believed that the time would arrive when reason would prevail, and churchmen would come to value their inheritance.
It is almost superfluous to point out the meaning of the various clauses of the Rubric. It was made at the last revision explicitly to order the old vestments as well as ornaments, by the insertion of the words ‘and of the Ministers thereof.’ Its position before the first prayers in the Book was chosen to give it prominence, and not to confine it to Morning and Evening Prayer; for the ornaments are to be used ‘at all times of their Ministration.’ These ornaments are not to be retained in the negative sense in which the cope is now retained at Durham or Westminster, but are to ‘be in use.’ The ornaments to be thus used are not to be affected by any arbitrary acts of Tudor despotism, or of Calvinistic bishops; but are those that were used ‘by the authority of Parliament.’[1] And, finally, they are to be those not of modern Rome, nor of medieval Salisbury, nor of the primitive Church, but of ‘the second year of King Edward the Sixth.’
The only serious attempt ever made to lessen the effect of this Rubric has been the confining of its meaning to those Ornaments which were mentioned in the First Prayer Book of King Edward vi.; and in support of this it is alleged that Cosin himself (who had a large share in the revision of 1662) interpreted the Rubric in this sense,[2] as did the eighteenth century authorities.
- ↑ These words are not necessarily Erastian; they merely safeguard the rubric from any doubts that could arise through the unconstitutional action of individuals, which was so rife in the time of Edward.
- ↑ But Cosin’s well-known Notes on the Ornaments Rubric (vol. v. 232, 438) make it clear that he understood the Rubric as covering all the ornaments that were used under the First Prayer Book, and much more than were mentioned in it:—‘As were in use, etc. Among other ornaments of the Church that were then in use, the setting of two lights upon the communion-table or altar was one, appointed by the King’s Injunctions (set forth about that time [1547, the first year], and mentioned or ratified by the Act of Parliament here named) … that two lights only should be placed upon the altar to signify the joy and
