Responsibility of the Laity.

Brethren of the Laity, recognise, and teach your children to recognise, the greatness of the heritage which, in our pure religion and free Church, God has given us. Resist, with might and main, the beginning of error, false doctrine, and tyranny within the Church. See for yourselves how far innovations, foreign to the principles of our Church, have been introduced here. Let page 15 each bring to the touchstone of Holy Scripture and the Book of Common Prayer, the teaching and ritual of the Church in which he worships. At this stage of the League's existence it is not thought well to single out particular persons or churches for its attention, and we trust that there may be no need in the future. But should any of you desire aid, beside that of your fellow parishioners, against the encroachment of error, the League, as far as it is within its power, will render it. This is our bounden duty. For the Church of Christ is not so much a body, clerical and lay, but a body more lay than clerical; from this it follows that lay action is not incidental or occasional, but an essential part of all Church action whatever. The action of the Laity is competent in matters of doctrine and government, from the very nature of Christianity and of the Church; it follows from this that The Laity are Responsible if False Doctrine is Formally Accepted by the Church.

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How easy and natural is the slip from Ritualism to Romanism is well exemplified in the case of "Father" Hugh Benson, son of a late Primate of England, who, speaking to a Roman Catholic audience, stated :—

"At that time (when he was in the English Church) I believed that we had the true priesthood and we practised Catholic doctrine. We had what we believed to be the Mass, we observed silence during the greater part of the day, we wore a certain kind of habit with a girdle, and some wore a biretta. We used the Anglican Book of Common Prayer, supplementing it with a great part of the Catholic Breviary, and I for months—I might say years—before I became a Catholic, recited my rosary every day. . . . At the conclusion of the missions which I conducted as part of my public work, I used to hear far more confessions than I have heard as a Catholic priest. . . . On practically every point except the supremacy of the Pope, we believed the teaching of the Catholic Church, taught most of her doctrines, as thousands of Anglican Clergy are doing to-day, and it is this High Church teaching that is building the bridge over which Anglicans will come into the true fold."

Professor St. George Mivart, F.R.S., a well-known Roman Catholic writer, in the Nineteenth Century, after referring to the "absurdly grotesque" conduct of Ritualists in some respects, says :—

"But these facts should not blind us to the good work the High Church party in the Establishment is doing. The English people are sadly inaccessible to the Catholic clergy on account of old habits and traditional prejudices, and modern Catholic worship is often strange and repellant to them. But the Ritualistic ministers of the Establishment can easily obtain a hearing, and succeed in scattering the good seed of Roman doctrine far and wide. We now frequently meet with devout practices which, forty years ago, were unheard of, save to be denounced and scouted outside the small Catholic body. But Ritualists are rapidly making the word Protestant to .stink in the nostrils of their congregations, amd causing them to regard it as a detestable form of belief. Thus, not only are our ancient Churches being renovated and decorated in the Roman spirit, and so prepared for us, but congregations to fill them are being gathered together. The devout and noble-minded men who form the advance arty are preparing the way for a great increase of the [Roman] Catholic hurch in England."