10 



ANGLICAN CHURCHES. 



Liberation Society. The annual meeting 

 of the Society for the Liberation of Religion 

 from State Patronage and Control was held in 

 London, May 6. Sir G. Trevelyan, M. P., pre- 

 sided, and made an address vindicating the ne- 

 cessity of the society taking part in political ac- 

 tivity. He mentioned as the chief matter in 

 which the society was now immediately inter- 

 ested the contemplated institution of free edu- 

 cation, and he urged his hearers to be watch- 

 ful to secure a real exemption from fees in all 

 the grades of the public schools, and to have the 

 elementary schools, in the villages as well as in 

 the great 'cities, placed under a real and not a 

 nominal popular control. 



The Church House. The foundation-stone 

 of the Church House was laid June 24 by the 

 Duke of Connaught, with the assistance of the 

 Duke of Westminster, the Archbishop-desig- 

 nate of York, the Archbishop of Canterbury, and 

 the Bishops of London and Carlisle. The Duke 

 of Westminster, in presenting the building, said 

 that the corporation looked forward to the time 

 when it would be regarded as a central institu- 

 tion of supreme value to the Church at home 

 and to all English-speaking churches through- 

 out the world. The Bishop of London antici- 

 pated that it would become a center of communi- 

 cation between all the different branches of the 

 Church ; and the Bishop of Carlisle that it would 

 do more than anything else to bring together all 

 the clergy and laity of all sections of the Angli- 

 can Church, including the American Church. 



The Church Association. The twenty- 

 sixth annual meeting of the Church Association 

 was held in London, May 3. The report noticed 

 as among the events of the year bearing upon 

 the objects of the association, the faculties 

 granted by the Chancellors of Hereford and 

 Gloucester for the removal of " altar " crosses and 

 candlesticks where the clergy and parishioners 

 concurred in desiring it ; the confirmation by 

 the Chancellor of Chichester of the ruling of 

 Chancellor Kempe that what are called " side 

 altars " are now illegal in the Church of Eng- 

 land, and that no faculty could lawfully issue 

 for their erection ; the opinion given at the re- 

 quest of the Bishop of Gloucester by Chancellor 

 Jeune, that a bishop had no power to forbid 

 the removal of the Lord's table at service time ; 

 the institution of a second suit in order to bring 

 before the House of Lords the fact that idola- 

 trous worship had been publicly paid before the 

 graven images set up at St. Paul's ; and the prose- 

 cution of the Bishop of Lincoln. But notwith- 

 standing certain admissions, the judgment of 

 the archbishop's court in this case, as a whole, 

 Seemed so utterly at variance with the decisions 

 of the Privy Council in previous suits that an 

 appeal was at once seen to be inevitable. A 

 resolution was passed deploring "the episcopal 

 pressure put upon English missionaries laboring 

 in foreign lands to prevent their witnessing 

 against the departures from the faith by the 

 Eastern and other churches which are recognized 

 as corruptives in the XlXth of the XXXIX Arti- 

 cles of Religion to which all missionaries have 

 solemnly subscribed," and urging the commit- 

 tees of all evangelical missionary societies in 

 connection with the Church of England " strenu- 

 ously to resist every kind of iuterference which 



might compel her faithful members to seek other 

 channels and agencies than her own for the 

 preaching of the Gospel as a witness unto all 

 nations." 



The Church Union. The thirty-second an- 

 nual meeting of the English Church Union was 

 held in London, June 9. Viscount Halifax pre- 

 sided, and considered in his address the likeness 

 between the conditions under which the union 

 met now and those under which the leaders of 

 the* Oxford movement took counsel just fifty 

 years before. They welcomed the decision of 

 the Archbishop of Canterbury in the case of the 

 Bishop of Lincoln, because, for the first time 

 since those matters had been made the subject 

 of legal proceedings, they had had a judgment 

 which had recognized the fact of the contimious 

 existence of the Church of England. The report 

 showed that 4,032 communicants had joined the 

 union in 1890, making the present number of 

 members 32,975. Resolutions were passed re- 

 gretting the adoption of free education, "as cal- 

 culated to widen still further the sacred tie be- 

 tween parent and child, and to injure, if not to 

 destroy, the position of voluntary schools " ; giv- 

 iqg to the Rev. J. Bell Cox assurance of sympa- 

 thy and support ; and pledging the union to 

 work for the repeal of the law which compels the 

 clergy to allow the use of their churches for the 

 marriage of divorced persons. 



The Case of the Bishop of Lincoln. The 

 court of the Archbishop of Canterbury gave its 

 decision, Jan. 21, in the case of the prosecution 

 against the Bishop of Lincoln for offenses in 

 ritual. The complaints against the defendant 

 included charges that when celebrating the holy 

 communion, on certain specified occasions, he 

 had allowed two lighted candles to stand upon 

 (or apparently upon) the communion table ; had 

 added water to the wine and administered it so 

 mixed ; had before the consecration prayer stood 

 in what is called the eastward position ; had dur- 

 ing the consecration prayer stood so that certain 

 " manual acts " could not be seen : had allowed 

 the hymn " Lamb of God " to be sung after the 

 consecration ; had made the sign of the cross at 

 the absolution and benediction ; and had taken 

 part in what is referred to in the articles as the 

 " ceremony of ablution " which acts, it was al- 

 leged, were all and each of them contrary to the 

 law. The bishop pleaded that the acts which 

 were done by him or with his sanction were not 

 any of them illegal ; that he had no wish or in- 

 tention to prevent the communicants present 

 from seeing him break the bread and take the 

 cup into his hands. 



Concerning the charge of mixing water with 

 the wine, the court decided that mixing in and 

 as part of the service is against the law of the 

 Church, but found no ground for pronouncing 

 the use of a cup mixed beforehand to be an ec- 

 clesiastical offense. To the charge of ablution, 

 the bishop had answered that, in the disposition 

 of the elements which he had made after admin- 

 istering them to the communicants, " the re- 

 mains of that which was consecrated were com- 

 pletely and reverently eaten and drunken in ac- 

 cordance with the rubric " The court was not 

 able to hold that any minister who, after the 

 service was ended and the benediction given, in 

 order that no part of the consecrated elements 



