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is only in our own churches that we can receive the Bread of Life. To avoid misunderstanding, let me here remark that personally I deprecate habitual, as distinct from occasional, attendance at services of the Latin Rite in England. My opinion is that it is a mistake both on general grounds of expediency and also because to make a regular practice of attending Roman churches is confusing, since their existence in England is, historically, due to the belief that the Anglican Communion is outside the Church.

Moreover, I cannot believe that an Anglican has fulfilled his obligation by hearing Mass in a Roman or an Eastern Church. And this point of view can be defended by means of an analogy. In Paris, just under the shadow of the apse of Notre Dame, there is a little church, St. Julien-le-Pauvre, which belongs to the Uniate Greek Rite. Anybody can freely wander in and assist at the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom on Sundays; but there is a notice hanging near the door to this effect: "N.B. Ordinary Catholics of the Latin Rite are warned that the Sunday Liturgy in this church does not count for them for purposes of fulfilling the obligation of hearing Mass on Sundays." Arguing from this analogy, I maintain that it is at least very doubtful whether a member of the English Rite fulfils his obligation by hearing a Latin Mass. And I see no reason for limiting this to England. I suggest, therefore, that Anglicans are bound to hear Mass on Days of Obligation in their own Rite, wherever that is possible, even though the ministrations of the Colonial and Continental Church Society are alone available.

The acceptance of ideas such as those which I have suggested makes the whole atmosphere with regard to Romanism clearer and freer. We, who are convinced of the truth of the Anglican position, go on side by side with our Catholic brethren who differ from us, longing and praying for the time when we shall kneel side by side at the altar to receive the Holy Sacrament of Unity.

David Raeburn.

Deep Thinking in Religion

From The Commonwealth

"Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught.”— St. Luke, V. 4.

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ONE of us can look back on our lives without a sense of ineffectiveness. There seems so little result. We remain so much the same. Other people remain the So many of our "works" are superficial, temporary, makeshift; we have so little treasure in heaven. And yet we seem to have done our best. The services we have attended. The sermons we have heard. The books we have dipped into. The morning and evening prayers. We feel they have not left their mark. Much of our religion tends to become something outward, something performed. Its result is small, and its influence is slight.

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What is Christ's advice to men like us who feel our ineffectiveness, our superficiality, our surface-religion? It is very plain, very real, and stirring. There is the note of adventure, the clarion of faith, the call to effort. "Launch out into the deep, and let down your nets for a draught." Our true future lies out in the great deeps, we must not stay among the shoals and sand banks, we must not haunt the havens protected by the wind, we must steer out into the new and the unknown, the region of wonderful undreamed of opportunity, and there in strange waters we must make our effort, and the effort will be rewarded. So in the Incarnation God did a new thing, invaded His own world, launched into new deeps, and let down His nets for a draught. So ever in times when the world seemed paralysed, the word has come to some in the Church, to go out from the shallow and superficial into the deeps, the wider waters, where God is nearer, because man is farther off. And in the deeps a new reality has come into life, a great multitude of fishes caught.

1. There is the deep of self. How it lies unstirred and unruffled, a glassy surface - your self, and you drop no plummet

in it, or let down no net. The treasures of the deep lie unharvested in the abysmal deeps of personality. You are content to live with a surface self, that works like clock-work. Very seldom do you call on the resources of your inner life. Very seldom make a clear decision. There are moments of passion, and excitement, hours of quiet brooding, when you are startled by the strange possibilities of that unknown self. It is mysterious, volcanic, and you would rather not peer too far into it, or unloose its hidden forces. Yet out of a self like yours all the great things have come: they have rushed up in beauty, power, force and faith - these movements, and revivals, and divine certainties triumphing over the superficial and the conventional, like the steeds in the chariot of God, rejoicing as giants to run their course. God's good men launched first into the deep of their own selves and found God there, and brought His Law and His Power back with them in their nets. And you and I must think of them when we pray. We go down into a great deep, out of which all great things have come. In the great waters, the silent waters, we find God near. And He, the living God, is realized below all the surface-things that we have called religion.

