ation Service" calls "The Primitive Church". This
"Primitive Church" is the Reformed Church now established in England.
{18} The Reformers themselves never meant it to be anything else, and
would have been the first to protest against the unhistoric, low, and
modern use of the word "established". In this sense, they would have
been the sturdiest of sturdy "Protestants".

And this word Protestant reminds us that there is one more name
frequently given to the Church of England, but not included in our
scheme, because found nowhere in the Prayer Book.

THE PROTESTANT CHURCH.

The term is a foreign one--not English. It comes from Germany and was
given to the Lutherans in 1529, because they protested against an
edict[14] forbidding them to regulate their own local ecclesiastical
affairs, pending the decision of a General Council.

It had nothing whatever to do with "protesting" against ceremonial.
The ceremonial of the Church in Lutheran Germany is at least as
carefully elaborated as that seen in the majority of English churches.

Later on, the term was borrowed from the Germans by the English, and
applied to {19} Churchmen who protested (1) against doctrines held
_exclusively_ by Rome on the one hand, and by Lutherans and Calvinists
on the other; and (2) against claims made by the King over the rights
and properties of the Church. Later still, it has been applied to
those who protest against the ancient interpretation of Prayer-Book
teaching on the Sacraments and Ceremonial.

There is, it is true, a sense in which the name is fairly used to
represent the views of all loyal English Churchmen. Every English
Churchman protests against anything unhistoric or uncatholic. The
Church of England does protest against anything imposed by one part of
the Church on any other part of the Church, apart from the consent of
the whole Church. It does protest against the claims of Italy or of
any other nation to rule England, or to impose upon us, as _de fide_,
anything exclusively Roman. In this sense, Laud declared upon the
scaffold that he died "a true Protestant"; in this sense, Nicholas
Ferrar, founder of a Religious House in Huntingdonshire, called himself
a Protestant; in this sense, we are all Protestants, and in this sense
we are not ashamed of our unhistoric name.

{20}

In these Prayer-Book names, then, we see (1) that the Church on earth
is a society, established in the Upper Chamber on the Day of Pentecost;