most cases this test of explicit agreement with Scripture is sufficient. Belief in God, in our Lord's Incarnation and death on our behalf is indisputably to be found there. But inevitably the reference of many statements of our documents to biblical sources will be challenged. In that case the appeal is to the interpretative tradition of the Church. What was actually taught about the matter in dispute during the first centuries of the Church's life, the centuries during which the Church was thinking out the meaning of the revelation committed to it? It may seem to most of us sufficiently obvious that the statement of the Baptismal Office about the newly baptized child, that this child is regenerate, is a truly biblical doctrine; and yet it is disputed and our appeal must be to the constant teaching of the Church from the beginning for the accuracy of our report as to the biblical doctrine.

While it is true that we are entitled to disregard the utterances of contemporary writers as having any more than an illustrative value, there is a class of contemporary documents which are of interpretative value in our attempt to understand the religion of the Prayer Book. This class of documents is composed of the formal utterances of the Church through its accredited channels.

There is a whole series of documents be

ginning from the Reformation Parliament and Convocation of 1529 and going down through the whole Reformation period which are very valuable as indicating the mind of the Church on matters to-day in dispute. From them the mind of the Anglican Church on such matters as the papal jurisdiction, the invocation of saints, the real Presence can be gathered.

Our method of interpretation then would be to take the statements of the Prayer Book in their simple grammatical meaning. Take as an illustration, its teaching about the Eucharist. The Catechism would seem to be sufficiently plain. It declares that there are two parts of the Lord's Supper: an outward part or sign, which is bread and wine; and an inward part or thing signified which is "the Body and Blood of Christ which are spiritually taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's supper." The statement is prepared for children, and one would think that any fairly intelligent child would understand its meaning. But what a child would easily understand, an adult, sophisticated by theory, may not understand. He comes to a definition, not to get a meaning out of it, but to impose one upon it. In case therefore that a question is raised as to the meaning of the Catechism, we have to interpret it. We can do this, in the first place, by refer

ence to other parts of the Prayer Book, notably to the Communion Office itself. When the priest distributes the elements to the faithful he declares that what he is giving is the Body and Blood of Christ. If the interpretation drawn from the Prayer Book is challenged the recourse is to the official documents of the Church. It is not at all to the point to collect passages from the writings of the Reformers. Contemporary opinion in this particular instance was in a state of chaos; but reference must be made to the formal utterances of the Church. The XXXIX Articles are not of faith, but they have a certain weight which does not attach to the opinions of any individual reformer. The XXVIIIth Art. declares that "the Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper, only after an heavenly and spiritual manner." The documents hold all together and have a perfectly plain and consistent meaning.

They do not, however, as we know, command universal assent; and with those who do not assent it would be purposeless to continue the argument inasmuch as such will have departed utterly from the principle of an authoritative interpretation being possible, in favor of the principle of private judgment; and when a man asserts that he is the final court of appeal as to the meaning of a doctrine all use of argument falls. But for

those who want an intelligible principle of interpretation we may carry the appeal from the official documents of the English Church to the final court which is the Holy Scripture interpreted by the mind of the universal Church. The appeal is not to Holy Scripture simply, for that would land us again in the jungle of private judgment. If Scripture means what I think it means religion is reduced to mere individualism and tends to vanish altogether. But Scripture actually means (on the Catholic hypothesis) what the Church understands it to mean; and in this special case of the Eucharist we have the consent of the Church in its formal action in councils and in the liturgies it has authorized and the constant interpretation of the Scriptures and authorized documents by the great Catholic Fathers, to whose interpretation of the Christian Religion the English Church plainly appeals. It may seem at first sight that the writings of the Fathers are of as little authority as the writings of the Reformers as a source of interpretation; but this is not The writings of the great Fathers of the East and West have always been held to embody the Catholic interpretation of the Church's formal documents and while, of course, no formal authority attaches to any passage from S. Chrysostom or S. Augustine, the mind of the Church as

So.

to their orthodoxy is sufficiently plain and the explicit appeal of the Anglican Church is to the Holy Scriptures as interpreted by them. In the case of the Eucharist this interpretative tradition in the sense of the real Presence is continuous.

Here, then, we have an intelligible rule of interpretation which is sufficient to free us from the vagaries of private judgment. If any one, priest or bishop, local or national council, teaches anything as of faith it is easy to bring the teaching to book. We are not left to the tender mercies of the individual interpretation of religion, as it is often said of us by some of our critics.

But one perceives the objection that while this method of arriving at truth is no doubt the authorized one, yet it has this particular difficulty that the plain man cannot apply it. It is a method for scholars, but it is not only scholars who need to know the Catholic faith.

To which the answer is that the plain man does not have to go beyond the simple grammatical meaning of his Prayer Book. All that he needs for the solution of his difficulties is there; so long as he is content with it he need not trouble about vexed questions. If those who are set as his teachers deny the plain meaning of his Prayer Book, he can still adhere to it rather than to them, and go his way. Of doctrines which to-day are