Reformed Episcopal Church

Collier's New Encyclopedia (1921)

a denomination organized by members of the Protestant Episcopal Church, who give substantially the following statement of the events and circumstances which, as they believe, justify their (1) The Protestant Reformacourse: tion in England had outwardly a political origin (in the act of the king, VIII., renouncing allegiance to Henry ary the Pope, and proclaiming himself head of the English Church), by which the work was biased and cut short. During the brief life of the young king, Edward VI., the regent, or protector, being in favor of the Reformation, great progress in it was made. Under Mary the supremacy of the Pope was again acknowledged. When Elizabeth became queen, wishing to harmonize. her divided subjects, and hoping for reconciliation with Rome, she strove to have the liturgy framed so as to satisfy both parties. Consequently it contained contradictory elements. At a later period, when she had found her hope futile, the articles of faith adopted were decidedly Protestant. Thus it came to pass that in the Church of England two parties found support in her ritual; the one Protestant, the other having an affinity with Rome. (2) After the American Revolution, when the Church of England in the colonies became the Protestant Episcopal Church of the United States, the Book of Common Prayer, having been adopted without material alterations, retained its conflicting elements. (3) The Tractarian movement, which began at Oxford, 1833, was a successful endeavor to revive the principles of antiquity and Catholicity contained in the prayer book, in opposition to its Protestant elements. It discarded Protestant principles and taught the doctrines of ap apostolic succession, priestly absolution, baptismal rethe real presence, and the generation, on, authority of the Church. (4) These teachings produced a powerful effect in the United States also. A great increase in ritualism, and of the drift toward Rome, was soon manifested; the opposition between the "High" and the "Low Church" parties was intensified, and practical measures were adopted by each which widened the chasm. (5) Several subsequent public events fanned the flame of discontent, especially the censure of one clergyman for preaching in a Methodist Church, and the suspension of another for omitting the word "regenerate" in the baptismal office. (6) Remonstrances and petitions for relief, which were numerously and urgently presented to the General eral Convention, produced no effect. (7) During the ses sions of the Evangelical Alliance in New York in October, 1873, Bishop Cummins of the diocese of Kentucky, having, by invitation, officiated at a union celebration of the Lord's Supper, in company with representatives of other denominations, was for this act of Christian fellowship bitterly censured through the press by members of the "High Church" party. After this, convinced that he could no longer rightfully continue in a church whose theory and practice (as interpreted by the majority of its members) denied the brotherhood of believers in Christ, Bishop Cummins withdrew from the ministry of the Protestant Episcopal Church. (8) This led to the organization, Dec. 2, 1873, of the Reformed Episcopal Church, of which Bishop Cummins and the Rev. Dr. Charles E. Cheney were elected bishops. At the same time the following declaration of principles was adopted: I. The Reformed Episcopal Church "holding the faith once delivered to the saints" declares its belief in the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments as the Word of God, and the sole rule of faith and practice; in the creed "commonly called the Apostles' Creed"; in the divine institution of the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper; and in the doctrines of grace substantially as they are set forth in the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion. II. This Church, recognizes and adheres to Episcopacy, not as of divine right, but as a very ancient and desirable form of Church polity. III. This Church, retaining a liturgy which shall not be imperative or repressive of freedom in prayer, accepts the Book of Common Prayer, as it was revised, proposed, and recommended for use by the General Convention of the Protestant Church, 1785; reserving full liberty to alter, abridge, enlarge, and amend the same as may seem most conducive to the edification of the people, "provided that the substance of the faith be kept entire." IV. This Church condemns and rejects the following erroneous and strange doctrines as contrary to God's word: (1) That the Church of Christ exists only in one order or form of ecclesiastical policy. (2) That Christian ministers are "priests" in another sense than that in which all believers are "a royal priesthood." (3) That the Lord's table is an altar on which the oblation of the body and blood of Christ is offered anew to the Father. (4) That the presence of Christ in the Lord's Supper is a presence in the elements of bread and wine. (5) That regeneration is inseparably connected with baptism. To this statement it may be added that in this Church the bishops do not constitute a separate order, but are presbyters; in council they vote with and as their brother presbyters, and are