Sundays. Mainly there were only three, which were attacked by the
upholders of the Reformation doctrines. The Papal Supremacy over the
Church, the safeguard of unity of Faith, and a mark of the Church,
Christ established in this world; the Christian Sacrifice--the Mass,
attacked and swept away by the Reformers; and the Priesthood in its
sacrificial character, which was the necessary consequence of the
Eucharistic doctrine upheld by the German and English Reformers. There
were of course many minor points of Catholic belief and practice which
were attacked and destroyed in these days; such, for example, as
devotion to the Mother of God and the Saints, and the long established
custom of blessed ashes and candles and the creeping to the Cross on
Good Friday. But the main lines of departure from the Catholic Faith
along which the Reformation moved were the three I have indicated. A
return can be contemplated only by frankly facing the issues. To-day we
find men of the highest intelligence and good faith claiming to have the
same Christian sacrifice and the same sacrificing priests as the
Catholic Church, and they are using a Communion Service from which of
set purpose every notion of Oblation and Sacrifice has been ruthlessly
removed, and their ministers are ordained by an Ordinal, which
designedly was composed to express the rejection of the sacrificial
character of the Christian priest. The prayer for Christian Unity must
go up from every heart, but if it is to be something more than
sentiment, the facts must be faced frankly and with courage.
BOOKS SUGGESTED FOR READING
Short History of the Church in England. _Gasquet_.
Henry III and the Church. _Gasquet_.
Roman Law and Canon Law. _Maitland_.
Lollardy and the Reformation, 4 vols. _Gairdner_.
History of the Reformation. _Blunt_.
History of the English Church in the 16th Century. _Gairdner_.
The Eve of the Reformation. _Gasquet_.
England under the Old Religion and Other Essays. _Gasquet_.
What then happened at the Reformation (in above).
Henry VIII and the English Monasteries. _Gasquet_.
Henry VI and the Book of Common Prayer. _Gasquet and Bishop_.
What Edward VI did with the Liturgy (in England under the Old Religion).
Anglican Ordinations (in above).
Anglican Ordinations. _Canon Estcourt_.
The Pope and the Ordinal. _S. Barnes_.
The Elizabethan Religious Settlement. _H. N. Birt_.
Hampshire Recusants. _Gasquet_.
The Line of Cleavage (C. T. Soc.). _H. N. Birt_.
Parker Society publications.
Catholic Truth Society--various Historical Papers.
The Ecclesia Anglicana, for what does it Stand? By the Bishop of
Tanzibar, and subsequent correspondence in the _London Times_,
December, 1913, and January, 1914.