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Yes! Let us go deeper into ourselves, and seek the Presence of God within and we shall do better with our lives. 2. There is the deep of Thought. Ours is a day of surface opinion. There is little conviction. There is little seriousness of mind — we sail the shallows safe, yes! but they have their own dangers. And all the time the magic and the mystery of the deeps grows deeper, more absorbing. The Cathedral door stands open, and the rites within grow to the verge of ecstasy, but out in the market-place the townspeople buy, and sell, and chatter and sing, as if there were no other life possible. You all have a lot in the world of knowledge. You all have a share in the adventures of thought. You have no right to be satisfied with mere opinion and hearsay. You ought to go down into some of the depths, and then in them, as in yourself, you will find God-God in Nature, God in men's imaginations, God in the strivings of Christian theology, and God in the pulsation

of all thought. On the surface is the opinion of man, deep down in thought is the spirit of it - the eternal Word, Who is yours in all His myriad energies.

3. There is the deep of Life. The Church, it is said, has less and less influence on Life. It preaches a dead message of content and acquiescence, while the song of Labour rises loud, vigorous, and clamorous. Dare we say that the Hebrew Prophets had a message for their own day, and we not? Dare we say that the Incarnate Son of God has no standard of right and wrong to offer the phalanxes of Labour and Capital that have in our time massed themselves in opposition? Shall we be content to squabble among ourselves as to what we are to wear, or what we are to carry, when the things that touch humanity at all points are in jeopardy? Shall we contest the questions of the schools in the pulpit - when the big issues are being fought at our very gates? You will say with many, these social questions are for experts. He who would interfere with big political and economic issues must be trained by long experience of the conditions of trade, and the possibilities of each question. It is very, very true. And there is the call for deeper thinking, for understanding the rights and wrongs of things; for not being content with the specious words of partisans, the interested views of professional politicians - but each man for himself, each in his own circle to strive with such faculties as God has given him to understand what the great movements of the day mean, what inevitable changes they portend, on what basis of justice they rest, what evolving order they stand for -and in what relation they stand to the central messages of our religion- the faith in a Father of all spirits, the faith in a manhood taken into God in Christ, the faith in a living Spirit working in the midst of human life for justice, love and peace. There is the great deep into which we do not launch, we' Churchfolk, though we complain often enough that with all our efforts we have taken nothing, that our influence is ebbing away. We must think deeper, we must get to the root of what is going on around us if the revelation of God entrusted to us is to have its share in moulding the changing environment of our lives,

if men around us are really to believe that the Church is anything more than a relieving officer, with very scanty means at his disposal.

In all ways we are ineffective, shallow, superficial. Ineffectiveness is the penalty of not going to the root of things. At the root of things we ever find the living, active, inspiration of God. In self, in thought, in life, God promises to reward effort by His Presence: "Draw nigh to God, and He will draw nigh to you."

Let us away with easy praying. Let us away with unthoughtout opinions; let us away with unexamined politics; let us away to the deep, where under the surface is the thought and the life of the Living God- and let down our nets for a draught.

W. J. Ferrar.

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The Psalms in Public Worship

From the Church Times

AM perplexed about the Psalms. Our synodical leaders tell us that some of them are not suitable for use in

Christian worship, and it seems probable that we shall be forbidden to recite them. It has taken a good deal of time to make this discovery. I cannot think what the Apostles were about to allow the passage of these objectional lyrics into the Christian library of devotion, or why men like St. Bernard, St. Francis of Assisi, St. François de Sales, Fenelon, William Law, the Cure d'Ars, and John Keble did not detect their offensiveness. I have picked up names at random, and it is easy to think of many other men conspicuous for tenderness of heart, for delicacy of perception, and for burning charity, who read these Psalms hundreds of times in the course of their lives without discovering their inconsistency with the Gospels. It is a disturbing fact. It moves one to question the judgment of these revered men or, to be sure, of those who are now setting them right.

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