subject to appointment by the confirmation or general council. In 1919 the denominations had in the United States and Canada 11,217 communicants. REFORMED PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, or CAMERONIANS, a body of Christians who profess to hold the principles of the Church of Scotland at the period of the second Reformation between 1638 and 1650. They claim to be the legitimate successors of that section of the Covenanters which was headed by Cameron and Cargill, who considered that Charles II. had forfeited all title to their allegiance, having broken the solemn vows which he made at his coronation. When William of Orange was called to the throne in 1688 they were among the first to welcome him; but while they avowed their readiness to yield all loyal obedience and submission they they openly openl declared their dissatisfaction with the Revolution settlement. In 1690 Presbyterianism was established in Scotland, but because the state claimed a certain control over the Church this settlement was also repudiated by the Reformed Presbyterians. The position which the sect was thus compelled to occupy was that of dissenters from the Church and protesters against the state. For upward of 16 years after they had publicly avowed their principles they remained in an unorganized condition and without a regular ministry. The first who exercised this office was the Rev. John McMillan, who in 1706 demitted his charge as parish minister of Balmaghie, and in 1743 he met with a coadjutor in the Rev. Thomas Na Nairne, whereupon these two constituted a Reformed presbytery in 1743. In 1810 three presbyteries were formed, and in 1811 a synod was constituted. The number of presbyteries was afterward increased to six, and the number of ministers rose to about 40. In 1876 a large portion of them united with the Free Church of Scotland. The Reformed Presbyterians in the United States in 1919 had about 10,000 members. REFRACTION. When beam of a light traveling in a transparent medium, impinges obliquely upon the surface of another transparent medium, what occurs in the vast majority of cases is that a part of it is reflected (see REFLECTION) and a part of it enters the second medium, but in so doing is "refracted" or bent out of its former course. If, for example, the light travel in air and impinge obliquely on glass, the course of the refracted portion is bent so that the refracted light travels more directly or less obliquely through the glass; and, conversely, if the light travel in glass and impinge on an air surface, the portion which is refracted into the air will travel through the air more obliquely with respect to the refracting surface than the original light had approached it. The law of refraction was discovered by Snell in 1621, and is the following: The refracted ray is in the same plane with the incident and the reflected ray, and is therefore in the "plane of incidence," and the sine of the angle of incidence bears to the sine of the angle of refraction a ratio which remains constant, for any two media, whatever be the angle of incidence. The observed fact that light is differently bent in its course by different refracting media shows that there is a difference between bodies in their power of receiving light through their bounding surface. Newton, in accordance with his corpuscular theory, interpreted this as showing that when the luminous corpuscles come very near the surface of a denser substance they are as it were jerked or made to swerve out of an oblique path and hurried in by the attraction of the denser substance so as to enter that substance more directly; and that when the light quits the denser substance it is retarded by a similar attraction. The consequence of this would be that light would travel in the denser medium perhaps not appreciably faster than in air, but with a mean velocity certainly not less. On the undulatory theory, however, refraction is a necessary consequence of a slower travel of ether-disturbances in the denser medium. When a spherical wave impinges on a plane surface it is modified into a hyperboloid, the center of curvature of the central portion of which is farther away than or nearer than the center of the sphere in the ratio of the refractive index of the second medium to that of the first. An eye within a rarer medium will thus see the image of a point situated within the denser medium as if it were nearer than it really is; hence a stick appears bent when partly immersed obliquely in water; and, owing to differences in the amount of refraction at different angles, the bottom of a tank looked down upon appears sunk in the middle. Why ether disturbances of differing wave lengths are differently refracted in such a medium as glass is not yet perfectly clear. The fact that ether disturbances of greater frequencies are propagated more slowly through optically denser matter may be fairly inferred to arise from a mutual interaction of the ether, periodically stressed and released, and the matter amid whose molecules the disturbance is propagated. The question is complicated by the downright absorption or non-transmission of many particular wave lengths, and by the peculiar behavior of some particular transparent substances which produce "anomalous