required of
any man.' . . . The English Reformation cor
responds with the English character, which is
disinclined to seek the completeness of a Theo
logical system. It looks to finding Truth through
life rather than through Logic, for Truth is not
of the intellect only. It is patient of hesitation,
indefiniteness, even of superficial inconsistency,
if only the root of the matter can be held firmly
for the guidance of conduct; for spiritual sub
jects are too vast to furnish clear-cut premises
from which exhaustive conclusions can be drawn.
So we naturally turn again and again to the his
toric elements in our Creed. These are of life;
and unto life; and through life." Or, as we
Americans express it, Only the things that belong
to life and help life and increase life, are worth
our while.

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE
ITS MEANING AND VALUE
A sermon, preached at the consecration of the Rev. James
R. Winchester, D.D., as Bishop Coadjutor of Arkansas,
on the Feast of St. Michael and All Angels,
September 29, 1911

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE
ITS MEANING AND VALUE
"/ am the Light of the world: he that followeth Me
shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of
life."— -St. John 8: 12.
HE Lord Jesus Christ is the Light
and Life of the world. To-day, as
I speak to you, His Presence and
the communication of His Personal
Power are the vital forces in the progress of man
kind. Not His words, not His example, but He
Himself is the vital Energy, that is pulsing
through Humanity, slowly but surely redeeming,
renewing, re-creating our mortality into Eternal
Life. "He that hath the Son hath life." 1 "This
is Life Eternal," we have His word for it, "to
know Thee, the Only true God and Jesus Christ
whom Thou hast sent." 2 "I am the way, the
truth, and the life, and no man cometh unto the
Father but by Me." 3
I have seen the sun in the morning, obscured,

1 St. John 5 : 12.
2 St. John 17: 3
3 St. John 14: 6.

98 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
almost hidden, by the heaA^y banks of cloud, and
then, little by little, I have seen the light absorb
the darkness, and the heat melt and dissipate the
vapor, until the atmosphere was clear as crystal.
The clouds were not destroyed ; the vapor was still
there; but it was so permeated by the light and
heat, that its gloom was transformed into glory.
So, I believe, the Eternal Christ is throbbing
through life's vapors, like a fiery heart to the
world, melting its cruelties, forging its faith,
kindling its love, brightening its vision.
This was the keynote of St. Paul's message,
and his hearers so understood it. As Festus said
to Agrippa, "It is a question of one Jesus, Avho
Avas dead, and whom Paul affirms to be alive." *
This is what St. Paul means in the Epistle to
the Ephesians, when he says, that the complete
dominion of this Christ life — this Christ nature —
in commerce, in legislation, in international rela
tions, in theology, in social life, in home life,
and in individual experience, Avill be the fulfil
ment of God's ideal for the race, and the perfec
tion of man, as the son of God, "until we all
come," he says, "in the unity of the faith and of
the knoAvledge of the Son of God, unto the per
fect man." '

• Acts 25 : 19.
'Ephes. 4: 13.

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 99
''Where is one, that born of woman, altogether can escape
From the lower world within him, moods of tiger or of ape ?
Man, as yet, is being made; and ere the crowning Age of
Ages,
Shall not aeon after aeon pass and touch him into shape?
All about him still the shadow, but, while races flower
and fade,
Prophet-eyes may catch a glory ever gaining on the shade,
Till the peoples all are one, and their voices blend in
choric
Hallelujah to the Maker, It is finished. Man is made."
II. And second, this communication of the
Christ Life to the world is the Avork of the Spirit
of God. It is the Holy Spirit, Ave say in the
Creed, who is the Lord of Life.
Wherever we see outward, visible, material
things organizing into system, and order, and
beauty, and pulsing with life, there is the Holy
Spirit of God. When all nature was chaos and
confusion it was the Ploly Spirit that moved
upon the face of the waters and brought forth
order and law. When God willed to become man
for our sakes and forever unite the physical (as
we call it) to the spiritual — the mortal manhood
to the immortal Deity — it was the Holy Spirit
who came upon the Virgin and overshadowed her,
so that "that Holy Thing that was born of her was
called the Son of God." " When at last the work
of Jesus on earth was finished and He had as-

