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 “on the complaint of two parishioners” (too often qualified ad hoc by a temporary residence) followed; and since the act had provided no penalty save imprisonment for contempt of court, there followed the scandal of zealous clergymen being lodged in gaol indefinitely “for conscience’ sake.” This result revolted public opinion; the bishops acquired the habit (rendered easier by the personal expense involved in setting the law in motion) of vetoing, under the power given to them in the act, all prosecutions; and the act became a dead letter. The “persecution” had meanwhile produced its natural result: the use of the forbidden vestments rapidly spread; and since there was no central authority left competent to command obedience, every incumbent—intrenched in his freehold as a “corporation sole”—became a law unto himself. The outcome has been that in the Church of England, and in many of her daughter Churches, there exists a bewildering variety of “uses,” varying from that of Sarum and that of Rome down to the closest possible approximation to the Geneva model.

Some explanation of this state of things may be ventured. Apart from those clergy (still the majority) who follow in all essentials the post-Reformation traditions of the English Church, there are three schools among those who justify the use of the ancient “eucharistic” vestments: (1) a small number who affect to ignore the rules of the Prayer Book altogether, on the ground that no local or national Church has the right to alter the doctrines or practice of the Catholic Church, of which they are priests in virtue of their ordination, and whose prescriptions and usages they are in conscience bound to follow; (2) those who maintain that the Ornaments Rubric, in the phrase “second year of King Edward VI.,” prescribes the ornaments in use before the first Prayer Book; (3) those who hold that under the Rubric the ornaments prescribed in the first Prayer Book are to be “had in use.” The attitude of the first group needs no comment: it makes every priest the arbiter of what is or is not “Catholic,” and is destructive of that principle of definite authority which is the very foundation of Catholicism. The attitude of the second group is based on a mistake as to the technical meaning of “the second year of Edward VI.,” the second Prayer Book not having come into use till the third year. As to the third group, their contention seems now to be admitted, though not all its implications. What, then, are the vestments sanctioned by the Ornaments Rubric? In its present form this dates from the Prayer Book revision of 1662. It runs: “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 was in the Church of England by the authority of parliament in the second year of the reign of King Edward VI.” The wording of this was taken from the last section of Elizabeth’s Act of Uniformity, prefixed to the Prayer Book of 1559. In the Act, however, these words were added: “until other order shall be therein taken by the authority of the Queen’s Majesty, with the advice of the Commissioners appointed and authorized under the Great Seal of England, for causes ecclesiastical, or of the Metropolitan.” The Rubric in the Prayer Book of 1559 ran: “ the minister at the time of the Communion, and at all other times in his ministration, shall use, &c. according to the Act of Parliament set in the beginning of this book.”

Clearly it was the intention of the government, consistently with the whole trend of its policy, to cover its concession to the Protestant party dominant in the Commons by retaining some of the outward forms of the old services until such time as it should be expedient to “take other order.” Then followed a period of great confusion. If the “massing vestments” continued anywhere in use, it was not for long. Whatever the letter of the law under the rubric, the. Protestant bishops and the commissioners made short work of such “popish stuff” as chasubles, albs and the like. As for copes, in some places they were ordered to be worn, and were worn at the Holy Communion, while elsewhere they were thrown into the bonfires with the rest.

The difficulty seems to have been not to suppress the chasuble, of the use of which after 1559 not a single authoritative instance has been adduced, but to save the surplice, which the more zealous Puritans looked on with scarcely less disfavour. At last, in 1565, Queen Elizabeth determined to secure uniformity, and wrote to Archbishop Parker bidding him proceed by order, injunction or censure, “according to the order and appointment of such laws and ordinances as are provided by act of parliament, and the true meaning thereof, so that uniformity may be enforced.” The result was the issue in 1566 by the archbishop of the statutory Advertisements, which fixed the vestments of the clergy as follows: (1) In the ministration of the Holy Communion in cathedral and collegiate churches, the principal minister to wear a cope, with gospeller and epistoler agreeably; at all other prayers to be said at the Communion table, to use no copes but surplices; (2) the dean and prebendaries to wear surplice and hood; (3) every minister saying public prayers, or ministering the sacraments, to wear “a comely surplice with sleeves.”

This has been decided by the judicial committee of the Privy Council (Hebbert v. Purchas, 1870; Ridsdale v. Clifton, 1877) to have been the “other order” contemplated in the Act of Uniformity of Elizabeth, and it was held that from this time the cope and surplice alone were legal vestments in the Church of England. The authority of the Advertisements, indeed, was and is disputed; but their lordships in their judgment pointed out that they were accepted as authoritative by the canons of 1603 (Can. 24 and 58), and argued convincingly that the revisers of the Prayer Book in 1662, in restoring the