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No one who knows the world can be insensible to the fact that a large and growing proportion of those who habitually attend our religious services have come to diverge very widely, though in many different degrees, from the beliefs which are expressed or implied in the formularies they use.
It is said that the number of young men of ability who take orders is diminishing, and that this is due, not merely to the agricultural depression which has made the Church much less desirable as a profession, and indeed in many cases almost impossible for those who have not some private fortune; not merely to the competitive examination system, which has opened out vast and attractive fields of ambition to the ablest laymen, but also to the wide divergence of men of the best intellect from the doctrines of the Church, and the conviction that they cannot honestly subscribe its articles and recite its formularies.
The Church which remained attached to Rome, and which held the same doctrines, practised the same devotions, and performed the same ceremonies as the English Church under Henry VII., professed to be infallible, and it utterly repudiated all connection with the new Church of England, and regarded it as nothing more than a Protestant schism; while the Church of England in her authorised formularies branded some of the central beliefs and devotions of the Roman Church as blasphemous, idolatrous, superstitious and deceitful, and was long accustomed to regard that Church as the Church of Antichrist; the Harlot of the Apocalypse, drunk with the blood of the Saints.
We may admire the skill with which formularies of the national worship are moulded into the sapphic stanza, and prescribed language, hardly, if at all, removed from prose, is made to run in stately, though stiff and monotonous, verse; but our admiration is of the ingenuity, not of the poetry.
Similarly it may be said that, however great the difficulties that beset liturgical revision by legislative process at the hands of some five hundred men, nevertheless the fact remains that the body known in law as The Protestant Episcopal Church in the United States of America has provided in its Constitution that change in its formularies shall be so effected and not otherwise.
But, secondly, the great stumbling-block lay in the 39 Articles. But, if so, the doctrine must be the same; the doctrine of the Old Church must live and speak in Anglican formularies, in the 39 Articles. Did it? Yes, it did; that is what I maintained; it did in substance, in a true sense.
That is to say, they have tacitly shaken off the old forms the Creeds and formularies that bind the visible, the legal, church. They do not even think much about them. Forgive me if I speak plainly! They are not grieving about the old. Their soul those of them, I mean that have the gift of religion is travailing dumbly travailing with the new.
King, Lords, and Commons can make new formularies or abolish the old. The laity owe no allegiance to the Canons, and in every theological suit the final appeal is to the King in Council, now the Judicial Committee. Since the accession of Elizabeth divine service has been performed in English, and the English Bible has been open to every one who can read.
The most flimsy mise en scène of a mock ceremony was sufficient to dupe a simplicity like hers; and therein was enacted the wicked old tragedy possible only in a world like ours, which ignores the pledge of the strong to the weak, however clearly that pledge may be attested, unless the wording of it jumps with the formularies of a sanctioned legalism.
There is, of course, such a danger as that of providing too much liturgical variety. To transgress in the compiling of formularies the line of average memory, to provide more material than the mind of an habitual worshipper is likely to assimilate, is to misread human nature. But here, as elsewhere, there is a just mean.
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