0 St. Luke 1 : 35.

100 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
cended to the Right Hand of the Father, it Avas
the Holy Spirit Avho came doAvn upon that hand
ful of bereft, perplexed disciples, and moulded
them into an organized, definite and effective
society, called The Church. For indeed, this
was the Lord's promise: "It is expedient for you,
that I go away; for, if I go not away, the Com
forter (the Spirit) will not come' unto you; but,
if I go away, I will send Him unto you." ' "He
shall receive- of Mine and shall show it unto
you":8 "When He, the Spirit of Truth, is come,
He will guide you into all truth." * Therefore
the great Apostle, on a special occasion, having
need to assert this authority of organization in
the Church, did not hesitate to say, "We have the
mind of Christ" ;10 and, in writing to the man,
Avhom he had appointed as the head and ruler of
the Avhole church in Ephesus, he commanded "The
things which thou hast heard of me among many
witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men,
who shall be able to teach others also," n and
"lay hands suddenly on no man." '
III. It is of vital importance to us as Chris-

7 St. John 16: 7.
8 14.
»13.10 1 Cor. 2: 16.
11 II Timothy 2 : 2.

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 101
tians to remember that Christianity began its
Avork in the world, not as an appeal to individuals,
not as a doctrine or a philosophy, but as a family,
a kingdom, an institution.
The communication of the Life of the Christ
to humanity had to begin somewhere; and it is
remarkable, that it began, not Avith one man, but
Avith two men together, and Avas at the very out
set a social institution. As St. John tells us
(1: 37), two disciples of the Baptist heard Him
speak, and they folloAved Him. So also the Holy
Spirit at Pentecost descended upon all the dis
ciples and constituted the Church ; and it was only
after that, that Ave read of the Holy Spirit being
given to individuals. In other Avords the Com
munity, the Family, the Church, comes first, and
is the medium of the life and grace, Avhich is
given through the Church to the individual. As
St. Paul says, "God gave Him to be head over
all things to the Church, which is His Body, the
fulness of Him that filleth all in all," 1S and that
"through the Church might be known the mani
fold wisdom of God" ;13 which is consistent with
what he says elsewhere, that to be baptized into
Christ is to be baptized into the Church.14 The

12 1 Tim. 5 : 22.
"Ephes. 1: 22; 3: 10.
"Galat. 3: 27 and I Cor. 12: 13.

102 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
Church is ideally the manifestation of the gradu
ally expanding impartation of Christ to the world,
and therefore it is called His Body; "Ye are the
Body of Christ and members in particular."
(I Cor. 12:27.) If that Body were perfect in
all its parts and activities, every member of the
Body Avould be a living expression of the Christ;
but because the Body is composed of imperfect
human souls, because the Church is human in its
administration though Divine in the origin and
source of its life, Ave must expect failure here
and there, where the intimacy of union with the
Divine Lord has temporarily declined. The Lord
kneAV this and anticipated it; and therefore at
the very heart of the Body, the Church, as the
guarantee of its essential Divine life, He Him
self instituted a great and solemn Ceremonial
Action, in and by which the Life-giving Presence
of the Living Christ should be certified and as
sured to the end of time. Every Celebration of
the Holy Communion is a declaration, that the
Lord Jesus Christ is living, now and here; that
the Church is His Body, through which He is
giving Himself to the world; that every man and
woman, who in faith partakes of that Sacrament,
is partaking of Christ; that as the life of Christ
on earth was the life of sacrifice, so the law of
all spiritual life is sacrifice; and finally, that the

