damning by singularly weak arguments the cause he pro

*

fesses to have espoused, but which it is impossible he can from his heart approve; so, on his next appearance, we trust to see his lordship in his true colours, and to hear him speaking his own thoughts, and joining to support the cause of the Revisionists through evil and through good report. I remain, yours, &c.,

September 3, 1860.

"INGOLDSBY."

LETTER XCIV.

THE REVISED PRAYER-BOOK OF 1852, AND THE REVISION MOVEMENT OF 1860.

"A thing devised by the enemy."-SHAKSPEARE, Rich. III., Act v., Sc. 3.

SIR,-You lately favoured us with a Review of the Book of Common Prayer as revised in 1852, and published by Pickering, London,-concluding your article with the following remarks:

"Our readers will be able, from what we have now laid before them, to form a conclusion for themselves. There is one thing very certain, and that is, that if this be the kind of revision that is desired in influential quarters, we had better by far be content with our present Prayer-book, faulty and imperfect as it may be. The book we have laid before them will have done some good, if it serves to show at what a price the desired uniformity is to be purchased; and what would remain after every disputed expression or offensive doctrine had been removed."

To whom your reviewer may refer under the term "in

*The Bishop of London concluded his speech of May 27th, 1862, by saying, "Their lordships would observe he had spoken on both sides of the question."-Times' Report. See Vol. I., pp. 276-280.

"A THING DEVISED BY THE ENEMY."

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fluential quarters," I am, of course, ignorant. But as only one individual is known to myself as coming properly under such a designation, connected with the question of Revision, I beg most emphatically on Lord Ebury's part (being now absent on the Continent) to repudiate any such idea of a Revised Prayer-book as that lately exhibited in your columns.*

The book itself I have not seen, nor have I any reason to believe that it has been seen by the noble lord who has taken up the question of Revision in Parliament. It is hardly fair, therefore, to cast a slur on a good cause by insinuating its possible connexion with a work of distinctly Unitarian tendency.

This is no new device of the enemy. It was attempted in the case of Tillotson, Burnet, Watson, and others. But I trust Lord Ebury's well-known attachment to the Church, as well as that of the more prominent of his supporters, will sufficiently protect them, and the cause they espouse, from the impression intended to be produced by the disingenuous writer of this Review.t

I am, yours, &c.,

Sept. 29, 1860.

"INGOLDSBY."

The extracts given in the Review were many of them adapted to the Unitarian form of belief. It is the fashion with the opponents of Revision (Blackwood and the Quarterly, for example) to hold up some extravagant specimen of a Revised Prayer-book, and to represent it as a fair exponent of the views of all Revisionists.

+ Another very different form of a Revised Prayer-book for the use of the "Reformed Episcopal Church in Great Britain and Ireland" has since been published by J. F. Shaw, 48, Paternoster Row; 1878. See Letter LXXXVI., p. 99. It may be as well to note here that this last specimen of a "Revised Prayer-book," as also a "Reformed Episcopate," owes its origin entirely, I believe, to the fact that many of the clergy and hundreds of the laity will no longer submit to the thraldom of being compelled to use the Prayer-book of 1662, pur et simple, as we now have it, 1878.

LETTER XCV.

EARL STANHOPE ON THE REVISION OF THE LITURGY.

"By the revival of the active powers of Convocation, it is probable that the enemies of all religion will often be gratified with the unseemly sight of conflicting divines."-LORD MAHON'S "History of England," Vol. I., chap. IX. (Anno 1718).

SIR, It is a relief to ourselves, and cannot but be so to our readers, that instead of the long list of bishops and archbishops who have hitherto engaged our attention, we have a layman expressing his sentiments on the subject of a Revision of the Prayer-book.

*

One would be tempted at times to think that the laity were either ignorant how large a portion of the Church they form; or that they were supremely indifferent as to the manner in which its services are conducted in their presence. There seems no other rational way of accounting for the apathy (we had almost said the stolidity) with which for now full five years they have been all but passive spectators of a scene in which their interest is involved fully as much as that of the clergy, who have hitherto borne the brunt of the battle.

