for the people.' If Marx had meant that Christianity is opposed to violence and destruction he would have been right. But if he meant that Christianity is opposed to reform and construction he was wrong. Nowadays the best brains of the 'Socialist' parties of the civilised world have repudiated Marx and hold his doctrine to be untrue. Such is the schism that it is impossible to picture some of the familiar figures of intellectual Socialism in a revolution. In Germany, where the revolutionary ferment has been much fiercer than anything in England since the war, Rathenau dissented from those destructive economics which the Communists would carry to their barren victory. In The New Society, published in 1921, a year before his assassination, Rathenau rescued the conception of the higher life of man from irrelevant economics :

... the goal is not any division of property, or equality of reward. It is the abolition of the proletarian condition of life-long and hereditary servitude, of the two-fold stratification of society, of the scandalous enslavement of brother by brother which vitiates all our acts, all our creations, all our joys. Nor is this the final goal. The final object of all endeavour is the development of the human soul.5

Again he writes, as a reformer who repudiates any proposal for reform on an economic equalitarian basis:

The Socialists envisage a future where there are no more rich, and they imagine that as a result there will be no more poor. They are the slaves of parrot-phrases. Logical Socialism means the proletarian condition for us all. We must achieve a genuine democratisation of the State and of education. Only then will the monopoly of class and culture be overthrown. The cessation of the unearned income will register the downfall of the last of the class monopolies, that of the plutocracy.

This objective, which may seem revolutionary enough to the diehard and to many who would repudiate that title, is yet a far cry from the anarchic nonsense of some of the Communists. But it embodies the mainspring of the whole agitation, which we are tempted too readily perhaps to identify with the devil. When Rathenau writes' The final object of all endeavour is the development of the human soul,' he states an aspiration which is often strangely inarticulate, which is often expressed in violent and materialistic language which horrifies the conservative religious mind, which sometimes concealed under cover of conspiracy, and which is sometimes brought to the surface by a dull passion which stirs men to strikes and rioting and revolution. Under the repressive influence of vast inequality between the brazen ostentation of wealth and the squalid struggle with poverty and starvation men

5 Translated from Die Neue Gesellschaft, and quoted in Germany, by G. P. Gooch (Benn, 1925), p. 291.

• Ibid., pp. 291, 292.

are driven to make a protest. They may not have found the true cause of the trouble. They may not direct their protest aright. They often direct it amiss. But at bottom their misdirected movement comes from a stirring of the soul, which beats against the walls of its prison house, and beats long and violently, before it finally fades into invertebrate resignation to fate.

This stirring of the soul is conspicuous in movements which find a false expression: in Communism which threatens to destroy by violence when it desires to construct in freedom, and in feminism which mistakes sex antagonism for the true emancipation of women from slavery to masculine appetite. Turn where we will, we find movement and obstruction to movement. And the leaders of ' progressive' movements never fail to find in the traditions of religion, as they think, a barrier to the progress of their movement and a voice ringing with denunciation. When Marx described religion as 'opium for the people' he said the same thing as the modern crowds who hear a text about the kingdom of heaven and call it dope.' Like the compiler of the catechism of which we have treated, they misconstrue, by taking at its face value much of the traditional language, a religion of which the truth is to be realised, not up in the sky, but in the hearts and lives of men and women. Heaven is to be found here and now. It is not confined to the future. It is expressed as well in the things of human life as in the unseen world of the spirit. The contention of the Communists is that the conditions of their existence have denied them the opportunity of realising the fulness of heaven; and that the Church, which is part of the established order, has put them off with a hollow promise of a heaven beyond the grave. But the modern multitudes are not so materialistic as some of their critics judge. They cry for life, and their cry is the cry of the soul, which is something greater than those suppose who look only' beyond the veil' for the life which God has promised to men through His revelation of Himself in Jesus Christ. When the Communist apologist aspires to banish the Gods from the Skies and Capitalists from the Earth,' he sees a certain truth, but expresses it with perversity and folly. Religious folk who keep their religion in a compartment separate from life, and limit their thought of heaven to a remote future and a distant place; plutocrats who know no thought of heaven save in a world of riches; revolutionaries whose heaven lies in the appropriation of other people's riches-none of these know the meaning of heaven. For although heaven is beyond, yet it is here and now; and although it is in part expressed through the medium of materialistic things, as the soul expresses itself through the body, yet it opens the eye

'Part of the motto of Communism and Christianism, by 'Bishop' Brown, quoted by Dr. Nairn in this Review for May 1925, p. 689, and referred to supra.