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 103
Minister, who, on behalf of the Church and by
appointment of the Church, administers this Sac
rament, is the representative of a Priesthood, so
high, so beautiful, that it fulfils and crowns all
the types and dreams of priesthood, that in the
past have helped and blessed the world.
What Christ is, that the Church ought to be
and will be; and that unrivalled priesthood of
Jesus, whereby He through the Eternal Spirit
offered Himself without spot to God, is the priest
hood of His Church, which is His Body — the
priesthood of service, of light-giving, and life-
giving to mankind. So St. Peter says to the
members of the Church, "Ye are an elect race,
a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for
God's OAvn possession"— "to offer up spiritual
sacrifices, acceptable to God through Jesus
Christ." 15 The existence of the Church — realiz
ing, actualizing, the life and Presence of Christ
by the power of the Holy Spirit, and communica
ting that Life to the world by its sacramental
agencies — this, we believe, is of the very essence
of the Gospel.
This Church was a real and visible society on
the Day of Pentecost, when after St. Peter's ser
mon, three thousand were added to it by baptism.

"I Peter 2: 5.

104 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
It has continued to be a real and visible institu
tion with its own principle of life, its own law,
its own worship, its own Creed, ever since. There
has never been a day nor an hour since Pentecost,
when the visible and recognizable Church of
Christ has not been existing and working in the
world. To deny this is to deny the continuing
Presence of the Lord, perpetually giving His
Life through His authorized agencies to His peo
ple. To deny this is to make His promise of no
effect, "Upon this Rock I will build My Church,
and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against
it." 10 Of course the Church has been adminis
tered by fallible human beings. It has passed
through many vicissitudes. In some countries
and at some periods it has officially sunk to ap
parent depths of degradation. Its authority has
been usurped by individual Bishops, by Kings
and Emperors. Worldly and wicked ecclesiastics
have used its power for cruelty, bigotry and
wrong. It was rent by the schism of the East
and West in the eleventh century, and again by
the separation of Rome and England in the six
teenth century; but there has never been a time,
when good Bishops have not been true pastors
of their flocks, Avhen faithful priests have not

"St. Matt. 16: 18.

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 105
regularly administered the sacraments, and when
loyal and godly laymen have not devoutly and
consistently kept the faith. And so through it
all — through the fires of heathen persecution,
through the barbarism of the sixth and seventh
centuries, through the storm of the Reformation,
it has continued to be the One, Holy, Catholic, and
Apostolic Church, to which Ignatius referred in
the year 110 A. D., and the belief in which we
profess to-day in the great Creed of Christendom.
IV. I have referred to St. Paul's description
of the Church as the Body of Christ. I have
spoken of the Holy Eucharist as the heart of the
Body. Now I believe that the authorized Minis
try, continued from age to age, ordained and ap
pointed according to the provisions of the Church's
public law, is the spinal column of the Body.
That Ministry is essentially a priesthood, because
the Church, as I have shown, is a priestly insti
tution, for Christ, whom the Church represents,
is a Priest forever.
As to the method and manner of the con
tinuation of that Ministry, and its proper and
legal appointment, the Church" itself has never
had any doubt. The First General Council met
in Jerusalem in the year 51, and the Apostles
were recognized as the authoritative members of
it. The second General Council met in Nicea in

100 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
A. D. 325, and the Bishops of the various dio
ceses rendered its decisions. The historic Church
has never hesitated for an instant in its assertion
of the continuity and authority of the Episcopate.
Some Councils have debated the Papal claims.
Other Councils have questioned the authority of
Archbishops and Metropolitans; but every Coun
cil of the Church for a thousand and five hun
dred years has taken the Episcopate for granted.
Indeed, if we except the sacraments of baptism
and the Holy Communion, there is not an insti
tution of Christianity for which there is such
ancient and indisputable evidence as there is for
the Episcopate. Not even the observance of Sun
day; not even the doctrine of the Trinity, can be
attested by such ancient and indisputable proof.
For example: In the year 110 A. D., about
ten years after the death of St. John the Apostle,
there was a Bishop of Antioch, who had con
versed with St. John, and was called Christo-
pheros, because, it was said, he had been held in
the arms of Our Lord Himself. This Bishop,
Ignatius, Avas devoured by lions in the Arena at
Rome, because he would not deny Christ. He
wrote seven letters to the churches of Asia Minor,
which have been preserved, and in them he speaks
so frequently of the Episcopal government of the
Church, that Lightfoot says, "All the evidence,

