possible, for the old as against new-fangled innovations; that it is, in a word, a simplification of that which is primitive and medieval, and not in any sense a creation of a new Protestant ceremonial.
We have seen, further, how it retained the old arrangement of the Church’s year, with its fasts and festivals, and the old arrangement of the chancels. That it retained also all that was essential of the old Catholic services was admitted even in the eighteenth century. Indeed the Catholic nature of our ‘Popish Liturgy,’ as those call it who confuse what is Popish with what is Catholic, has been consistently urged against it by the Puritans, from the days of Thomas Cartwright[1] to the present time.
We have now only to consider the most important point of all, the Ornaments Rubric. This will show us how much of the old ceremonial is to be retained.
5. Some of our documents are studiously vague in their wording. But from such vagueness the Ornaments Rubric is conspicuously free:—
- ‘And here it is to be noted, That such Ornaments of the Church, and of the Ministers thereof, at all times of their Ministration, shall be retained, and be in use, as were in this Church of England, by the authority of Parliament, in the second year of the reign of King Edward the Sixth.’
This is the only direction we have as to what the priest is to wear,[2] and almost the only one as to what he is to use, in the services of the Church. It is our sole authority for the use of organs and lecterns, just as much as for that of censers and roods. We are nowhere else told to wear the surplice any more than the chasuble; for those Canons of 1603 that deal with vestments have been superseded by the re-enactment of this Rubric in 1662, and are only in