of the soul to the vista of limitless life which even the yawning chasm of human death cannot eclipse. When Saint Paul wrote to the Christians at Philippi and told them that 'our citizenship is in heaven,' he stated the truth of the continuity of life; that although we are citizens of this world through this transitory life, yet we are citizens of the unseen world which is eternal and timeless, whose laws of righteousness and truth and love we are set to realise in this concurrent human life of variety and inequality, of inconstant love and passing beauty, of sorrow and lust and shame. No Christian can ever be quite content or quite complacent with the life of society in this world. It is not weakness but common justice to realise that the misdirected agitation of the Communists represents an aspiration to a better world. It is not Christian courage but religious panic and prejudice which delivers the denunciations of the diehard at a movement which is heading for disruption and finds religion across its path. There are conditions in which the course of Christian courage is to resist the currents of Communism. There are others in which Communism itself is a truer expression of the Christian urge' to righteousness than the established injustices of life which the Communist desires to destroy. In either case our appeal must lie to the highest revelation of truth, and not to those traditions which the Communists attack because they believe them to be the bulwarks of capitalism. The only course which is worthy of our Christian name accords with the commonsense of the post-war world and the courage of our generation. It is to trust the truth and to face reality to make our own the confidence of Butler, the great Bishop of Durham in the days of the Deists: 'Indeed, whatever efforts are made against our religion, no Christian can possibly despair of it '8; and to share the spirit of the Apostle of Christian liberty, in whom we are confronted by a personality which . . . transforms every influence to which it is sensitive with the freedom born of a triumphant faith.' 9

J. WORSLEY BODEN.

8 Vide Works, vol. ii., Primary Charge in 1751, p. 398.

• Vide Saint Paul and the Mystery Religions, by Dr. H. A. A. Kennedy, p. 299.

1925

SHALL THERE BE A BOOK OF COMMON PRAYER?

THE revision of the Book of Common Prayer has been the outcome of the Royal Letters of Business which were issued to the Convocations of Canterbury and York on November 10, 1906. It has therefore occupied the attention of the Church in the Convocations and in the National Assembly of the Church of England during more than eighteen years. But it has widely differed, at least in one important respect, from former revisions of the book. The revision in 1559 was primarily the work of ten divines, who were all afterwards promoted to archbishoprics or bishoprics or deaneries. The revision in 1661 was the work of a committee consisting of eight bishops of the Convocation of Canterbury, with eight proxies added to them as representatives of the Convocation of York; and the committee executed their work with such rapidity that, although the Savoy Conference met for the last time on July 24, the revision was completed by December 20, 1661. The present revision has been entrusted or submitted not merely to a select body of divines, but to large bodies both of clergymen and of laymen. According to the latest statistics which I have at command the Convocation of Canterbury contains 245 members, 26 being members of the Upper House and 219 members of the Lower House. The Convocation of York contains 12 members in the Upper, and 90 in the Lower, House-in all 102 members. It follows that the total number of members in the two Convocations, when they sit together, is 347. But the House of Laity, representing the Provinces both of Canterbury and of York, contains 356 members. Thus the total number of clergymen and laymen who constitute the National Assembly of the Church of England is 703. So large a body, whether all its members sit together or are divided into several houses, if it is entrusted with the difficult and delicate task of revising the Book of Common Prayer, lies open to the criticism that they are not all, and cannot all be, experts in liturgical scholarship; their meetings, so far from being continuous, are spread over many years, and during those years great changes in the membership are wrought by death and other causes; some members cannot

afford the time and the cost of frequent visits, lasting over several days, to London or York; they cannot all attend the long course of the debates, still less can they always appreciate at once the cumulative effect of amendments, which may in themselves be tolerable or even valuable, upon the Book of Common Prayer as a whole; and it necessarily happens that some votes are passed by small majorities or even by minorities of the members, and perhaps by those members who enjoy the largest amount of leisure, as being the least actively occupied with the regular parochial life and work of the Church. In the Preface to the Book of Common Prayer of 1549, now entitled 'Concerning the Service of the Church,' the revisers state explicitly the object which they had set before themselves in the words: Whereas heretofore there hath been great diversity in saying and singing in Churches within this Realm; some following Salisbury Use, some Hereford Use, and some the Use of Bangor, some of York, some of Lincoln; now from henceforth all the whole realm shall have but one Use.' But a study of the Revised Prayer Book (Permissive Use) Measure, 1923, known as N.A. 84, and still more of the Amendments made by the House of Clergy in the Revised Prayer Book known as C.A. 158, suggests that the revisers to-day have sought rather to allow so wide a latitude of variations as would satisfy the theological or ecclesiastical prepossessions of all persons, especially of all ordained clergymen, who, however widely they might differ each from the others, would be willing, on such terms as pleased themselves, to remain within the pale of the Church of England. A distinguished mathematician, who has allowed me to consult him, estimates the possible variations in Morning Prayer as 192, and in the Celebration of Holy Communion as 384. These figures are not indeed, and cannot be, unquestionable. It is not always easy to decide what justly amounts to a variation; still, the number as so estimated avails at least to show how great an uncertainty would attach under the revision to the most familiar services of the Church.

But there are two or three considerations which ought to be borne in mind. Whatever changes have been suggested or may be ultimately sanctioned, the Book of Common Prayer will itself remain intact. The changes will be optional, not compulsory. Churchmen, who value the Book of Common Prayer as it is, will not necessarily be debarred from hearing it used, and used in all its fulness, within their churches. But the fact that the Book of Common Prayer will still remain, if only as an alternative book or as one of two or three alternative books, will itself complicate the variety of possible uses at Divine Service; for there may apparently be a perpetual intermixture between the existing Book of Common Prayer and the revised book or books. It is expressly