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 107
without one dissenting voice, points to Episcopacy
as the established form of Church government in
Asia Minor from the close of the first century;
and the testimony for the spread of the Episco
pate in this period is more abundant and more
varied than for any other institution and event
during this period." 17 And Professor Fisher, the
Congregationalist Professor of Ecclesiastical His
tory at Yale College wrote, "The institution of
the monarchial or diocesan Episcopate may be at
tributed to St. John." 1S Again, there was a man
named Irenaeus, Avho was Bishop of Lyons in
Gaul from A. D. 179 to A. D. 200. He lived
to a great age. He was born in Asia Minor and
was a disciple of Polycarp, Bishop of Smyrna,
who was a pupil of St. John. We have a bulky
volume of the writings of Irenaeus, which have
come down to us, and in these writings he says:
"We can enumerate those, who by the Apostles
were appointed Bishops in the churches and their
successors even to our own time." A great Mod
ern scholar, speaking of the reverence due the
Bible, says, "Any man who wishes to know what
the early Christians thought about the Bible can
learn more from reading the writings of Irenaeus
than he can by reading all the German mono-

" Apostolic Fathers, Vol. I., p. 377.
18 Validity of Non-Episcopal Ordination, p. 4.

108 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
graphs on the subject that have appeared in the
past fifty years." Irenaeus. is a good witness for
the Bible. He is also a good witness for the his
toric Episcopate.
But, to show that this conviction was not
limited to any one part of the Christian world
at that time, we have the statement of a Roman
lawyer, TertuUian, who lived in North Africa
before the end of the second century, as follows:
"If any dare to connect themselves with the
Apostolic age, let them unfold the succession of
their Bishops, so coming down from the begin
ning with continuous steps from the Apostles."
These men lived very close to the Apostolic
Age. St. John did not die until about the year
100 A. D., and Irenaeus was born about 125
A. D. Bishop White, the first Bishop of Penn
sylvania, was consecrated Bishop in 1784; and
Bishop Green of Mississippi, with whom I Avas
intimately associated for a number of years, was
a friend and companion of Bishop White. Con
sequently I have a right to feel that I know from
Bishop Green's conversations with me what the
opinions and judgments of Bishop White were;
and I am separated from Bishop White by as
long a period of years as Irenaeus was separated
from St. John. I regret that I have had to
weary the congregation here this morning with

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 109
these quotations. My argument is, that Chris
tianity was from the start a vital organism — an
institution, a Church — used as a vehicle and me
dium by the Holy Spirit to bear witness to
Christ's Life-giving Presence in the world; and
my reference to the dry facts of history Avas only
for the purpose of corroborating this truth. We
believe that the life and power of Christ, in a
special sense, are communicated to men to-day,
in and by the sacramental ministrations of the
organized Church; and that they were so com
municated during all the preceding centuries for
eighteen hundred years. If this be true, it is
worth while enquiring whether the Christian
Church from the beginning has asserted and pro
claimed this tremendous truth. We cannot help
appealing to history, and history without doubt
declares that the Church has proclaimed this
truth, in its liturgies, its Creeds, its councils, and
its public law.
V. It is not necessary for me to discuss at
length the question, when and how the Church
became conscious of the need of legislating on
the subject of the Ministry. It is one thing to
live, and it is another and a different thing to
enquire into and determine those laws of health
and growth by obedience to Avhich life is promoted
and sustained. We are quite justified in believ-

