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my people would be delighted to hear you preach. Do try to make it. I should like you to meet my wife, too. Tommy is a little under the weather tonight and she is sitting up with him. Do come again."

I found myself in the now silent street and as I started back to the hotel tried to set in order my impressions of Earnshaw. It grew clear to me as I thought it over, that Earnshaw's real position and what he imagined to be his position were quite different things. He was wholly honest in his belief that he was a Prayer Book churchman; but in fact there was little relation between his religion and the Prayer Book. He had absorbed and was transmitting a theory of religion which he had assumed was that of the Prayer Book; but he had never tried to verify the assumed identity. It has been the great source of the interior weakness of the churches of the Anglican communion that quite distinct religious systems have managed to exist within them and to make themselves believe that they are quite valid interpretations of the Anglican formularies.

Earnshaw and I had been educated under like circumstances. Earnshaw had evidently remained pretty faithful to what he had learned in the seminary. I went back in imagination to the seminary years. I had come gradually to think of the presentment of religion which we had received and which Earnshaw had preserved, as being characterized by marked timidity. The exponents of the Anglican formularies with whom I was in contact always seemed to me to be afraid of them. We students were constantly being warned of the dangers of religion. Instead of whole-heartedly throwing ourselves into the practices suggested by the formularies, we were taught to have a hesitating and cautious spiritual life. It was perfectly true, we were told, that the formularies of the Church taught that the Priesthood of the Church had power to remit and retain sins; and that under certain circumstances of great urgency it was right to make our confession. But under ordinary circumstances the dangers of the confessional were so great that the practice of confession was not to be encouraged. It was undoubtedly a

universal Catholic practice to pray for the dead. For good and sufficient reasons such prayers had been excluded from the public services of the Church; but most Anglican theologians of repute taught the allowability of such prayers and had used them. But there was a good deal of danger in the use of such prayers. One might easily pray for a person for whom one ought not to pray-what particular disaster would follow in that case I never found out. It was true that the Church taught the Real Presence of our Lord in the Eucharist—at least some sort of real presence. But there was danger in so teaching it that people should be led to the practice of Eucharistic adoration.

And so it went. There was extreme anxiety to hold fast the Catholic tradition, to be able to justify one's position by an appeal to the early Church-Church of the Great Fathers; but coupled with this feeling that one must hold fast the Catholic tradition was an ever present fear of Catholic practice. Earnshaw, probably, had lost this fear. He no longer feared Catholic practices-he had forgotten all about them. If he remembered them at all it was as something "High Church," and therefore negligible.

F

BY THE REV. ALBERT C. LARNED, CHAPLAIN U. S. Navy.

OR us churchmen one of the great demands arising out

of the War is for adequate worship. We chaplains who have served on land and sea, who have ministered to men at the Front, in S. O. S. or on board ship, have certainly been privileged to see men as they are, and to learn how they look at religion. The underlying note is simplicity and a desire for reality that shall make their attitude towards God concrete and definite. The demand is for Popular Devotions and Objective Worship. To go into the cathedrals and churches of France, and to see there crowds of men, women and children, led thither by popular devotions and objective worship, is an experience not easily forgotten. Much may be said in criticism of this phenomenon, this observance of the outward forms of religion. That the effect on character and life seems on the whole to be very negligible in Roman Catholic countries may be easily asserted, though it does not prove anything: for who knows the many holy lives lived in seclusion from the world whose motive power is found in these popular devotions and objective worship? Be that as it may, we are not concerned with speculations about the Roman Catholic Church but with meeting a growing demand in our own branch of Catholic Christianity.

Let us frankly confess that we have failed to meet these demands. The Prayer Book as it stands is too complicated to appeal to the great majority of our men, although it is dearly loved by many. Matins and Evensong as they are in the Prayer Book are not used by the Chaplains. It is doubtful if anyone misses the many obscure passages from the First Lesson, and the meaningless repetition of psalm after psalm which seem remote from our life? When the Eucharist is made the central service, as it should be, is it not a little disconcerting to one's honesty and understanding to find a service that is so obviously meant for communicants who are intending to make their communion used as a Mass without communion?

That the Eucharist has tremendous drawing power has been proved over and over again. I have celebrated frequently on board ship, in hospitals, at the Front under all kinds of conditions, in a cattle shed, in school-houses, huts, private rooms, and frequently I have had more men present who did not receive than who did, and who although ignorant of the service seemed deeply interested in it. War conditions, of course, are one thing and require special treatment, so that an afternoon or evening celebration may be most necessary for troops going into action; the normal circumstances of peace times are an altogether different matter.

Here then is the dilemma in which we are placed in regard to the High Celebration on Sundays. If we make it the chief service of the day, we have communicants receiving without proper preparation, carried away by the music and the beauty of the service. If we make it the chief act of worship without communion we appear to violate both the letter and the spirit of the service as it stands in the Prayer Book. What is the remedy?

The answer to this question is this: allow a use of the Communion Service that shall make a Mass without communicants possible and lawful, as an act of praise and thanksgiving. Let it be understood that this Service must never take the place of the Holy Communion, which whether with music or without, at 7:30 or at 10:30, is always the chief service of the day. Further as this Service would only be optional it would in no way change the existing order of things in parishes of the Evangelical type.

The proposition at first seems very radical but it is not more so than the existing practice today. It would legalize what is now considered by many illegal, although it is a legitimate heritage of the Catholic Faith. It would be a frank acknowledgment of the rightful place in our midst of many who hold by the Reformation of Henry VIII and the early days of Edward VI before the foreign Protestantism and the later Puritanism of the succeeding reigns gained so powerful a sway in the Church of England. It would be a broad church move in the true sense

of the word, for it would show the world that the spirit of the Anglican Communion is broadly tolerant, not in spite of but with the support of the leaders of the Church.

The method by which this change is to be made is very simple and does not tamper with the sacred language of the Holy Communion. Before the beginning of the Service some such rubrics as these could be inserted: "If on any Sunday or Holy Day the Holy Communion has been celebrated the minister may celebrate the Holy Eucharist without other communicants than himself. This celebration shall never take the place of Holy Communion." "After the Prayer for the Church Militant shall be said the Sursum Corda. After the Proper Preface the Prayer of Consecretation shall immediately follow. After the Consecration a hymn or anthem may be sung during which the priest makes his communion. Following the Lord's Prayer may come special collects and prayers closing with the Benediction. The preparation and confession would be said by the priest alone secretly before the beginning of the Service."

The advantages of this scheme are obvious. In the first place, it gives us the supreme Gospel Service of the Eucharist as the central act of the day. Religion is presented in the simple objective and spiritual way that it has been in the Catholic Church since early days. Without forcing a change on any parish it procures a lawful celebration without commmunicants instead of what is considered by many as unlawful. Matins and Evensong will be regarded in their true light as companions, not substitutes for the Divine Service. Church-going based on the love of our Lord in His Sacrament will become a greater power in the land; and children will be brought up to worship in church as they are brought up to read and write in the day school. In the next war it will not be necessary for the chaplain to search out communicants in order to have a celebration, but with the authority of the Church he will be able to offer the Sacrifice of the Eucharist in a language understood by the people, and by that means to draw men to Christ. Call it Mass or Eucharist, or whatever you want to name it, it is the Divine

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