Some Things for High Churchmen to Think About.

London, October 3, 1902.

It does not follow, from what I said in my former letter about the different forms of service in use among Episcopalians and Presbyterians, respectively, that the latter necessarily disapprove of the use of written prayers. So far is this from being the case that Calvin and Knox themselves wrote liturgies, though neither they nor their successors believed in the rigid prescription of fixed forms, but insisted upon ample freedom for the use of such original prayers as occasion demanded. The Book of Common Prayer itself, which is the product of every Christian age and Christian people, including Reformers, Presbyterians, Puritans and Lutherans, as well as Romanists and Anglicans, and which is used constantly by the Episcopal churches throughout the English-speaking world, owes no little to the influence of men of our faith and polity, and especially to that of the illustrious Genevan reformer, John Calvin. The General Thanksgiving, called "the chiefest treasure of the Prayer-Book," is said to have been composed by the Rev. Dr. Edward Reynolds, a distinguished Presbyterian member of the Westminster Assembly of Divines, and afterwards Bishop of Norwich. These prayers, as well as other parts of the Book of Common Prayer, are constantly used, in whole or in part, by many Presbyterian ministers when leading the public devotions of their people, and the more such models of prayer are studied by Presbyterian ministers in general the sooner will they cease to deserve the reproach that their manner of conducting this important part of public worship is sometimes rambling, slovenly and unedifying. No minister of our time of any denomination was more acceptable and helpful in the conduct of this part of the service than the late Rev. Dr. Moses D. Hoge, of Richmond. His prayers were characterized in a preËminent degree by good taste and propriety of expression, as well as by unction. He was a diligent student of the best liturgies, such as those of Calvin, Knox and Cranmer. His biographer, speaking of "the elaborate and laborious preparation that he made for this service, as evinced by his papers," says: "Dr. Hoge's peculiar power in prayer was not merely the result of what is called the 'gift of prayer.' Not only his celebrated prayers on great public occasions were carefully written out, but from his early ministry he wrote prayers for every variety of occasion and service, and formulated petitions on every variety of topic."

When we visited Canterbury Cathedral, the other day, we were reminded of another striking proof of the liberty of Presbyterian usage in this matter. The place is, of course, one that brings to mind innumerable events of interest, ranging all the way from the tragedy of Thomas a Becket's death to the comedy of the struggle that took place in St. Catherine's Chapel, Westminster, in 1176, between the Archbishops of Canterbury and York, a scuffle which led to the question of their precedence being decided by a papal edict, giving to one the title of Primate of all England, to the other that of Primate of England. One cannot help thinking, in connection with it, of the official titles of the two great Presbyterian bodies in our country, the technical title of the Northern Church being the Presbyterian Church in the United States of America, and the technical title of the Southern Church being the Presbyterian Church in the United States. Fuller's Church History gives a racy account of the scene referred to: "A synod was called at Westminster, the Pope's legate being present thereat; on whose right hand sat Richard, Archbishop of Canterbury, as in his proper place. When in springs Roger of York, and finding Canterbury so seated, fairly sits him down on Canterbury's lap (a baby too big to be danced thereon); yea, Canterbury's servants dandled this lap-child with a witness, who plucked him thence, and buffeted him to purpose." But far more interesting to us than the story of this undignified behavior on the part of these two dignitaries, and even more interesting than the thrilling story of Becket's murder, was the chapel in the crypt, where for three hundred and fifty years the Huguenots, who were welcomed by Queen Elizabeth and given the use of this part of the cathedral, have continued to use the ancient Presbyterian forms of worship which they brought with them when driven from France by Roman Catholic persecution. And it is a very interesting fact that the liturgy (in French) which they use is almost the same as the Book of Common Prayer, but immensely significant that the congregation continues to observe the Lord's Supper seated, after the Presbyterian form. The communion plates and cups, which we had the pleasure of taking up in our hands, were brought by the refugees to England three hundred and fifty years ago, but are still in use.

