the Reformation, and the work of the Reformers, seems forgotten in England to-day. What do we know about it? For the most part, people's knowledge is vague, and mainly confined to the fact that men and women were burnt at the stake because they refused to believe certain doctrines which were held by the Church of Rome. Traditions of Bloody Mary, and the horrors of the Inquisition on the Continent, linger in people's minds, but they are apt to be ascribed to the temper of a barbarous and cruel age, and a repetition of such sanguinary and persecuting methods is held to be impossible in any country at the time of the world's history at which we have arrived.

As to our own Reformation, there are not wanting authorities who will assure us that the breach with Rome was mainly due to the desire of an autocratic sovereign to gratify his sensual inclinations, and that Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth were influenced by political and not religious motives in the policy which they carried to a successful issue; whilst others would have us believe that the only object of the Reformation was to free England from the supremacy of the Pope, and that it in no sense aimed at altering the doctrines of our Church.

If the first allegation were true, and the Reformation was only due to the desire of Henry VIII. to get rid of one wife and marry another, then indeed it would be difficult to see why the martyrs should have died, or to explain the reason why liberty, prosperity, and expansion have marked the career of this country from the moment that the Reformation was an accomplished fact; whilst, if the Reformation was nothing but a rejection of the interference of the Pope in the affairs of our Church or country, it is not easy to account for the fact that our Prayer-book, which was compiled by these very martyrs, in the most explicit manner rejects those pre-Reformation doctrines and in our Articles stigmatises them as blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits. The fact is that both these allegations are made by men who desire to upset the Reformation, and who are hard pressed to find any standing-ground on which to rest whilst they convert the country to their views, or any arguments to justify them in their unpatriotic and thankless task. It is difficult to know whether to marvel most at the fact that Englishmen should be found capable of discrediting the work of men, who, in the truest sense, may be described as the makers of England, men who loved not their lives unto the death, in their heroic efforts to free our country from the bonds of superstition and priestly tyranny, or at the credulity which is content without examination to accept of such shallow arguments to undo a work rightly described by one of our own bishops as the greatest event in the world's history since the time of the Apostles. The Reformation cannot be explained by any of these causes. It was entirely an appeal to Scripture as the source of authority. It was a denial that the Church, apart from Scripture, could claim the obedience of men.

Except on the principle of the supremacy of Scripture, of its being an authority superior to that of the Church, there was absolutely no justification for the line of action taken by our Reformers. The Church of England is either justified in her appeal to Scripture, or else she is, as has been well said, in a meaningless schism. The position, therefore, of our Reformed Church is a logical one, and, as we hold, a true one. But the two principles are opposed to each other. One of them must be supreme. It must be either the Church or the Bible which is the ultimate court of appeal. It is easy to see that these are principles which lead to roads that must diverge ever farther and farther, for they touch springs which reach down to the depths of human thought and action. The one is the principle of authority, and demands absolute and unreasoning submission of every faculty; the other gives play to all the God-given powers of the soul.

If

If we now apply these two principles to the matter in hand, what do we find? We find the Ritualist leaders engaged in the hopeless task of reconciling the irreconcilable. They are striving to develop in the Church of England, a Church which stands on the Scriptural principle, that creed and system which belong only to the Church of Rome. Rome, on the authority of the Church, has promulgated certain doctrines which we, on the authority of Scripture, reject. Rome is right, and the authority of the Church is the one to which God would have us yield obedience, then those who accept this authority, and these doctrines on that authority, are sinning against their consciences and all light in not yielding obedience to her. It is only on the supposition that her claim to define doctrine is an unlawful one that we are justified in our independent position. These men, therefore, are not only illogical, but they are sinning perversely, and Rome has a perfect right to say that they are dissenters and schismatics, for they hold her doctrines, acknowledge her principle of Church authority, and yet do not submit to her control. And while they are dissenters as regards the Church of Rome, they are equally dissenters from our own Church, and worse, for while their sin against Rome is the sin of rebellion and schism, their sin against the Church in which they find themselves is the sin of disloyalty and deception. They cannot shut their eyes to the fact that our Church, taking Scripture as its authority, shuts the door, on almost every page of its Prayer-book, to the beliefs they hold and teach. They hold Masses for the dead, and we search in vain there for a prayer for the dead: they pray to the Virgin and Saints, and we find not one such prayer in that book. They teach the doctrine of the Mass, whilst using a Communion office drawn up by men who died at the stake to reject it and banish it for ever. To such plights are they reduced that the Roman Missal has to be surreptitiously dovetailed into the English Communion Service. So lost are they to all sense of the propriety of human conduct that they do not find it impossible to tell us that

they offer the sacrifice of the Body and Blood of Christ, whilst reading words from our Prayer-book which tell of the Saviour who came to suffer death upon the Cross for our redemption; who made there (by His one oblation of Himself once offered) a full, perfect, and sufficient sacrifice, oblation, and satisfaction, for the sins of the whole world'; nor to invite people, in the words of our Communion Service, to 'draw near and take this holy Sacrament to your comfort,' and, further on in the service, to thank God for that Thou dost vouchsafe to feed us, who have duly received these holy mysteries,' when the religious ceremony has been a Mass without communicants, and where there has been nothing but a wafer held up for the adoration of the people. It is utterly impossible that such a moral deception, which constitutes an outrage, not only on our sense of honour but on our intelligence, should continue long to disgrace our churches. If men want the Mass, let them have the courage to discard the English Prayer-book altogether, for it is an insult on the compilers of a book which is the glory of our Church to degrade it into a cloak for doctrines which it exists to condemn.