dispersion"; for example, iodine vapor refracts red light more than blue, and blue more than violet; and Vol. VII-Cyc fuchsine refracts blue and violet light less than it does red, orange, and yellow, while it absorbs the rest. Further, it is found that in these cases of anomalous dispersion the substance generally has in the solid form a surface color different from that seen through its solution; and there are always absorption bands, on the red side of which the refrangibility is increased, while on the other side it is diminished, as if the molecules themselves took up oscillations of particular periods and hurried on the propagation of slightly slower or retarded that of slightly more rapid oscillations of the ether. It appears as if this kind of action were never wholly absent; the spectrum produced by a prism never wholly coincides with the diffraction spectrum in which the deviation for each wave length depends directly on the wave length itself; and the spectrum produced by a prism say of crown glass does not exactly coincide in its visible distribution of colors with a spectrum of equal length made by a flint-glass prism. This is called the "irrationality of dispersion." If we take two prisms, one of crown, the other of flint-glass and pass a beam of light through; then, if the angles of these prisms be suitable, the rays dispersed by the one will be collected by the other, and there will on the whole be deviation without dispersion; but not absolutely so, on account of the irrationality of dispersion of both prisms, the effect of which is that a calculated ratio of angles and refractive indices which will cause deviation without dispersion for any given pair of wave lengths will, to a very slight extent in most cases, fail to do so for the other wave lengths present in the mixed light transmitted through the system. By the use of three prisms three wave lengths may similarly be achromatized. Double Refraction. - The wave surface developed when a disturbance originates at a point in a homogeneous medium, like glass, is spherical in form. In uniaxial crystals the disturbance travels with two wave fronts, one spherical, the other ellipsoidal; and the two wave fronts are coincident along the direction of the optic axis. Of such crystals some are "positive," such as quartz and ice, and in these the sphere incloses the ellipsoid; in "negative" crystals, such as Iceland spar and tourmaline, the ellipsoid incloses the sphere. In biaxial crystals the three optical axes are dissimilar, and the wave surfaces become complex; there are two refracted rays. If a doubly refracting substance be put between two crossed Nicol's prisms light passes; and by this means it is found 31 that many substances ordinarily not double refracting become so when exposed to unequal stress, as by pressure, heat, or rapid cooling. Conical Refraction. In certain cases light, passing as a single ray through a plate of a biaxial crystallized body, emerges as a hollow cone of rays; and in others a single ray, falling on the plate, becomes a cone inside the crystal, and emerges as a hollow cylinder. These extraordinary appearances were pre-employed for producing cold dry air for dicted from the wave theory of light by Sir W. R. Hamilton, and experimentally dead-meat-carrying steamers, the prinrealized by Lloyd. See Preston's "Theory of Light" (1890). REFRIGERATION. In refrigerating machines there is a transference of heat from the substance which is to be refrigerated to the cooling agent, which is evaporating fluid, expanding gas, or a material which promotes evaporation of the liquid to be cooled. If 80.025 pound Centigrade units of heat be withdrawn from a pound of water at 0° C. it will become a pound of ice of the same temperature. If this heat be withdrawn from the water by an evaporating liquid there are two conditions which must be fulfilled; the evaporating liquid must evaporate very rapidly, and the latent heat of evaporation (i. e., the heat absorbed from outside during evaporation) must be as great as possible. Ether boils at 35.5° C. (95.9° F.), and has at 0° C. (32° F.) a vapor-pressure of 18.4 cm. (7.36 inches) of mercury; at 0° C. it requires 94-pound-Centigrade units of heat to evaporate a pound of it; and at that temperature its evaporation ought accordingly to be able, if the whole of the heat required for evaporation were withdrawn from water, to free 94 80.025 times its weight of water at 0° C., so that a ton of ice (2,240 pounds) would be produced by the evaporation unds at 0° C. of a minimum of 1,907 pounds of ether. Liquid ammonia boils at -35°C.(-31° F.), and has at 0° C. a vapor-pressure of 318 cm. (127.2 inches), or more than four atmospheres; it is thus extremely rapidly volatilized at 0° C.; and, as its latent heat of evaporation is as much as 294, the production of a ton of ice would thus only demand the evaporation of a minimum of 610 pounds of liquid ammonia. Machines for using ether have been constructed by Siebe, Duvallon, Lloyd, Mühl and others. The ether is caused to evaporate rapidly by an air pump or pumps worked by steam; it cools brine or a solution of calcium chloride, and this cools the water to be frozen or the air to be refrigerated; the ether vapor is condensed by pressure and cold and used