The Liverpool Standard and General Commercial Advertiser.
Liverpool, Merseyside, England, 1854-06-27 00:00:00

TO THE EDITOR OF THE LIVERPOOL STANDARD.

Sin, I ventured to assert a short time ago;. through
your paper, that " the Lord's Day cannot be duly honoured
without the offering of that sacred memorial which He
ordained as the peculiar service of His religion ;. and that
a monthly celebration of the Lord's' Supper is a disgrace-
ful abridgment of the Church's office three Sundays out
of four, without warrant from Scripture, or antiquity."
Of course; I should not have hazarded such an assertion
as this, had, I not been prepared to justify it, and glad of
an opportunity of reiterating a statement which unhappily
so well deservses the serious consideration of thepeople of
Liverpool.
Your anonymous correspondent,. "A Churchman. of
Liverpool," challenges me to produce my "authority" for
a weekly Communion from the Bible and Prayer-Book.;
and has been already sufficiently answered by yout corre-
spondents of last week, who ask him to produce chapter and.
verse for monthly Communion ; for his observance. of
Christmas-Day,. or Good Friday, or even for the Lord's.
Day, and also for neglecting to keep holy the Sabbath, or
seventh day. It`mi,ght also be demanded of "A Church—
man of Liverpool? to produce hie authority from the-
Prayer-Book for the assembling of Christians for worship
on one day only in seven, seeing that the Prayer-Book is
entitled " The-order of morning and evening prayer daily
throughout the year," and does not eontain a single prayer
peculiar to Sundays only.
A Churchman .of Liverpool" cannot produce his Scrip-
tural authority for any of these Christian observances, still
less for his weekly prayer and monthly communion; and
his inability to do this ought to make him question the
soundness of the principle which would appeal on all
occasions to the Bible, and the Bible only, as the religion of
Protestants. The fact is, that the Bible is not ordinarily
the source of truth, though it is the- witness and confir-
mation of all truth. The Christian Church, for which the
New Testament was written, existed long before that
volume was compiled. The primitive Christians received
their first faith and discipline from. the apostles them-
selves; and, consequently, it is the height of presumption
for us of the present day to ignore their faith and practice,
and to pretend to understand the Scriptures better than
they. The Church of England certainly adopts a very
different course, as both the preface-to the Prayer-Book
and the Book of Homilies testify, our services being com-
piled from those in use, so as to be " agreeable to the mind
and purpose of the old Fathers," and more than twelve of
these Fathers- being quoted on a point of doctrine in a
single homily.

What, then,. is our authority for-weekly Communion?
Simply the universal practice of Christians from the
very first. The Holy Communion is emphatically THE
CEREMONY Op CHRISTIANITY—the one act of worship
ordained by it—the peculiar Gospel mode of drawing near
to God. St.ithe, in the earliest- history of the Church,
informs us that the disciples "came together to break
bread," and that they " broke bread from house to house,"
and "continued in breaking of, liread." And all subse-
quent history witnesses to the same fact. Christians
always assembled for this purpose ;. this was their mode of
worship.. What are the forms of primitive worship which
have come down to us ? The order of administering the
Holy Eucharist, and little else. Formerly the word,
" Liturgy" was applied exclusively to the administration:
of this sacrament. This was .the staple worship of the -
primitive Church, daily celebrated by the clergy, and?.
received: weekly at least by the-people ; so that congreg
tions which met from week.to week without this act, and
churches in which it was solemnized once a month, were
wholly unknown.

"A, Churchman of Liverpool" will please to remember.
that I am not hazarding a- private opinion, but stating a
notorious fact—a fact which proves the worship of Church,
men. of Liverpool to be essentially different from the worship
of the " Holy Church throughout all the world" in.the
first and purest ages, and different, too, from the worship
prescribed by the Church, of England, the rule of the
prayer-Book being that the• Holy Communion should. be
administered on all Sundays and other holydays—that all
priests and deacons should receive it " every Sunday at
Me least"—and the, only contemplated exception to, its
being celebrated in all churches on every Sunday being the
paucity of communicants, as in parishes containing only
twenty people of discretion, and there not being on all
Sundays, four, or at least three, " to communicate with the
priest.'
As the Church, of England intended to forbid' the prac-
tice of private masses, it was necessary to makeprovision
for such exceptional cases as the above. But there is no
ground for supposing that the clergy have a discretionary
power to curtail, the office in large congregations, where
there must always be three or four persons ready to com-
municate. It were a slander upon our Church, highly
mischievous in, our controversy with Rome, to• maintain or
allow for a moment that, in adopting, or rather continuing,
the ancient " Liturgy," she intended to fimsake the ancient
rule of freqnent Communion. In every church, therefore,
in Liverpool, there ought tothe weekly communion at the
least. prayer and a sermon, without the Lord's Supper,
is not the- Gospel mode of hallowing the Lord's-day.
" The foolishness of preaching" is useful in its way, espe-
cially to.the unlearned and unconverted; but it must not
be allowed to thrust out that holy sacrament and mystery
of God, which is no vain ceremony, no bare sign, no untrue
figure of a thing absent, but is the food of immortality—
in which the faithful see, hear, and know the mercies of
God, sealed, the satisfaction by Christ towards us con-
firmed, and the remission of Birk established.—l am, Sir,.
yours, faithfully, CECIL WRAY,
Feast of the Nativity of John Baptist, 1854.

WEEKLY COMMUNION.