Allow me to make the following inquiries through the pages of "N. & Q.,"
which may possibly elicit valuable information from some of your many
correspondents. In the Archbishop of York's questions put to candidates for
Holy Orders, Feb. 1850, occurred this Query: "The Church Catechism ... by
whom was the latter part added and put into its present form; and whence is
it chiefly derived?" The former part of this is readily answered; being, as
any one at all read in the history of the Prayer-Book well knows, added at
the Hampton Court Conference, 1603; and was drawn up by Bishop Overall, at
that time Dean of St. Paul's: but _whence is it chiefly derived?_ That is
the question for which I have hitherto sought in vain a satisfactory
solution, and fear his grace, or his examining chaplain, must have looked
in vain for a correct reply from any of his _quasi_ clergymen, college
education though they may have had. It is a point which seems to be passed
over entirely unnoticed by all of our liturgical writers and church
historians, as I have been at no little pains in searching works at all
likely to clear it up, but, hitherto, without success. It may be
conjectured that the part referred to, viz., on the Sacraments, was taken
from Dean Nowell's Catechism; or, at all events, that Overall borrowed some
of the expressions while he changed its meaning, as Nowell's was purely
Calvinistic in tendency. He may have had before him the fourth part of
Peter Lombard's _Liber Sententiarum_, or some such work. But all this is
mere supposition; and what I want to arrive at, is some correct data or
authoritative statement which would settle the point. Another interesting
matter upon which I am desirous of information, is, as to the protestation
after the rubrics at the end of the Communion Service. In our _present_
Prayer-Book it is in marks of quotation, which we do not find in the second
book of King Edward VI., where it originally appears--and the expressions
there admit the real presence. It was altogether left out in Elizabeth's
Prayer-Book, but again inserted in the last review in 1661, when the
inverted commas first appear: the sense being somewhat different, allowing
the spiritual but not the actual or bodily presence of Christ. Why are the
_commas_ or marks of quotation, if such they be, then inserted? I have
written to a well-known Archdeacon, eminent for his works on the
Sacraments, but his answer does not convey what is sought by