Messenger - v. 40 Author:Unknown Author Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: THE ANGLICAN CRISIS. It might certainly have been thought that the cry of "The Crisis in the Church of England," like that of Wolf! had lost all power to alar... more »m, had fallen, so to speak, into innocuous desuetude. But it appears that: " Age cannot wither it, nor custom stale Its infinite variety." It is still a word to conjure with ; to call from the vasty deep of heterogeneous Protestantism—Low church, Nonconformist, hoc genus omne—the spirit of bigotry, persecution and of'' No-Popery.'' The Education act, decried by Nonconformists, at least, as " a fresh endowment of clericalism," has had its share in aggravating the present febrile condition of the British Protestant mind ; nor have the wholesale conversions at S. Michael's, Shoreditch, London, due, surely, to the public use of the Rosary, been without their effect. (1) The article on the Graymoor Friary, in the March number of The Messenger, is of the greatest possible interest, as showing the latest phase in the United States of a movement, the trend of which, we cannot doubt, is most certainly Romeward: towards reunion, in the Catholic sense, in fact. The movement in England has reached a point which may, without exaggeration, be termed a crisis, which has, at all events, roused the motley ranks of its opponents, united for once, to very strenuous action. Two Church Discipline Bills, the provisions of which we shall consider presently, have been introduced into Parliament, the more stringent one has, at the time of writing, passed its second reading by a substantial majority. It has still to pass the committee stage, its third reading, and the House of Lords, but its present or immediate fate is of less importance than the spirit that underlies it; the rabid Protestantism, which aims at removing all traces of Pope...« less