110 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
ing that the Church during the last half of the
first century had a regularly constituted Minis
try, even though we have no official and positive
enactments or declarations on the subject. It is
contrary to all experience of life to expect any
such pronouncements. The Church, for example,
lived in the faith of Jesus Christ, as the Only-
begotten Son of God, for at least two hundred
years before that truth was made the subject of
formal enactment and credal definition; and the
Gospel itself was preached for at least thirty
years before it was committed to writing. The
oak is involved in the acorn; and He who made
the seed, made the tree.
Scholars with varying predispositions and
motives have entered upon minute study and spec
ulation as to the forms of ministry mentioned in
the New Testament; as to the identity of the
office of Bishop and Presbyter, when St. Paul
wrote his Pastoral Epistles; as to the character
and limitations of the charismatic ministries; as
to the value of the evidence contained in the
Christianized Jewish manual called the Didache;
as to whether the authority of the Episcopate was
to any degree advanced by the fact that Bishops
appear to have been the financial agents of the con
gregations; as to whether there were any congre
gations in New Testament times which were in-

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 111
dependent of all order and authority — and the
results have varied, according to the predilections
of the scholars, some of Avhom seem to have lost
sight of the whole in studying the parts. The
great, the important fact is, that Christ founded
His Church; that the Holy Spirit vitalized it on
the Day of Pentecost; that the ministers of that
Church baptized converts and administered the
Holy Communion; and that the Church of St.
Paul and St. John was the Church of Clement
and Ignatius and Irenaeus and Augustine and
Gregory and Anselm and Laud; and that that
Church is on earth to-day, witnessing by the Eu-
charistic Oblation on a thousand thousand Altars
throughout the world, the Presence and the Life
of Jesus Christ her Lord.
VI. That Life is indeed, as our text says,
the Light of the world, and with increasing earn
estness and intensity good men are acknoAvledg-
ing His dominion.
For (1) the world cannot progress without a
moral standard, a moral criterion; and all the
genius of more than thirty generations has failed
to invent an ideal of life equal to His. What
ever may be the differences of opinion among men
as to the meaning and purpose of religion, there
is practically no doubt in the civilized world as
to its Highest Representative. The supreme type

112 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
of manhood is Jesus Christ. There are Chinamen
who are saying that to-day and trying to live up
to it ; and Japanese, and Malays, and Indians, and
Africans, as well as Americans and Europeans.
There is no race of people on the earth among
whom the appeal of the life and character of Jesus
Christ can be said to have failed.
And then (2) as Ave realize the increased em
phasis which is being placed to-day upon the social
meaning of the Gospel and the social nature of its
appeal, we cannot but be impressed with the wis
dom of the Lord's provision, that there should be
an illustration of this truth in an actual society
of men and women, Avhere love and not envy, ser
vice and not selfishness, are the ideal principles
of its existence. Such a society, which is a family,
where there are indeed differences of gifts, differ
ences of function and order, but identity of life
and purpose, based on love— such a society we be
lieve Christ instituted Avhen He founded His
Church. It is true indeed, that the Church has
not adequately fulfilled the purpose of its Founder
(St. Paul says we have this treasure in earthen
vessels), and that its unhappy divisions have di
verted its attention from its primary aim and the
justification of its being ; but any fair-minded man
who reads history, must admit that, to turn aAvay
from the historic Church is to turn away from the

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 113
only institution, Avhich for more than a thousand
and five hundred years has continuously and con
sistently offered any kind of organized resistance
to the influences and forces, which have always
been trying, as they are now trying, to make God
a monster and man a mere selfish animal. Talk
as you please ; say what you will against the Medi
aeval Church or the eighteenth-century Church,
there has never been a day nor an hour, Avhen
Bishops and priests — multitudes of them — have
not been honestly and faithfully trying to realize
the ideal, for which the Church was founded;
viz. : to be an example and inspiration of social
righteousness to the world. As an organization —
and what is the use or value of any movement with
out organization? — the Church has had to have
men exercising authority. But surely that exer
cise of authority has never been, in theory or inten
tion, either arbitrary or selfish. Always, when
men have been set apart for the higher ministries
of the Church, it has been understood that they
have accepted for, and on behalf of, the people
a responsibility for wider, deeper, and more con
secrated service.
We believe that these facts deepen the respon
sibility and enlarge the opportunity of the Episco
pate in our day. The Bishop represents the uni
versal, the Catholic spirit of Christianity. By the

