REMARKS
UPON THE
FIRST REPORT OF THE ROYAL COMMISSION ON RITUAL,
IN CONNECTION WITH THE INTEGRITY OF THE
BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER.

A Lecture
DELIVERED AT THE ANNUAL MEETING OF THE BRIGHTON BRANCH
OF THE ENGLISH CHURCH UNION, NOV. 27, 1867,
(F. BARCHARD, ESQ. IN THE CHAIR,)

BY
THE REV. M. W. MAYOW, M. A.

INCUMBENT OF ST. MARY’S, WEST BROMPTON,
AND LATE STUDENT OF CHRIST CHURCH, OXFORD.

CHURCH PRESS COMPANY (LIMITED),
13, BURLEIGH STREET, STRAND, LONDON,
AND G. WAKELING, ROYAL LIBRARY, BRIGHTON.
1868.

It is right to state that the Brighton Branch of the English Church Union kindly requested leave to publish the following Lecture.  It may be well to add that it was likewise delivered at Bradford and Leeds.

REMARKS UPON THE FIRST REPORT OF THE
ROYAL COMMISSION ON RITUAL, Etc.

The Executive of the Brighton Branch of the English Church Union, through you, sir, their Chairman, have, too rashly, I fear, as well as too kindly, supposed that I might have something to say upon the above subject which may repay this assemblage of Churchmen for their trouble in coming here this evening.  It is certainly not for me to say you have deluded them, but rather, without wasting time in apology, to do my best to save (if it may be so) your credit and my own; and, what is of more consequence, to throw some light upon the very important matter to which my remarks are to be directed.  At any rate, the great importance of the subject itself and the imminent likelihood of some action being taken to disarrange or subvert the present standing of the Church of England by an alteration in her Book of Common Prayer will ensure your deep interest, and, I do not doubt, secure me an indulgent hearing; whilst the very large and influential, and,—I think it will be on all hands allowed,—most successful meeting held last week in London, gives an additional reason for strengthening, if it may be so, the action then taken by diffusing as widely as possible information as to the dangers apprehended, and the means of resistance to be used in order to preserve its integrity.

It is a trite saying just now that there is a great crisis in Church affairs; but I think it must be allowed to be not less true than trite, even after making all allowance for the magnitude with which the time present always invests things present.  In secular and material warfare it may be that sometimes an underrating difficulties, a blindness to the peril, is the very cause and means of safety or success.  But in assaults like the present, where the battle-field is the Law and Order of the Church, where the contest is carried on not with sword or spear, but with the keen weapons of intellectual and moral contention, where very much turns and must turn upon the enlistment of public opinion upon this side or that; where prejudice, and ridicule, and sneer, and scoff, appealing constantly to the irreverence and perverseness of the evil side of human nature, backed up in large measure, as might be expected, by a licentious and unbelieving press, adapting itself to a licentious and unbelieving age; where these things are the daily engines of assault, there would seem to be no safety in shutting our eyes to the danger, merely hoping that all “will come some strange way right at last.”  Especially when the assault is made upon doctrine, either directly or indirectly, (for if it be upon ceremonial representing doctrine it is indirectly upon doctrine itself,) when it takes the form of assault upon the integrity of the Prayer Book, and the Catholic status of the Church of England in connection with it, we must be wise, and wary, and far-seeing to the utmost of our vision, if we would duly organize our defence and fight well the battle for God’s Church and Gods Truth.  We must indeed try not to exaggerate anything, but we must also endeavour not to underrate any real danger which exists, and especially not suffer our citadel to be undermined, whilst we are merely regarding a plausible or fair surface.

There seems, too, to be a peculiar and apt propriety in this term crisis, as applied to the present aspect of Church affairs.  It is not merely that there is a great danger, but a danger coming to a head, which, if happily now overcome, will again subside.  Johnson gives as the first sense of crisis, “The point in which the disease kills or changes to the better;” and, as the second, “The point of time at which any affair comes to the height,” according to the exact use of the word by Dryden:—

Now is the very crisis of your fate,
And all the colour of your life depends
On this important Now.

And we may well believe that if the present dangers which beset the Church of England be overcome, God may have in store for her a very glorious future indeed, even to her being a great instrument in His hand, not merely for the spreading His Kingdom here at home, but also (may He in mercy grant it) for the restoration of the Unity of Christendom, and thereby for the Evangelization of the world.  As our hopes of this must, however, depend upon her being able to maintain her Catholicity, so must we watch with the most jealous care, and resist with the firmest constancy all which shall impair, her maintenance of Catholic truth and that position which God of His mercy has hitherto permitted her to hold.

One great means of her maintaining this position is the maintaining untouched her Book of Common Prayer, and therefore there is and must be need of the most careful watchfulness as to every threatening of assault upon it.

Now I affirm without hesitation that the first Report of the Royal Commission, appointed, to use its own terms, “to enquire into the Rubrics, Orders, and Directions for regulating the course and conduct of public worship, &c., &c., according to the use of the United Church of England and Ireland,” threatens, and even leads, such an assault.  And this gives the connection of the two parts of my subject as announced to you in the title of this Lecture.

As to this threatening or assault contained in the Report, take a witness the most unexceptionable perhaps of any who may be found anywhere, and one whose testimony is only the more convincing as to the danger because he himself does not see it at all, so that it is impossible to suppose him to be straining anything to make a case.  Nay, he does not consider what he himself suggests or advocates as a measure carrying out the recommendations of the Report, or as a means to remedy certain embarrassments, to be an alteration in the Prayer Book at all.  In his recent Charge, the Bishop of Gloucester and Bristol (himself one of the Commissioners), after considering and dismissing as useless or dangerous, or otherwise inadmissible, several other plans, recommends this:—“A simple and positive enactment declaring what shall be, and be considered to be, the ministerial dress, until further order be taken concerning the same by lawful authority.”  And