Is it, or is it not, for example, a matter of indifference to the congregation, whether the Sunday Morning Service lasts ordinarily for two hours, or one hour and a quarter? +-Is it a matter of indifference that they hear the Lord's Prayer read

* In London, where there is a large choice of churches, this may be a matter of comparative indifference; but the case is far otherwise in the country and small provincial towns.

The author of these Letters has practically reduced the Morning Service in his own Church to these limits, except on those Sundays when the Holy Communion is administered, to the great contentment and satisfaction of the congregation, without a single dissentient voice. (1878.)

THE LAITY NOT INDIFFERENT TO REVISION.

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five or six times in the same service, with several other repetitions in a less degree?-Do they, or do they not, care to be told thirteen times a year, that they will, "without doubt, perish everlastingly," if they do not keep whole and undefiled" every article of the Athanasian Creed?

We only put forward these, not to be tedious, out of a hundred points, some of them of even greater importance, which have been raised in the course of the present discussion. And we ask, if the laity are not stupidly indifferent to all these things, caring, like so many Gallios, for none of them, why are they silent?*-Why, for instance, when Lord Ebury brought forward his motion in the House of Lords last May, were Earl Stanhope and Lord Lyttelton the only two laymen who spoke at all to the motion-(for Earl Granville† gave no opinion one way or the other)—and that in opposition to the noble lord? Can we believe that no other lay peer took any interest in the question? Or is it conceivable that they were all frightened, as many of the bishops are said to have been, by the noise of the Bishop of Oxford ?

Why, too, is the House of Commons so long dumb on the subject? Of six hundred and fifty-four representatives of

A divine of no mean authority on this matter writes as follows:Many of the clergy prefer to do violence to the meaning of words, and interpret certain parts of our services in a non-natural sense, to having them reformed; and the expressions in the Baptismal Service, the Ordinal, Burial Service, and Visitation of the Sick, to the plain grammatical meaning of which some Churchmen take such grievous exception, they prefer to interpret for themselves than to have them altered by authority.

"But it is not so with the laity; on the contrary, if Englishmen were polled at this moment, we believe it would be found that nine-tenths of them, possessing intelligence enough to comprehend the matter, would vote for alterations more or less important, or, to use a common expression, would desire LITURGICAL REVISION."—Disestablishment and Disendowment, by Rev. Henry Burgess, LL.D. Longmans, 1875; p. 13.

+ See Letter XCVI., p. 145.

the people, is there not one who is also a representative of the Church in that House ?*

But, to have done with our queries-which we must, however, say, in passing, demand an answer-we will proceed, according to our wont, to make a few remarks upon the speech of the noble earl who followed the Bishop of London in replying to Lord Ebury in May last.

Earl Stanhope (better known as the late Lord Mahon) was, it will be remembered, the primum mobile in ridding the Prayer-book of the State Services, of which we have spoken before. His lordship draws a marked, and not an unreasonable, distinction between the circumstances attending that operation and the one now proposed by Lord Ebury.

The State Services were, strictly speaking, no part of the Prayer-book. The Rubric, the Calendar, the Occasional Offices, and the like, are. This, we suppose, Lord Ebury does not deny. But this, though a good reason, perhaps, for taking the State Services first in order, is hardly an argument for not taking the other more important matter into consideration at all.

But this course even Earl Stanhope himself is scarcely prepared to insist on. He thinks that a conclave of bishops and archbishops (or, as the Bishop of London calls it, "the rival Parliament over the way") is all-sufficient for the purpose required; and appears to take it for granted that they will grapple with the question.

He considers that "such parts of the Rubric as direct the

*The question seems at last likely to be taken up in earnest in that House; but, alas, by one who is not a member of our Church, Mr. Edward Jenkins, M.P. for Dundee, author of "The Church and the Law." (1878.)

† Vol. I., Letter XXXIV., p. 221, "The State Services Expunged." His lordship seems to have forgotten the passage from his own History, which we have taken the liberty to reproduce (in a slightly modified form) as the motto to our present article. See more on the subject of Convocation in the same place.