From what has now been said, it is clear that it is not altogether the use of the Prayer-Book which gives to the American Protestant worshipping in an Anglican church that curious feeling of strangeness and formalism. It is rather the Romish-looking arrangements about the "altar," the crosses and candles and cloths, the vestments and processions, the turning of the people towards the east when they pray, the "vain repetitions" of certain parts of the liturgy, such as the Lord's Prayer, which sometimes occurs four or five times in one service, and the "intoning" of the service, that is, the literally monotonous recitation of the prayers, without any rising or falling inflection, every word being uttered in precisely the same tone, without the slightest variation. I do not mean that all these features always occur in every service. Sometimes one or more of them will be omitted, such as turning to the east in prayer, or intoning. For instance, Canon Hensley Henson, whom we heard a short time ago at St. Margaret's, Westminster, where the late Canon Farrar preached so long and so brilliantly, and who, though quite radical in some of his views, is the most thoughtful preacher among the ministers of the Anglican Church in London at the present time, did not intone the prayers which he offered, though his assistant did. I do not know whether Canon Henson's usage is from necessity or choice—whether it is because he cannot intone or because he does not care to do so, preferring to address the Almighty in the same natural and expressive tones which he uses in communications with his fellow-men.

Canon Henson does not look the least like the typical Englishman. His appearance is antipodal to that of the beefy, bluff, full-blooded John Bull. He is slender, clean-shaven, boyish, white, his face "sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought." His body may be delicate, but there is no lack of vigor about his mind. The strength and charm of his preaching, due chiefly to the freshness of the thought and the purity and clearness of the language—for he has no marked advantages of presence or voice or manner—draw great crowds to St. Margaret's. We had to wait at the door for some time to let the pewholders have a chance, but when the word was given the crowd at the door poured in and quickly overflowed all the vacant seating space. Shortly after he began his sermon, which was read throughout, three ladies rose to leave the church, and I was not a little astonished to hear him stop and say, with what I thought was a touch of irritation, "I will wait till those ladies get out." No doubt it is vexatious to have people leave the church during the sermon, but no minister has a right to pillory anybody in that fashion, unless it is somebody who is known to be in the habit of interrupting the service in that way. The minister has no right to assume that people are doing a deliberately discourteous or culpably thoughtless thing. The probability is that one of the ladies in the group referred to was sick or faint and had to withdraw. This kind of rudeness may be naturally expected from some of the men who in our country have done so much to degrade the fine name of "Evangelist," but surely one does not expect it from a gentleman like Canon Henson.

While bound to criticise Canon Henson for this breach of good manners, I hasten to express my cordial admiration of his courtesy, courage, and Christliness in general, and especially of the power of his statement of the claims of Christian love against the Anglican custom of refusing to commune with Nonconformists. The most remarkable sermon preached by any clergyman of the Established Church during our sojourn in England was a sermon preached by him before the University of Cambridge on the text, "There shall be one fold and one Shepherd," in which he advocated the admission of Nonconformists to the sacrament. Hear him:

"The primary need of the hour is more religious honesty. In the classic phrase of Dr. Johnson, Churchmen beyond all others need 'to clear their minds of cant.' 'Let love be without hypocrisy' is the kindred protest of St. Paul. Bear with me while I bring these considerations to a very simple, indeed an obvious application. On all hands there is talk of Christian unity. Not a Conference or a Congress of Churchmen meets without effusive welcome from Nonconformists. A few weeks ago I sat in the Congress Hall at Brighton and listened to a series of speeches by prominent Nonconformists, all expressing the warmest sentiments of Christian fraternity. I reflected that by the existing law and current practice of our church all those excellent orators and their fellow-believers were spiritual outcasts; that, if they presented themselves for the Sacrament of Unity, they would be decisively rejected; that, in no consecrated building, might their voices be heard from the pulpit, though all men—as in the case of Dr. Dale, of Birmingham—owned their conspicuous power and goodness. The contradiction came home to my conscience as an intolerable outrage, and I determined to say here to-day in this famous pulpit, to which your kindness has bidden me, what I had long been thinking, that the time has come for Churchmen to remove barriers for which they can no longer plead political utility, and which have behind them no sanctions in the best conscience and worthiest reason of our time. I remembered that in my study, at work in preparation of the sermons which expressed my obligation as a Christian teacher, I drew no invidious distinctions. Baxter and Jeremy Taylor, Dale and Gore, Ramsay and Lightfoot, DÖllinger and Hort, George Adam Smith and Driver, Ritschl and Moberley, Fairbairn and Westcott, Bruce and Sanday, Liddon and Lacordaire, these and many others of all Christian churches united without difficulty in the fellowship of sacred science; it was not otherwise in my devotions. Roman Catholic, Lutheran, Anglican, Nonconformist were reconciled easily enough in the privacy of prayer and meditation. The two persons whom I venerated as the best Christians I knew, and to whom spiritually I owed most, were not Anglicans. Only in the sanctuary itself was the hideous discovery vouchsafed that they were outcasts from my fellowship. I might feed my mind with their wisdom, and kindle my devotion with their piety, and stir my conscience with their example, but I might not break bread with them at the table of our common Lord, nor bear their presence as teachers in the churches dedicated to his worship. It seemed to me that the love so lavishly expressed in that Congress Hall must, at least on our side, be a strangely hollow thing. It is true that the presiding bishop reminded the Nonconformists that there were doctrinal differences which could not be forgotten or minimized, but this obstacle was effectively demolished by the debates of the Congress—debates which revealed the widest possible doctrinal divergence between men who, none the less, communicated at the same altars and owned allegiance to the same church."

