agree with my critic that definitions of religion should be suggested by the highest forms of prayer and worship; I even go further, for I believe in limiting illustrative instances also to the highest forms.

But it is evident that what Mrs Husband objects to in particular is that my definition of religion limits prayer to the expectation of good things to come, whereas she seems inclined to set a higher value than I upon an immediate, ecstatic union with some being beyond oneself, without any reference to any task or purpose of the human will, or any craving, as yet unsatisfied, of the human heart. When I turn to the Lord's Prayer, however, I find no evidence of union with the Father suggested, except in the desire to see his will fulfilled on earth, and in the craving that his disciples and apostles might have sufficient daily bread to carry on his work, and might be hemmed in from temptation and evil sufficiently not to have their own good work intercepted or its influence marred. I find no evidence in the Lord's Prayer of any emotion like that to which Mrs Husband, in another passage of her criticism, alludes-of the union of the lover with the beloved. I believe that many so-called spirituallyminded persons have fallen away from the dignity and virility of the religion exemplified in the Lord's Prayer, and that not everything that might be sweet in spiritual practice is necessarily good. Therefore, until I see evidences in what, with most people, I regard as the highest manifestations of religion, of something else than devout and reverent attention to a being in order to receive the supreme blessings of life, I think it safer to restrict what influence I may have to the advocacy of this as the essence of religion.

It might be well to add that, from my point of view, to prove an act to be religious is by no means to prove it

to be commendable. religions, and only the good are to be approved. Therefore no citation of unworthy practices which would fall under the definition I have given could prove that my definition was wrong; it could only prove that some religions have been wrong.

There have been good and bad

August, 1908.

S. C.

NATIONAL IDEALISM AND THE

BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER

CHAPTER I

THE TEN COMMANDMENTS: "THE LORD THY GOD"

THE Ten Commandments are given a striking prominence in the Book of Common Prayer; the rubric enjoins that they shall always be read prior to the celebration of the Lord's Supper, and that they shall be committed to memory by every person before confirmation. No such mark of high esteem is given to any other part of the Old Testament, nor to any part of the New except the Lord's Prayer. It is evident, therefore, that the founders of the Anglican Church regarded the Decalogue as containing the quintessence of the Old Testament, and considered this quintessence of such importance, not only in substance but even in form, that it should be imprinted indelibly from childhood on the mind of every

communicant.

This throwing of emphasis upon the Decalogue by England as she awoke to national self-consciousness in religion was an ecclesiastical innovation, which of itself alone proves that the English Reformation was not simply a nationalistic protest against religious cosmopolitanism, nor by any means a merely individualistic assertion of the

right of private conscience against the dictation of priestly authority, but was also distinctly an ethical movement.

Indeed, there are three trends plainly discernible in the Anglicanism of the sixteenth century, which have been almost universally overlooked, yet which are as well marked and historically as significant as its nationalism and its new claim for the individual conscience.

The Book of Common Prayer, when compared with the Roman Catholic Missal and Breviary, exhibits, in the first place, a bold move away from supernaturalism. For ages the Church had practised universally the ceremony of exorcising evil spirits, and that of invoking good spirits. Here was a supposed intercourse with personal agencies, both good and bad, who, although outside of the living organism of human society, were yet believed to be manipulating human events and the destinies of mortals. But the Anglican Church suppressed both exorcism and the invocation of saints. Another striking evidence of the trend towards organic humanism under natural law is seen when the Burial Service of the Anglican rite is compared with that of the Roman. Such a comparison reveals the fact that, whether conscious or unconscious of the philosophic nature of what they were doing, the revisers of the Church of England turned the attention of mourners away from the soul of the deceased as concerns its existence after death, towards the souls of the mourners themselves, their responsibilities and their spiritual privileges. Prayers for the soul of the dead were forbidden by the genius of the new Anglicanism. Anxiety for the welfare of friends after death, instead of continuing to be systematically intensified and even awakened by the Church, was now assuaged by guiding the thought of the bereaved to other interests. While there is still full recognition in the Burial Service of personal immortality, and an expression