The Henson Journals

[104]

Monday, December 8th, 1924.

Lillingston sends me an inscription which he says he copied recently 'from a tablet on the wall of a church in Suffolk':

'In memory of Elizabeth Hyam of this Parish, for the fourth time widow, who, by a fall that brought on mortification, was at last hastened to her end on the 4th May, 1748, in her 113th year'.

Legality of Reservation

The situation in Birmingham, where the Bishop and the Anglo–Catholicks, are in open hostility, is becoming critical. An impudent person named Rosenthal writes to the Bishop claiming that Reservation is legal, & rudely attacking the Bishop's orthodoxy. The legality of Reservation is built on the fact that the rubric of 1549 appears in the Latin Prayer Book of Elizabeth, & that the practice of reservation existed in Scotland, and among the Nonjurors. The Archbishops in their Opinion (1899) disallowed reservation.

Cripps 7th ed. p. 579: "The reservation of the sacrament & ceremonies connected therewith (e.g. the service of Benediction) are unlawful". In a note he quotes three recent cases.

Wickham Legg. "English Church Life" p. 64f. says that "after 1662 (when the present rubrick was inserted in the P.B.) Reservation 'was no longer lawful'. He quotes [105] Thorndike in a treatise written between 1670–1672, as being "apparently not conscious that he is saying anything opposed to the rules of the Church, when he recommends that the Eucharist be reserved between each celebration for the sick and dying".

Bishop Wordsworth of Salisbury found that reservation for the sick had persisted in certain places in his diocese.

Bishop Stubbs 'censured most definitely' 'the question of reservation' in his 4th Visitation Charge. 1899.

Bishop John Wordsworth (v. Holy Communion. p. 117) says that 'reservation for the sick – being directly contrary to the rubrics of our Communion Office – must be pronounced unlawful without fresh authority', and declares himself not personally anxious to move for such authority. This was in 1891.

Bp. Jeremy Taylor is stated to have practised reservation, see 'The Prayer Book Dictionary', Art. Reservation.

Bishop Dowden ('Further Studies in the P.B.') thinks that the arrangements made for communicating the sick, 1549–1552, were affected by German parallels. v. p. 248f.

I fooled away my day in trying to strike out a plan for the inaugural address, which – like the yielding idiot I am! – I am pledged to deliver early in January to the Historical Association when it meets in Newcastle: and I went round the Park with Clayton & the dogs.

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