Such a discourse from such a man in such a place naturally created a sensation in England. It would not have done so, as to its main point, in Virginia. Why? Well, the fundamental reason is that the average Virginia Episcopalian represents a much higher type of Christianity than the average English churchman, broader, sweeter, truer. Indeed, if there are in any church anywhere people of lovelier character, truer charity, and more genuine devotion to our Lord than the evangelical Episcopalians of Virginia, many of whom it has been my good fortune to know long and intimately, I have never heard of them. I only wish the type was more common in some other parts of the country. Now, the things so trenchantly stated by Canon Henson in the foregoing excerpt are mere matters of course to the mind of your evangelical Low Churchman in Virginia. To him it is no uncommon thing to break bread with Christians of other denominations at the table of our common Lord or to hear the gospel preached by ministers of other churches from the pulpits of his own. I have heard it said that this fraternal attitude is deprecated by some of the younger clergy in Virginia of late, and that through their opposition this open recognition of other Christian people and their ministers is less common than it used to be. I should be sorry to believe it, and I know some facts which seem to disprove it. Four or five years ago I myself was invited to deliver the Reinicke Lecture to the students of the Episcopal Seminary at Alexandria, Va., and did so with a feeling of as cordial welcome as I had ever received anywhere in my whole life. I have been repeatedly invited to preach in Episcopal pulpits. When the General Assembly of our church meets in Lexington, Va., next May, you may rely upon it Presbyterian ministers will be invited by the rector of the Episcopal church there to supply his pulpit on Sunday, just as they are by the pastors of the other churches. More than that, I have a friend in the Presbyterian ministry, now a pastor in Baltimore, who not long ago, by invitation of the vestry of an Episcopal church in a Virginia town, not only occupied the pulpit and preached, but also wore the surplice and administered the sacrament of the Lord's Supper.

It may be true that there is a reaction going on even in Virginia against this spirit of Christian fellowship, and that things of this kind are less frequent than formerly; but, if so, I am satisfied that it is a reaction with which the Virginia laymen have nothing to do, and which they will oppose as soon as they become aware of it, [6] and I am sure, too, that clergymen will not be lacking who will make a strong stand against it.

One or two other facts which may well be pondered by High Churchmen have been brought to light by the census of church attendance in London, recently taken by the Daily News of that city. The census shows that, while more than one-half of the five millions of people in London are Christian worshippers, there has been a decrease in church attendance of over one hundred thousand since 1886, that this decrease has been almost entirely in the congregations of the Church of England, and that the attendance in the Established and Nonconformist churches is now about equal.

The census shows further that in wealthy districts the Established Church, as we might expect, has the majority. As was also expected, Nonconformists have a majority in middle-class districts. But, contrary to all expectations, Nonconformists are a majority in the working-class districts and among the very poor. It was often said that only the ritualists were getting hold of the poor, and many supposed the Salvation Army was doing great things amongst the lowest people. It is one of the surprises of the census that ritualism fails to attract the non-churchgoing classes.