114 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
very traditions of his office he is pledged to overgo
and transcend all differences of party, all preju
dices of class and section. A truly Catholic
Bishop cannot be a partisan. People, it has been
often said, who are doubtful of their social posi
tion, will always be asserting it ; but a Bishop, who
knows that he is a legitimate successor in the Apos
tolic Office, can afford to be broad-minded. He
can recognize all baptized Christians as members
of the one Catholic Church; and with due appre
ciation of the historic causes of our unhappy di
visions he can interpret rules and rubrics, so as to
emphasize the points of agreement among all
Christian people, and cultivate charity, good-will,
and sympathetic understanding, one of another.
The love of Christ constraineth us.
Brethren: The Church of England was called
the Bulwark of the Reformation, and we believe
that it was the Providence of God that preserved
in this Church the ancient order of the Episcopal
Succession, which it is her duty to protect and to
maintain, not as an exclusive privilege, but as a
trust committed to her, and as basis perhaps, upon
Avhich all Christians may some day come together
in visible union. Mortal men will never agree
perfectly in their opinions or in the method of
expressing their religious life ; but they may agree
upon an institution; and there is no organic insti-

THE HISTORIC EPISCOPATE 115
tution of Christianity so Catholic, so ancient, as
the Historic Episcopate.
Like St. Paul, therefore, we must magnify our
office by cultivating the personal virtues of hu
mility and faith. To minimize and depreciate
the office would be to magnify ourselves. The
more utterly we believe in the Divine authority of
our commission, the more humble and gentle and
charitable shall we be in the exercise of its
authority. The Lord said, in the words of my text, "I am
the Light of the world ; he that f olloweth Me shall
not walk in darkness, but shall have the Light
of Life." There is no compromise in those words — no
suggestion of doubt, or concession, or indecision.
Christ is all or nothing.
So the Church of Christ, which is His Body —
the Church which was born, not yesterday, nor in
the sixteenth century, nor in the eleventh century,
when Hildebrand created the Papal Monarchy;
but which began to be on the day of Pentecost —
so the Church of Christ to-day, as in the beginning,
asserts her authority and appeals to men, not with
a "perhaps," but with a conviction of certainty.
At this service this morning Ave are assisting in
adding one more to the list of those stewards and
trustees of her gifts, who by God's will have been

116 THE EPISCOPAL CHURCH
the instruments in perpetuating her long-descended
life. It does seem a long, long time since Pente
cost; and some men who would like to attribute
uncertainty and confusion to the history of the
Church, tell us that we cannot be sure of our eccle
siastical genealogy or our legitimate descent.
How foolish such talk is !
I remember standing in the Cathedral at Can
terbury three years ago and reading upon the
tablet in the west front the list of all the Arch
bishops, with dates of birth, death, and consecra
tion, for thirteen hundred and twenty-one years.
In the pavement of the sanctuary of our New York
Cathedral of St. John the Divine there is a Roman
"brick, taken from the Church of St. John at
Ephesus, which was built by the Emperor Jus
tinian in the year 554 A. D., over the traditional
site of St. John's grave.
Brethren : Time is but a law of thought. The
Church is still young. The Christ who appeared
visibly to St. Stephen and St. Paul and St. John,
is the Christ who is with us here to-day.
Let us surrender ourselves to His Presence,
and, as we set apart this our brother to the duties,
the responsibilities, the labors of his Apostleship,
let us listen for His Voice, saying: "Ye have
not chosen Me, but I have chosen you; that ye
should go and bring forth fruit, that your fruit
should remain."

D D