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He is present at all solemnities, gay or grave, being essentially a man of erudition and a good speaker; and on these occasions he has always to act as spokesman, and to execute well and worthily certain formularies of speech, in use from time immemorial.
Soon after Elizabeth's accession a committee of divines assembled under her authority for the purpose of again revising the formularies.
The day has gone by when new formularies of worship could be imposed on an unwilling Church by edict, and although under our carefully guarded system of ecclesiastical legislation there is little danger of either haste or unfairness, we must bear it well in mind that something more than "a constitutional majority of both houses" is needful if we would see liturgical revision crowned with real success.
Zeal for God, love for his fellow creatures, pleasure in the exercise of his newly discovered powers, impel him to become a preacher. He has no quarrel with the establishment, no objection to its formularies, its government, or its vestments. He would gladly be admitted among its humblest ministers. But, admitted or rejected, he feels that his vocation is determined.
But that which gave Latitudinarianism its chief notoriety, as well as its name, was a direct practical question. The term took its origin in the efforts made in William and Mary's reign to give such increased latitude to the formularies of the English Church as might bring into its communion a large proportion of the Nonconformists.
I speak in the Preface of "offering suggestions towards a work, which must be uppermost in the mind of every true son of the English Church at this day, the consolidation of a theological system, which, built upon those formularies, to which all clergymen are bound, may tend to inform, persuade, and absorb into itself religious minds, which hitherto have fancied, that, on the peculiar Protestant questions, they were seriously opposed to each other."
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. Man had done his worst to disfigure, to mutilate, the old Catholic Truth; but there it was, in spite of them, in the Articles still. It was there, but this must be shown.
The attitude of laymen whose opinions have come to diverge widely from the Church formularies is less perplexing, and except in as far as the recent revival of sacerdotal pretensions has produced a reaction, there has, if I mistake not, of late years been a decided tendency in the best and most cultivated lay opinion of this kind to look with increasing favour on the Established Church.
Still, when all this is admitted, it can hardly be denied that there has grown up in a great section of the English Church a sympathy with Rome and an antipathy to Protestantism and to Protestant types of thought and character utterly alien to the spirit of the Reformers and to the doctrinal formularies of the Church of England.
But it happens only too often that religion is choked in ceremonial, and that the divine light is obscured by the opinions of men. The pagans, who inhabited the earth before Christianity was founded, had only one kind of outward form: they had ceremonies in their worship, but they had no articles of faith and had never dreamed of drawing up formularies for their dogmatic theology.
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