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Church Politics and Church Prospects.
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translator of the ancient hymns (mostly adapted from the 'Hymnal Noted' of the Ecclesiological Society), which have sprung into vogue. Still, the soil must have been prepared to receive the seed, or else it never would have germinated so rapidly. If to the churches where the ritual is altogether correct, be added those in which modified reforms have been adopted, such as chancels properly fitted though not properly used, or else filled with unvested choirs, and those in which, while all other things are satisfactory, the officiator occupies a sideward prayer-desk; if, too, the structural and decorative beauty, enhanced, restored, or given from county to county, to churches old and new, under all conceivable circumstances, be reckoned up, it will not be too much to say that the worship of the English Church is undergoing a silent revolution.

That, however, which is hardest to find in the best appointed church is the one thing which, in its distinctive simplicity, is really of the deepest importance—the eastward posture of the celebrant, showing forth (as his predecessors of all times have done) the Lord's death till He come; not presiding, as a Zwinglian minister, at the head of a table spread for a mere 'love-feast.' We venture to suggest to those who are so eager to group the singers of the Magnificat in a tableau vivant, and to change stoles during the baptismal service, that it would be a less sensational, but a far more useful task, quietly to co-operate in inducing the clergy of England throughout the land to acquiesce in the adoption of that attitude at the most solemn moment of the most sacred rite, which alone coincides with the traditions of the Catholic Church, and alone corresponds with the teachings of the ordinal which they are working out. The timid Churchman, who is doubtful where to stand at the prayer of consecration, will certainly not be won to the right position by the perusal of the 'Union Review Almanack.'

The sensation movement in the Church of England reaches its climax in the proceedings of that active young deacon, Mr. Leycester Lyne, who calls himself Brother Ignatius, and signs 'O. S. B,' How Mr. Lyne dresses, and what his pretensions are, we need not fill out our pages to detail, for he is one of the lions of the day. Supposing that he could have excited himself up to the conviction that a revival of monasticism tout cru was the likeliest method of working a missionary enterprise in the Church of England, we cannot understand the logical process by which Mr. Lyne persuaded himself that he ought to be, or that he could be, a Benedictine. The Benedictine order is, by many centuries, the oldest existing corporation in the world—at least, if we except the college of Cardinals, who have so far deviated, as the Benedictines have not done, from their primi-