The Church in the World: Collected Essays
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The opening
THE CONDITION OP THE CHURCH OP ENGLAND
‘It hath been the wisdom of the Church of England,’ says the Preface to the Prayer Book, ‘ ever since the first compiling of her Publick Liturgy, to keep the mean between the two extremes.’ In more precise and picturesque language, a divine of the same period defines the extremes as ‘ the meretricious gaudiness of the Church of Rome, and the squalid sluttery of fanatick conventicles.’ But the Englishman, like a sailor on shore, preserves his equilibrium by rolling heavily from side to side, still keeping somewhere near the middle of the road. His institutions, both secular and religious, reflect this national habit. An ecclesiastical historian, the late Mr. Warre Cornish, has said that the average duration of a lurch, or ‘ movement,’ in the Church of England, is about two generations. If this is so, a reaction from the tendency which has been dominant since the Oxford Movement is somewhat overdue.
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About this edition
- The words
- The author's text, copied word for word.
- Left out
- Page numbers and running heads from the printed pages, in 288 places
- Other material that isn't the author's, in 3 places
- Archive.org's digitizing notice (2 blocks)
- A speck read as “I” on a blank page
- The half-title
- Other works printed in the same volume
- The title page and opening pages before chapter 1
- The library's stamps and the printer's line “Made in Great Britain” (5 blocks)
- Specks on a blank page (2 blocks)
- The library's date-due slip (4 blocks)
- The library's catalogue card and labels (12 blocks)
- The library's accession number stamped on the page (“146382”)
- The book's title printed again above the first essay (“THE CHURCH IN THE WORLD”)
- The printer's imprint, its last line (“Colchester, London & Eton”)
- Notes and pages added by translators, editors or publishers