Logic, honesty, and common sense must ere long compel those who hold the creed of the Church of Rome to see that our English Prayerbook cannot satisfy them, and that it is the height of folly and disingenuousness to remain where they are, luring people on to a position from which there is but one possible exit, and that out of our Church into the Church of Rome.

We cannot, however, shut our eyes to the fact that the leaders of this party have an object in view in their present line of action and in pursuing a course which to us seems so wanting in honesty. They can hardly themselves be under the delusion that Roman doctrines can be held apart from submission to the Roman Church. It would be almost as easy to prove that black is white, or that two and two make five, as to believe that the formularies of the English Church do not repudiate in the clearest manner the doctrines of the Church of Rome. But they have to persuade their followers that there is no impossibility in this position. Their task is a difficult one. They have to do with a large mass of uninformed opinion, a flock which must be gently led from one pasturage to another, until it can be herded in the fold of what they hold to be the true Church. For them, therefore, the fiction and phrase of Catholic doctrines and practices within the Church of their baptism has been invented and coined, and very large numbers of unthinking people imagine that this discovery of a Roman paradise in England is as real and tangible as was the discovery of the New World to the explorers of the Far West. But in this case a mirage is taking the place of a continent, and the poor travellers will find to their cost that they have forsaken the land of their birth to be cast as exiles on the inhospitable shores of a foreign people. But for the nonce they are swimming in smooth waters, fondly

believing under the tuition given them-a tuition which, we regret to say, is afforded unlimited scope and opportunity through the strange blindness of some in authority and the apathy of the general public-that the Reformation is but a bad dream, that their churches and services may take their colour from those in Roman lands, and that ere long they may communicate indifferently at friendly altars.

The unthinking public in England who are toying with Ritualism are altogether unaware of the edifice that they are unconsciously rearing, of the web they are weaving round themselves, of the fetters they are forging. They indulge in it because there is something so fascinating to some minds in ritual and ceremonial, something so pleasing in the care and concern which the priests evince over the affairs of people's souls; it is so pleasant to be under direction and guidance, to have the Church always busying itself about you, whether you are alive or dead. May we not,' say they, 'have just a little of the best part of Romanism, just the incense and candles and beautiful vestments, just a little of the confessional, just the prayers for the dead, and the reverence for the Blessed Virgin? The alternative is so unpleasing, so cold and unattractive; nothing to aid devotion, nothing to stimulate affection. We have no idea of going over to Rome, we love our Church too well; we only want to see her graced with all the ceremonial which a Puritanical generation deprived her of.'

People thus persuade themselves that they are culling the fair flowers of the Church of Rome without running the risk of any of the dangers which lurk around the system, those echoes of a far-off past when that Church was guilty of corruptions which even they can hardly condone. Even they cannot fail to see there is a difference between Roman Catholic and Protestant countries, that England is more blessed in many respects; and although they incline to attribute our better condition to our natural good qualities rather than to any. thing connected with our religion, yet they would for the most part rather not see the Church of Rome again established in England. For them, therefore, this Ritualist system is as balm to the soul. Little do these unconscious victims of the halfway-house system realise the nature of their temporary shelter, which has been erected for them by men who know well its frail and feeble structure, and only intend it to last until it is full enough to allow of its removal.

The mass of the Ritualist world is walking in a fool's paradise; they are like people who are lost in the mist on some mountain-side. It has descended all around them, shutting out of their horizon the goal towards which they are hastening. The road behind them is completely blotted out, the perspective is blurred and indistinct. All they can behold is the figure of the guide close at hand, on whom they blindly rely to conduct them to safety. It is well for such people if

the mist suddenly rises and shows them the precipice they are nearing. To dispel the mental fog in which so many are now wandering, a concrete issue, such as the title of this paper suggests, may not be without effect.

If proof were needed that modern Anglicanism is but the wicketgate to Rome, it must surely be supplied by the history of those who, in recent years, have seceded from our Church and joined that other communion. In a book recently published, entitled Roads to Rome, we have the autobiographies of some sixty persons who have taken this step, and with almost wearisome monotony they tell us the mental process through which they passed, and how in that process they reached a point where no other course was open to them but to join the Church of Rome. Each writer enlarges upon the peace of mind then attained, and marvels that he or she could so long have hesitated on the brink; but the reason for this peace of mind is to be found rather in the mental surrender, in the cessation of conflict, and in the fact that their beliefs and environment were no longer contradictory, than in any virtue belonging to the faith itself. A far larger number would seek this haven of rest but for the attitude of their guides. The object of these men is not individual secessions, which hinder the general advance by creating alarm and checking the movement. Those who are bold enough to obey the dictates of conscience in this respect are treated with coldness, and held to have played the part of traitors. The entire party is gradually to be brought to a position where a crisis will accomplish the rest. Meanwhile, for the benefit of the general public, the Ritualist leaders and Rome play the part of lovers coquetting with each other. At times they vow that no power on earth could bring them together; that terms of unconditional surrender on the one hand, and feelings of national antipathy on the other, must for ever keep them apart; while secretly, in their heart of hearts, they long for a closer embrace, and, in spite of acts and words, know well that they are destined for each other. Each, with consummate skill, is playing into the hands of the other, while persuading the outside world that nothing is further from their intention than a union of forces.

Both are adopting the same methods, and those are the capture of the children. Rome is deliberately working for the conversion of England, and is planting her schools and seminaries all over the country. An enormous influx of monks and nuns from abroad is enabling her to put forth fresh efforts in this direction, and from all quarters of England and Wales come accounts of buildings and properties passing into the hands of the Roman Orders, who have but one object in view, and that is, through the education of the young, to bring back England to obedience to the Roman Church. The recent Education Act has conferred upon them immense facilities for this work, and they are well aware of it, and intend to avail them