In the proportion of the sexes present, in almost all cases the Episcopal churches showed two women to one man; in nonconformist churches the proportion of men was greater, being two men to three women. Does not this preponderance of men in the nonconformist congregations indicate clearly that if the Church of England is to retain her hold upon men she must lay less stress upon the appeal to the Æsthetic sensibilities and more upon the appeal to the mind; that she must make less of the ornamental features of public worship and more of the didactic; less of millinery, music and marching, and more of the preaching of the gospel? As the British Weekly puts it:

"The great means of attracting the people is Christian preaching. Whenever a preacher appears, no matter what his denomination is, he has a great audience. Nothing makes up for a failure in preaching. The churches of all denominations, if they are wise, will give themselves with increased zeal and devotion to the training of the Christian ministry. I have no doubt that it is for lack of a trained order of preachers that the Salvation Army has failed in London. Nor will any magnificence of ritual or any musical attractions, or any lectures on secular subjects, permanently attract worshippers. It can be done only by Christian preaching."

In this connection the following clipping from The Evangelist is not without interest, as showing that both the disease and the remedy are at least partially recognized by some observers within the English Church:

"A recent writer in The Guardian, one of the leading Church of England papers, laments the decay of preaching within his own communion, and is forced to contrast the conditions obtaining in Presbyterian churches with those which prevail in Episcopalian ones, to the obvious disadvantage of the latter. While it is true that the Church of England has some great preachers, as it always has had, the ordinary village vicar is scarcely mediocre. Such is not the case among the Presbyterians—in Scotland, with which the writer is familiar—or in America, Canada, Australia, or in missionary lands, where the same standards and ideals are in effect. Here are the characteristics of Presbyterian preaching as described by a Church of England critic:

"'Their ministry lays itself out for the cultivation of prophetical power, and not without success. In general, they are students of Hebrew, which the English clergy are not. The consequence is that for a good Old Testament sermon you must go north of the Tweed. In England we confine ourselves almost exclusively to the New Testament, not merely because of its transcendent importance, but because it is ground with which we are more familiar. But the loss to our people is great.

"'Then, again, the Scottish ministers are students of German theology. More or less they are at home in the writings of the great German thinkers, both orthodox and liberal. We, as a rule, are not....

"'One more point. In travelling through Palestine some years ago, with a view to the study of biblical geography, I was greatly struck with the preponderance of Scottish ministers who were there on the same purpose intent. I think it no exaggeration to say that they were in numbers to the English clergy as five to one. Evidently they regard it as a necessary part of that same biblical equipment they are so careful about, that they should with their own eyes realize the scenes of the sacred narrative. A pilgrimage to the Holy Land is now so easy, and is, moreover, to any thoughtful Christian teacher so fruitful in results, that it is a marvel it should not be made an ordinary addition to a university or theological college course. To any one who will go with a reverent mind and open eyes, and with his Bible as his Baedeker, it is an unparalleled experience for life. If it is objected to on the score of expense, I ask, How do the Presbyterian ministers, and a large proportion of Nonconformist ministers also, manage to accomplish it?'"

The Guardian itself, in an editorial comment on the decreasing attendance of men in the Anglican churches, says frankly that a large number of men are "repelled by the extremely low standard of preaching which prevails, and the comparative success of Nonconformity may be due in part to the attention which is devoted to the preparation of the sermon." "Another source of offence is the over-elaboration of musical services, and the practical exclusion of the congregation from any real share in prayer and praise. It is a fatal policy which drives the devout but unmusical away from our churches to chapels in which they can find greater simplicity and greater heartiness. One of the surprises of the census has been that the Nonconformists have been found to be strong not only in middle-class districts, but in the regions where poverty abounds. The poor, we believe, are attracted by greater simplicity, and it must be acknowledged that the services of our Prayer-Book are difficult for the uninstructed to follow and to appreciate. There is a stage at which a greater elasticity of worship is needed, and for this we make no adequate provision."

According to the latest statistics, the relative strength of the Established Church and the free evangelical churches is as follows: