Chapter  VIII – The Rise of Dissent in England

By the Rev. J. Hunt, D.D.

      Why is not the National Church the Church of the nation?  To this question there are many answers, according to the different readings of history.  Unfortunately, the history of religious parties in England is rarely written with impartiality.  Facts are sometimes ignored and often denied, so that, instead of history, we have merely the colouring or the party prejudices of the writers.  They follow each other, tell the same stories without further inquiry, misrepresent the men whom they dislike, praise those with whom they agree, and end in a representation of history which is essentially false.

      This essay is intended to be an historical inquiry.  The writer wishes to keep close to undisputed facts, and to make only such inferences as he believes can undeniably be deduced from the facts.  He wishes to write in a conciliatory spirit, not to provoke opposition, which, however, he scarcely hopes to avoid so long as there are any who to truth prefer their party or their prejudices.

      The first and most direct answer to the question we have asked is to be found in the principles of a narrow Puritan party.  It is difficult to speak on this subject with sufficient caution, because of the vague and indefinite use of the word Puritan.  A custom has of late arisen which speaks of Catholics and Puritans, or Anglicans and Puritans, as if all Puritans were one definite class, and distinct from the Church of England, while some who were not Puritans are regarded as constituting the Church.  But all Puritans were Churchmen.  They strove to avoid separation.  Independents, Baptists, and all who separated from the Church, ought not to be classed with Puritans.  As a matter of history, the name has been applied to all who embraced the doctrinal system of Calvin.  Bishop Montague called the framers of the Lambeth Articles Puritans; and according to Bishop Sanderson, Richard Hooker himself, as a doctrinal Calvinist, was called a Puritan.  The name was also used as a general term for all persons who were more than usually serious, who had morning and evening worship in their families, and were more strict than others in their religious duties.  King James I reckoned all as Puritans who did not approve of his arbitrary government.  Richard Baxter said that in his time a Puritan was one that was for archbishops, bishops, liturgies, and ceremonies, as he had always been.

      When we speak of a narrow Puritan party, we mean those represented by Thomas Cartwright – those who believe that in the New Testament there is a complete system of ecclesiastical polity, that Christ established a Church with authority to confer Orders, without which no man had a right to preach or to administer Sacraments, and that this Church polity was not episcopal, but presbyterial.  The minutest points of government and ritual were supposed to have been determined by Christ, as they had been by Moses in the old dispensation.  The argument was that if care was taken for the ornaments of the Temple, much more for those of the Christian Church.  If the bars, pins, and besoms of the Tabernacle were of Divine appointment, it was not likely that the government and the ritual of the Christian Church would be left undetermined.  The elder Leighton to the same effect said, that if God remembered the bars of the ark, it was not likely that He should forget the pillars of the Church.  Even the genius of Milton, led away by the exigencies of an argument, failed to realise that the Christian Church had more of the spirit and less of the letter than the older dispensation.  He, too, thought that if God cared so much for the inferior building, much more for the more glorious structure.

      Those who speak of Puritans as if they were not Churchmen suppose a Catholic or Anglo-Catholic party.  There was, indeed, at one time such a party.  It was represented by Gardiner, Tonstal, Bonner, and others, who held all the Roman Catholic doctrines taught in the Church of England before the Reformation, with the exception that they acknowledged the supremacy of the King in the place of the supremacy of the Pope.  But to this they returned in the days of Queen Mary, and when Elizabeth came to the throne they refused the oath of royal supremacy.  They were strictly and properly Roman Catholics.  In the time of Elizabeth there was no such party as is now called the Catholic or High Church party.  Those who were not Roman Catholics were definitely on the side of the Protestant Reformation.  Most of them had been in exile, and were the friends, and to some extent the disciples, of the Swiss Reformers.  The majority of them would not have objected to the establishment of a Presbyterian polity and Presbyterian ritual.  But it was the will of Queen Elizabeth that the hierarchy or a hierarchy be continued.  Her policy was to make outward changes as few as possible.  Such men as Jewel, Grindal, Sandys, Pilkington, Parkhurst, and others, who afterwards became bishops, were indifferent as to what polity was established.  Parkhurst, when Bishop of Norwich, said in plain words, that he wished the Church of England had been modelled after the pattern of the Church of Zurich.  There were many things enforced by the Queen which they did not like, but they reckoned that to conform was the wisest thing they could do.  Sandys, who at one time strongly objected to the ceremonies, recommended that they should be laid aside gradually and quietly.  A beautiful house, he said, was not to be pulled down and levelled to the ground because there was “a window awry or some little eyesore.”  Some of the same bishops were afterwards strict in enforcing the ceremonies, because they were ordered by royal authority.  The whole of the bishops and leading clergy in Elizabeth’s time were Calvinists, strong Protestants, in a sense Puritans.  The real division was into Erastians and Anti-Erastians.  Those who conformed and enforced conformity did so because they believed the habits and ceremonies were indifferent in themselves, but the royal or state authority should be obeyed.  Those who scrupled conformity did so because they believed that the things imposed were not indifferent, that they had a meaning, and that the Queen or Parliament had no right to enforce them.

      If the Reformation in any way affected the constitution of the Church of England besides the introduction of Protestant doctrines, it was in establishing the supremacy of the civil ruler as supreme head of the Church.  The Act of King Henry’s time conferred on him the power to redress, reform, &c., all such errors, heresies, &c., whereby any manner of spiritual authority or jurisdiction, &c.  The same power was restored to Elizabeth.  The Church which had authority in controversies of faith was the Church of which she was the governor.  Convocation has had no actual authority since the Act of Submission.  The argument which underlies the whole of Hooker’s Polity,* which is fully set forth in the eighth Book, is the supremacy of the civil ruler over the Church.  Hooker even defended the title given to Henry of “Supreme Head of the Church,” on the ground that the civil ruler had the same authority in the Christian Church which the Jewish kings had in the State Church of the Jews.  He did not defend the divine right of episcopacy as opposed to what Cartwright maintained of the divine right of presbytery.  He defended the authority of the king or queen to rule the Church.  The first writer in the Church of England after the Reformation who advocated the divine institution of episcopacy was Bancroft, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury.  In a famous sermon, preached at St. Paul’s Cross in 1588, he took the ground for episcopacy which Cartwright** had taken for presbytery, but far above the ecclesiastical authority he put the civil.  He reproached those represented by Cartwright as being the only party of Christians in the world that had framed an ecclesiastical polity in which the civil ruler was not supreme.  It was on the same principle that the Elizabethan bishops enforced the habits and the ceremonies.  Archbishop Parker said that he cared nothing for surplice, cope, tippet, or wafer bread, but he did care for the authority that enjoined them.***  Bishop Aylmer told his recalcitrant clergy that they were the Queen’s servants; the surplice was the queen’s livery, and they must wear it.

      [* Burnet says that this Act was understood by the old learning as no interference with ecclesiastical matters, but by the new learning that in such matters the magistrate had full authority (“History of Reformation,” P. iii., B. iii.).  As a matter of fact, it took away all power from Convocation.]

      [** So much is said in the sermon of the supremacy of the civil magistrate over the Church that Hallam says Bancroft did not advocate the jus divinum of Episcopacy, but only stated the fact of its existence, and that “in no strong terms” (“Constitutional History,” vol. i., p. 396, n.).  He quotes Cardwell as saying the contrary, which has certainly been the general belief.  The sermon is said to have been evoked by the Mar-Prelate Tracts, which were written not by a Puritan, but by a Separatist, if John Penry was, as is supposed, the author.]

      [***Quoted in Hook’s “Parker.”]

      The principles of this narrow party of Puritans were an entire innovation on the principles of the English Reformation.  They believed that they found an ecclesiastical polity in the Scriptures, and therefore they refused to acknowledge the supremacy of the Queen in matters which concerned the Church.  The controversy evoked by Cartwright turned on this question.  Whitgift, who answered Cartwright before Hooker did, found no Church polity in the New Testament, and maintained that the civil ruler should be supreme in the government of the Church.  These principles accorded with the facts of the Reformation, which had been effected mainly by the sovereign and Parliament.  Henry compelled the clergy to submission; Edward and his advisers took the side of the Reforming bishops, who were the minority in his reign; and Elizabeth suspended all who refused to acknowledge her supremacy and embrace the reformed faith.

      It is common now with some party historians to follow Peter Heylyn and the Nonjuror Brett, in ascribing the scruples of the Puritans to the influence of Calvin.  Heylyn even credits him with having cajoled the English bishops not to enforce the ceremonies.  The great Reformer of Geneva is not at the present time in high favour, but he was certainly not responsible for the scruples of the Nonconforming Puritans.  Calvin was a man of peace, a great reconciler.  He was willing to sacrifice much for unity.  He wished to unite all the Protestant Churches into one great Reformed Church, and he looked to the Church of England as the natural and proper leader in such an enterprise.  Heylyn has a story of Cranmer’s refusing Calvin’s help, giving as a reason that “he knew the man,” but like many of Peter’s stories it does not rest on any authority.  Cranmer always called Calvin his “dear brother in Christ.”  Great deference was always paid by our Reformers to Calvin’s judgment.  The first Prayer Book of Edward is believed to have been revised at his suggestion, and changes introduced which he recommended.  The sentences, exhortation, confession, and in a sense the absolution, as they now stand in our Prayer Book, were in substance taken from Calvin’s.  He thought the revised book still contained tolerabiles ineptiae, trifles that might be endured, but he urged conformity on all the Puritans.  When the troubles at Frankfort were ended he rejoiced, though the victory was on the side of those who had contended for the use of the English Prayer Book.  He regretted that the Queen enforced the ceremonies, but it was due to him, to Bucer, and to Peter Martyr, that many of the Puritans did not make an actual separation.  These all advised conformity as the wisest thing to be done in the circumstances.  Beza gave the same advice to a congregation of Baptists at Banstead in Surrey.  They were to continue to frequent their Parish Churches.  When some Puritans succeeded in forming a presbytery or classis, it was to be in subjection to the existing government of the Church.  The classis was not to ordain but to recommend to the bishops proper persons for ordination.

      On the principle that opposites generate each other this narrow party produced another.  Peter Heylyn calls the Puritans a “faction,” and so they were if they are all to be identified with Cartwright, but this cannot be done.  Heylyn’s party was also a “faction,” and of later origin.  It, too, was an innovation on the principles of the Reformed Church of England.  The old Episcopal regime of the Church had been retained by the will of Elizabeth, but it was not regarded as of divine institution or essentially necessary to the constitution of a Church.  The orders of foreign and non-Episcopal Churches were recognised by Act of Parliament.*  Men like Travers at the Temple, and Whittingham, Dean of Durham, who had been ordained by presbyters, were licensed and instituted by the bishops.  The Huguenots were openly protected and their Orders acknowledged, and there are cases of Scotch Presbyterians preaching in the Church of England.  The narrow party among the Puritans had taken very high ground in the assertion of the divine right of Presbytery.  The new party was to rival them in the same claim for Episcopal government.

      [*13 Eliz. c. 12, “An Act for the Ministers of the Church to be of Sound Religion.”  It is quoted at length in Marsden’s “Early Puritans,” p. 227.]

      By the time of Archbishop Laud this new faction had become so strong that it was able in great measure to revolutionise the Church.  The communion tables, which took the place of the altars ejected at the Reformation, and which were to stand, as the rubric still directs, in the body of the church or chancel, were removed to the place where the altars formerly stood, and placed altar-wise by the east wall, and people were told to bow to them as Roman Catholics bow to the altars.  We do not know if in Laud’s time the clergyman turned with the tables, and, contrary to the rubric, stood on the west side instead of the north.

      This party not only made changes in the worship and ritual of the Church, they even succeeded to some extent in changing the doctrine.  Hitherto the clergy accepted the theology of Calvin.  All the Reformers, so far as their sentiments are known, were Calvinists.  As the doctrinal system of Calvin is now all but universally abandoned, the question is merely one of antiquarian interest.  We may examine it with the same impartiality that we would a petrified fossil.  But the Calvinism of the Standards of the Church of England is a fact which no one who has not party interests to serve would ever have thought of denying.  The arguments of such writers as Archbishop Lawrence are not worth a moment’s consideration.  His main argument on that side is that our Articles were taken from the Augsburg Confession, which was compiled by Melanchthon, and he was not a Predestinarian.  It is true that some of our Articles are taken from this Confession, but it is also true that this Confession has no Article on Predestination, and our Reformers thought proper to compile one.  Lawrence has another argument, which is, that the subject was not yet under discussion when our Articles were written; but Calvin’s Institutes were first published in 1534, and that was a famous book with all the Reformers.  The contrary doctrine was first preached at Cambridge, and struck with astonishment the old orthodox Churchmen as much as they had been struck by the doctrine of the jus divinum of Episcopacy.  It was at once denounced as a dangerous novelty.  The heads of the Church – Canterbury, York, and London – immediately met and asserted in the strong language of the Lambeth Articles the doctrines which were embodied in the Standards of the Church.  The chief Anglican theologians in the time of Elizabeth and James were Calvinists.  Not merely Hooker and Whitgift, but some of the ablest defenders of Episcopal government.  Hall, Carleton, and Davenant were sent to the Synod of Dort to support the Calvinists of Holland.  Some sneer at this as merely an eccentricity of the Scottish king, but it was in accordance with the prevailing belief of the Church at that time.  James said of Bertius, a Dutch Arminian, that he was so shameless as to identify his doctrine with that of the Church of England.  By the time of Charles I the change was very marked.  Not many years had passed since the Synod of Dort, when some one asking what the Arminians held, was answered, that they held all the best bishoprics and deaneries in the kingdom.  [The Church of England not only adopted Calvin’s doctrine of Predestination, but also his doctrine of the Eucharist.  We often hear of “the bare meal” and “the nude commemoration” of the Calvinists, but Calvin expressly repudiated the view of the sacrament commonly ascribed to Zwingli.  He calls the Lord’s Supper a spiritual banquet, a feast on Christ’s sacrifice, a real participation of Christ, not a simple figure, but the verity joined with the symbol.  If any one were to compare what Calvin wrote on the Sacraments with the fifth Book of Hooker, the conclusion will be irresistible that Hooker had Calvin before him when he wrote.  There is not only the same doctrine, but often the same language and illustrations.  Calvin’s doctrine is not to be confounded with Cartwright’s, which Hooker refutes.]

      It is not easy, nor is it necessary for our purpose, to trace all the influences at work from the Long Parliament to the time of the Restoration of Charles II.  The Civil War has been called the bishops’ war, but this is scarcely correct, for many of the bishops, as Williams, Hall, Ussher, and others, had opposed the faction which had revolutionised the Church.  They had, indeed, to share the misfortunes of Laud’s party, but this was owing to their political action.  They did not wish to oppose the king.  The time of the Commonwealth has been called the reign of the Puritans, and the hardships which some of the clergy had to bear are ascribed to Puritan persecution.  But those here called Puritans were entirely different from Cartwright’s party in the time of Queen Elizabeth.  The members of the Long Parliament were regular members of the Church of England, and in nowise opposed to Episcopal government in the Church.  The Westminster Assembly of Divines, if we exclude the Scotch contingent brought by political necessity, were almost to a man of the general rank and file of the English clergy, who had received regular Episcopal ordination, and were satisfied with the constitution of the Church as it stood in the time of Queen Elizabeth.  It is only in a conventional sense that they are called Presbyterians.  Some of the chief of them, as, for instance, Herbert Palmer, had received promotion at the hands of Archbishop Laud.  They agreed to a Presbyterian government as the best thing they could do in their circumstances.  That they were Calvinists in doctrine shows what a strong hold the doctrines of Calvin still had on a great body of the English clergy.  They were now the party in power, and it is contrary to all that we know of parties in triumph if those on the other side do not suffer.

      During the Commonwealth were heard the voices of two men, afterwards bishops, who well deserved to be heard.  These were Jeremy Taylor and Edward Stillingfleet.  They were at that time on the losing side, and were more alive to the evils of intolerance than they might have been in their hour of prosperity.  Taylor advocates the liberty of prophesying [Published in 1647.] on the broadest principles, and with resources of ecclesiastical learning such as have been rarely equalled.  He called it terrible folly to expect all men to be of one mind.  There was room in heaven for men of different opinions, and so there ought to be on earth.  Unity may be desirable, but charity is even better than unity.  The Apostles’ Creed is the summary of the Christian faith, but it is not even necessary to believe this to be a Christian.  It is enough to confess that Jesus is the Christ.  There is no heresy where there is a good life.  The party which called itself the Catholic Church assumed the office of judge of heresy, and then went on adding new articles to the Christian faith.  But those who judge are as likely to be in error as those who are judged.  Protestants who take the Bible as their standard ought to be tolerant of those who differ from them, because of the uncertainty of the meaning of many things in the Bible.  Every religion ought to be tolerated except it can be shown to be injurious to the State.  God will not be angry with a man because he is in error if he has done his best to find the truth, and we should not be less tolerant than God is.

        Edward Stillingfleet [The “Irenicum” was published in 1659.] wished to see the whole nation united in one Broad National Church.  His argument, like Hooker’s, was addressed to those who believed in the divine institution of the Presbyterian government.  These must have been very few, for many of the leaders of them, who at this time were called Presbyterians, agreed with Hooker and Stillingfleet that there was no definite ecclesiastical polity in the New Testament.  Stillingfleet said that the old Catholic Church was broad, embracing different parties and admitting different doctrines and ceremonies.  A Church is a society for public worship, and all its outward forms should be arranged according to what is convenient.  At first a Church was probably a society with a pastor or deacon, but when a Church became co-extensive with a nation, a different form was not merely lawful but necessary.  The Jewish Church was constituted after the fashion of the civil polity, and if Jesus is to be over His house as Moses was over that of the Jews, then the Christian Church should receive its polity from the State.

      At the Restoration of Charles there was a golden opportunity for strengthening the National Church on its true basis, as here expounded by Stillingfleet, with the liberty of prophesying which had been advocated by Jeremy Taylor.  But Stillingfleet at the Restoration was too young to have any influence with those in authority, and Taylor was away in Ireland.  The party called Presbyterians told the king that they wished to see a wide National Church.  Very few of them objected to Episcopacy in itself.  Notwithstanding the sneer of Jeffries, “Baxter for bishops!” it is true that, though against what is understood by a hierarchy or prelacy, they wished an Episcopacy in which the bishops would act with the presbyters.  They also wished the creation of suffragan bishops, as some of the dioceses were too large for one man to govern.

      The King issued a warrant for a conference on the Prayer Book, in which both parties were to meet, consult, and determine on the changes to be made.  When they met, the Puritans were not treated as equals, but as the vanquished or disinherited.  The Bishop of London said that they had asked the Conference, and now they must say what they wanted.  This was clever policy, worthy of a statesman like Sheldon, but when the question was the peace and unity of the Church, something else was wanted than clever policy.  The Puritans asked some things which were desirable and would have been beneficial to the Church, but they also asked many things which were trifling and unimportant.  They would have been satisfied with much less than they asked, but they were at the mercy of men more disposed for retaliation than for unity.  The Prayer Book was in some matters made more objectionable than it was before.  The great opportunity was lost.  The blame is generally considered to have rested with Sheldon.  “This,” Coleridge once wrote, “was the incendiary; this Sheldon, the most virulent enemy and poisoner of the English Church.  She still feels the taint in her very bones.”  Perhaps this is too strong, but Dissent may now be said to have really begun.  Those called Puritans had been hitherto members of the Church of England, unwilling to separate.  Now they are called Nonconformists, and are in separation.  The ejected ministers had popular preaching power, and their adherents among the laity represented a very large proportion of the wealth and industry of the nation.  Bishop Burnet says that for many years after the Restoration the Churches were but thinly attended.  It was not till towards the end of the century that they began to fill.  The Nonconformists had decreased by a third or a fourth, yet some years later Lord Barrington could say that they were still a fourth part of the population and were “men of substance and of great influence in the nation.”

      Not many years had passed before some on both sides began to devise schemes of accommodation or comprehension.  The King had proved as unreliable to the victorious party as he had been faithless to the vanquished.  Now both found that they were brothers born for adversity.  The primary difficulty with the Nonconformists was reordination.  Even the most liberal of them had an idea that there was something mystical or mysterious about ordination.  Art. XXV of the XXXIX seems to suggest that Orders, Confirmation, and Extreme Unction were merely “a corrupt following of the Apostles.”  There is, indeed, the other alternative that they are states of life allowed in Scripture, which does not seem a description applicable to any of them.  The Puritans, that is some of them, thought it sacrilege to take a second ordination, but common-sense Churchmen, like Bishop Wilkins, explained that re-ordination simply meant compliance with the present law.  Orders implied order.  To leave some ceremonies open was a common Puritan request, and one which might wisely have been granted.  Some which were called “nocent” would in time have been found to be in-“nocent.”  Another reasonable request was that they might use the Prayer Book without giving “assent and consent” to all and everything contained therein.  This is now virtually granted.

      Richard Baxter once said that “if all the Episcopalians had been like Archbishop Ussher, all the Presbyterians like Stephen Marshall, and all the Independents like Jeremiah Burroughs, the breaches of the Church could soon have been healed.”  But this spirit was not that which prevailed.  There were other men who would yield nothing.  Many books were written against toleration, and compulsion was declared to be the sure way to make “good Catholics.”  St. Augustine was quoted, who had testified that the Donatists flourished so long as they were tolerated by Constantine, but they were soon extinct after Honorius made laws for their suppression.  Herbert Thorndike saw no other remedy for Nonconformity but to compel all to embrace the Catholic faith as set forth in the first six General Councils.  This was the duty of those in authority.  To comprehend Presbyterians was to put them on equality with the Catholic Church.  Samuel Parker, afterwards Bishop of Oxford, said that the pretence of conscience was the greatest of all disturbers of government, and that Christianity itself would be annihilated if the State did not use its authority to suppress the sects.  As the State was so remiss in its duty, another writer proposed the restoration to Convocation of its ecclesiastical authority, for that was the proper body to distinguish between heresy and the Catholic faith.  That it should be again assembled, the writer said, was absolutely necessary, for there were even pleas current for “universal unlimited toleration.”

      Now we come to a new development in our Church history.  James II became a Roman Catholic.  William of Orange, a Presbyterian, came in his place.  There was no more trust to be put in princes.  Hitherto, to use Stillingfleet’s comparison, Church and king, like Hippocrates’ twins, laughed and wept together.  But now the new faction had taken the ground of the old Cartwright faction, that the Church should rule itself, and be independent of all secular authority.  The Lower House of Convocation asserted this principle by some acts of lawless disobedience.  It refused to obey the royal mandate, and claimed a right to meet when and where it liked, independently of the Upper House or any higher authority.  The Lower House pursued its course of rebellion till George I found it necessary to put it to silence as a disturbing element both in Church and State.

      The great comprehension scheme of 1689 missed its way.  Tillotson had recommended that it should be referred to Convocation.  A High Churchman was chosen prolocutor, and its fate was soon sealed.  With one party there was great rejoicing; South expressed his delight that the “rabble” had been excluded and the “thief” not allowed an easy entrance, but the ejected party still showed its unwillingness to be entirely separated from the National Church.  After the Act of Uniformity they had made an agreement to continue to receive the sacrament at their Parish Churches.  Though not conforming in all things they wished to be regarded as members of the Established Church.  This they showed by occasional conformity; but it raised opposition from some of both parties.  The famous De Foe was the chief objector on the Nonconformist side.  As a political Dissenter, it appeared to him as merely a mode of evading the Test Act.  His argument was the easy one, that if attending church was right going to chapel was wrong, and contrariwise if going to chapel was right going to church was wrong.  To dissent and yet occasionally to conform was to deny the lawfulness of Dissent.  Howe, as an occasional Conformist, answered De Foe.  He argued that the Church of England was not essentially defective; its defects were only the accidentals.  It was, therefore, the duty of Nonconformists to conform as far as they could with a good conscience.  De Foe’s alternative of God or Baal was not regarded as serious, but only as a play of wit.  Though a Nonconformist by circumstances he had never tried to persuade any one to Nonconformity.  To this De Foe answered, that when a man has become so indifferent to the interests of Dissent, it is his duty to conform at once and entirely.

      In 1703 a bill was brought into Parliament to prohibit occasional conformity.  Moderate men on both sides regarded this as an infringement of the rights of Nonconformists.  On one side it was defended by such men as Sacheverell, who wished to see Dissenters effectually excluded from all civil offices.  The interests of the State required the suppression of all Dissent.  The object of occasional conformity was said to be the undermining of the Church.  Leslie, the Nonjuror, supported Sacheverell, and to use his elegant language, stripped the “wolves” of their shepherd’s clothing.  He rejoiced to find that the spirit of intolerance had its counterpart in the Scotch Presbyterian Church, which had just petitioned Parliament that in any bill for toleration the benefits of it might not be extended to the Episcopal Church in Scotland.  Other Nonconformists besides Howe defended occasional conformity.  They pleaded that they were unwilling Dissenters, and had always been opposed to separation.  One of the chief of them was Lord Barrington, father of the famous Bishop of Durham.  He called it an injury and a hardship if Nonconformists were not allowed to communicate at their Parish Churches.  Bishop Burnet opposed the bill as inconsistent with the principles and practice of the Church of England since the Reformation.  In the time of Queen Elizabeth Roman Catholics held civil offices, and practised occasional conformity until they were forbidden by the Pope.  Both Burnet and De Foe said that the tendency of occasional conformity was to reconcile Dissenters to the Church, while the denial of it tended to confirm them in their Nonconformity.

      The result which many foresaw came in its time.  The Nonconformists gradually conformed.  Only a small remnant was left, which became Arian and ultimately Unitarian.  In the third decade of the eighteenth century many are known to have conformed.  Among them were Joseph Butler and his friend Thomas Seeker; Isaac Madox, who died Bishop of Worcester; and Josiah Hort, who became Archbishop of Tuam.  It may be difficult to trace the causal nexus, but as a matter of fact the decay of the Dissenting interest became a subject of lamentation among Nonconformists.  With the accession of the House of Hanover the spirit of toleration had increased.  The Stuarts were gone, and with them the Sheldons, the Thorndikes, the Sacheverells, the Souths, and the Leslies.  The Lower House of Convocation had paid the penalty of its intolerance.  Its last effort was to censure Bishop Hoadly, that great but much abused prelate, whose whole life was a continuous battle for the toleration of all sects and parties.  He lived to a great age, and saw the complete triumph of the principles for which he contended.  His biographer’s words are, “He was so happy as to live long enough to reap the full reward of his labours, to see his Christian and moderate opinions prevail over the Kingdom in Church and State, to see the Nonconformists at a low ebb for want of the opposition and persecution they were too much accustomed to expect from both, many of them ministers desiring to receive re-ordination from his hands, to see the general temper of the clergy entirely changed, the bishops preferring few or none of intolerant principles, and the clergy claiming no inherent authority but what is the natural result of their own good behaviour as individuals in the discharge of their duty.”  Nonconformity had fallen almost to zero.  Some of the ministers said that they were starved into conformity, but it was not dead, and it had a new life in the future.  The Presbyterians may be said to have ceased to exist.  The Independents and Baptists had always been separated, and were not, properly speaking, Puritans.  It seems correct to say that they had the new life from the Evangelical or Methodist revival, which was a movement within the Church, though it produced communities which are practically Dissenters.  The Wesleyan community, which is the largest Protestant Church in the world, the Anglican not excepted, are Nonconformists as it were by accident.  They never made any formal separation, and if they have ever shown hostility it has been in the way of retaliation for having been treated as schismatics.

      The Church of England is still the National Church.  The nationality is the basis of its unity.  The enemies of the Church’s nationality are the two factions of which we have spoken, who, each in its own way, have maintained that there is in the New Testament a definite ecclesiastical polity, and therefore the Church should not be subject to any secular authority.  Toleration and comprehension are still our ideals.  Let us unite as a nation for national worship, and tolerate each other as far as toleration is possible or practical.  But let us look honestly at facts.  The Church of England at the Reformation was stamped as a Protestant Church.  By a licence of speech it may be called Catholic, but it is not Catholic in the sense in which Catholic is the antithesis of Protestant.  At the Reformation it separated from the Papal Church, and accepted the same doctrines as were taught by the continental Reformers.  It has become a custom with some party-writers to speak of the foreign Reformers as having instituted new Churches while we reformed the old.  This is made on the assumption that Episcopacy is an essential of a Church, but this distinction was never made by any of the Reformers either in England or on the continent.  They all professed to reform the old Church.  Luther, Hooker says, formed no new Church. [As if we were of opinion that Luther invented a new Church!  No. – B. iii., s. 1.]  The Church of England is the same that was established by Augustine, not in virtue of a successive hierarchy but in virtue of a successive people.  It had its origin from the Church of Rome.  It shared for centuries the errors of the Church of Rome, but these were cast off when it took its stand as a separate National Church.  Through all its changes it was still the Church of the Nation.

      The recent decision of the Pope concerning the invalidity of Anglican Orders is one of the most fortunate things that could have happened to the Church of England in its present stage.  It has been what the Germans call an Aufklärung, a clearing up of the whole business.  It accords with the indelible Protestant character which was stamped on the Church of England at the Reformation.  The Reformed Ordinal did not contemplate making a priest in the Roman Catholic or Jewish sense of a priest.  In the revisions of the Liturgy everything that seemed to have such a meaning was carefully eliminated.  The mere fact of the removal of the old altars, and the excision of even the word “altar” from the Prayer Book, is sufficient evidence of that, and but for the ambiguity of the word priest it too would have been excluded.  The Archbishops justly retorted on the Pope a Tu quoque, by showing that the primitive Ordinals had not the words which the Pope said were necessary to make a sacrificing priest, which by the Pope’s argument proves that his own Orders are not valid, and that the very idea of a sacrificing priest is an innovation in the Christian Church.  The power of working the miracle which the priest professes to perform by the consecration of the bread and wine, is denied to the English clergy in virtue of the denial of transubstantiation in our Articles and the substitution of the doctrine of a spiritual presence only to the worthy receiver.

      The Pope took one clear strong point, and that one was sufficient for his purpose, but there were many other considerations.  On what is called the Catholic ground, that in virtue of the hierarchy we continue one with the Church Catholic, our Reformers certainly violated the canons which were made for the preservation of unity.  A canon of the Council of Nicaea requires for the appointment of a bishop the sanction of all the bishops of the province, but the bishops in possession of the sees did not approve of a Protestant Consecration.  When Elizabeth came to the throne they were suspended, not by ecclesiastical but by lay authority – all except Kitchen of Llandaff, a man of doubtful character, who turned with every wind.  One of the most notorious falsifications of history is that the Church of England was reformed by the bishops and Convocations.  It is a simple historical fact that the first Convocation in Elizabeth’s reign, that of 1559, passed a series of resolutions strongly in favour of Roman Catholic doctrines and against the Reformed.  Elizabeth had to wait for the sanction of Convocation till she got a Protestant Convocation willing to do as she wished.  She issued a mandamus to four of the bishops to consecrate an archbishop.  They refused.  She then very properly did just what the head of a National Church ought to have done.  She found some Protestant bishops who had been deprived under Mary who were willing to consecrate, and by her regal power she undertook to make good whatever was defective.  On Catholic principles there was a defect which she could not make good.  These bishops had no ecclesiastical jurisdiction; they were not bishops in office.  The sees to which some of them were nominated were not vacant, and on Catholic principles there cannot be two bishops in one see.  This subject was exhaustively discussed in the time of the Nonjurors.  They said that the deprived bishops were still the bishops of their sees, and those who took their places were merely intruders.  No civil power can deprive a bishop.  Elizabethan bishops might confer such orders as were necessary for a Protestant Church, but they could not he valid according to Catholic law as it was interpreted by the Nonjurors.  There were other objections to the consecration of Parker.  Barlow, who was the consecrator, did not believe in the necessity of consecration.  He said, as Cranmer had done, that election by the king or the people was enough without any consecration; so that if intention was necessary, he had no intention to make any such consecration as would now be considered Catholic by either Roman or Anglican.  Miles Coverdale is known to have been a decided Puritan, and appeared at the consecration in his Geneva gown, as did also John Hodgkins.  Moreover, Coverdale was not a bishop on Catholic principles.  He had been intruded into the See of Exeter while John Voysey the lawful bishop still lived, who was restored in Queen Mary’s time.  Protestants may be perfectly satisfied with Parker’s consecration, but Anti-Protestants can scarcely be satisfied with Orders through a succession in which there is so much uncertainty, and where the secular has governed the ecclesiastical.

      The Pope by his decision had declared that the English Church can only be reunited with Rome by an unreserved submission.  It would have been to the Papal interest to have acknowledged Anglican Orders.  We might, like the Maronites in the East, have been allowed our own Liturgy and our own ceremonies, and we might gradually have drawn nearer and nearer to the Pope in all things, just as occasional conformity among Nonconformists tended to entire conformity.  Again, we may be thankful for the Pope’s decision, for now we know that we can never effect union with Rome by merely doing as Rome does.  Our experience in past times of the Pope’s interference is not such as to make us long for it again.  It is better that we keep our ground as an independent National Church.  Those in England who adhere to the Pope have now their full rights as citizens.  We do not wish to see them make progress, but this need not hinder the exercise of charity which is the bond of all virtues.  They have declared by following the rites of a foreign Church, and by submission to a foreign bishop, that in religion they are not Englishmen but foreigners.

      The corporate reunion of Protestant Dissenters has not the same impossibility as with the Church of Rome, but the difficulties are not to be ignored.  Their absorption into the National Church seems from our point of view as desirable.  But members of Dissenting communities are not of our opinion.  Some see advantages in the very fact of separation, and some even see evil in the connection of the Church with the State, regarding the secular as in itself unholy.  Their Church organisations are the means of the defence and propagation of principles which are to them of great importance, and in some cases they are agencies for reaching classes which have not been reached by the National Church.  Some of these communities were begun with sacrifices, and are kept together by self-denial.  They may have originated from forefathers whose memories are revered for their unwavering adherence to principles which are still deemed sacred.  They may have been centres of religious life when the lamp burned but dimly in the National Church, and they may be so again.  That they will at once give up their present position as separate communities is not to be expected; but the clergy might often show a better spirit towards them.  As a rule, the average Dissenter is a more tolerant man than the average Churchman.  The Churchman’s idea of a Nonconformist is generally taken from Nonconformist newspapers, where the predominant spirit is that of political or militant Nonconformity.  This is like taking the idea of Churchmen from party Church newspapers where they appear in the least amiable light.

      There are occasions in which the clergy and Nonconformist ministers might work together, but they are not many.  Here we are met by a difficulty the same in kind as that of asking them to break up their present Church organisations.  By the parochial system, which is a necessary part of the National Church idea, the clergyman of a parish is bound to do the best he can for his parish and for every parishioner.  But Dissent is a discordant element.  This, it may be said, is a disadvantage to the Nonconformist, and so an argument against the principle of a National Church.  To this objection Dr. Chalmers rightly answered, that the question is not one of justice between Church and Church, sect and sect, but one of justice to the whole population.  It is the misfortune of the present Nonconformists that, having been so long excluded from the universities, they have failed to reach a high standard of education.  A Dissenting minister is not necessarily an educated man, while a clergyman of the Established Church is generally one who has had the highest advantages of public school and university training.  This has resulted in what may be called a class distinction.  The old Nonconformists strove hard to give their ministers a high class education, but the Nonconformity which has sprung up under Methodist influence has been more indifferent.  A change, however, is gradually going on.  Many of the clergy can now boast no more than the meagre training of a clerical college.  On the other hand, now that the universities are open, the Nonconformists begin to have a higher education.  It is yet to be seen if, with this higher education, they will remain Nonconformists.  There does not appear to be any abstract reason why they should not, and so it may come to pass that a Nonconformist minister in a parish may be a Senior Wrangler at Cambridge or a double-first at Oxford, while his brother, the rector or vicar, may rejoice in nothing higher than a pass degree.  We may lament our divisions, and show the healing spirit though we may not have the healing power.  At the moment in the last century when there was the greatest likelihood of reunion, Dr. Doddridge proposed that the conforming and nonconforming clergy should occasionally preach for each other.  This met the approbation of Archbishop Herring, but there are old Canons made under other circumstances by which this is illegal.  It might perhaps be well to deal with some of these Canons on the principle which has been adopted in other cases, that of Solvitur Ambulando.

      We have tried to state the facts concerning the National Church.  It is by its very constitution a broad Church, and it is better that it should embrace parties which differ than not exist at all.  But it must also be tolerant to those that are without.  Comprehension may not at present be practical, but the clergy should show such a spirit of charity as at least will not produce further alienation.  Hostility has been provoked by the conduct of many Churchmen.  The Wesleyan community is not likely to forget such an act as that of an amiable bishop who refused to allow “Rev.” to be prefixed to the name of a departed minister in an epitaph in a country churchyard.  The body of Nonconformists are not likely to forget the attitude once assumed by the National Society under the influence of such men as Denison and Manning, when it opposed the conscience clause, and even proposed to exclude from the benefits of secular education all children not baptized in the Established Church.  Intolerance is hard to tolerate, and it is to be hoped that these things will be regarded merely as the eccentricities of individuals for which the Church is not responsible.  It is gratifying to contemplate the good spirit which at the present time generally prevails among all Churches and sects towards each other.  The Greek as well as the Latin Church repudiates the Anglican claims to such Orders as make a sacrificing priest, but the friendly intercourse which has lately appeared between the Russian Church and the English ought to be welcomed and encouraged.  It is pleasant also to see that the Pope of Rome, though he does not admit the Anglican claims to Catholicism, is no more “the Man of Sin” and the great “Antichrist,” but the “Venerable Brother” of Canterbury and York.

Chapter  IX – The Origins of Church Government

By The Editor

      The precise origin of Church government is an obscure question, complicated not only by the general scantiness of our information on the Apostolic Age and that which followed it, but by the special difficulty that things must have been in a fluid and transitional state.  One disturbing influence was the indefinite authority held in reserve by Apostles, another the waning ministry of gifts, which for some time crossed the growing ministry of office.  Nor is it altogether an advantage that the question is a battlefield of controversy.  If partisan zeal has done good service in collecting evidence, it has also done much harm – never more than in our own time – by its persistent appeal to other motives than the love of truth.  Fortunately we need not go into the whole question.  If Church government is as much ordained of God as secular, the powers that be of every lawful Church must have in any case as much divine sanction as the Empire under Nero.  But is any particular form of Church government in itself unlawful?  Whatever be the sin of its founders, is a later generation living quietly under it living in sin?  Is Episcopacy, for example, or Presbyterianism so ordained of God that a Church otherwise governed is in a state of disobedience?

      Now we are all agreed that there is a distinction between means and ends, and that in some cases God has made some particular means necessary for a particular end.  If therefore Church government is a means and not an end, this does not hinder but that some particular form of it may have been ordained of God as necessary, or at any rate as conducive to the end.  Whether this be the fact is plainly a different question, which it would be rash to decide by a priori considerations of doctrine or philosophy or personal inclination.  The general tone of Scripture may give us a presumption, perhaps a strong presumption, one way or the other; but we are simply begging the question if we allow mere presumptions, however strong, to overrule clear historical facts.  It may be true that we start with “presuppositions,” as they are too politely called; but I hope we are not all of us too contemptuous of truth to alter them if truth requires it.  These however are truisms, albeit two-edged truths as well, and the only reason for reciting them is the loud complaint of late in certain quarters that Bishop Lightfoot (of all men) was fool enough to overlook them.  However, if any particular form of Church government is ordained of God as the only lawful one, there must be historical proof of the fact, and there can be no other proof of it.  If no direct command of Christ or His Apostles can be shown like that which enjoins the Lord’s Supper, it will suffice to show that the historical facts cannot reasonably be explained without assuming that such a command was given.  The proof may be indirect; but it must be historical, and purely historical.

      Let us first make sure of our terms.  When the bishop first appears in history, he holds his office for life, standing singly at the head of his presbyters, and governing the congregations of a single city.  Country bishops governing villages cannot be more than a secondary growth of the office, for the Gospel spread from city to city, and more slowly to the country districts.  So far as I am aware, there is no early instance of a bishop not holding his office for life.  Even translations were a novelty in the third century, and were forbidden by the Nicene Council.  Neither do we meet with two bishops governing one Church, for Narcissus of Jerusalem, at the age of 116, is hardly a real exception either to this or to the life-long tenure; or with two bishops governing distinct Churches in one city, unless Hippolytus at Portus be an exception; or with a bishop governing several cities at once.  Thus the city bishop as just defined will be the earliest type of the bishop.  It is not till Teutonic times that we find bishops of tribes, like the Goths or the Kentishmen, and the modern territorial bishop is a much later development.  Of course the city bishop, the country bishop, the tribal bishop, and the territorial bishop are equally legitimate forms of the office; but the early Church was necessarily governed by city bishops, because the ancient world was as definitely constituted by cities as the modern world is constituted by territorial states.  The bishop might have a country district attached to his city; but a bishop of several cities was as unthinkable as the King of Europe is now.

      Let us next set down some undisputed facts.  Whether the so-called bishops mentioned in the New Testament held definite offices or not, it is now agreed on all hands that their functions are ministerial, and not what we should call episcopal.  They are doers of work, not overseers.  Their relation to the presbyters is obscure; but the single fact that there were several of them at Ephesus and Philippi is enough to distinguish them broadly from the bishop of the next age.  It is therefore all but universally admitted that there is no trace whatever of the bishop (unless it be James at Jerusalem) before, say, St. Paul’s arrival at Rome: and it is equally admitted that every city has its one bishop at the end of the second century.  Here then is a great change.  How is it to be accounted for?

      The short answer is that the Apostles must have left command that every Church was to have its bishop.  There is a good deal to be said for this theory.  It explains a whole series of the facts before us, like the early spread of Episcopacy in Asia and elsewhere, and the insistence of Ignatius.  It gives us an additional reason for the importance attached to the lists or succession of bishops by Hegesippus and Irenaeus.  Above all, it explains why later ages so firmly believed in a divine sanction for Episcopacy.  So utterly have they forgotten the earlier state of things that they read Episcopacy without hesitation into the New Testament, calling James Bishop of Jerusalem, Timothy of Ephesus, and so on.  Even Irenaeus turns the bishops or presbyters of Ephesus (Acts xx. 17, 28) into the bishops and presbyters of Ephesus and the neighbouring Churches.  Taking these facts together, they are summarily decisive that Episcopacy dates back to Apostolic times, and is at any rate not contrary to any Apostolic ordinance that was meant to be permanent.  Whatever the Apostles did, they never gave command that the Churches were not to be ruled by bishops.

      The theory is tempting: but it is not yet proved.  It explains some of the facts, and would be a poor theory if it did not: but we must go further to make sure that it is needed to explain them, and that it is consistent with other facts.  Now if the Apostles really commanded that every Church was to have its bishop, this must be a historical fact capable of historical proof from the New Testament or later writings.  We therefore begin with the New Testament.  Can we trace in it (under no matter what names) a class of permanent local officers, each ruling singly the presbyters of his own city?  These will be bishops in our sense of the word.

      The first instance commonly given is James the Lord’s brother, who was no doubt the chief man at Jerusalem after the removal of the other “pillars.”  His strictness of life and near relation to the Lord (a more important matter to Easterns than to us) must in any case have given him enormous influence.  But influence is one thing, office is another; and an influence sufficiently accounted for as personal does not compel us to assume that he held a great office, though as a matter of fact he is called an Apostle, and ranked with the chiefest of the Apostles.  The story that he was Bishop of Jerusalem was old in the time of Eusebius, for it dates back to the Clementine romances; but there is no sign that Eusebius knew more than we do of the matter, for we cannot take seriously the episcopal chair which was shown as that of James.  Perhaps there is a touch of truth in the romances, when James is given a Papal rather than an Episcopal position at Jerusalem, for even in the New Testament he is rather a centre of all the Churches than a local bishop.

      The case of Timothy and Titus is a stronger one, for their work of appointing and governing elders is plainly that of a bishop.  But this is work which must be done in every Church; and if it is done by a single man, he still needs a permanent tenure and local connexion to make him a bishop.  Now Timothy and Titus have no permanent office, and Titus moreover is not connected with any particular city.  They are not bishops, but vicars apostolic, sent in the apostle’s place on special missions at Ephesus and in Crete.  The letters by which we know them are letters of recall (2 Tim. iv. 9, Tit. iii. 12), and there is no serious evidence that they ever saw Ephesus and Crete again.

      Then come the “angels “ of the seven churches of Asia.  It would be rash to take these for literal bishops, contrary to the general symbolic character of the Apocalypse and to the particular argument that “the woman Jezebel” at Thyatira cannot well be taken literally.  Moreover, these angels are identified with their Churches for good and evil, and made responsible for them to an extent which would be quite unjust to any literal bishop.  As regards the “rulers” mentioned (Heb. xiii. 7, 17), it is commonly agreed that the Epistle is written to a definite Church; and if so, its plural rulers cannot be a single bishop.  There remains the “ministry” of Archippus (Col. iv. 17), and this gives no reason for making him Bishop of Colossae or Laodicea, rather than, for instance, an evangelist or presbyter.  We do not know what it was, though the allusion indicates, if anything, a subordinate office.

      These appear to be the only instances by which serious persons have endeavoured to prove the existence of the bishop from the New Testament, and the proof seems in each case a failure.  But if the necessity of Episcopal government cannot be proved by Scripture, we are bound, on the principles of the Church of England, to deny that it belongs to the essence of a lawful Church, however legitimate and useful it may be.  However, there is still the possibility that, though this necessity is not declared in the New Testament, surviving Apostles may have laid it down a few years later.  This would have been a binding command for that age, and for our own it would be, to say the least, a recommendation of the most weighty character, which a Church will disregard at its peril.

      There are few cases (if any) where the Apostles can be proved, otherwise than by Scripture, to have issued a particular command.  However, there is no reason why this should not prove an exception.  If, then, Apostles commanded every Church to have its bishop, either we shall find a bishop in every Church, or else (if fair occasion arise) we shall get a plain hint that the disobedient Churches are doing wrong.  Now it is as certain as any historical fact can well be, that there was no bishop in the important Church of Corinth when Clement wrote.  The purport of his letter is that certain presbyters have been turned out of office without good cause – the question of all others on which the bishop must have had an important word to say.  It is begging the question to answer that the see must have been vacant, gratuitous and impossible to distinguish the “rulers” (plural, by the way) from the presbyters, or to assume that Corinth was ruled by some wandering prophet, or even to suggest that an episcopal Church need not have a resident bishop, as was the case with Virginia in 1775.  All these explanations are shattered on one simple fact.  From beginning to end of a long letter, Clement never gives us the faintest hint that the presbyters at Corinth either had, or ought to have had, over them any human authority whatsoever.  They are responsible to Christian opinion, but not to any official superiors.  Again, though we need not doubt that Polycarp was bishop of Smyrna, there seems to have been no bishop at Philippi when he wrote.  A monarchical bishop can hardly lie hid among the bishops and deacons greeted by him.  It is just possible that St. Paul’s greeting is copied without regard to facts, but I should be sorry to think that Polycarp “had far too much respect for the bishop” to send him so much as a civil message.  Corinth and Philippi were important Churches, and are therefore flagrant cases of disobedience, if disobedience it was; and to them we may add the Churches contemplated in the so-called Teaching of the Apostles.  The work is good evidence for some Churches of the sub-apostolic age, unless it be rejected as a romance of the fourth century – which at present seems an excess of scepticism.

      We now come to Ignatius.  Lightfoot has left little room for doubt that the seven Greek letters are genuine, and that he wrote them on his way to death in Trajan’s reign.  If we date them roughly in 110, they will fall about a dozen years after the death of St. John; and as Ignatius was then an elderly man, his youth must be well within the Apostolic Age.  His conversion was probably not in early life, but, in any case, he must have known the truth of the matter perfectly well.  His evidence, if we can get it, ought to be decisive; and so, indeed, it is.  Episcopacy has already got a footing in Syria, in Asia, and probably elsewhere.  He names the bishops of Ephesus, Magnesia, and Tralles, calls Polycarp a bishop, and mentions a bishop at Philadelphia.  He calls himself a bishop from Syria, and speaks of bishops near Antioch, and says that the bishops at the ends of the earth are in the counsels of Jesus Christ.  These are most likely monarchical bishops, and however exaggerated the phrase may be, it at least seems to prove that Ignatius knew of such bishops outside Asia and Syria.  But this is only a small part of his evidence.  He has the firmest possible conviction that Episcopacy is according to God’s will, and this conviction he puts in the strongest language.  “Obey the bishop” is his recurring theme.  To put a few of his sentences together: “We ought to regard the bishop as the Lord Himself.  It is good to know God and the bishop.  He that honoureth the bishop is honoured of God.  It is not lawful to baptize or to hold a love feast without the bishop.  The Spirit preached, saying, Do nothing without the bishop”; and much more to the same effect.

      If a reasonable time be allowed for this spread of Episcopacy, its beginnings in Asia must fall within the lifetime of St. John; and his opinion of it must have been well known.  Indeed there is some reason to suppose that Tertullian may be right in tracing back bishops to St. John, and that the Apostle may himself have constituted some bishops, like Polybius and Polycarp at Tralles and Smyrna.  Ignatius could not have used or found acceptance for his daring language without some sort of Apostolic sanction.  Yet all his urgency falls very far short of proof that an Apostle commanded every Church to have its bishop.  In the first place, Ignatius is attacking separatists, not presbyterians; individuals who disobeyed an existing order, not Churches which deliberately preferred another order.

      With all his earnestness, he says nothing of Episcopacy different in kind from what the Apostles say of the Empire, “Honour the emperor: the powers that be are ordained of God.”  Yet few of us will hold that republican countries are living in sin.  As the Apostles commanded obedience to the emperor as the de facto ruler of the world, so Ignatius with still more emphasis preaches obedience to the bishop as the de facto ruler of the Church to which he writes.  But this is not all.  He says, Obey the bishop, and that with all the urgency he can.  His earnestness in the matter has not been exaggerated.  All the more significant is the absence of the one decisive argument which would have made everything else superfluous.  He never says, Obey the bishop as the Lord ordained, or as the Apostles gave command.*  Must not this be the first argument in the mind of every one who believes it to be true?  Could such a one, especially a man like Ignatius, have suppressed it all through six letters full of urgent exhortations on the matter?  The silence of so earnest an advocate seems a plain confession that he knew of no such command: and the ignorance of one who must have known the truth of the matter seems decisive that no such command was given.

      [* The only passage which needs discussion is Trall 7 αχώριστοι [Θεου] Ιησου Χριστου και του επισκόπου και των διαταγμάτων των αποστόλων, where Lightfoot says, “the reference is doubtless to the institution of Episcopacy.”  Very well; but in what sense precisely?  It does not assert that the Apostles instituted Episcopacy as a binding ordinance on all Churches.  For (1) if Ignatius alluded at all to so decisive a fact, he cannot have failed to mention it frequently.  (2) The διατάγματα (plural, be it noted) need not be taken more narrowly than the παραδόσεις of 2 Thess. 15 and 1 Cor. xi. 2: and New Testament usage will not allow us to say that the compound word necessarily implies a general command.  (3) If Apostles appointed Polybius bishop of Tralles, as they very likely did, the fact would be alluded to in του επισκόπου, and the διατάγματα would be injunctions to obey him, &c., rather than general commands that other Churches should have bishops.]

      We have seen in a former chapter that the Apostolic Age was not without hints which may have helped the transition to Episcopacy.  If James was not actually Bishop of Jerusalem, the example of a Church practically guided by a single man was conspicuous, and may have been suggestive.  Occasionally some old disciple, one perhaps who had seen the Lord, would settle down in the midst of a younger generation, and might wield an enormous influence.  Again, Timothy holds for the moment the powers of a Bishop of Ephesus; and he is not likely to have been the only special commissioner of the sort.  If some of the others were left stranded by the Apostle’s death, they might decide to remain indefinitely at their posts; and in this case they would be (monarchical) bishops at once.  As the Apostle had entrusted Churches to them, another generation would say with practical truth, though not with precise accuracy, that Apostles had made them bishops of their Churches.  Even this is more than we need to account for the origin of such a tradition.  Imagine that St. John made Polycarp only one of the (plural) bishops at Smyrna, and that he did not become the (monarchical) Bishop of Smyrna till after the Apostle’s death.  It would be a very pardonable confusion of dates if the next writer told us roundly that St. John made him Bishop of Smyrna.  This would be verbally true, though not strictly accurate.  I give this merely as an illustration of what might happen in other cases, for when Irenaeus tells us that his own teacher was made Bishop of Smyrna by Apostles, he is not likely to be mistaken.

      We need not assume any Apostolic command to explain the rapid spread of Episcopacy.  Given that there was no Apostolic command the other way, the fact is as easily accounted for as the spread of despotism over Europe at the end of the Middle Ages.  The Churches must have felt a heavy strain as the last of the Apostles were passing away.  The Neronian persecution, the fall of Jerusalem, and the rise of heresies had seemed to usher in the last days, yet the Lord delayed His coming.  Meanwhile strong measures were urgently needed to brace up the loose government which remained when the two great Apostles had been cut off.  Corinth was one conspicuous object lesson of disorder, and most likely there were plenty more; and even if Clement’s Christian tact availed for the moment, the Church could not long escape the task of working out its own enduring peace.  But when the forces of anarchy rise high men always turn to monarchy for help, and the bishop was visibly the strongest centre of unity the Churches could have, at a time when they needed all the strength they could get.  A Papacy, for instance, would have been very much weaker.  It may well be that the last word of St. John from Ephesus was precisely that encouragement which alone was needed to make the drift to Episcopacy irresistible.

      The change was easy, for the bishop was no successor of the Apostle.  The two offices are utterly different.  The Apostle is a witness to the world, who preaches from city to city, founding and confirming Churches, but never treating any particular city as more than a convenient centre for the work in hand.  The bishop is the resident head of a local Church, whose proper business is just the administration with which the Apostle meddles but seldom and unwillingly.  In the main, the one office is preaching the Word, the other serving tables.  Things are fairly clear if the one monarchical bishop was developed from the plural bishops of the Apostolic Age.  In this case the name would remain, and few who are not students of history know how easily even great changes are overlooked, if only names are kept unchanged.  Indeed, the great difficulty in studying history is that meanings change so much faster than words.  If so, there is nothing surprising in the naïve way in which most of the early teachers are called bishops by writers of the third or fourth century, who may sometimes have known rather less of the facts than we do.

      The right conclusion would seem to be that Episcopacy is like monarchy, an ancient and godly form of government, which we may be well content to live under and loyally to serve.  Divine sanction it has, and of the clearest, but we have found no trace of any such exclusive divine authority as would make other forms of government sinful.  It is often, indeed, maintained that when a custom has once obtained prevalence in the Churches, it becomes as binding on all future ages as if the Lord Himself had so declared it.  But as such prevalence may fairly be claimed for some customs plainly repugnant to God’s written Word, like the worship of images in the fifteenth century, such prevalence is of itself no proof whatever of divine authority.  The Lord called Himself Truth, not Custom, as the arch-reformer Gregory VII reminds us.  Truly the voice of God is in the silent adoration of the ages bending low before the cross of Love.  Through all the sins and ignorances of men the Spirit of God is working hitherto.  Christ promised to be with us all the days, and that promise He will most surely keep and perform; but He never promised to tie God’s truth to any decisions of sinners, however unanimous they may be.  Circumstances may change our duty with regard to any custom that is not ordained of God, and of circumstances every Church must necessarily judge for itself in each generation.  If the Scots, for example, have done rashly in abolishing bishops, then so much the worse for them; but we cannot say that they have disobeyed Christ.  Granted that our own clergy are as truly called of God as if St. Paul’s own hands were laid on them, what more can we want?  Whitgift and Hooker took a strong position when they limited themselves to the proof that Episcopacy is a lawful and ancient institution; the Caroline divines only weakened it by attempting to turn the tables on Puritans who insisted that a Church governed by bishops is no Church at all.

      But if we deny that Episcopacy has any exclusive divine authority, some of the weaker brethren will ask whether we are not giving up all certainty in religion.  Not at all.  Christ is none the less our Saviour, and His Holy Spirit none the less our guide, if we use His gift of reason on a command He never gave.  It is bad logic, not to say unbelief, which refuses to be sure of our own place inside Christ’s Church if we cannot lock our neighbour out of it.  But some consequences do follow our denial.  If bishops are not essential to the being of a lawful Church, neither is any particular mode of appointing or consecrating them, provided all things are done decently and in order.  If even the outlines of Church government are not positive laws of God, much less are the details of public worship.  There is a strong presumption (though not the argument they took it for) in the scoff of the Puritans, that the Holy Ghost had remembered the basons, and forgotten the archbishops.  The particular ceremonial of the Lord’s Supper, for instance, is not more likely to have been directly ordained of Christ than an order of bishops; and there is no historical evidence that it was.  Christ’s Church is no fortress of Zion with guarded gates and battlemented walls, for Jerusalem shall be inhabited as towns without walls, and the Lord Himself shall be a wall of fire around her.  It is a flock, not a fold; and its unity is not in a Catholic uniformity of doctrine, discipline, and ritual, but in the living faith which alone has power to touch the ever-living Shepherd.  This the Church of England has not forgotten.  “In these our doings we condemn no other nations, nor prescribe anything but for our own people only.  For we think it convenient that every country should use such ceremonies as they shall think best to the setting forth of God’s honour and glory, and to the reducing of the people to a most perfect and godly living, without error or superstition; and that they should put away other things, which from time to time they perceive to be most abused, as in men’s ordinances it often chanceth diversely in divers countries.”  So says the National Church of England, and so the National Churches which make up Eastern Christendom must say too.  Rome is the dissenter.

      We do not believe as we are taunted, that God remembers the ends and forgets the means, or that the things He leaves to men’s discretion are uncared for by Him.  We are not the men who cut God’s world in sunder with a sharp distinction of sacred and profane.  It is all holy.  Christ ordained but two sacraments; yet the men who invented others were not entirely wrong, if the thought of their heart was a dim idea that every experience of life has a sacramental virtue of its own, if only we have faith to make it ours.  All things end in mystery, as the schoolmen said; and on the deepest mystery of all, the guidance of our life by the Spirit of Truth, we can safely rest in reverent and loving thankfulness.

Chapter  X – History of the Lord’s Supper

By the Rev. Canon Meyrick, M.A.

      On the day before He suffered, the Lord Jesus Christ sent two of His disciples, Peter and John, from Bethany to Jerusalem, to make the necessary preparations for the Paschal feast.  The preparations consisted in the purchase of a lamb, some bitter herbs of the nature of endive, a mixture of vinegar, dates and other dried fruits, forming a sop, some unleavened bread, and sufficient wine to fill four cups or bowls when mixed with water.  The bread, the wine, the sop, and the bitter herbs they probably sent immediately to the guest chamber designated to them by the Lord; the lamb they led to the temple and killed it before the altar in the court, some of its blood being caught by a priest and solemnly thrown at the base of the altar.  Then having taken out and burnt on the altar the inward fat, they dressed the lamb to be ready for cooking, and transfixing it with a pomegranate spit, carried it to their lodging and roasted it in an oven.

      At a later period in the day the Master, with the remaining ten Apostles, entered Jerusalem and took His way to the house where He was to eat the Passover.  When the hour for the banquet on the sacrificed lamb arrived, He and His twelve companions disposed themselves round the board in a reclining position.  He then took one of the cups, known as the first cup, in His hands, and, having given thanks over it, gave it to His disciples, saying, “Take this and divide it among yourselves” (Luke xxii. 17).  This was the cup of the Old Testament, as distinct from one that was to follow.  When they had drunk of it, they dipped their hands in water, and to add the lesson of humility to that of purity, the Lord also washed His disciples’ feet.  Next, each took in turn with their fingers from the dish a mouthful of the bitter herbs (which reminded them of the oppression suffered by their fathers in Egypt), and the second cup was filled.  Then, after an exposition of the historical bearing of the sacrificed lamb, the bitter herbs, and the unleavened bread, Psalms cxiii and cxiv were sung, the second cup was drunk, and the lamb was eaten.  The feast was now drawing towards its close when the Master, taking a piece of the bread in His hands, blessed, brake, and gave it to the disciples; and just as He had probably said a little before over the dish containing the lamb, “This is the body of the lamb that was sacrificed by our fathers in Egypt,” so now He said of the bread, “This is My Body, that is being given for you.”  As the solemn eating of the lamb had hitherto commemorated the Israelites’ deliverance in Egypt, effected by the sacrifice of the Paschal Lamb, so henceforth the solemn eating of the bread was to commemorate the greater deliverance effected by the sacrifice of Himself, the antitype of the Lamb.  Next came the drinking of the third cup, which in like manner the Lord transformed and elevated into being a commemoration of His blood-shedding on the cross.  The final address to the disciples and the intercessory prayer (John xiv–xvii) followed; the fourth cup was drunk; Psalms cxv–cxviii were sung; and the Paschal supper was over, while from the dead wood of the old form, whose meaning was now exhausted, there had blossomed forth a new institution which was to last until He came again.

      Twice the Master had commanded His disciples to “do this,” that is, to eat the bread and drink the cup, in memory of Him, when He should have passed away from the earth.  Primitive Christian piety was not content to confine the injunction to one part of the feast that was being celebrated.  The Apostles and their disciples felt themselves bound to reenact the whole of the feast, and they kept it on the evening of every Lord’s Day, with such changes as circumstances had made necessary.  Those changes were considerable.  The Paschal Lamb could no longer be eaten, for it was a type now fulfilled by the antitype; the bitter herbs could not belong to a feast which, since the resurrection of the Lord and His ascension, had become a commemoration of joy and gladness; bread could no longer be used unleavened, for that was peculiar to the Paschal week, and represented an event no longer to be commemorated.  Instead of these things, ordinary food was provided by those who were capable of offering it, and shared by all alike; while towards the end of the meal, in the same place that it had occupied in the Lord’s Last Supper, a loaf and a cup of mixed wine, selected from the offerings, was placed before the president, was solemnly set apart by prayer as the Body and Blood of the Lord, and was distributed to all present, who, no doubt, stood for the ceremony.  Then followed exhortation, prayer, and singing of Psalms after the model of the original feast.  Two hundred years later, Tertullian says, that when the eating was over, they sometimes chanted the Psalms of David, sometimes sang original hymns, and that prayer concluded the feast.  “We go away,” he adds, “as men who have not so much supped as been to a school of philosophy” (Apol. xxxix.).

      Such an institution as this, a joyous commemoration of the Master spiritually and invisibly present to their affections, was altogether in accordance with the character of Christ’s religion, who described Himself as coming not as an ascetic like John the Baptist, but (in contrast with him) eating and drinking; and it accorded with the practice of the Apostles, who not only on the particular occasions of the public meal, but every day in their own homes, “ate their meat with gladness and singleness of heart, praising God” (Acts ii. 46).

      So much was the Lord’s Supper, both in its social and devotional aspect, a part of the early Church system, that St. Paul instituted it as a matter of course in the Churches which he founded, and when it was abused did not therefore countermand it, but ordered the correction of the abuses.

      To us it might seem the most natural thing possible that St. Paul should have prevented the recurrence of the profanities of which the Corinthian converts had been guilty (in not discerning or distinguishing the Memorial food from the other elements of the meal), by enjoining a separation of the sacred and the common parts of the feast.  But this, we see, he did not do, and it probably would have shocked the Apostles who had been present at the Last Supper, and all the Christians of the first century, to have proposed to do so.  It was not any theological reason, nor any sense of the practical evils indicated by St. Paul (and seemingly almost inseparable from the ordinance when enthusiasm had died), that at length caused the transference of the Eucharist to the forenoon from the evening, and the consequent separation of the sacred and the social feast.  It was the stern pressure of Imperial Roman Law.

      At the beginning of the second century the Emperor Trajan entertained a rooted apprehension and dislike of all societies and clubs, and absolutely forbade their holding their meetings in the evening, when he believed that conspiracies would be hatched by them against the State.  The various prefects, therefore, issued prohibitory edicts against evening meetings in the years 110 and 111.  The prohibitions imposed by these edicts covered the case of the Lord’s Supper, understanding by that name the feast consisting both of the Agape, or love feast, as it was called, and of the Eucharist proper, the two not being yet separated (Ignatius Ep. ad Smyrn. viii., Ed. Lightfoot).  What was the Church to do?  She transferred the Lord’s Supper to the forenoon, making at the same time a change in the order of proceeding.  Whereas hitherto the memorial part had been nearly at the end of the feast in accordance with the order of the Last Supper, it was now made to precede the meal, which thus came at a time more suitable for refreshment than the earlier morning would have been.  It was probably the practice of the second century, not of the first, which St. Chrysostom describes as follows: “After the sermon, and prayers, and the communion, when the congregation broke up, all the faithful did not return immediately to their homes; but the rich and well-to-do, bringing food and eatables from their own homes, invited the poor, and made a common table, a common meal, a common party in the Church itself; and thus, from eating together, and from reverential regard for the place, they were all closely united in Christian love” (Hom. in Dict. Pauli, Oportet esse haereses).

      This order did not last long.  Before the end of the century, probably in the reign of Commodus, when the severe vigilance of the Emperors was relaxed, the Agape or social meeting was retransferred to the evening, whilst the Holy Communion proper remained as part of the forenoon service, or occasionally even of the ante-lucan service (Tertull. De Corona, iii.).  The likeness to the original Lord’s Supper was diminished by the change effected at the beginning of the second century, and still more by this further change towards the end of the same century, when indeed to outward appearance it was almost destroyed.  The Communion was now preceded by the “Missa Catechumenorum,” consisting of psalms, hymns, lessons from the Old and New Testaments, sermon, prayers for the catechumens, for the possessed, and for penitents; then came the Communion service proper, or “Missa fidelium” (so-called from all but the faithful who were about to become communicants having been now dismissed), which was composed of a litany, an offertory, the consecration prayer and the reception in both kinds, followed by further prayers, hymns, and thanksgivings, and concluded by the bishop’s blessing.

      Up to this period the Eucharistic thanksgiving offered by the officiating minister had scarcely taken a fixed form, but whether extempore or not, it consisted of a giving of thanks for two things, first, for the supply of the necessary wants of man, secondly, for the benefits received through the death and passion of Christ, solemnly commemorated in the Bread and Wine, which at once represented the Creator’s gifts to His creatures, and were the tokens of the Body and Blood of Christ.  When the Holy Communion and the Agape were finally separated, the thanksgiving for temporal food was confined to the Agape, and the character of a mystical commemoration of the sacrifice of the death of Christ was more notably stamped on the offering of the Bread and Wine, now standing apart from its previous environment.  In the “teaching of the Apostles,” A.D. 100, in Justin Martyr, A.D. 150, in Irenaeus, A.D. 180, we find a joyous recognition of the sovereignty of God and His goodness in giving sustenance to man, together with an offering of praise and thanksgiving for the redemption wrought by Christ.  Now the idea of temporal sustenance drops away, and from the time of Cyprian, A.D. 250, the more solemn character of the rite, as commemorating the sacrifice of the Lord, is dwelt on with great and greater emphasis and exclusiveness.

      Then in the fifth and sixth centuries came an event which had an untold influence on the doctrine and on the constitution of the Church.  This was the breaking up of the Roman Empire and the irruption of the barbarians.  The Roman troops drew back, and left territories which they had occupied in the possession of the Northern invaders; the Church did not equally recoil.  To its infinite credit, it exerted every nerve to gather within its fold the heathen conquerors.  The strain was enormous, and the Church had to condone a vast amount of ignorance and superstition, which it hoped afterwards to remove and correct, satisfied for the time if only it could gather the new nations within the net.  The barbarians found that the Church to which they had submitted celebrated, with great pomp, a pomp once unknown, a service, not now making part of a social meal in which the Last Supper of the Founder had been commemorated and reenacted, but standing by itself and apart from its old surroundings, in which the priest appeared to declare that the bread which he held in his hand, and the wine which he poured forth, were the Body and Blood of the Lord.  The new converts were for the most part simple, rude soldiers of the peasant class, not acquainted with Hebrew parable and poetry, but familiar with the magical rites of their own superstitions.  They accepted the words that they heard in their baldest signification.  Their teachers knew that they were materialising the traditional faith in respect to the Sacrament, but they had to leave the rude conception uncorrected for the present, considering that the immediate work to be done was to secure a profession of Christianity, and that if they did that, all would come right in the end.

      Thus, the materialistic view of the bread and wine becoming the Body and Blood of Christ took its place in the Church, and when once it was rooted in the apprehensions of the vulgar, the more enlightened members of the body were not able, as they had expected, to eradicate it.  It continued, however, to be only the view of the uneducated populace, and it was not till the ninth century that any one was found to put it into words and advocate it in a serious treatise.  This was done by Paschasius Radbert, a monk of Corbey, probably himself sprung from the people.  His doctrine was at once controverted by men more learned than himself, who had been trained in the traditional doctrine of the Church, Amalarius, Archdeacon of Treves, Rabanus Maurus, Archbishop of Mentz, John Scotus Erigena, Walafrid Strabo, and Bertram, or Ratramnus.  But argument could not overthrow a now widespread, if ignorant, belief, which based itself when assailed upon the apparent meaning of the words of Scripture.  The materialistic conception still grew, and invaded the higher ecclesiastical ranks, so that two centuries later, when Berengarius restated the primitive doctrine, that the bread and wine were not Christ, but were the means of conveying the benefits of His death and passion to the soul if received with faith and love, he was regarded as an innovator, and brought before Synods and Popes for heresy.  One of the Popes was Hildebrand (Gregory VII).  Hildebrand hesitated; “he was not sure himself,” but he, too, had to yield to the pressure from below, and by his command Berengarius made confession that “the bread and the wine placed upon the altar are, by the mystery of holy prayer and the words of our Redeemer, converted into the true, actual, and life-giving Flesh and Blood of our Lord Jesus Christ, and are after consecration the true Body of Christ, which was born of the Virgin, and which hung on the Cross an offering for the salvation of the world, not only in the way of sign and in virtue of a sacrament, but also in propriety of nature and truth of substance.”

      Two things still remained, one to give a name and authority to the new doctrine that had won its way to the mastery of the Western Church, the other to construct an intellectual support for it.  The Lateran Council, A.D. 1215, supplied the first need, the Realistic Schoolmen the second.  Intelligent thinkers could not hold the common people’s belief of a physical change.  The question must be taken out of the sphere of physics and transferred to that of metaphysics.  The theory of Realism seemed to be the Deus ex machina to effect this.

      When we look at a number of tables of different sizes and shapes, by disregarding their differences we get a general idea of a table; when we look at a number of men and women, differing in colour, height, and looks, by disregarding these differences we get the general idea of man.  These general ideas are creations of our minds.  They have no objective existence in themselves outside our minds, but the Realists did not understand that their existence was only subjective.  They held that they had a real substantial existence of their own; and more, that every table that we see, comes to be a table only by partaking of the table-substance; and that every man comes to be a man only by partaking of the man-substance.  The Schola theologorum, whose business it was to find arguments for the new doctrine, grasped eagerly at the realistic theory.  Here, they said, are indicated the relations of the bread and of the Body of Christ.  By consecration we do not take away the properties or appearances of bread, but the bread-substance lying beneath them, which makes the bread to he bread; and we substitute for that bread-substance the flesh-substance, which makes the Body of Christ to be a body.  With this theory they were content.  They did not apprehend, or they kept it in the background, that on the very principles of the philosophy in which they took refuge, the cessation of the bread-substance must make the properties and appearances of bread to cease also; and that the substituted body-substance could not either lose the properties and appearance of a body, or invest itself with those of bread.  But it was hardly worth while for opponents thus to point out the invalidity of the hypothesis, for very soon the whole theory of Realism was overthrown by Conceptualists and Nominalists, and it was proved and acknowledged that there was no such thing at all as a supposed metaphysical substance separable from its phenomena.  With Realism the only argumentative prop for transubstantiation fell, and no other has ever been erected.  Henceforth its supporters justified it, not by argument but by the authority of the Roman See.  “The chief thing is to hold about it what the holy Roman Church holds,” said Duns Scotus.  “I prove that the bread is changed into the Body of Christ, because we must hold what the Roman Pontiff says must be held” (Joan. Bacon).  In other words, acceptance of the unintelligible, on the authority of Rome, had to be substituted for intelligent belief.  When compelled to argue, the transubstantiationist still falls back on the exploded Realism.

      The change which took place in the conception entertained as to the result of consecration on the bread and wine could not but affect the conception entertained of the Eucharistic sacrifice.  At first men offered in the Eucharist praise and thanksgivings to God, and that was a sacrifice (Heb. xiii. 15); they offered prayer, and that was a sacrifice (Justin Martyr, Dial. 117, Tertull. Ad Scap. ii.); they offered of their goods, and that was a sacrifice (Phil. iv. 18); they offered themselves individually, and that was a sacrifice (Rom. xii. 1); they offered themselves as the mystical body of Christ collectively, and that was a sacrifice (S. Augustine, De Civ. Dei x and xix.); they offered bread and wine to the Creator in acknowledgment of His sovereignty and of our dependence on Him (“of Thine own have we given Thee,” 1 Chron. xxix. 14), and that was a sacrifice; they offered the bread and wine in commemoration of Christ’s offering on the Cross, and that was a commemorative sacrifice, or might be called so.  And all these sacrifices were offerings made to a reconciled Father by His reconciled children, conscious of their reconciliation having been already effected, who for that reason approached their Father with the loving confidence of sons.  But when men came to believe that the bread and wine were Christ Himself, not only did all other minor senses of sacrifice drop away from the rite, but a propitiatory force was attributed to the one sacrifice which was left.  It passed over from the class of peace offerings to that of sin offerings. The offerer was no longer God’s child, joyously feasting with its loving Father, to whom he had been brought nigh by the adoption in Christ; he was still in his sins; God’s face was averted from him, and Christ was now being offered to God to serve as a propitiation and satisfaction and to restrain His wrath.  We gather from the highest existing authorities in the Roman Church, S. Alfonso de’ Liguori and Cardinal Bellarmine, that the present phase of the doctrine of the sacrifice of the Mass is as follows: – 1. That when the consecration takes place Christ in His Divinity and Humanity, Spirit, Soul, and Body, enters on a sacramental existence on the Altar.  2. That He is there offered as a propitiatory sacrifice to the Father.  3. That His sacramental existence is again destroyed (else according to their definition there could be no sacrifice) by the priests eating the wafer and drinking the wine; but that nevertheless, 4. He exists still in the consecrated wafers, where He may be worshipped until He is eaten by the teeth of the recipient.

      Many other consequences follow from the doctrine of Transubstantiation beside that of the propitiatory sacrifice of the Mass.  Anselm’s dogma of the Reception of the whole Christ under either of the two elements was a logical conclusion from it, and from that followed the denial of the cup.  Reservation of the Sacrament for worship, Processions of the Host, Elevation, Hearing Mass or attendance without communicating, Worship of the Sacrament, Fasting Communion imposed as a necessity, the tenet of the eating of Christ’s Body by the wicked, all result from the theory of Christ’s entering into the bread and wine, or the appearances of bread and wine, on their consecration.  From it consequences upon consequences have been drawn, from the eleventh century onwards, and are being drawn in our own day.  Le Manrèze du Prêtre is a manual ordinarily employed in the annual retreat of French priests.  In this manual the priests are assured that it is no exaggeration to equal them with God.  “God created the universe, but our daily creation is no less than the Word Himself made flesh.”  “God can make other universes, but He cannot make under the sun a greater action than your sacrifice.”  “You are creators, as Mary was when she cooperated in the Incarnation.”  “Jesus dwells under your lock and key.  His audiences are opened and closed by you.  He does not move without your permission.  He does not bless without your concurrence.  He gives only by your hands, and this dependence is so dear to Him that in more than 1800 years He has not for one instant escaped from the Church to return to His Father’s glory.”

      The tenet of the objective presence of Christ in the sacred elements slipped into acceptance, as we have seen, almost imperceptibly, and without prevision of the future.  In the above quotations we see the portentous consequences derived from it in the nineteenth century; and we have indications of further consequences already coming into sight, such as that the recipient partakes of the flesh of Mary, from whom Christ took His Body, and that Christ’s incessant occupation of Heaven is offering to the Father His body, brought by the mystical agency of angels from every altar on earth at which a consecration takes place.

      We now turn to England.  No doubt the primitive and traditional doctrine that the bread and wine, being the symbols of His sacrificed Body and Blood, are means by which the benefits of the sacrifice of His death upon the cross are conveyed to the penitent and faithful soul, as it spiritually feeds upon Him, prevailed throughout the British Church before the Saxon invasion, as it did elsewhere.  We may reasonably suppose that some of the heathen Saxons that were swept in masses into the fold of the Church by Augustine in the south and by Aidan and the Celtic missionaries in the north and midlands, like the Franks and other barbarians, misapprehended the Lord’s words, and accepted them in a gross and materialistic sense, but we have no proof that this error of the multitude spread upwards to the educated classes and the clergy, of whom Archbishop Ælfric, who was free from any such taint, may be taken as a specimen.  It was not formulated before the Norman Conquest.  Then Lanfranc and Anselm brought in from Bec the theology by this time prevalent in France and Italy, to which even Hildebrand had bowed.  Lanfranc, unaware that he was himself the innovator, and believing himself to be a champion of orthodoxy, wrote a book to refute Berengarius, who represented the traditional but forgotten teaching of the Church; and Anselm drew from the now accepted doctrine of a substantial presence of Christ in the elements the legitimate conclusion of reception in one kind.  From this time onwards in England, as elsewhere in the west, the materialistic view became dominant, supported by the philosophy of Realism, as long as it prevailed, and on its overthrow by the authority of the Roman See.  On the repudiation of the authority of the See of Rome there followed, not immediately, but necessarily, the rejection of transubstantiation and of the sacrifice of the mass.  Cranmer and Ridley, perhaps the two most learned Prelates that have ever sat in English Sees, had been brought up in the Medieval conception of the Eucharist.  But they knew familiarly the writings of the Fathers and Divines of the first thousand years, and gradually they came to see the incompatibility of the mediaeval with the primitive doctrine.  Ridley was aided by Bertram or Ratramn’s treatise of the ninth century, and having by its help cleared his own mind and resumed the theology of the early Church, he led Cranmer to the same standing point as himself.  We can imagine the discussions of these two seekers after truth, their references to Holy Scripture, to Augustine, Chrysostom, Theodoret, Gelasius, their longing after spirituality in the midst of the materialism with which the faith had been corrupted.  They may have had before them too the words of Wyclif, “This Sacrament is not naturally the Body of Christ, but the same Sacrament is Christ’s Body figuratively. ... That this venerable Sacrament is in its own nature veritable bread and sacramentally Christ’s Body, is shown to be the true conclusion.  Hardness, softness, &c., cannot exist per se, nor can they be the subject of other accidents; it remains therefore that there must be some subject as bread.  Oh! how great diversity is between us that trow this Sacrament is very bread in its kind, and between heretics that tell us that it is an accident without subject” (Trialogus, Book IV).

      Ridley, in his “Brief Declaration of the Lord’s Supper,” states the two theories with the utmost clearness, concluding – 1. That “there is no such thing in deed and in truth as they call transubstantiation, for the substance of bread remains still in the sacrament of the body.”  2. That “the natural substance of Christ’s human nature is in heaven, and not here enclosed under the form of bread.”  3. That “that godly honour which is due only unto God is not to be done to the Holy Sacrament.”  4. That “the wicked do not receive the natural substance of the blessed Body and Blood of Christ.”  5. That “Christ’s blessed Body and Blood, which was once only offered and shed upon the Cross, is offered up no more in the natural substance thereof, neither by the priest nor any other thing” (p. 109).

      In the next generation the same doctrine was held by Hooker and by Andrewes.  “If,” says Hooker, “it is on all sides confessed that the grace of baptism is poured into the soul of man, that we receive it, though it be neither seated in the water, nor the water changed into it, what should induce men to think that the grace of the Eucharist must needs be in the Eucharist before it can be in us that receive it?  The real presence of Christ’s blessed Body and Blood is not to be sought for in the Sacrament, but in the worthy receiver of the Sacrament” (Eccles. Pol. v. 6).  Andrewes’ words are so strong that, were it not that he is quoted as if he were on the other side of the question, we might shrink from using them.  “That a memory is there made of the sacrifice we grant willingly; that your Christ made of bread is sacrificed there we will never grant.  The King (James I) knows that the word ‘sacrifice’ is used by the Fathers, and he does not put it among novelties, but your ‘sacrifice of the Mass’ he does” (Answer to Bellarmine, viii).  So with all the Caroline divines, beginning with Laud and ending with Bull; so with all the leaders of thought, and writers of the Anglican Church, down to the middle of the present century.  Without exception they taught the doctrine of the Primitive, and condemned the doctrine of the Mediaeval Church.  But a short time before he left the Anglican for the Roman communion, Archdeacon Robert Isaac Wilberforce wrote a book on the Eucharist, restating and enforcing the medieval doctrine, avoiding the word transubstantiation, but teaching an objective presence, which is best expressed by the formula of transubstantiation.  Since that time others have been found within the Church of England to maintain the objective or even the substantial presence of Christ in the elements after consecration and before reception, and, as a consequence, to explain away the Church’s condemnation of transubstantiation.  But they represent only a back eddy in the main stream of the Church’s teaching.

      Historically then the question of the Eucharist stands thus.  During the first century the Apostolic Church reenacted the Last Supper, as far as that was possible, on the evening of the first day of every week, thus carrying out the command of their Lord, “Do this in remembrance of Me,” in its amplest signification.  What He had meant by calling the bread His Body, and by calling the wine His blood, they meant; but they were so far from regarding the bread as having become His Body and the wine His Blood that some of them, having grown careless, ceased to distinguish the sacred elements from the ordinary materials of a common meal, which, however shocking, is an eloquent testimony to the nature of St. Paul’s teaching when he instituted the Lord’s Supper.  In the second century the reenactment of the Last Supper still continued, but now the hour at which it was held was altered, from political causes external to the Church, to the morning.  The memorial eating and drinking was made to precede the eating and drinking of the common meal, and was accompanied by ceremonies and prayers previously impossible.  At the end of the century the social meal was once more transferred to the evening, and the spiritual feeding upon Christ by means of the appointed memorials, separated from its original surroundings, was celebrated in the forenoon of each Sunday in conjunction with the matin prayers.  The thanksgiving for the fruits of the earth, which had hitherto been a part of the complex rite, being now relegated to the Agape, the writers and teachers of the third, fourth, and fifth centuries, such as Cyprian, Augustine, and Chrysostom, dwelt the more urgently on the commemorative character of the Eucharistic partaking, frankly calling the bread the Body and the wine the Blood of Christ, but explaining that when they spoke of the Eucharist as a sacrifice, they meant a memorial of the sacrifice of Christ.  The gross imagination of His actual Body and Blood being eaten and drunk, and of the Lord Himself being sacrificed, had not yet emerged; and natural reverence as well as the traditional teaching of the Church made the very thought inadmissible.  But from the sixth century onwards the rude conception of the uneducated masses that had been swept wholesale into the fold of the Church began to prevail over the traditional belief, making itself heard in the ninth century, and in the eleventh century triumphing over all opposition in Western Christendom.  The elements were no longer types through which the realities that they represented were conveyed to the soul, but they were those realities themselves.  Christ was present, not only in the heart of the believer, but in the elements after consecration and before reception.  Educated theologians, overwhelmed by this inflow of popular superstition, fled to the philosophy of Realism as a resource against the outcries of their reason, and when that philosophy fell, substituted for rational explanation the now dominant authority of the Roman See.  Wherever the influence of that See has prevailed, the doctrines of Transubstantiation and the Sacrifice of the Mass have prevailed likewise.  In the sixteenth century those nations which repudiated the authority of the Roman See repudiated also the doctrine of Transubstantiation, and, with the exception of the immediate followers of Luther, the doctrine of any objective presence in the sacred elements.  The Church of England, as proved by her formularies and the teaching of all her divines down to the present century, returned to the primitive view that the bread and wine are the types, symbols, and figures of the Body and Blood of Christ; that what is conveyed to the mouth is bread and wine, set apart for a sacred purpose, and that by receiving these elements in a faithful and humble spirit the recipient is enabled to feed upon Christ in his soul, and receives the benefits wrought for man by the one true and proper Sacrifice of the Cross.

Chapter  XI – Protestantism

By the Editor

      The centre of Christian thought has twice been shifted in the course of history; first from the East to the West, then from the southern to the northern West.  Thus the development falls at once into three great periods, each with its own peculiar task, and a character of its own almost entirely shaped by one great race.  The Greek does the work for several hundred years, and then stiffens into monumental orthodoxy.  Then the Latin takes up his work till he has brought the Catholic Church to something very like paganism in the age of the Renaissance: and since the Reformation the new thought of Christendom has been almost wholly Teutonic.

      As soon as Christianity outgrew its Jewish cradle, it of necessity became a Greek religion.  Greek culture was supreme, and of necessity shaped the expression – not the substance – of Christian belief.  There is no such contrast as is fancied between the Sermon on the Mount and the Nicene Creed.  Even the marvellous teaching of the Sermon on the Mount is less impressive than the unspoken challenge of the Teacher.  Who is this that says, Ye have heard what God said to them of old; but I tell you something better?  This surely is the question that comes first; and the Greeks did right in seizing on it and working it out to an answer in the Nicene Creed.  The revelation is not directly of morality, but of the Lord who is Himself the way, as well as the truth and the life, so that the Person of the Lord was the first and fundamental problem of the Gospel.  Now Greek thought had in the providence of God reached a stage in which it was eminently qualified for the work, trained as it was by philosophy to seek for truth, and wielding a language of unrivalled precision and subtlety.  Yet more, the old Greek belief in man, which tempted the pagans to deify men, also helped the Christians to realise the old Gospel of Creation which enabled them to see that divine and human in the Incarnation are not foreign to each other but near akin, and therefore capable of a perfect union in Christ for evermore.  This was the conviction which guided the Eastern Church through two of the four great struggles of Christian thought, that with Gnosticism, against a tyrannous philosophy which trifled with the historic facts of the Gospel and explained away the Lord’s humanity; and that with Arianism, against a tyrannous philosophy which confessed indeed the historic facts, but explained away the Lord’s divinity.

      Presently the Greek Church came to a stop.  Its task was to ascertain the outlines of the revelation; and this was fairly completed when the Council of Chalcedon rose, though they still went on refining the theoretic truth of the Lord’s Person till Iconoclasm burst in to convict them of gross idolatry.  The causes of the stop are fairly clear.  The Church was too closely connected with the Empire not to share its decline and assume something of the same fossilized Byzantine form.  Again, the Greek search for truth was too purely intellectual, and tended to a barren orthodoxy which might shelter strange growths of untruth and superstition.  Again, even their noble defence of the Lord’s divinity tempted them to forget His manhood, and by a natural reaction to worship saints who seemed to give them back the human sympathy they could no longer look for in the gracious Lord.  Indeed, even Athanasius speaks of Him far more as a theological Person than as a man who lived among men.  Beyond all this there was the unrecognised difficulty that theological truth does not stand alone, but has the closest relation to other truth which is equally divine, but which could not yet be effectively compared with it.  Doctrinal questions necessarily engrossed attention for a long time; but in the fact that the Gospel is history and life, not philosophy and dogma, lay the pledge that sooner or later it would be the clue to truth in all its range.

      First, however, came a set-back of a thousand years.  Latin Christendom started on a lower plane, and was more deeply influenced by the stronger paganism of the West.  If the Greek evaporated the Gospel into philosophy, the Latin hardened it into law.  He never was much interested in the Greek discussions of the Person of the Lord, and accepted the decisions of the Eastern Councils chiefly as a matter of law and order.  He was a practical man, and therefore began at the other end, from the practical fact that mankind lies in sin.  He thought it too speculative to look on the Incarnation as the manifestation in time of an eternal humanity that is in God.  He was content to regard it as the practical remedy for sin, to be dispensed according to the law and order of the Church.  In this life, and most of all in the evil days of barbarian invasion and feudal anarchy, sin seemed nearer than salvation, and the Church seemed nearer than an absent Lord.  So Western thought did most of its original work in the monasteries, and on doctrines hardly mentioned in the Eastern creeds.  It revolved round original sin, predestination, grace, atonement, justification, sacraments, and above all, the authority and functions of the Church.  The East remembered that Christ is the revelation of man, and began with Christ: the West forgot that fallen man is no revelation of Christ, and began with man.  This was the Arian error of order pointed out by Athanasius; and it was mischievous also in the West.

      This low view of man determined the whole attitude of the Latin Church.  So far as man is a child of God, he can be reasoned with, but so far as he is a beast without understanding, he must be kept in order like a beast without understanding; so that a low view of human nature emphasizes and enlarges the functions of authority and law.  In this way the Latin Church tended to become a judge and a divider rather than a witness.  It was from the first much too ready to silence inconvenient questions by an appeal to authority and order; and this tendency increased when it undertook the training of the northern nations, again when the world turned to the Church for help in the eleventh century, and yet again when the world began to rebel against the Church in the later Middle Ages.  Education is a hard task, and Rome thought she did well when she let go the Greek theology as unpractical, concentrating herself on a few main doctrines, and building round them rampart after rampart of Church observance.  It seemed a great thing to save any Christianity at all from the wild passions of northern barbarians.  The policy was tempting: yet it was not St. Paul’s policy, even in the slums of Corinth.  The Apostles had but one gospel of Christ crucified for wise and unwise, and taught men to hold it for themselves, not to lean on saints and confessors, images and exorcisms, vain repetitions and sensuous rituals, and such like “helps for the weak.”  If men needed them in the Middle Ages and until now, they did not need them then, though some were “weak in the faith” at Rome already.  The Latin Church forgot the image of God in man, and did not notice that her own glorious victories were not won in the strength of helps forsooth like these, but in the might of love divine, which can burst its way through all of them.  More and more it seemed unfit that sinful men should presume to speak directly to the sinless Christ, or rather to the terrible Judge of all.  So more and more the Virgin and the saints replaced Him in the worship of the people, and more and more the Church became the real mediator between God and men.  The Church was the one dispenser of grace, and outside it there was no salvation.  The Church was the one mouthpiece of God’s will, and from its commands there was no appeal to conscience.  The Church was the one interpreter of God’s truth, and from its decisions there was no appeal to reason.  In this way church authority was made the single and sufficient test of truth.

      And church authority along with the Church itself had fallen into discredit before the Reformation.  Reason revolted at the quarrelling popes, and conscience at the scandalous popes.  Were these the Vicars of Christ? Transubstantiation was an insult to common sense, auricular confession a defilement of purity, and willful treachery to heretics an outrage on common truthfulness.  Christendom cowered under Amurath’s rebuke at Varna.  And had the Church Christ’s authority to make traffic of God’s forgiveness, and to turn purgatory into a bottomless treasure for the pope?  Whatever was true, these things must be false; and it was time to bring the Church to account for them.

      The Church, however, was not easily brought to account.  The profane might scoff at hocus-pocus and make songs on the disreputable popes, and the learned might tear in pieces the False Decretals and such like pious frauds; but men’s hearts misgave them at the thought of serious conflict.  The Church seemed as strong as ever, entrenched behind its twin strongholds of transubstantiation and auricular confession.  The one made the priest almost a god on earth, the other laid private life at his mercy.  In fact the Church was stronger in one direction than it ever was before.  Now that it leaned on princes, it no longer needed to stir up a Pataria to lynch the married clergy, but could use the power of the State to put down its rebels.  The Church was never so terrible to its enemies as when it neared its fall in northern Europe.

      The Reformation was the stormy centre of an age of revolution.  First the revival of learning revealed an older and nobler literature than that of Rome, an older Bible than the Vulgate.  The decayed and worn-out world grew fair and young beneath the spell of Greece.  Peradventure it was not so bad as the Church made out.  Then the discovery of America and the Cape let loose the spirit of adventure like a new crusade.  The conquest of Mexico is a romance as brilliant as the siege of Antioch.  The Turkish conquest of Egypt and the ruin of Italy completed the revolution of commerce.  The political work of the age was the struggle against the overwhelming power of Spain, the struggle maintained by France till she sank into the confusion of the religious wars, and then by the tiny Dutch republic till the decisive blow was struck by England.  When France recovered herself under Henry IV, the danger was over for awhile.  A second period of contest followed in the Thirty Years’ War, so that the struggles of the Reformation extended to the Peace of Westphalia in 1648.

      At one time the Reformation bade fair to cover most of Europe; but its advance was checked by its own divisions, and by the crafts and assaults of the Jesuits and of the princes they trained.  Its permanent conquests were limited to England and the Teutonic North, dividing Germany and securing toleration for a time in France.  Thus the Pope lost half his domain; but he gained a much stronger hold on what remained to him.  The Council of Trent reformed the Church of Rome, though the reform was only of scandals and abuses, for the doctrine underlying them was not reformed at all – only the reins of government were drawn much tighter.  And from that day to this the Church of Rome has gone on the same line, consolidating and developing the old doctrinal system in opposition to Protestantism, and tightening yet again the reins of government to breaking point.  Will it be endured much longer in America?  However, we have done with Rome.  She has had her mystics; but her Church in general has contributed very little to Christian thought since the Reformation.  She has chiefly dealt in unhealthy casuistry, false miracles and novel superstitions, and anatomical devotions.

      The Greek Church laid out the outlines of Christian doctrine, the Latin guarded them through the evil times; the task of the Reformation was to find some better test of truth for them than the church authority which had gone so grievously wrong.  Three main forms of Protestantism emerged – Lutheranism, Calvinism, and the Church of England – Zwingli is too isolated to count as a fourth, though on some points (not the sacraments, if he really differed here from Calvin) he is in advance of both Luther and Calvin.  These three then agreed in rejecting the Pope and the mischievous developments of the Middle Ages, accepting the ancient creeds, and restoring what they deemed to be the primitive doctrine and government of Christ’s Church.  In this sense they may be each called catholic.  They were further agreed on Justification by faith only, on the supremacy of Scripture, and in general on Predestination also.  The English reformers generally went with Calvin in this matter, though fortunately they never made it a binding doctrine of the English Church.  On these three doctrines the three groups of reformers were in the main agreed; but each group laid the emphasis in a different way.

      Justification by faith only was to the Lutheran the articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae.  He might compromise on other matters if need were, but this was vital.  It looks scholastic, and in fact it lent itself before long to a scholasticism as wearisome and unspiritual as any that had gone before.  But in its proper and original meaning it is nothing else than St. Paul’s doctrine (almost forgotten, except among the mystics), that God calls us to know Him directly, not simply to hear of Him through the Church; to receive our forgiveness and do good works in the strength it brings, not to set about the hopeless task of buying forgiveness with works of law.  Thus Church and State are alike holy.  The Church was made for man, not man for the Church – for Rome had gone back to her old heathen sacrifice of the individual to the society.  Individualism, which in the evil days had fled for refuge to the selfish cowardice of the monastery, had in the mendicants renounced the selfishness, and in the Reformation it thanked God and took courage to face the duties of that state of life to which He should please to call it.  The victory of faith is not that which fleeth from the world.

      Calvinism proclaimed the same fundamental truth – the supreme sacredness of the individual – but preached it in the doctrine of predestination.  Calvinism is out of fashion in our time; and if we mix it up with Arminianism, as most of its enemies do, the compound is as diabolical as they say; but if we take it fairly, and therefore as a whole, it will be found rather one-sided than untrue.  The difficulty is not in predestination, but in the doctrine of hell fire that was commonly held with it, for the Bible is full of predestination – to everything except perdition.  Are not all the gifts born with us matter of predestination?  Calvinism bore the brunt of battle with Rome; yet in its fundamental ideas it is much nearer to Rome than either Lutheranism or the Church of England.  Was not Calvin the one great reformer not of Teutonic birth?  He held and even hardened the Latin conception of God as a Roman emperor in heaven, an inscrutable despot in a far country – though he tempered it with a much firmer hold than Rome’s on Christ and His manhood – and worked it out into a system of Church government and discipline as rigid as the Roman, and as regardless of the State.  The real objection to Calvinism is that it was too Romish.  It took over persecution, for example, from the Church of Rome; and if it taught that infants deserve damnation, what else did the old English baptismal service teach, with its four successive exorcisms of all the devils from the infant?  Calvinism saved some by election, Rome saved some by baptism: the rest were a massa perditionis.  But the freedom which Calvinism took away with one hand was often given back by the other.  The true ideal of our heart is not the caprice of roving fancy, but the rest of a service which is perfect freedom.  As the old monk had found this in willing and complete submission to God’s calling in the rule of his house, so the Calvinist found it in willing and complete submission to God’s calling in his Bible.  And there he found something that lifted him above his baser self.  Had not the Most High foreknown him from eternity?  Had not the Saviour died for His elect?  Was not the call to good works as much as to salvation?  He could do them too, because his strength was not his own, but given him from on high, and given him for the very purpose.  The living power of Calvinism – the inner meaning of predestination – was the conviction it shared with Lutheranism and with the mystics of all ages, that sovereign Love can save without the help of men –

“Thou must save, and Thou alone.” 

Calvinism has fought some of the hardest of Christ’s battles in the world; and its failure was the common failure of Western Christendom to reach the fullness of the Gospel, that Christ should taste of death for every man.

      The English Reformation ran a different course.  It bears the stamp of no one great man, but that of the nation itself.  It is as national as the Swedish.  It was the work of the State (the Church was more than once compelled to acquiesce), and therefore its aim was practical, not to work out a theory with French completeness, but to remedy practical evils and do no more.  If Edward served the theorists a little, and Mary served them much, Elizabeth soon brought things back to common sense.  She at least understood England.  The royal supremacy was true conservatism as well as needful reformation.  If Henry used his power tyrannically, the power itself was only what the old kings had used before him, and later kings had never abandoned.  If he restrained Convocation, this was only the Conqueror’s law, that nothing should be enacted by Church councils but what he had himself ordained beforehand.  As soon as the Church had been properly subjected to the State, the way was clear, first for the reform of abuses, then for the revision of doctrine.  And here a Conservative policy was followed.  The reformers did not change for the sake of change, and were as far as possible from the Puritan idea that nothing was right which Rome had done, or which is not expressly commanded in Scripture.  So they changed no practice unless it was “vain or superstitious,” and altered no doctrine unless it was “repugnant to the plain words of Scripture,” or at least “could not be proved by Scripture.”  In some ways then they made little change.  The old creeds were retained, the prayers were to a large extent the old ones translated, the succession of bishops was carefully preserved, and even their old jurisdiction was to some extent continued.  This generally Conservative policy gives a double emphasis to the changes they did make.  And these changes are much deeper than the Calvinistic.  No Church has ever put on record a more deliberate and comprehensive repudiation of the distinctive ideals of Latin Christianity.  Other Churches have taught the supremacy of Scripture over Church tradition; but no Church has ever taken such pains to make that supremacy effective.  It is not merely that Scripture is constantly appealed to for proof, and even the creeds are only to be received and believed because “they may be proved by most certain warrants of Holy Scripture.”  Rome quotes too, though very commonly in a super grammaticam sense.  It is not merely that Scripture saturates our Liturgy, and that it is read to the people more fully and systematically than in any other Church.  The laity also are encouraged (not forbidden) to read it freely for themselves; and the clergy at priests’ orders are urgently exhorted “to be studious in reading and learning the Scriptures,” and give their solemn promise to teach nothing as necessary “but what they are persuaded may be concluded and proved by the Scripture,” and “to banish and drive away all erroneous and strange doctrines contrary to God’s Word.”  The decisive point is that the meaning of Scripture is left for reason to determine.  No judge is constituted; and all human infallibility is utterly denied.  Is it in Churches?  All the great Churches have “erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith.”  Is it in Councils?  “General* Councils may err, and sometimes have erred, even in things pertaining unto God.”  Is it in the Pope?  He “hath no jurisdiction in this realm of England.”  The Church is “a witness and a keeper of Holy Writ,” not its final interpreter.  It is assumed here that Scripture is reasonably clear on essentials, and that the Holy Spirit will so far guide every one who truly seeks Him.  Truth within will recognise God’s truth without.  Here then in the midst of care for the society comes the fullest assertion of individualism that any Church has ever made.  Private judgment is not private licence, but a necessity we cannot escape, and there can be no faith without it.  The most besotted of infallibilists depends on it as absolutely as the most blatant of freethinkers, only he likes a quick way down from the pinnacle of the temple.

      [*The reformers made no distinction between OEcumenical (East and West) and General (East or West) Councils.  When Jewell denounces the General Council of Trent as a sham, his first question is, Where are the Greeks?  Even Sancta Clara (no mean special pleader) seems ignorant of the evasion.]

      The promise of the Reformation was hardly realised, though the next generation was a splendid period on both sides of the North Sea.  A great and complex movement is not to be judged by the scandals of its beginnings – we do not measure the French Revolution simply by the Reign of Terror – and the value of the Reformation is not so much in what it did, as in what it made possible.  Now that the method was found, the advance would come sooner or later.  Now that the great tyrant was checked, there was less danger from the petty tyrants who came after him.  They were only shadows that would pass away.  But there were plenty of them, for the Epigoni of Protestantism shrank from the vision of liberty, and tried hard to get back into slavery.  Lutheranism soon lost itself in the scholastic jangle, and Calvinism followed a little later; and in England the reactionary Carolines came to power under the Stuarts.  Yet England fared much better than the continent, for even Laud was no traitor; and it was good to have a voice for decency and order, and a protest against the exclusive dominance of Calvinism.  Meanwhile the religious wars were brutalising, and sometimes utterly ruinous; and toleration and charity were not likely to grow up among Protestants as long as they were compelled to fight a battle of life and death against an implacable enemy who systematically used and glorified the resources of treachery and assassination.  There is no more skilful devilry in history than the work of the Catholic reaction in that age; and the only marvel is that the struggle against it did not make the Protestants a great deal worse than they were.

      The peace of Westphalia was a peace of exhaustion for Germany; and a few years later England settled down for awhile under the Restoration, and France under Louis XIV, so that there was a clear pause in the wars of religion.  It is not accidental that Science now came forward to make its decisive advance.  Modern science is the nursling of Christianity.  The unity of God implied the unity of Nature, the Incarnation implied the dignity of man which gave research a worthy object, and the Christian duty of patient and impartial search for truth pointed out the scientific method of research.  Advance was checked first by an asceticism which “despised the world,” then by an infallible Church which reduced Science to a minor department of Theology, and decided questions even of criticism by authority, as it notably did at Trent; and now that the Reformation had renounced asceticism and limited the province of the Church, the advance was checked for another century by the noise of the doctrinal disputes and the wars they caused.  But now the way was free, the method clear.  It was time for a revelation to come up from the earth to meet the revelation which had come down from heaven. [Hort Hulsean Lectures, ch. ii.]  Nature is as truly God’s word as Scripture; and now that Scripture had unsealed it, the time was come to compare God’s new Book with His old.  This has been the work of the last two hundred years and more; and if it has searched out the weaknesses of Christian theories, it has also revealed Christ on a new side, and unveiled whole worlds of glory which our fathers never knew.

      England and Germany both had two great religious movements between the Reformation and the French Revolution, one to piety, and one to scepticism.  But in Germany the pietistic movement came before the sceptical; in England Deism culminated before the Methodist Revival.  It was but one sign of the widespread weariness of Church controversies, which the Cambridge Platonists represented from the side of mysticism, the Latitudinarians from that of common sense.  The Deists also stood for common sense; but unlike Tillotson, they went far beyond the limits of English orthodoxy.  The floating doubts of half a century were summed up on their behalf by Matthew Tindall in 1730.  Christianity is “as old as Creation,” because it is a republication of Natural Religion and nothing more.  So far as it is this, it deserves respect, though truly it is not much needed; but anything more than this is harmful, or at best useless.

      Deism was really too shallow.  It could not be more than a passing phase of thought, even in an age which had so little sense of mystery.  The French were behind the times when they dressed it up (with a little sentiment from Rousseau) to be the Gospel of the Revolution.  Yet Deism is no unworthy opening to the great contest whose end our children may not live to see, for it threw down among the people the questions it raised, and they have never rested since.  Is the Bible credible?  Are miracles possible?  Is atonement needed for sin?  Deism itself never went on (though others soon did) to the final question – Is there a God at all? and if so, can we know Him?  It was good that the questions should be raised, that some of the huge masses of unbelief which lurk in all conventional religion should be brought to light.  Faith is never secure till unfaith has been probed to the bottom.  Better any wrangling than unreasoning orthodoxy, for there is no poison so deadly as God’s own truth if swallowed whole.  Wesley was right when he welcomed the Deists to laugh the Christianity out of the nominal Christians who are none the better for the name they bear, “and then He whom neither you nor they know now, shall rise and gird Himself with strength, and go forth in His almighty love, and sweetly conquer you all together.” [Works, ix. 77.]

      Meanwhile Science came on like a giant, and dealt at every step another blow at human pride.  Astronomy reduced the world of men to a mere atom of the universe, geology reduced the human period to an insignificant fraction of the earth’s duration, and evolution firmly linked man himself to the beasts that perish.  And if all is law, where shall we find room for our Father in heaven?  Is not revelation finally disproved?  Not at all.  The science which abases man reveals a glory of God_, which fills earth as well as heaven with a splendour undreamed of in past ages.  And to that we must lift up our hearts.  What if God is in the world as well as above it, immanent with the Greeks as well as transcendent with the Latins?  What if rather the world is in God, and in Him lives and moves and has its being?  What if law is no arbitrary appointment, but the expression of a Nature in which there is neither variableness nor shadow of turning?  Its awful unrelenting sternness proves indeed that God is not easygoing good nature; but not that He is other than Love.  Is it not the very thing we ought to expect from Love too strong to change in moods, too faithful to spare us the self-sacrifice which makes us like Himself, the suffering through which the final summing-up in Christ is working out from age to age?  He that spared not His own Son, will He spare us?

      The French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon cleared away the wrecks of medievalism from Europe, and a peace of more than fourscore years has followed, broken chiefly by the struggle which transferred the military leadership from a Latin to a Teutonic power.  It was now time that yet a third revelation should come back from the past to meet the revelation which had come down from heaven.  Marvellous as the work of Science has been, and yet more marvellously as it grows from year to year, I still incline to think that History is quite as much as Science the special message to our own time, and that it is giving us a second and not less thorough sifting of our Western thoughts concerning God and man.  History was of necessity fragmentary among the old heathens, with their “godless multitude of gods” and hatred of barbarians; for the unity of God was needed to reveal the unity of mankind, and to give worth and meaning to the obscure fightings of barbarian peoples.  The Incarnation is the philosophy of history, as St. Paul showed in his Epistles to the Romans and Ephesians, so that his clues needed only to be followed up.  The Apologists and the Alexandrians did something, Augustine did something more; but no great advance was possible till the Reformation had lifted the dead weight of authority, nor even then till fairly settled peace returned to Europe, for the first time in fourteen hundred years.  Scripture gave the method of research to Science and History in common; and Scripture gave to History through Science the illuminating thought of evolution.  The teaching of History is less advanced and less generally understood at present than that of Science; but it is not less profoundly influencing our ideas of revelation.

      On the Old Testament we must speak with caution, for we are still in the thick of the battle.  But it may safely be said that the moral difficulties become less formidable the more clearly we recognise that Israel had no more than the dawn of the light which we believe is shining more and more unto the perfect day.  Nor need we fear for the general result, though the book be sifted as never book was sifted yet.  God’s guidance of Israel in a direction contrary to the national character is much too deeply marked on Israel’s history to be overlooked by any reasonable student: and whatever modifications of current opinions about the method of that guidance truth may finally require, they cannot but be so many avenues to truth which is now obscured.

      On the New Testament the results are clearer; and they are not in the sceptic’s favour.  One Epistle is no longer St. Paul’s, and another is no longer to the Ephesians only.  The Apocalypse is shifted back to Nero’s time, and perhaps the First Epistle of Peter thrown forward to Vespasian’s.  A few passages are spurious, though not all even of these are unhistorical; and a few more are doubtful.  But these are secondary matters: seventy years of searching study have only settled the historical integrity of the New Testament as a whole more firmly than it stood before.  Nobody, for instance, would now date St. John’s Gospel as Baur did, some seventy years after the Apostle’s death; and nobody would now feel it safe to charge St. Luke with the gross historical blunders that were so freely fathered on him a generation ago.  But there are deeper things than these outward evidences.  The student is even more impressed by the subtle accuracy of the language, and by the subtle harmonies of thought which unfold themselves more and more to patient and truthful study, harmonies not only with other parts of Scripture, but with the course of Nature and the course of History, and most of all with the spiritual truth we have already learned by living it.  Must not such words as these be words of life eternal?

      Yet History gives no countenance to the rigid systems of Western Orthodoxy, whether they call themselves Protestant or Catholic.  History joins its witness to that of Scripture, that even so far as they are true, they cannot be the vital things men take them for.  The Gospel is neither a Protestant idea nor a Catholic organisation, neither a Greek philosophy nor a Latin law, but a living Person including and transcending all of them, a living Person on whom faith can feed continually, and only faith, for it is a plain absurdity to fancy that anything else can have touch of spiritual things.  The witness of History confirms the instinct of every spiritual man, that the questions of government, of discipline, of ritual, of dogma, which occupy the noisy world are very minor matters, however needful it be to get some of them settled.  History points us back with solemn emphasis to Christ himself.  All Christian doctrine is summed up in Christ’s Person, all Christian morality in Christ’s example.

      The warning we had of late, that we are more Latin than we know, [Wilson Hulsean Lectures, 143.] is not only for the silly creatures who are always bewitched with the last new finery, if only they hear say it comes from Rome.  Some of our stoutest Protestants also are enslaved to Latin glosses on the Gospel.  If the Reformation broke the yoke of bondage, it could not of itself cast out the spirit of slavery.  Only “the truth shall make you free”; and the truth is Christ, not Protestantism, far less Romanism.  Rome has not always towered over Christendom.  She was a minor power when she committed schism against the Holy Orthodox Church a thousand years ago; and she will be a minor power a hundred years hence, if she cannot conquer England.  The future is not with the Latin Church, unless God raise it from the dead.  We shall find a better guide, though still but a human help, in the older Church of God which flourished before the times of Roman greatness.  The same Providence which has brought us round to the old problems of Christ’s Person also bids us take them up again.  The knowledge of Christ is the revelation of man; and we need it even for the reconstruction of society which is the visible task of our time; for only in the light of His sinless purity dare we look up the steep ascents to heights of human nature towering as far above the angels as the deeps of sin are sunk below the beasts that perish.  Yet we may not – we cannot – take up the old Greek problems quite on the old Greek lines, as if all things had continued as they were from the beginning, since the fathers of Chalcedon fell asleep.  Christ reveals Himself to us in the Latin Church, which laboured for a thousand years to teach the law and order if not the freedom of the Gospel; in the Reformation which tore in sunder the unspiritual unity of Western Europe, and broke the yoke of human infallibility; in the students of Nature who have scrutinised the universe from the far away stars to the dust of our feet and the nerves of our body; in the students of History who have sifted every word of Scripture with microscopic accuracy, and traced with loving care God’s training of the world from Ur of the Chaldees to yesterday’s newspaper.  The change from the times of Origen and Athanasius is the change from a winter to a summer landscape.  Every tree is there, and every twig; but almost hidden by the glory of the spring with which our God has clothed it.  In Christ all things are holy.  In Christ the Bible is holier than to the men who make it an idol, for its record is of Christ; and the Church is holier than to the men who make it a goddess, for its witness is of Christ.  “The old things are passed away; behold, they are become new.”  As we look back through the long ages of history, we see the evil consuming itself, the good perishing only to return in new and nobler forms.  The day of the Lord is burning round us even now; and on the decision of England rests her future.  We must go forward, if we are not to be choked in the backwash of a dead superstition.  A mere return to Protestantism would now be as unbelieving as a mere return to Romanism.  But the signs are rather signs of hope.  The blending of parties of late years, their willingness (would it were more!) to learn truth from one another, is a pledge that Christ has not forsaken us.  And in Christ all the questions of our heart are answered, and all our discords have their everlasting peace and harmony.

Chapter  XII – Romanism Since the Reformation

By the Rev. Chancellor Lias, M.A.

      The present volume of Essays is, as I take it, an attempt to recur to the first principles of the Reform movement in the sixteenth century, as a preliminary to the application of them to the problems which await us in the century now so close at hand.  Those principles have been sufficiently treated by those who have gone before.  For me, whose difficult task it is to sum up in a few pages the conflict between the absolutist and the reforming principles since the close of the Council of Trent, it must suffice to say that the Reformation presents itself to us under two aspects, the one temporary, the other permanent.  The dogmatic basis on which the principal Reforming systems were erected has been unquestionably proved to have been temporary.  Yet at the time such a dogmatic basis was both necessary and unavoidable; necessary, because in that age it was found impossible to meet the majestic and prescriptive claims of Rome on so wide a basis as that of free thought and free inquiry alone; unavoidable, because the Reformers themselves approached the questions of their day with minds trained in the mediaeval schools of theology, and great men though they were, they were unable altogether to shake off the prejudices, and emancipate themselves from the traditions, of the theological systems in which they had been brought up.  Scholars and thinkers like Colet, Erasmus, Fisher, and More, were doubtless abstractedly right in their desire to see philosophic and dispassionate inquiry take the place of religious bigotry.  But they were before their age.  Strong religious convictions, and the passions and energy they engender, were necessary in the Reformation era, if the conscience of Europe was to be stirred to a struggle with the gigantic spiritual authority at that time wielded by the Pope.  Colet, felix opportunitate mortis, died before the storm had burst.  The others, timidly and unwisely, as I must believe, shrunk from taking their part in a conflict in which they fully sympathised with neither party, and took refuge in the haven provided for them by authority and custom.  There is at least one excuse for them.  The philosophic mind, accustomed to reflect, to discuss, to balance probabilities, is somewhat apt to fail us in times of stress.  The philosopher is the man of all ages.  Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli, as well as the English Reformers, were the men of their own day.  They applied the training they had received to what they felt to be the needs of the hour, and they generated an amount of spiritual force which enabled them practically to deal with those needs.  But the bottles in which that spiritual force was confined have of late “decayed and waxen old,” and are like to burst with the pressure of modern opinion.  The Lutheran and Calvinist systems of theology, so long dominant among Protestants, are on the point of “vanishing away.”  Men on all sides are recurring to the first principles of Christianity itself, and if there be any presentment of those principles which is more likely to find favour than any other in the coming age, it is that which is found in the writers of the Alexandrian school in the third and fourth centuries.

      To the permanent and therefore more important aspect of the work of the Reformers scant justice, I must confess, seems to have been done of late.  Not only has a determined effort been made during the last fifty years to rehabilitate Roman and medieval opinion among us, but even liberal thinkers, in their earnest desire to be candid, have of late shown less gratitude to, and less appreciation of the men in the sixteenth century who won for us the freedom we now enjoy, than they deserve.  If a portion of their work was transitory, there is another part of it for which the world is permanently indebted to them.  And this in two ways.  First, the civil and religious liberty we now enjoy, which has spread so many blessings around, and which we may hope is our permanent heritage, is exclusively traceable to the action taken by the Reformers; and next, the spirit of reform itself which they evoked is still at work among us.  The Reformation was not confined to the sixteenth century, though it began then.  It has been operating ever since, and never more widely and effectually than at the present moment.  In truth the spirit of reform is the spirit of Christianity.  Or may we not rather say, it is the Spirit of the living God, who can never cease His efforts until He has destroyed every abuse, every perversion or denial of God’s truth, and has brought not only every form of human life, but every thought of the human heart, into captivity to the law of Christ.

      The secret of Luther’s vast success was that he gave voice to the long-suppressed yearnings of thousands of his contemporaries.  His defiance to the powers that be penetrated like wildfire throughout the West; but the infant Hercules to which his protests gave birth had still many labours to achieve before it reached maturity, and many more still await it before it is destined to achieve its final triumph.  Governments took fright at the new force which had been introduced into the world.  Despotic monarchs instinctively perceived that religious freedom and civil freedom could not be separated.  And so they set themselves to put down the former by axe and gibbet, fire and sword, wherever their authority reached, in order to preserve themselves from the danger of the latter.  The new doctrines were, in the first instance, often suppressed by torture and the executioner before they had any time to take root.  In those cases it was no wonder if the new inspiration soon died out.  The first occasion on which the world was called upon to witness the death-grapple between despotism and liberty, civil as well as religious, was the war of Independence, partly religious and partly secular, between Spain and Holland.  At the outset, all the success was on the side of discipline and authority.  The task of the fathers of civil and religious liberty at first seemed hopeless.  The patriots were beaten in almost every action; the Spanish arms proceeded almost unresisted throughout the land.  The most fiendish cruelties, the blackest perfidy, the most cynical contempt for human suffering, were not sufficient to rouse even a maddened people to successful resistance.  One might have fancied, as one witnessed the repeated hideous scenes of treachery and bloodshed, that, as an English chronicler said of his country in the days of Stephen, “God and His saints slept.”  But at length the tide turned.  “The heavens themselves” seemed at last to “strike” at Spanish “injustice.”  “The Lord arose as one out of sleep and as a giant refreshed with wine,” when the Spaniards retreated from before Leyden, baffled by Dutch valour combined with the fury of the elements.  The same thing was repeated twenty years after, at the climax of the long struggle of England against Spanish bigotry, faithlessness, and arrogance.  Once more the “stars in their courses” seemed to “fight against” the oppressor of the nations.  After English valour had done its best, the storm arose which swept the baffled fleet into the North Sea, whence only a few disabled hulks were destined to return.  The fight for religious freedom has been a longer and yet more desperate one.  In many countries it has not yet been achieved.  It is a more arduous struggle in precisely the same proportion as the “children of this world are wiser in their generation than the children of light.”  But that the free development of individual opinion, rather than the voice of external authority, will be the means by which the Spirit of truth will ultimately lead Christ’s disciples into all the truth, admits of little doubt.  The πρωτον ψευδος of the Roman and semi-Roman theories is that there exists an authority competent to decide, at any given moment, every controversy which is at that moment in existence.  Such a theory is at variance with the fundamental idea of the Christian Church.  That Church had power to define what the message was with which she was charged.  But she never claimed the power of settling what deductions might fairly be drawn from its principles.  External authority unquestionably has its place in all communities destined to occupy a place of any prominence in the world’s history.  It is necessary to secure order, law, the coherence of the body politic.  And as with nations, so with Churches.  If they are not to be reduced to chaos by a process of disruption, there must be regulations, as well as persons whose business it is to enforce them, and periods during which it is necessary that they should be definitely ascertained and laid down.  It is only when the principle of order and submission to lawful authority has taken a firm root, and when its nature and limits are clearly understood, that the principle of free and constitutional development can be allowed full play.  It is here that the disciples of the Reformation have made their gravest mistakes.  Like the Hollanders, who constantly began to argue with their commanders just as they were going into action against men long inured to discipline, the Reformers began to quarrel with one another at the outset of their combat à outrance with spiritual authority, backed by superstition and long prescription, and enforced by the sword of the civil magistrate.  The Calvinist hated the Lutheran and the Arminian as much as, if not more than, he hated the Papist.  What wonder if religious freedom found a home only among the stronger races, if the weaker ones made a poor fight against authority when they felt they were hopelessly divided among themselves?  Moreover, unfortunately for itself, Protestantism, in its struggle for freedom, has consecrated the spirit of religious division.  If men were not altogether satisfied with the regulations of the religious body to which they belong, they held themselves justified in forming another for themselves.  And they have not been content to view secession as a necessary evil.  In some quarters it has been extolled to the skies as the perfection of Christian liberty.  So Rome, like Napoleon, has defeated, and continues to defeat, her antagonists in detail, and is able to preserve the imposing front which it cannot be denied that she still continues to present to the world even to the present hour.

        Thus the struggle between Romanism and Protestantism has, from the moment of its commencement to the present hour, been a conflict between organised and unorganised effort.  Rome commenced the conflict with every external advantage in her favour.  Not only did the strongest civil governments ultimately range themselves on her side, but she had all the prestige attaching to long-standing supremacy.  The shock of the Reformation compelled her to perfect her discipline, in order to meet more serious dangers than she had ever before been required to face.  At the Council of Trent she succeeded in closing her ranks into a compact phalanx.  The body of religious opinion which had grown up by degrees in the Church was crystallised into a system.  Purgatory, the worship of the Virgin and the Saints, Sacramental grace, Justification, and other doctrines which had long been practically accepted, were carefully defined, and some extravagances on both sides were firmly repressed.  It was felt, moreover, that some of the worst abuses prevalent in the Church must be put down, and the fact was recognised that even the most absolute ecclesiastical despotism could hardly, in the then condition of affairs, continue to exist without at least some regard for public opinion.  Side by side with this careful and skilful consolidation of Church organisation, a body of men arose, whose special province it was to bring that organisation to bear on the life of individuals and of nations.  It is not too much to say that the very existence of the Roman Church during the last three centuries has been bound up with the activity of the Society of Jesus.  Even their suppression is only the exception which proves the rule.  The rare instinct the Roman communion displays in dealing with the difficulties which beset her, soon showed her that Rome without the Jesuits was as a warrior without arms or ammunition.  Therefore the Order was re-established, and is probably the stronger for the mistakes in the seventeenth century which led to its temporary downfall.  The existence of a body of defenders pledged to nothing but the establishment of a spiritual supremacy over the human mind, and ready to adopt any means whereby that spiritual supremacy can be gained and secured, is absolutely essential to the maintenance of a despotism such as that which is enshrined at the Vatican.  It has lately been said of the leaders of the Jesuit body that they are absolutely destitute of religious convictions themselves, and only use religion as a means of obtaining supremacy over others.  It may well be believed that this is so – that the man who is restrained by no religious scruples or prejudices of his own is best qualified for playing on the religious emotions of others.  But, however this may be in the case of the present heads of his society, want of intense religious conviction certainly cannot be laid to the charge of the founder of the Order.  Strange, even bizarre, his religious convictions may have been.  His notions of morality on many points were not those of the religion of Christ.  But it must be borne in mind that in religious, as in civil despotisms, fidelity to the despot outweighs every other consideration whatsoever.  If submission to constituted authority be the articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae, then the end will naturally justify the means whereby obedience to that authority is enforced.  Firmly convinced that fidelity to the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and to the rules and regulations of the body over which he ruled, was fidelity to Jesus Christ himself, Ignatius Loyola founded a society on the principle of loyalty to the Head of Christ’s Church on earth, an object to which every other principle whatever must give way.  Morality, no doubt, even the highest standard of morality, wherever possible; but wherever this came into conflict with the best interests of the Church, the ordinary rules of morality must be set aside.  Accordingly Loyola and his followers set themselves, with the utmost energy, to set up permanently and irreversibly on earth that kingdom of which Gregory VII and Innocent III had dreamed, and were admirably seconded in their single-minded efforts by the self-will, the self-assertion, the contentious spirit of their adversaries.  The pages of Ranke will tell us how they set about their task.  They flung themselves, with the utmost energy and judgment, into the movement for secular education, and contrived for the most part to get it into their hands.  They used the Confessional with extraordinary dexterity, and especially did they contrive to gain an influence over the female sex.  Recognising the truths of the absolute supremacy of conscience on the one hand, and the imperfection of popular ideas of morality on the other, they skillfully adapted their principles to the spirit of the age.  No standard of morality at all would have shocked the public conscience; a too exalted standard would have provoked resistance.  So in their books on casuistry they lowered their morality to the level of public opinion, and if they sowed the seeds of future disaster, they were at least rewarded by immediate success.  They were acute enough also to see that absolutism was still the dominant principle in civil government.  It was their policy to ally themselves with existing despotisms, to accommodate the religious system of Rome as far as possible to the wishes and prejudices of the civil ruler, and to point out to him the intimate connection of religious liberty with licence and insubordination in the State.  By this means they gained an extraordinary influence in public affairs.  Before very long they had the Latin races in Spain, in France, in Italy, in Belgium, at their feet.  If the spirit of freedom was stronger in the Teutonic races, they at least won back Austria and half the rest of Germany; and if they could not regain Germany as a whole, yet by arraying Teuton against Teuton they could at least paralyse German influence in Europe, and had good reason for entertaining the hope that ultimately all Western Christendom would be won back to the Roman obedience.

      To gain this end they used every weapon in their power – denunciation, calumny, intrigue, bribery, assassination, and above all, persecution.  One can but make a passing allusion to the Spanish and Netherlandish Inquisition, to the vast number of lives that were sacrificed by their means, until the spirit of religious inquiry was absolutely crushed.  The Jesuit morality of persecution was disturbed by no scruples.  Those who ventured to think for themselves were “burned handsomely,” as a Roman Catholic eyewitness puts it.  Cities which would not expel the Reforming preachers were at once besieged.  The doctrine that no faith need be kept with rebels and heretics was extremely to the taste of the tyrants of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; and again and again the articles of capitulation under which beleaguered cities were surrendered were most shamefully violated, and those whose lives the victors had solemnly promised to spare were butchered by hundreds in cold blood.  The connection of such foul breaches of faith with ecclesiastical despotism is about as clearly proved as any fact of history can be.  In the old heathen days, conditions of capitulation were, as a rule, strictly and faithfully kept.  Heathen deities were supposed to hate and punish perfidy.  Even when the barbarians swept down in their savagery upon the Roman empire, the breach of the pledged word was rare.  It was not until submission to an earthly potentate had taken the place of obedience to the moral law that such breaches became common.  As early as 1444 we hear of Cardinal Julian, the papal legate, proclaiming at the battle of Varna, that faith need not be kept with unbelievers; and report states that the Sultan Amurath called on Jesus, the Son of Mary, to avenge the treachery of His disciples.  It is satisfactory to think that in this case, the first, so far as I remember, in which this unworthy doctrine was publicly proclaimed, its promulgation was rewarded by a disastrous defeat.  Nevertheless, it continued to hold the field for more than two centuries, and even then it was necessity, not conviction, certainly not any recantation at the Vatican, which led to its abandonment.  There are few students of history who do not sympathise with the Dutch in their war of independence, when they were at last in a position to threaten reprisals on their perfidious and dishonest foes, and with William III, when after allowing Marshal Boufflers to depart, according to the terms of the capitulation of Namur, he afterwards rearrested and detained him until he pledged his word that similar engagements, entered into with equal solemnity by his master, Louis XIV, should be observed with equal fidelity.  It was everywhere the same.  Violence, cruelty, perfidy – very seldom indeed reason, argument, persuasion – were the means by which countries were won back to the Roman yoke.  English people have been persuaded to lavish a good deal of sentimental admiration on that interesting personage, St. Francois de Sales, whose gentleness, meekness, and persuasiveness, combined with a rare eloquence and logical power, we are asked to believe, restored the authority of the Roman Church in the neighbourhood of Geneva.  The story is about on a level, in point of historic accuracy, with a mediaeval legend.  The hard, stern truth is, that Francois endeavoured for a considerable time to use such means as have been attributed to him in later times, and did not make a single convert; and that then, despairing of making any impression on hearts so hardened as those of the Protestants of Annecy and the neighbourhood, he suggested more efficacious means to the Pope and the Duke of Savoy.  Backed by a body of troops he took possession of the churches, and restored the mass in them, while the Duke of Savoy threatened imprisonment and confiscation of goods to those who refused to hear the Roman preachers.  The Reformers and their adherents were deported to the frontiers, happy only in this, that they were not required to seal their testimony with their blood.*

      [*It is further said that the Saint offered a bribe to the heretic Beza, then resident in Switzerland, under the impression that the Reformer was capable of being approached by such a proposal, but that it met with the reception it deserved.]

      By such means were the Latin races and some Teutonic districts recovered to the Roman fold.  The Thirty Years’ War, the intervention of Sweden, and the ultimate peace of Westphalia, put a term to the conquests of the Papacy in Germany, and it is a remarkable fact that the religious settlement then arrived at has never been disturbed.  Nor is this the only remarkable fact to be observed.  Religious opinion has ultimately, in every case, followed the lead of the civil government.  Where the government was inclined to the Papacy the population declared for the Pope.  Where it favoured Reforming opinions, the people accepted them also; and from that time to this, neither party has been able to win back the ground they have lost.  This points, first of all, to religious exhaustion, which has rendered men weary of controversy; next, to the divisions and mutual hatreds among the Reformers, which neutralised their efforts after freedom and truth; and lastly, to the tendency among many of the nations which adhered to the Reformation to substitute a sentiment, a philosophy, a theological system, a bare spirit of inquiry and research, for the eternal principles of the “faith once delivered to the saints” – the historical religion preached by Apostles, recorded by Evangelists, and handed down in the creed of Christendom as the one unchanging deposit committed by Christ to the care of His Church.

      At first, in France at least, some toleration was extended to the Reformers.  Henry IV, though he thought the Crown of France well worth a mass, was not so unprincipled as to betray those who had so bravely fought for him.  The Edict of Nantes protected the Protestants in the enjoyment of their belief.  But the engagement was ill kept.  The Huguenots may have been turbulent at times, but their opponents were unscrupulous and unmerciful.  Savoy, then a state independent of France, continued to display a similar spirit.  We are all of us acquainted with Milton’s sonnet on the atrocities which disturbed the peace of the tranquil valleys in which the Vaudois had carried on their simple worship for centuries, and if, as we have been lately told, the effect of Cromwell’s intervention has been exaggerated, there has been no exaggeration of the cruelties against which our great national poet protested.  As time went on things went from bad to worse in the countries of the Latin race.  The voice of religious freedom in Spain had long since been reduced to silence, and with it went the moral strength of the nation, whose history, from that day to this, has been one of moral and political, and, it might be added, religious corruption and decay.  Italy was the battleground of the stranger, and it is a question whether the oppression of foreign races, of native princes, or of the States of the Church, was the worst.  Ranke tells us how the dominions of the Pope were harassed by maladministration and excessive taxation, and it is remarkable how, at the present moment, though in other parts of Europe it is the ignorant peasantry who form the chief support of the Papal cause, in the States of the Church it is the peasantry who hate the Pope most, so keen a sense do they continue to entertain of the injustice and oppression to which they were exposed at the hands of his officials.  As for France, she also steadily declined in prosperity and in her influence on Europe.  Despotism, ambition, civil and religious oppression went hand in hand, and slowly and surely the moral and material life-blood of the nation was drained away.  People in this age have unfortunately forgotten the cruel persecutions of the Protestants, the horrors of the Dragonnades, in comparison with which the recent Armenian atrocities would scarcely seem more shocking.  It might be well that they should be forgotten, had it not also come to be more than half forgotten, that the principles of the Reformation alone delivered Europe from atrocities such as these.  Had it not been for those principles, the fiendish outrages which the infallible head of the Church frequently encouraged, and never took the least trouble to repress or to denounce, would still, unless Protestantism had meanwhile been extirpated, have been going on, under the sanction of the so-called “Vicar” of the “Prince of Peace.”  The Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685 was a wanton and inexcusable infraction of a religious peace which had existed for a century, and it inflicted cruel losses and wrongs on the most industrious, the most peaceable, and not the least loyal of the subjects of the Grand Monarque. Our own national historian, Lord Macaulay, has sketched, with his usual inimitable clearness and point, the effect of this foolish as well as barbarous measure.  It is a satisfaction to think that it not only turned out to be a source of national weakness and humiliation for France, but by substituting religious subjection for religious conviction, it paved the way for that fierce revolt against the hierarchy which was one of the distinguishing characteristics of the French Revolution.

      Nor were the Jesuits, who contrived to gain the upper hand in France as well as elsewhere, less resolute and less revengeful in extirpating the last lingering remnants of freedom of opinion in their own Church.  Molinos was burned at Rome for believing that the soul should be passive in its reception of impulses from on high, rather than active in seeking them.  Madame Guyon was rewarded for her expression of similar opinions by relentless persecution and a dungeon; and the great, the good, the pious Fénélon, though he had been entrusted with the education of the Duke of Burgundy, son of Louis XIV, was involved in her disgrace.*  The struggle of the Jesuits with Port Royal deserves more extended mention, since it has been the means, after a long interval, of inflicting the most serious blow the Church of Rome has sustained since the Reformation.  In the earlier part of the seventeenth century there arose a great struggle between the followers of Augustine and the Jesuits.  The former accused the latter of Pelagianism; and Paul V, in 1607, had gone so far as to censure a work by the Jesuit Molina, published in Portugal in 1588, as Pelagian.  The controversy waxed warm.  After the death of Cornelius Janssen, Bishop of Yprès, in Belgium, his “Augustinus” was published.  In this work he maintained with great ability the Pelagian tendency of the Jesuit teaching.  The Jesuits, embittered by the influence Janssen’s disciples were gaining in France, replied by procuring the condemnation of Janssen’s book by Urban VIII.  The Abbe St. Cyran, a friend of Janssen’s, was at this time Director of the Convent at Port Royal, then presided over by the celebrated Mere Angelique, whose secular name was Marie Jacqueline Arnauld.  Around these soon gathered a band of learned and able men, whose names have become well known to posterity: Arnauld d’Andilly, Antoine Arnauld, De Sacy, the translator of the Scriptures, Tillemont the historian, Quesnel, Nicole, and, greatest of them all, the immortal Pascal, whose “Provincial Letters” have thrown such light on the remarkable methods of reasoning to which the Jesuits were addicted.  St. Cyran set himself to oppose the morality taught by the Jesuits in the Confessional.  For this the Jesuits prevailed on Cardinal Richelieu to imprison him.  He was released, but his health had suffered so much by his imprisonment that he soon died.  Others of his party were treated with similar rigour.  The intense sincerity and earnestness, however, of the Port Royalists, as they were now called, continued to attract attention, though it must be confessed that their high qualities were mingled with credulity, superstition, and an excessive and unreasonable asceticism.  Neither argument nor intrigue, however, were sufficient to crush them.**  The Jesuits, therefore, after an attempt to close Port Royal altogether, at length obtained a Papal Bull condemning five propositions which they asserted were extracted from Janssen’s “ Augustinus.”  The Port Royalists replied that the propositions were unquestionably false and worthy of condemnation, but that Janssen had never maintained them.  The Jesuits, having complete influence over Louis XIV, who had taken the reins of power into his own hands on the death of Mazarin, obtained his sanction to the forcible closing of the whole establishment at Port Royal, which was regarded as the headquarters of Janssen’s party.  The Port Royalists were driven into exile; but three bishops in Holland, the Archbishop of Utrecht and the Bishops of Haarlem and Deventer, remained firm to Janssen’s cause, and continued to maintain, in flat contradiction to the Pope, that Janssen had never affirmed the propositions it was sought to attribute to him.  As they remained obstinate, the Papal excommunication was launched against them, not, be it observed, for heresy, but for disputing the Papal infallibility on a question, not of doctrine, but of fact.  The small Jansenist, or more properly, Old Catholic Church of Holland, continued to exist, though in declining numbers, in spite of the papal excommunication.  After much hesitation, during the course of which the succession to these Bishoprics had actually more than once died out, it was resolved to transmit it.  And through the descendants of these protesting bishops, a valid Episcopal succession, according to the principles of canonicity acknowledged in the West, was transmitted to the present Old Catholic Bishops of Germany and Switzerland, and to the ecclesiastic recently consecrated to preside over the Independent Polish Catholic Church in the United States.

      [* La Combe, Madame Guyon’s confessor, was also imprisoned on the plea that he had imparted these views to his penitent, and was kept in prison till he had lost his reason!  This was in the last decade of the seventeenth century, just when England was passing her Toleration Act.  Cruel as the laws of the Restoration were against Nonconformists, they displayed no such ferocity as was shown in France to all who did not abjectly submit to the opinions of the sovereign.]

      [** It was reported that a bishop in the Jesuit interest, entering the refectory of a monastery as the reader was uttering the words, “For it is God that worketh in us both to will and to do of His good pleasure,” angrily asked from what Jansenist book these heretical words were taken.  Argument in such hands was not likely to be very successful.]

      The policy of the Jesuits had thus been to crush out all independence of thought by measures of violence.  They allied themselves with the despotisms of the day, and what they failed to secure by fair means, they contrived to obtain by force.  The natural result followed.  The stronger and more deeply earnest among the persecuted fled to foreign countries to find that liberty which was denied them at home.  The weaker and less conscientious submitted to authority, and rendered an outward conformity to rites and doctrines which in their hearts they did not believe.  Thus by degrees, in the nations which submitted to the Papacy, sober and rational religious conviction ceased to exist.  In Spain the national energy died out, and with it enlightenment, religious and secular.  Italy had no national life at all, but still lay, crushed and bleeding, in the hands of her oppressors.  France and Austria alone were left to support the Roman Catholic interests in Europe.  The latter, as a mere congeries of nationalities, was all along in the same perilous position in which we see her at the present moment.  France, however, remained a predominant force in European politics.  But the policy of Jesuitism was not long in displaying its natural results.  The later years of Louis XIV were years of humiliation and defeat.  During the whole of the eighteenth century Roman Catholic France and Austria were on the decline, while Protestant England and Prussia were rapidly rising into pre-eminence, the latter in Europe, the former more especially in America and in Hindostan, from both of which she expelled the French by force of arms.  The growth of indifferentism in France, the natural result, as has been said, of the religious policy of her monarch under the direction of the Jesuits, filled the hearts of earnest men with deep forebodings, and historical critics have attributed to that policy, first the scepticism of Voltaire and the Encyclopaedists, and afterwards the French Revolution.  The cynical disregard of all moral principle on the part of the dominant classes in Church and State, coupled with the repressive measures which had destroyed intelligent religious opinion, and substituted for it fanaticism on the one hand, or a mere external conformity on the other, were the two factors which brought about the excesses at which the whole world stood aghast.  It is true that the miserable failure of Jesuitism in the seventeenth century brought about the suppression of the Jesuits in the eighteenth.  But it was soon found that the modern Papacy without the Jesuits was an impossibility.  The Pope might do without them in the religious apathy which distinguished the early part of the eighteenth century; but the revival of religious energy necessitated an organisation devoted to Papal interests.  The Jesuits were recalled into existence.  As has already been remarked, they have learned wisdom by their former failure, and are the mainstay of the Roman system at the present moment.

        The evils of religious despotism, however, are less clearly marked on the surface than those of civil oppression.  There is much which tends to conceal from the superficial observer the real demoralisation which lurks beneath the Ultramontane appearance of piety.  He sees that the churches are frequented; but he does not ask himself what are the nature of the influences which fill them, nor does he ask whether the moral and religious tone of the persons who thus throng to church is better than elsewhere.  Religious societies are at work, but it is not observed that they lie apart from the feelings of the nation at large.  Spasmodic reactions there continually are, where Christianity is identified with Romanism.  Such a reaction has lately been in progress in Spain and in France.  It could not be otherwise.  The religious sentiment is a necessity for the human heart.  And in these countries no form of the religious idea has taken root, save that of the Roman Catholic Church.  But these reactions do not last long.  There is no permanent foundation of rational religious conviction to build upon.  And so, when they have passed away, the conscience of the nation which has experienced them is more hardened than before.  The “last state” of the penitent “is worse than the first.”  As with nations, so with individuals.  The fear of death causes a man to send for the priest whom he has scorned all through his life.  The need of religion for women and children is a creed to the man who has no other.  And so he supports the priest against the religious reformer, and regards the latter as a pestilent disturber of the peace of society.  Beside these occasional and short-lived reactions in Roman Catholic countries, it cannot be denied that everywhere the “dissidence of Dissent,” the tendency, that is, which Protestantism has displayed towards infinite subdivision, has been a source of strength to Rome both before and since Bossuet’s “Variations of Protestantism” saw the light.  In one age such men as Charles II and James II,* in another, Frederick Schlegel, in another, Newman and Manning, pass over from what Newman once called “the city of confusion and the house of bondage,” into what they fondly presume to be a haven of security and peace.  The Tractarian movement has undoubtedly strengthened the Roman communion in this country as much as it has strengthened our own.  The Ultramontanes are never weary of predicting that it will ultimately bring about the submission of England to the Pope.  And no doubt there is a constant “oozing over to Rome,” to adopt an expression used to me years ago by one of the most able and original of the Tractarian clergy, from the extreme right among ourselves.  Such considerations as these lead many to imagine that Rome is destined to regain the ground she has lost, and when skillfully urged, they are not unfrequently successful in inducing superficial reasoners to join her.  But there is another side to the picture.  The Church of Rome is by no means the happy family she is represented to outsiders as being.  There has long been a restless dissatisfaction among the best and wisest of her members with things as they are, which must in the end produce its effect; and her secret history has long been one of perpetual bickerings and strife.  As long as heretics could be burned and imprisoned, the task of “an insolent and aggressive faction,” as Newman once termed the body which directs the movements of the Vatican, was easy enough.  But it is by no means so easy, in these days of general toleration, to suppress opinion by weapons purely spiritual.  From the days of Arnold of Brescia, of Savonarola, of Wyclif, of John Huss, and Jerome of Prague, to say nothing of the Reformation, there have been signs, within the pale of the Roman communion itself, of dissatisfaction with her doctrine and discipline, and in the present century these signs have been extremely frequent.  In France the recoil from the Concordat established by Napoleon with the Pope, led to a recondescence of the old Jansenist and Gallican spirit.  Thirty-six bishops refused to accept the Concordat, and died without having done so.  Only, unlike the Old Catholics in Holland, they refused to perpetuate the schism.  Yet the spirit remained, even when not only the bishops but the priests died out one by one; and at the present moment it is reckoned that there are about 10,000 persons in various parts of France who refuse to attend Roman Catholic worship.  They call themselves the Petite Église.  They have neither priest nor church.  But the works of the divines of Port Royal are handed down among them as the most precious treasures, and they remain to this day firm to the doctrines which the Jesuits imagined they had extirpated in the eighteenth century.**  The Pope lately addressed an appeal to them to return to communion with the chair of St. Peter, but it fell upon deaf ears.  Some of them have asked for religious privileges from the Old Catholic congregation at Paris, which is practically a mission from the Old Catholic Church in Holland, itself the ecclesiastical heir of Janssen and the Port Royalists.  Others still remain “as sheep without a shepherd.”  In Germany, too, the spirit of discontent has found expression.  The celebrated Hirscher, better known than at present to us English some two generations back, through the translation of his work under the title “Sympathies of the Continent,” by the late Bishop Cleveland Coxe, strove, in the early part of the present century, to press reform upon his ecclesiastical superiors.  He defended the abolition of the rule of celibacy for the clergy, recommended that the services of the Church should be conducted in the vernacular, and pleaded for the reform of sundry abuses connected with indulgences, confession, and the worship of the Virgin and the Saints.***  Sailer, too, afterwards Bishop of Ratisbon, advocated the reforms which the Old Catholics afterwards carried out, after their final separation from the Pope.

      [* Whatever value may be attached to the opinions of our last two Stuart kings, it cannot be doubted that their conversion was the result of conviction, any more than, on the other hand, we can doubt that had they never joined the Church of Rome, they would have been better kings and better men.]

      [** M. Léon Séché has lately written an account of this most interesting community.]

      [*** A full account of Hirscher as a theologian and reformer, by Dr. Lauchert, will be found in the Revue Internationale de Theologie, Oct. 1894, April and Oct. 1895, and Jan. 1896.  He was a voluminous writer himself, and the subject of many biographical and theological writings.]

      The story of Wessemburg, Coadjutor-Bishop of Constance, deserves, perhaps, to be told at greater length.  He was chosen as coadjutor to the celebrated Dalbey in 1802, in consequence of his having recommended himself to the Vatican, as well as to Dalbey himself, by his successful discharge of a mission to Switzerland, with which he had been entrusted.  His delegated authority extended over parts of Switzerland, as well as of the Grand Duchy of Baden.  As soon as he entered upon his duties he laboured might and main for a reform in the condition of the clergy and the Church.  He found the clergy uneducated and unfitted for their office, a defect which he strove at once to remedy.  He reformed the Theological Seminary, and strove to improve the education the candidates for Orders received before they entered it.  He endeavoured to introduce services in the vernacular and the knowledge of the Bible, as well as to improve the musical portion of the Church services.  He next laboured to impart a more democratic character to the Church organisation in the diocese.  He advocated self-government in the place of government from Rome, as well as the right of the laity to be consulted in the management of Church affairs, and in the choice of their pastors.  This brought the long-suppressed indignation of the Jesuit party to a head.  On the death of Dalbey, in 1817, Wessemburg was chosen by the Chapter of Constance to succeed him.  The Vatican replied by requesting that a man of better report should be chosen.  Wessemburg, in spite of the remonstrances of his friends, set off to Rome to plead his own cause, and tedious and protracted were the arguments and intrigues which followed.  His Roman experiences, like those of Lamennais after him, have been made familiar to us of late in the pages of Zola’s “Rome.”  Wessemburg, like others, found it impossible to make any impression on the Pope and his entourage.  Submission, and submission only, was the course required of him.  After six months he left Rome, saying “I breathe more freely now I have escaped from that atmosphere.”*  “The unconditional power of the Pope,” said Wessemburg of the “Römlingseele,” “is their idol.”  The Pope steadily refused to allow him to become Bishop of Constance; and when, after some negotiations, the seat of the Bishopric was transferred to Freiburg, the Vaticanists contrived to induce the Grand Duke Ludwig to nominate some one else in Wessemburg’s place.  The story of Wessemburg’s life is narrated in glowing terms by Dr. Beck, a member of the Council of the Duchy of Baden, who calls him the courageous pioneer and worthy leader of the reform party of the Catholic confession among his people.  He survived till 1860, and after nearly forty years his memory is still held in honour.  A Swiss friend of my own, who, while he lived, was among the most energetic and enlightened of the old Catholic laity, but who has lately, alas! been taken from us,** told me, how in 1863, seven years before the Vatican Council, his first act, when he went as a young gymnasiast to Constance, was to go to the Cathedral and visit Wessemburg’s grave.  “So highly,” he added, “was the character of this man honoured in the non-Ultramontane circles of the Catholic Church.”

      [* Some may be reminded by this of Dr. Newman’s memorable observation, when the intrigues against him at Rome were at their height, and when it was reported that he was about to repair thither, that “the atmosphere of Rome did not agree with his constitution.”]

      [** Dr. Weibel.]

      At a still later period, Leopold Schmidt, formally elected to the Bishopric of Mainz in 1849, an era of storm and revolution in Europe, was opposed by the Jesuits for his supposed Protestantising tendencies.  They procured his rejection from the Pope, and induced the Pope to nominate the well-known Von Ketteler in his place.  Their intrigues drove Schmidt, mild, gentle, and inoffensive as had been his life, to renounce communion with the Roman Church as intolerant and Ultramontane; while he still maintained that he was not a Protestant, but a Catholic.  Augustin Theiner, again, the Librarian of the Vatican, held his post amid ever increasing misgivings.  His book on Clement XIV, the suppressor of the Jesuits, was put at once on the Index.  His work on the Council of Trent was stopped.  At last, in 1870, he was turned out of his office on account of his persistent opposition to the Vatican decrees.*

      [* Since the Vatican Council Professor Reusch, one of the Reforming Party, in his Die Deutschen Bischöfe and der Aberglaube, has called attention to the increase of superstitions connected with Purgatory, the use of scapulars and blessed wonder-working medals, and has appealed to the Roman bishops to put a stop to it, but of course in vain.]

      In Italy the same reforming spirit showed itself, though amid great dangers and difficulties.  The celebrated Rosmini, a philosophical theologian of high repute in the Roman communion, published, in 1849, a work called the “Five Wounds of the Church,”* in which he boldly and honestly laid bare the evils which afflicted the communion to which he belonged.  The Jesuits laboured hard to obtain a condemnation of this book, but only partially succeeded, and Rosmini died in the communion of the Church he had in vain endeavoured to reform.  Gioberti, about thirty years previously, had written a treatise on “Catholic Reform in the Church.”  But this simply consisted in his recommendation of a more philosophical system of Church teaching, in which the sharp angles of dogma were to be rubbed off, and an exaggerated asceticism toned down.  The case of Father Passaglia also deserves notice.  The hero of the proclamation of the dogma of the Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin in 1854, he was the principal figure in a picture painted to commemorate that event.  But as he afterwards put himself at the head of 9000 priests who protested against the temporal power of the Pope, he fell into disgrace, and his likeness was removed from the picture in which it had occupied the most prominent place.  Monsignore Tiboni, Canon of Brescia, about the same time advocated the translation and free reading of the Scriptures, services in the vernacular, the Holy Communion in both kinds, confession made voluntary, and the abolition of enforced clerical celibacy, as well as the abolition of the autocracy of the Pope.  Audisio was another priest of reforming sentiments, and cautious as was his avowal of them, he did not escape the usual denunciation, from the consequences of which he freed himself by declaring that he had never said, nor wished to say, anything contrary to the authority of the Pope and the Church.  When Count Campello actually seceded from the Roman Church in 1881 in order to devote himself to the unfettered prosecution of the work of reform, Audisio, while wishing him God speed, excused himself from following him on the ground of his age.  The two most prominent opponents, however, of the Vatican in late years were Cardinal d’Andrea and Padre Curci.  The former placed himself at the head of the movement for an Italian Catholic Reformed Church in Southern Italy, and was followed by three hundred priests.  After some controversy, d’Andrea, contrary to the advice of his friends, accepted an invitation from the Vatican to discuss the question with the Pope.  This was in May 1866.  Immediately afterwards he died so suddenly that Cardinal Antonelli was compelled to acquiesce in a post-mortem investigation.  No cause of death was assigned, but the immediate realisation of the forebodings of his friends has been held by many unprejudiced persons to justify the suspicion that he was poisoned.**  Baron Ricasoli, the Italian Prime Minister at that juncture, not seeing the importance of the movement which d’Andrea had inaugurated, delivered the three hundred priests into the hands of their bishops.  They were one by one starved into submission, and thus ended a bold and promising attempt at Reform in the Italian Church.  Curci’s case is also remarkable.  Himself a Jesuit, he became discontented with the policy of his order.  In two powerful books, La Nuova Italia ed i Vecchi Zelanti, and Il Vaticano Regio, the first published in 1881, the second shortly afterwards, he painted in strong terms the miserable condition of his communion in Italy, the fanaticism, the intrigue, the party spirit at work in it, the ignorance and worthlessness of the great majority of the clergy, and especially the neglect of the study of Holy Scripture, a neglect he strove to remedy by publishing a Commentary on the Bible.  But his works were speedily condemned; the Jesuits laboured incessantly to effect his overthrow, and, after a noble and vigorous resistance, the old man (Curci was over seventy) was effectually starved out and silenced.

      [* The five wounds of the Church are: 1. Worship in an unknown tongue; 2. The ignorance of the clergy; 3. The despotism of the bishops; 4. The appointing of bishops by the State; 5. The State control of Church property.]

      [** Dr. Beck, in his Freiherr Heinrich von Wessemburg, Sein Leben und Wirken, p. 277, says of Wessemburg’s journey to Rome in 1817, “Viele fürchteten – und bei dem tödtlichen Hass der Partei, und der damaligen Zeitlage, nicht ganz ohne Grund – für die persönliche Sicherheit des Freundes.”]

      If we turn once more to France, the same spectacle awaits us.  I have already referred to the history of the Petite Église.  I proceed to further manifestations of the same spirit.  Like Grosseteste in the thirteenth century, Lamennais in the nineteenth commenced his career as a devout believer in the Papacy.  As in Grosseteste’s case, the severe logic of facts compelled Lamennais to change his mind.  In his Essai sur l’Indifférence en matière de Religion, he gave the warmest expression to his earlier belief.  Pursued by Jesuit opposition, by jealousy and intrigue, as he strove to develop a policy which he believed would reconcile his Church and nation, he found his idol shattered in his grasp.  In vain did he go to Rome and appeal to the Pope (Gregory XVI) personally.  In his last interview the wily Italian, so Spüller tells us, did but enlarge on the talents of Michael Angelo, and offer the enthusiastic reformer a box of lapis lazuli, containing some of the Pope’s best snuff.  Disgusted with the idol he had once adored, in his Paroles d’un Croyant he gave vent to his disappointment and despair.  Together with Montalembert and Lacordaire, whose youthful enthusiasm, like that of Lamennais, had seen in the Roman Catholic Church, with the Pope at its head, the only hope of regenerating society, he started L’Avenir, a journal devoted to the interests of religion.  But in the Encyclical Mirari Vos the principles advocated in this journal were condemned.  Its issue was suspended.  Lamennais retired into silence, solitude, and as his enemies asserted, into scepticism.  His comrades in the work ended their lives under a more or less thick cloud of censure and reproach.  And so pilgrimages to Lourdes and the like take the place of rational religion, new cults supplant the worship of God, the clergy grow more ignorant and fanatical, and in many villages the Church is unable to supply any clergy at all.*

      [* These facts are vouched for by the Abbe Bougaud in a work called Le Grand Peril de l’Église de France.  Mgr. Dupanloup, Archbishop of Lyons, also published a pamphlet in 1876, entitled Ou allons nous, speaking of the unsatisfactory state of things among the laity]

      The Roman Church then, in various lands, has long presented the aspect of a sea which, though smooth apparently on the surface, is heaving and struggling beneath that surface with the groundswell of suppressed emotions.  The ablest spirits of the ruling faction within her pale were not insensible of the dangers which environed her.  And they jumped to the conclusion that the best way to repress rebellion within, and to confound their enemies without, was to put the capstone on the monarchical system of the Church by the proclamation of Papal infallibility.  Of this policy Manning was the most persistent and determined supporter.  He believed he saw in it a weapon with which recalcitrants within could instantly be crushed, and a means by which those without who were wont to taunt their Roman Catholic antagonists with having indeed an infallible Church, but as being unable to define where the infallibility resided, could effectually be silenced.  The risks were unquestionably great.  The opposition was bold, numerous, and intelligent, even among the bishops who were present at the Council, and the three Munich Professors, Döllinger, Huber, and Friedrich, supported by a host of other learned men in Germany and elsewhere, had organised a most formidable resistance.  On this, however, as on other occasions, courage and determination triumphed over all obstacles.  The policy of the promoters of the Council was resolutely and not too scrupulously carried out.  One by one the protesting bishops gave in their submission, and at length all fear of an organised Episcopal revolt was at an end.  The rebellious German and Swiss Professors were excommunicated, and the establishment of a Papal monarchy over the Roman Church was a fait accompli.

      The success of Manning and his party, however, though almost beyond expectation, was not quite complete.  A movement, which, though small in its beginnings, has been already not unfruitful in results, was initiated in opposition to the sentence of the Council.  The ferment, which at first was great, rapidly subsided, and those who finally determined on an organised resistance to the new ecclesiastical despotism were few indeed.  Döllinger himself, though he could not bring himself to discountenance this resistance, did not feel at liberty to give it his active support.  Nevertheless the small band of resolute opponents, headed by Reinkens, Reusch, and Von Schulte, determined to proceed.  The bishops of the Old Catholic Church of Holland, the history of which has been narrated above, offered to consecrate a bishop, and Reinkens was ultimately consecrated to the charge of some fifty thousand souls in Germany, who were resolved as Catholics to have religious privileges for themselves and their families.  The Papal excommunication, it should be understood, involved the denial of all Church rites to those who came under its ban.  Reinkens consecrated Herzog to preside over about the same number of dissidents in Switzerland.  Thus was what is known as the Old Catholic movement inaugurated – the first attempt since the Reformation at organised resistance to Rome.  Among the fickle and volatile French Old Catholicism never took any root.  In spite of the strenuous exertions of M. Hyacinthe Loyson, one congregation only, at Paris, has been brought into existence to maintain Old Catholic principles.  It is now under the supervision of the Old Catholic bishops of Holland.  In Austria, on the contrary, the movement has made rapid and increasing progress, [Especially during the present year (1899)] and is only prevented by the intolerance of the Austrian Government from having a bishop of its own.  In Italy, Count Campello, once Canon of St. Peter’s at Rome, has been struggling manfully since 1881, and not altogether unsuccessfully, to form an Italian Catholic Church, and Professor Miraglia, who has lately initiated an independent movement of his own at Piacenza, has also, towards the close of the year 1897, announced his accession to the Old Catholic body.*  The consecration of a sixth Old Catholic bishop for an Independent Church of the Poles in America, at the beginning of this year, has extended the movement as far as the United States.  The immediate result of the formation of Old Catholic communities was the carrying out, as far as their members were concerned, of the reforms which earnest men in the Roman Catholic communities had so long desired.  The Old Catholic Churches lost no time in repudiating the decrees of a purely Western Council such as Trent, and recurred to the voice of the undivided Church.  The prayers were said in the vernacular; the free reading of the Bible was permitted; confession was made optional; the voice of the laity forced on a somewhat reluctant clergy the permission of marriage to the members of the clerical order, and the modern cults, the excessive veneration paid to the Virgin, and the abuses connected with private masses, purgatory, and indulgences were done away with.  The election of priests by their congregations, and the free participation of the laity in Church Government, are among the most prominent features of the system, and it is on the intelligent cooperation of its laity that the Old Catholic cause mainly reposes.  Of course, too, the incubus of the Index has been removed, and the clergy permitted freely to speak their mind on all points not formally decided by the Universal Church.  It is yet too early to estimate the effect such a bold step as the Old Catholics have taken is likely to produce.  The number of those who dared adopt an attitude so unprecedented as that of resistance to the Head of the Church was no doubt at first almost infinitesimal.  But, small as it was, neither persecution, abuse, bribery, social or political pressure, nor persuasion – and all have been freely and unscrupulously used by the Ultramontanes – have availed to put the Old Catholics down.  They have survived the indifference, the jealousy, the hostility of Romanism, of Protestantism, and of the civil government alike.  They have faced the difficulties of organisation, and these were considerable; but their publications are slowly and surely leavening the mind of Europe; no fear of the Index disturbs their freedom of speech; and their Churches are making steady, if slow progress.  Their negotiations for union with the Orthodox Churches of the East are considerably advanced.  Their relations with the Anglican communion would be most cordial if it were possible to induce Anglicans to take the slightest interest in them.  Even now Anglicans are freely admitted to communion in their Churches.  As to their protest against Rome, it cannot be silenced, as the previous movements already recorded have been silenced.  Weekly in their pulpits, and in their organs in the press, is that protest being made, and it is steadily increasing in volume and in effect.  The continual affirmation of the fact that Vaticanism is not Catholicism, but the most grotesque perversion imaginable of Catholicism, cannot possibly be without result.  But perhaps the greatest service Old Catholicism is rendering to Christendom, and the most serious injury it is inflicting on the Church of Rome, is the policy which has instituted Reunion Conferences, to which all Christians are freely invited, and to which all but Roman Catholics and extreme Protestants freely resort, and which has established the Revue Internationale de Théologie, in which all competent persons desirous of reunion are invited freely to discuss the points of difference between the various Churches.**

      [* Protestantism, some years ago, under the eloquent Gavazzi, made much progress.  But it has lost much ground since by its internal and external dissensions.]

      [** This serial admits articles in French, German, and English.]

      Englishmen may be inclined to wonder at the smallness of the results obtained so far by the Old Catholics.  Those who are well acquainted with the Roman Catholic Church will be inclined to wonder that they are not smaller.  The condition of helplessness and indifference to which the Roman Catholic system has reduced most men who outwardly conform to that Church, can scarcely be imagined by an outsider.  Lamennais, in 1837, had prophesied the birth of such a movement, and he added the following remarkable words: “It will be at first like a point one hardly perceives, a small aggregation at which possibly people will laugh.  But that point will expand, that aggregation will spread.  From all parts people will flow to it, because it will be a refuge to all who suffer.”  A French Abbé, writing on Old Catholicism in the Revue Internationale de Théologie for January 1898, speaks of the “indifference of the esprits biasés by Popery and Voltairianism.”  He adds, and he is not alone in adding, “Mais il finira par triompher.”  It is at least the only body on the Continent which retains the organisation on which Roman Catholics set such store.

      Thus a general view of the relative positions of the Roman Catholic body and other communions displays the former as gradually, though very slowly, losing ground.  Where Rome was able to make use of despotic authority to crush freedom of thought, for the time she bore down all opposition.  But since she lost the support of the civil government, her task has become immeasurably harder.  First and foremost, the control of education has slipped from her hands.*  Then the influence of the nations which lent themselves to her policy has steadily declined in Europe, while those which adopted the principles of the Reformation have as steadily advanced to supremacy.  France, the country on which her system had a hold for the shortest time, shook herself fiercely free from Roman domination at the Revolution, and has never in reality been a “ Catholic,” scarcely even a Christian nation since.  Nor is Rome able to maintain her hold, even on her own adherents.  In Germany the Lutheran Church steadily gains on her Roman antagonist.  Within the last few months thirty priests have left the Roman Catholic Church in France, including the Abbé Charbonnel and the Abbé Philippot, men of mark in their communion, and the Abbé Bourrier, the leader of the movement, has established a journal, Le Chrétien Français, to record its progress.**  Italy, by her adherence to the House of Savoy, and her determination to become once more a country, is at daggers drawn with the Vatican, and derives what national spirit she has from that very fact.  Spain and Portugal have ceased to be of any account in the councils of nations.  Their dominions have been dismembered already, and the former has just been dismembered once more.  Austria engaged in a duel with Prussia for the hegemony of Germany, and was signally worsted in the conflict.  The Vatican did its best to stir up strife between France, at that time under Roman Catholic influences, and Prussia, a Protestant kingdom, whose progress as such the Vatican feared, and was resolved if possible to prevent.  The struggle took place, France was hopelessly worsted, and William I, the Protestant King of Prussia, became Emperor of Germany.***  Thus Vatican intrigues succeeded in placing the ascendency in Germany in the very hands from which it had hoped to wrest them.  If we confine our glance to Europe, we find no Roman Catholic power holding a commanding position.  Austria seems almost on the point of dissolution.  France is rather an infidel than a Christian country.  Germany on the whole is Protestant, Russia Orthodox.  In the British Isles, the Roman Catholics, at the beginning of the century about one-fourth, are now not more than a seventh of the population.  If we endeavour to forecast the probable future of the world, three powers stand out above all others as the great powers of the future.  They are England, Russia, and the United States.  None of these profess any allegiance to the Holy See.  Nor, in spite of the able and almost superhuman efforts of the Vatican to extend, or at least to retain, its influence, do those efforts seem to produce much result.  It has always been its policy to obtain temporal supremacy, and a promising Mission came to nought in Japan, chiefly because the missionaries followed the vicious Roman custom of interfering in the civil politics of the country.  In the effort to obtain a tangible authority, instead of simply endeavouring to leaven religious thought, it has in various countries allied itself with influences the most antagonistic.  Imperialism or Legitimism in France, Socialism and Republicanism in Ireland, Carlism in Spain, have been employed to strengthen Papal influence, and to obtain supremacy in the United States, the “Catholic elector” has not scrupled to enter into close relations with the notorious Tammany Hall.  The loss of the temporal power, which the Papacy struggled so desperately to retain, has proved an advantage in carrying out this policy, because the Vatican has been able to give its undivided attention to it, unhampered by the cares and political entanglements of civil government.  Another advantage of which it avails itself to the utmost in Roman Catholic countries is the recent wide extension of the suffrage throughout Europe.  Political power is placed thereby in the hands of the most ignorant classes.  It is precisely these over which Rome has the most control.  Consequently, in Roman Catholic countries there are continual clerical reactions of a very dangerous kind.  To promote these reactions, the Vaticanists do not scruple to resort to the most unscrupulous tactics.  This very year the question of the acquisition of the Swiss railways by the State has been taken up by the Roman Catholic Church for her own purposes.  Railways promote the circulation of intelligent opinion; therefore the increase of railways in Switzerland is eminently undesirable in the eyes of the Vatican faction, and the most ignorant and backward of the Swiss cantons voted solid against the proposition, though it was supported by all the cantons, Roman Catholic or Protestant, where intelligence and manufacturing industries are to be found.  Where Protestantism is strong, the Vatican puts forward its fairest and most liberal aspect, poses as the friend of social order and the rights of capital, and endeavours to secure Conservative support against the dangerous tendencies of modern Liberalism.  In dealing with the infidel Socialist, the Roman Catholic Church makes capital of the very strongly pronounced indifferentism of many of her supporters; and a Socialist lately informed an Old Catholic candidate for the representation of Lucerne in the Swiss Federal Assembly, that he should prefer to vote for the Roman Catholic candidate, assigning as his reason that in voting for a Roman Catholic he would be voting for a man with no definite religious convictions, whereas in voting for an Old Catholic he would be doing the very opposite.  Yet where Rome has a free hand, all the old fierce intolerance breaks out, as fierce as in the days when the Church had the stake and the gibbet at her command.

      [* Theiner, the Librarian of the Vatican mentioned above, writes to Döllinger in a letter, dated April 28, 1867, “The Protestants are the sole masters in this field [education].  And this because the Jesuits were in exclusive possession of education, and crammed us only with their wretched dog Latin, so that we understood neither Latin nor German.”]

      [** The effect of the Dreyfus case has been largely to increase M. Bourrier’s following.]

      [*** M. Hoffet, in an article in the Revue Internationale de Théologie, April 1898, p. 403, remarks on the unification of German Protestantism brought about by the unification of Germany.]

      Thus, spite of all this skilful manipulation of policy to suit the particular occasion, the Vatican seems to be making very little, if any, progress.  Clerical reactions are followed by Liberal reactions.  The most remarkable of these, though by no means the only one, is the extraordinary revulsion of feeling in Canada last year in regard to the Manitoba schools question, which placed Mr. Laurier, a Liberal Roman Catholic, in power.  A serious opposition, headed by Archbishop Ireland, and supported by theologians of note, against the government of the Roman Catholic Church from the Vatican, and in favour of Home Rule, has lately broken out in the United States, and it has taxed all the resources of the Vatican, which has been compelled to give way to it.*  The consecration by the Old Catholics last year of Herr Anton Kozlowski, to preside over 30,000 members of the “Polish Independent Catholic Church,” is a further illustration of the progress in America of the movement for ecclesiastical Home Rule.  The Roman Church, in fact, is environed on all sides by difficulties and dangers, and well may Papal allocutions be full of complaints and lamentations.  She reminds us at the present moment of those conjurors who, with inimitable dexterity, balance themselves upon a pole.  We admire the dexterity; but we do not fail to perceive that a moment’s giddiness, a moment’s forgetfulness, might lead to very disastrous results.  Moreover, it is as dangerous now as it was in the days of Bishop Pecock to try to defend her system by argument.  The simple assertion of authority is felt to be far easier, and far more consistent.  Accordingly, the able writers and orators who arise from time to time to maintain the cause of Rome, are seen, one by one, to “go down into silence.”  Lamennais was condemned, was driven from the Roman communion, and refused to see a priest before he died.  Lacordaire died out of favour with the authorities of his Church.  Montalembert’s last moments were clouded by opposition and suspicion.  That splendid living orator and thinker, Père Hyacinthe, whom the age has hardly appreciated as he deserves, was in difficulties with his ecclesiastical superiors before the decrees of the Vatican Council compelled him to brave the excommunication pronounced against those who reject them.  Père Didon, another great French preacher, was ordered to retire and meditate on his rash utterances in the seclusion of his convent.  Padre Agostino di Montefeltro, who rather more than ten years ago was drawing vast crowds to the churches of Italy, and whose addresses were sold at every newspaper stall in the country, was compelled to read his recantation in the pulpit, his voice choked with tears; and from 1889 to the present moment, nothing more has been heard of him.  In short, Vaticanism at the present day must be described as an organisation which is determined, if possible, to wield unlimited power over the hearts and consciences of men, by the negation of reason and the suppression of inconvenient facts.

      [* At one time Archbishop Ireland was in disgrace, and his supporter Dr. Keane was removed from the headship of his Seminary at Washington.  Now Archbishop Ireland is in high favour, and Dr. Keane is preaching at Rome and giving general satisfaction.  At least, so says the Gazette de Lausanne of February 28, 1898.  Since this note was written, however, the Pope has condemned Archbishop Ireland and his followers.]

      In the foregoing observations it is frankly admitted that only the unfavourable side of the Roman system has been presented to the reader.  It is not for a moment denied that there is another, and a better.  It could hardly be otherwise as long as Christ on His Cross remains the prominent figure in Roman Catholic Churches.  There is an incalculable amount of the deepest self-devotion, the most ardent zeal, the most exquisite purity of heart and life, the most unbounded meekness, humility, and submission in the Roman communion; and it must be admitted that these qualities are, to a very considerable extent, a consequence of her system.  Such qualities are an untold source of moral strength, and without them she would barely have been able to outlast the century.  As Carlyle once said, Romanism unquestionably has a raison d’être, and not until she ceases to have one can she cease to exist.  It cannot be denied that for the ignorant, for women, for men of meek and submissive temperament, for men who are worn out by intellectual conflicts, the Roman Catholic Church presents herself as a haven of peace, a calm and restful authority which stills the struggles of the rebellious heart.  But certainly at the present moment it has once more become necessary to remind men that there is a reverse to the medal, another side to the picture.*  The recoil towards Rome from the vulgar Protestantism of half a century back, reinforced as it is by a spurious Liberalism and a still more spurious charity, compels us once more to call attention to the fact that there is a “seamy side” to Romanism as a religious system.  The ignorant, the commonplace, the submissive, the meek and lowly, the wearied and exhausted are not the only members of a church which numbers a Peter and a Paul, an Athanasius, a Jerome, and a Bernard, to name no other name, among her saints.  It has become necessary once more to insist, and to insist strongly, that freedom of thought, freedom of opinion, freedom of discussion, are the inalienable privileges of mankind.  If freedom, as it often does, degenerates into licence, authority not unfrequently slides into tyranny, and tyranny is everywhere a blighting curse.**  A combination of circumstances has of late tended to obscure our English apprehension of the evils of an ecclesiastical despotism, its injustice, its intrigues,*** its favouritism, its suppression, whenever possible, of inconvenient facts.  We have had our eyes too exclusively fixed on our own shortcomings, our attention too unfrequently directed to the far graver evils produced by a system the very opposite of our own.  Men forget, moreover, that Rome, in spite of her manifold shortcomings in every respect, professes to be under infallible guidance, whereas at most we do not pretend to do more than feel our way from good to better.  Many of us, appalled by the spectacle of our own intestine divisions, have come to look upon schism as the one unpardonable sin, forgetting that there is at least one thing more precious than the preservation of an external unity – and that one thing is truth.  At a moment such as this, a restatement of the main principles of the Reformation has become a paramount necessity.  At the Reformation there was no intention of questioning the fundamental truths of the Christian religion.  All that was contended for was, that those principles once admitted, the fullest liberty should be conceded of discussing and elaborating them, of applying them, and of drawing conclusions from them.  Christians are pledged neither to the opinions of Luther, Calvin, nor Zwingli, of Cranmer, Ridley and Latimer, nor, we may even venture to add, of Origen, Athanasius, or Augustine.  We venerate all these men; we believe that the Holy Ghost has spoken by each and all of them in their measure.  But the Christian conscience recognises none of them as infallible.  It attributes infallibility to nothing but the teaching of Christ, as preserved in the Scriptures, and handed down in and by the Universal Church.  It claims to be left unfettered, save by those elementary principles.  It asks to be allowed to “prove all things,” as well as to “hold fast that which is good.”  It declines to “teach for doctrines the commandments of men.”  It draws no artificial or exaggerated distinctions between the governors and the governed in Christ’s Church, believing that “the manifestation of the Spirit is given to every man to profit withal,” and that the “unction from the Holy One,” which enables us to “know all things,” is not the exclusive possession of any class or order within her pale.  Upon the fact that each one of us hath been “made to drink” into “a free Spirit” it is content to rest.  And it hopes, day by day, and step by step, in reliance on that Spirit’s indwelling in the Church, to draw ever nearer to the hour when it shall have been guided by the same Spirit “into all the truth.”

      [* These words were written before the revelations of the Dreyfus case startled all honest men, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant.  Many who would have disputed their justice when they were written would admit it now.]

      [** “Disunion comes from rebellion, and rebellion comes from tyranny, and tyranny is only the exaggeration of authority pushed to excess” (Duggan, “Steps towards Reunion,” p. 77).  “Rebellion comes from too much ruling, blind obedience makes blind subjects; blind subjects make blind rulers, and we know what happens when the blind lead the blind” (Ibid., p. 108).  Cardinal Vaughan has found it his duty to delate this work, written by a Roman Catholic priest, to the Holy See as “offensive to pious ears, temerarious, and scandalous.”]

      [*** “Cardinal Manning’s Life,” by Mr. Purcell, shows to what courses an educated Englishman could descend, as, for instance, in the Errington case, when entangled in the meshes of the Vaticanist system.]

Chapter  XIII – English Christianity Today

By the Right Rev, Alfred Barry, D.D.

      In the order of thought suggested in these Essays, “the English Christianity of today “must be considered, both in itself, and in respect of the contribution which it has to make to the present and future life of the whole Church of Christ.  It is clear that this consideration of it must take account, not merely of those essentials of Christianity, in which all Christians and all Churches are one, but of the peculiar characteristics which have been so stamped upon it in the course of its history, as to give it at this moment a certain tone and power of its own.  Now the “English Christianity of today” is the outcome of a continuous growth from the whole English Christianity of the past, but especially since the great epoch of the Reformation.  For at that time it had to take up a position of decided, though not unlimited, independence; while declaring emphatically that it “intended not to decline or vary from the congregation of Christ’s Church in things concerning the Catholic faith of Christendom, or declared in Holy Scripture and the Word of God to be necessary to salvation.”  It is the combination of the attachment to Catholic unity here claimed, with the independence of a free development of its own especial character, which has always constituted the peculiarity of English Christianity, and determined its function as a factor in the common growth of the Kingdom of Christ itself.  But our own age has brought out that function with a new clearness and vividness, because (as will be noticed more fully hereafter) it is a period of expansion of that Christianity, both in fact and in idea, losing insularity in the conception and realization of a worldwide mission.

      I ought to say at the outset that, in this attempt to estimate it, I must be in the main content to refer to English Christianity as it is represented in the Church of England.  I do so, not only with a view to limit a subject of formidable extent, and to consider it in a field of which we Churchmen have the fullest knowledge, but also, because – while I do not for a moment ignore the strength and vitality of Nonconformist Christianity, in England itself and (still more) among the English-speaking race in other parts of the world – I cannot but see that the Church of England, as the old National Church, is necessarily most truly representative of the characteristics of English Christianity, as a whole – not only in the present, but in the past – not in some classes, but in all classes of our people.  It is, of course, itself affected by the reflex action upon it of other religious Communions – each of which tends to emphasize, prominently, sometimes almost exclusively, some one element of its own complex life.  But it maintains still the comprehensiveness of its representative character.  Although the old condition of things has passed away, in which the Church was looked upon as co-extensive with the nation – as in fact the nation itself in its spiritual life – it has left behind this representative character as an inheritance from the past.  Moreover, the Church of England by its very nature stands, not only as the Nonconformist Communions stand, for Christian truth, but for Christian unity, which Nonconformity, as such, disregards, though it is remarkable that some Nonconformist Communions are now beginning to make tentative approaches to it.  If therefore English Christianity, as such, is to have any collective mission of service to the whole Church of Christ, it seems overwhelmingly probable, if not absolutely certain, that it will have to discharge that mission mainly through the Church of England.

      I.  Now it is clear that the peculiar character of our English Christianity is determined by the very fact that it is English – that it is indeed the leading factor in the remarkable function, which undoubtedly belongs to the English-speaking race, in regard to the progress of humanity.  For its main principle – distinctly asserted at the Reformation, but not as a new thing – is the realization in the spiritual sphere of what has been the distinguishing feature of the whole national life of England.  This is unquestionably the resolute maintenance of a harmony of individuality with unity, of freedom with authority – a harmony necessarily difficult and imperfect, involving many irregularities and anomalies, which are the scorn of the adherents of narrower systems, but accordant with our human nature, which is at once individual and social, and with the Divine Government, which, Almighty as it is, nevertheless works upon men, and through men, as free.  It is an ideal, which has been to a great extent realized in the lower spheres of English experience.  There its realization has, first, created a splendid national life, ruled by a free loyalty, which is incomprehensible to the iron systems of despotism, and lasting on in an unbroken continuity, while revolution has convulsed them, or oppression has brought with it decay of national strength.  It has, next, been the chief secret of that extraordinary spread of the dominion and influence of the English-speaking race, which is acknowledged as being in some sense unique in the history of the world.  Accordingly it has been, as indeed it was bound to be, the leading characteristic of the English Christianity, which lies at the heart of English character and English influence.  Even under the Papal autocracy it asserted itself vigorously, although perhaps illogically so long as that autocracy was acknowledged, mainly in respect of the independence of the National Church, but in some degree in respect of individual freedom of thought and faith.  In the sixteenth century that assertion in both its elements, but especially the latter, was made more thorough and consistent.  On it depends the true meaning of the common phrase, sometimes discredited, but undoubtedly true, that the Church of England is at once “Catholic and Protestant.”  For Protestantism, if we pass beyond its merely negative sense of repudiation of Papal authority and doctrines distinctively Romish, is really religious individuality; while Catholicity involves the right subordination of this individuality to the authority of the whole body.  But this harmony of the two ideas was a natural growth, not an artificial balance of opposites.  There can be no greater error than to suppose, as men constantly appear to suppose, that the course of the English Reformation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, or of the subsequent history of the English Church, was determined by a deliberate attempt to secure this harmony artificially, and to choose with that view what has been called (from an extension of a statement in the Preface to our Prayer Book, which refers only to the matter of Revision), the Via Media of balance between opposite extremes.  The leading idea of our Reformers was undoubtedly the ascertainment and revival in all essentials of primitive truth, as is shown by the emphatic appeal to the sufficiency and supremacy of Holy Scripture, as the articulus stantis aut cadentis ecclesiae.  A true way is likely enough to be a middle way; for historically errors are apt to diverge on either hand.  But it is important to understand that the ideal of the Church of England is the Via Media quia vera, and not the Via vera quia Media: for there is a worldwide difference between the comprehensiveness which is the natural result of the one, and the compromise which must attach to the other.  Nor should we fail to notice that, as usual in our English experience, the approach to that ideal has been rather a natural and gradual advance, than the result of any deliberate scheme of thought and action.  For the object contemplated has always been the modification and reformation of the old, so far, and only so far, as was necessary, rather than the striking out of a system absolutely new.  In this respect the Christianity of the Church of England stood out in the sixteenth century in obvious distinction from Continental Protestantism, especially in the logical completeness of the Calvinistic system, by which the Puritan party tried in vain to mould it.  In this it still stands distinct from the Christianity of other reformed Communions at home and abroad.  The distinction involved, and still involves, some penalty of isolation.  But it points to that in which lie the real strength of the Church of England, and her hope of larger service to Christendom.

      In all that is here said I shall take it for granted that this ideal will be substantially preserved.  It is, indeed, natural, perhaps inevitable, that there should have been at different times tendencies within the Church of England itself to destroy or impair this characteristic position, by so exaggerating one or other of the elements of this harmony, as practically to ignore the harmony itself.  In past times this tendency has been perhaps mainly what is commonly called “ultra-Protestant,” recognising only the sacredness of individual Christianity, ignoring the equal sacredness of the collective life of the Church itself, and ascribing whatever authority and unity it has to its Establishment by the State.  At the present moment what calls itself the “Catholic Revival” adopts the opposite extreme, tending to overbear individual freedom and independence, as far as possible, by appeal to ecclesiastical, which is virtually clerical authority, and accordingly, as it seems, desiring to revert, in respect both of worship and Church government, to that condition of things which the Reformation swept away.  These tendencies manifest themselves in the formation of opposite schools of thought in the Church, to which they give a distinctive colour, and which stand in pronounced and often vehement antagonism.  But the seriousness of these divisions, unhappy as they are, is apt to be exaggerated, both within the Church, and still more beyond her pale.  They do not touch the chief fundamentals of the faith; they do not enlist in their conflict the mass of the Church; their sound is far greater than their strength; what her enemies call “a city of confusion” is really “a city that hath the foundations.”  For neither of these antagonistic tendencies has ever prevailed, or is likely to prevail, against the comprehensive ideal of the Church of England.  There were times, as in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when success may have appeared to be within the reach of the former; but the appearance was falsified by the event.  The latter, however, loudly and earnestly urged, is simply an anachronism; its prevalence is out of the question; it is more likely to provoke a dangerous and revolutionary reaction in the opposite direction.  The great body of the Church goes on quietly in loyalty to its old traditions – perhaps over quietly; for it allows the extremes, vehemently and noisily self-assertive, to assume an apparent importance, far beyond their intrinsic strength.

      II.  Now this harmony of individuality and unity is not a matter of theory, nor does it depend on abstract declarations, which have little effect on the great mass of men.  It is brought home practically to all in the doctrine of the Word and the Sacraments, and so in the daily life and worship of the Church.

      The appeal to Holy Scripture, as the one ultimate standard of faith, is a leading characteristic of all English Christianity.  But it is put forth with a singular clearness and force in the Church of England.  Probably no Church in Christendom has enunciated it more decisively; few, if any, have taken so much pains to make it effective, by providing that Holy Scripture shall be read through and through in the public Service.  Of course, to take the Bible literally, as “the Bible alone,” without illustration and interpretation from the thought and life of the Church in all ages, and to suppose that no ordinance of the Church can have authority, which is not expressly enjoined in Holy Scripture, is not to take the Bible as God gave it.  For it was certainly given under His Providence to a Church, and given in close connection with its continuous life.  The Old Testament grew up through the centuries within the Covenant of Israel; it cannot be fully understood except in connection with the history of the covenanted people.  The New Testament grew up through the first century of our era, in a Church, which had actually been founded in the whole Roman Empire before the New Testament itself was complete; and it takes the existence and authority of that Church for granted in every page.  The Church of England, true, as usual, to history, commits no such error; she accepts the Creeds of the Catholic Church, as the interpreters of Scriptural truth, in its essence and in the right proportion of its various elements; she recognises that the Church, and even “each particular or national Church,” “has an authority to decree rites and ceremonies,” which is binding on the individual conscience, provided that nothing be decreed contrary to Holy Scripture; “as a witness and keeper of Holy Writ,” she claims “authority” – a real, although not absolute or infallible, authority – “in controversies of faith.”  But that authority is of interpretation, not of addition; no tradition of the Church is to be coordinated with Scripture, and regarded pari pietatis affectu et reverentia.  Nothing is allowed to set aside, or explain away, the free appeal to Holy Scripture as supreme; nothing accordingly to stand between it and the individual mind and conscience of the believer.

      Now this appeal to an open Bible, freely circulated and freely read, is certainly the charter of individuality in the Church.  For the Bible speaks directly to the individual, as the Word of God in Christ.  It is, indeed, ministered to us by the Church, and, in fact, received by us generally through that ministration.  But it can speak, and does speak, independently, as “living and powerful,” to each soul alone, face to face with God, with no mediation except the mediation of the Lord Jesus Christ; and by it ultimately, as the supreme standard of faith, all teaching must be judged and tested in each man’s conscience.  The appeal to it is, therefore, the safeguard in the Church of individual freedom and individual responsibility.

      Yet at the same time it clearly supplies the basis of the only Christian unity, which is possible in days of growing spiritual activity and spiritual freedom – a unity comprehensive of variety, because dependent on principle, rather than formal rule and law.  That unity can be seen largely realized even now in our English Christianity, in spite of the divisions and controversies which are its bane.  Wherever Holy Scripture is accepted as a Divine rule of faith, there is a striking agreement in the great body of English Christians on the fundamental verities of the faith, as expressed, for example, in the Apostles’ Creed.  For Holy Scripture, as we see more clearly every day, is a power, “not of the letter, but of the Spirit,” in its infinite variety appealing to the whole man in mind and heart and spirit, and yet through all that variety essentially one.  As simply a record, historical and spiritual, of the dispensation of God to humanity, it centres in the Word and Person of the Lord Jesus Christ.  Up to Him all leads which goes before, from Him all which follows is derived.  Hence it has to be taken as a whole, which cannot be understood piecemeal, as though in each text or book the perfect truth was enshrined.  So taken it founds our faith on the central reality – “learning Christ, and being taught of Christ” – and on this basis there must be a resting place for all who come to Him as “having the words of eternal life.”

      The Church of England, moreover, as we know, has laid down as authoritative no theory as to the inspiration of that Holy Scripture.  That it is a true and all-sufficient revelation of God in Christ, “containing all things necessary to salvation” – this, indeed, is most unequivocally asserted; but beyond this, which alone is absolutely needful, the declaration does not go.  It implies, no doubt, a belief in a special and unique inspiration of the writers of Holy Scripture, enabling them to speak in the name of God the Gospel of Christ, in words of truth, which shall endure for ever, and determine the faith of all mankind.  But what that inspiration is, how it has been given, how much it implies, how it is related to the human personality of him who receives it and to the spirit of his age – this is nowhere determined.  On all these points the thoughtful mind must and will speculate; on all these has always been, among sincere believers, great variety of opinion.  But on the determination of them the Church does not venture: for it is clearly a secret of the Spirit of God Himself.

      Accordingly, in the study of Holy Scripture, our English Christianity leaves free scope for the Biblical criticism, which examines these very points; and gives her members perfect liberty to consider it in each case on its own merits, provided always – and the proviso is important – that the great fundamental principle, so emphatically asserted, shall neither be denied nor explained away.  In this generation it is all but universally acknowledged that, taken as a whole, such criticism has given a more living interest and force to Holy Scripture, and taught us better to understand it in all the stages of its development as a whole.  No doubt the criticism itself, especially the confident a priori criticism, needs to be criticized, and corrected by appeal to evidences of a different kind; and experience, in regard especially to the New Testament, has shown us how, so treated, it is sure to be reduced to its right limits of authority.  But it is to such correction, not to suppression or denunciation, that the Church of England is bound by her traditions to trust.

      Nor is her position different in relation to the discoveries of physical or historical science, which crowd upon us every day.  All who believe in God must suppose that the book of Nature and the book of Humanity are in a true sense books of God, revealing Him in His almighty power, His perfect wisdom, His transcendent righteousness and love.  If, therefore, the Church of England appeals to Holy Scripture as the supreme revelation of Him, she is bound to welcome all these lower revelations as necessarily harmonizing with it, although incapable of rising to the higher mysteries of the Gospel, which this supreme revelation has made to be the treasure of all humanity.  Their discoveries may affect, and have affected, our interpretations of Holy Scripture, where it touches upon the lower spheres.  But the central spiritual truth, and its inherent spiritual power, they cannot touch.  Nay, as they are more philosophically considered, and pretensions put forth in their name are more carefully scrutinized, there can be no doubt that, like the Biblical criticism to which I have already referred, they have already thrown the light of illustration and analogy on many of the most important elements of the Christian faith.  And this attitude of what may be called a friendly and gracious independence towards all scientific or historical discovery is of infinite importance; on it depends not only the freedom of individual thought and faith within the pale of the Church, but also the accordance of her teaching with human progress, and the consequent prospect of her ability to direct and mould it in the future, as in the past.

      Once more – and this vitally affects its fitness for the vast opportunity of missionary work, which has been given us under the Providence of God – our English Christianity is now learning to assume a corresponding attitude towards the religions of the world.  We see the infinite significance of the fact, that in all races of the earth religion in some form – the recognition, that is, of a Superhuman Power creating, ruling, sustaining the world and man – is in possession of the whole field of human thought.  Crude, often grotesque, in the barbarian races – elaborate, profound, philosophical in advanced civilizations – everywhere it manifests itself as a development of an universal instinct implanted in our human nature by its Creator.  As such, it must always have an essential sacredness, in spite of all perversions, hesitations, superstitions.  Our English Christianity is more and more realizing that sacredness, and beginning to reproduce, with the advantage of larger knowledge and experience, the attitude of the old Alexandrian School of Theology towards the heathenism of earlier days.  For, after all, this is but to follow the teaching of St. Paul at Athens.  It is to acknowledge, on the one hand, that all these religions are embodiments of that “feeling after God,” which is an element of the supreme purpose, for which “He made of one blood all the nations of the earth,” and that whatever is true in them is a divine revelation, through which they “find Him,” or rather “are found of Him.”  It is to put forth, on the other, with reverent and enthusiastic confidence, the claim of our Christianity to declare in Christ the God who, to their “ignorant worship,” is “a God unknown,” though not unfelt, and in this revelation, of which they are but “broken lights,” to dispel all mists of doubt, and all clouds of error and superstition.  The deeper study of the religions of the world, in the light of our Christianity, and especially the comparison of their sacred books with the transcendent power of Holy Scripture, have certainly taught us to hold firmly both these elements of the Apostolic teaching, and to hold them moreover in their right proportion.

      All these things are results of the supreme appeal to Holy Scripture, bringing out, first the freedom of religious individuality, and then through it the unity of comprehensiveness.

      The same result seems to follow, but in the reverse order, from the coordination of the Sacraments of the Gospel with the Word.

      Primarily it is clear that the Sacraments are witnesses and expressions of Church unity.  For they cannot be laid hold of by each man for himself; they need the ministration of the Church.  By the first, men “are grafted into the body of Christ’s Church”; by the second, they are perfected in the membership thus begun.  As Hooker expresses it in well-known words: “The saving grace, which Christ originally is, or hath, for the good of His whole Church, the same by sacraments He severally deriveth to each member thereof.”  The Church of England has brought out in her Services, with unmistakable emphasis, the mysterious reality of the Sacraments, as Christ ordained them in His Church for ever.  In relation to that second great Sacrament, which has unhappily been the battlefield of religious controversy, she has in her Service gone back through the ancient Liturgies to what we may well hold to be the substance of an Apostolic original.  This “sacramental teaching” is the needful and most unequivocal witness to the corporate life and unity in Christ of the Church as a whole.  By pure religious individualism it is accordingly apt to be ignored or depreciated.  In an age like our own – when pure individualism in any form is felt to be insufficient to solve human problems, and when what may be called in the most general sense “socializing” principles are increasingly maintained and reverenced – it is most natural that this sacramental teaching of our Prayer Book, and the consciousness which it implies of the sacredness of the Communion of Saints, and its authority over individual life, should have been brought out, in word and in practice, with increased emphasis, and should, as usual, have sometimes tended by reaction to exaggeration.  This movement of thought (be it noted) is traceable in different degrees in other religious Communions than our own.  But in the steadfast and thoughtful maintenance of it by our own Church, is one main secret of her power of adaptation to the needs of humanity, especially in these later days.

      At the same time it will be noticed that in her sacramental teaching, individuality is doubly guarded.

      First, the Church has deliberately abstained from all attempts to dogmatize on the method and character of the mystery of the Sacraments, and has absolutely protested against rationalizing it (so to speak) in either direction, Roman or Zwinglian.  On this matter individual opinion and faith are left free, with room for large variety of development.  What was said by the same theologian, already quoted, as to the second great Sacrament, in an age of bold speculation and vehement controversy, expresses most truly the mind of the Church of England on the whole subject.  There are sufficient grounds of universal agreement, on which all may rest.  Beyond this lie varieties of theory, more or less speculative, more or less inclined to define the indefinable.  It is well for her children to be of the number, not “of those who, because they enjoyed not, disputed, but of those who disputed not, because they enjoyed.”  All that is asked of them is to acknowledge the reality of the Sacraments as in the New Testament sense a “mystery,” a secret (that is) of God’s dispensation, revealed, so far as it can be revealed, by our Lord Jesus Christ.

      Next, while emphatically witnessing to the reality of the Sacraments in themselves, the Church has, with at least equal emphasis, declared again and again that it can be made effectively real to each soul only through individual faith, drawing out, as in the Gospel miracle, the “virtue,” which is in the Presence of Christ – in infancy a potential faith of promise, to be unfolded hereafter, in mature age a faith of actual energy.  That which is spiritual can only be spiritually received.  In the clear conception of this truth is obviously the safeguard against superstition properly so-called; but in it is also implied the assertion of individuality, as resting all access to God on the secret grace of the Holy Spirit.  When in 1559 the words of Administration in the Holy Communion were brought to their present form, dwelling in benediction on the reality of the Sacramental gift, and in exhortation on the conditionality of reception, the harmony of the two ideas was expressed with a clearness which leaves nothing to be desired.

      III.  It should be added that on this same harmony depends what is again of infinite importance, the true conception of the relation of the clergy and laity in the Church.

      The Ministry of the Church is the chief organ of expression of its corporate life.  It exists (as its very name implies) for the ministration both of the Word and of the Sacraments to the whole body of the Church.  That it has so existed from the beginning, as an integral element in the constitution of the Church, and that those who are set apart for it have always been regarded, not as mere delegates of the congregation, but as having a mission from Christ Himself, through the chief of His existing ministers from the Apostles downwards – this is a matter of unquestionable historical fact.  On that historical fact, not only as to the ministry in general, but even as to the three Orders of the ministry, the Church of England takes an unhesitating stand.  Her Ordination service would be unmeaning, and worse than unmeaning, except on this ground; and it draws the inevitable inference, that continuity of ministerial charge implies a continuity of ministerial blessing from Christ Himself – an inference boldly expressed in the repetition of the words of our Lord’s own charge to His Apostles.  It is well: for without this acknowledgment of the sacredness of the ministry, no Church can well have an authoritative and effective pastoral ministration, a firm organisation, and a real sense of corporate unity.  No society can hold together without the recognition of some authority, having in some sense a Divine sanction, although not claiming, in virtue of that sanction, an absolute and irresponsible power.  Such an authority the Church finds in a ministry, not dependent on the will of the congregation, but holding a commission from the Lord Himself.  In keeping firmly to the acknowledgment of this character in the ministry, the Church of England places herself in indissoluble connection with the Church Catholic of the past and of the present.

      On the other hand, the grasp of the principle of Individuality is the safeguard of the rights of the lay members of the Church; for it implies for every member of Christ individually a large measure of religious liberty, both in thought and in action; it asserts for him what has been called “the priesthood of the laity,” – the freedom (that is) of access to God in Christ, without absolute necessity of any intervention by the ministration of the Church; it claims for him an indefeasible right to all Church ordinances, provided that he has the necessary spiritual conditions of repentance and faith.  In all these points the position of the Church of England stands in marked contrast with the strongly compacted system of priestly authority in the Church of Rome, as it once ruled, although with some restriction, in England, and as it now asserts itself more absolutely than ever in Churches under the Roman obedience.  This freedom is so deeply engrained in our whole conception of Christian life, that any attempt to destroy or even impair it must prove, as I have said, to be a pure anachronism, and accordingly a disastrous failure.  For it should be noted that in the extreme simplicity of the terms of entrance on lay membership – the acceptance of Holy Baptism and of the Apostles’ Creed, which grew up freely in the West out of the simple Baptismal profession; in the large liberty of the actual membership, and in the free access, with due spiritual preparation, to the fullness of that membership in the Holy Communion, we find the expression of that comprehensiveness of the Church of England on a broad Scriptural basis, of which I have already spoken.  It is a comprehensiveness which is often made her reproach, and which, undoubtedly, involves some loss of wholesome discipline, some risk of licence, division, perplexity, but which is nevertheless the secret of her vitality, and of the unequalled influence which she exercises over English life and thought.  Liberty may be perverted to licence through abeyance of discipline; but it is still the true condition of humanity and the mainspring of its progress.  Nor is this all.  For with individual liberty, as experience in other relations of life shows us, is always associated some claim of a share in the collective self-government of the Church itself, in respect of the legislative, judicial, and executive functions which such self-government implies; and this claim must be made practically effective through the representative institutions, which alone are capable of reconciling freedom with unity.  All these rights of the laity belong to the traditions of our Church; all were distinctly reasserted in the whole action of the Reformation.  The individual rights are recognised still to the full.  The right to a coordination in government of laity with clergy is acknowledged, as a matter of course, in all other branches of the Anglican Communion.  If it has fallen into abeyance in England itself – in consequence not so much of Establishment as of the abuses of Establishment – no one can doubt that we are feeling our way towards it in our tentative English fashion; that in some way the self-government of the whole body must be attained; and that, when it is attained, the two Orders can work in it together, without confusion and conflict, because without trenching on each other’s rights.

      Such, as it seems to me, is the leading characteristic principle of English Christianity as represented in the National Church, which is, I believe, in reality, as well as in theory, the truest organ of expression of the Christianity of the nation as a whole.  But in working out this principle, which is (as I have said) characteristically English in the civil as well as in the ecclesiastical sphere, against the irregularities and inconsistencies of which Englishmen are tolerant even to excess, there can be no doubt that our Church suffers greatly from the want of that which is the very life of the nation – the power through self-government of self-reformation and self-adaptation, throwing off what is virtually obsolete, adopting what is required by new needs and opportunities.  The result of this want is a mixture of constitutional immobility with developments of a strong individual licence.  Constitutionally we can change little or nothing.  In times of crisis and difficulty we are obliged to rally round a Prayer Book, even in its present form more than two hundred years old; our clergy still sign Articles intended for the needs, and tinctured by the theology, of the sixteenth century.  Church reform and Church discipline can seldom be carried out without the consent of a Parliament wholly different in character from the Parliament of the Reformation period, and in many cases cannot be carried out at all.  The lay members of the Church as such have no constitutional means of expressing their opinion on Church policy or doctrine.  Practically there is, almost of necessity, much of arbitrary irregularity, individual and congregational; much of irresponsible agitation and dictation through voluntary societies and Church newspapers; much unwillingness to submit to constitutional authority, and a practical impossibility of appeal in the last resort to Church law through our existing Courts.  For variation from appointed order there is but one means of authorization in that Episcopal licence, which in itself might be questioned in strict law: in default of legal enforcement, appeal can only be made to Episcopal decisions, which have to rely simply on moral authority, and have no remedy against willful disobedience.  That, in spite of all these drawbacks, the Church is advancing, and that rapidly, in power and efficiency, is happily true.  But it is also true that the present position is fraught with difficulty and danger; and the only remedy seems to lie in the attainment or restoration of self-government of the whole body.  That this is not inconsistent with Establishment in fact, the experience of the Church of Scotland shows.  Nay, we may see clearly that, if exercised, as it must be exercised, under recognition of the power of Parliament to prevent its infringing on the rights of individual citizens, or militating against the welfare of the whole community, it must tend to the efficiency of the Church in that service to the higher life of the people, which is the object of Establishment, and be accordingly for the interests of the nation as well as of the Church.  Certainly it seems to be the one thing most needful for the full vitality and progress of English Christianity, as represented in the National Church.

      IV.  It presses itself with a special urgency on our attention at this moment, because in the Church of England the present century has been, as I have already said, a most remarkable era of expansion.  This expansion is the fruit of the revivals which have passed over it, and thrilled through its whole life during the last hundred years; and these – realizing vividly, as all true revivals must do, the Headship of Christ – seem to have corresponded generally to the evolution of the idea of that Headship, which we trace in the New Testament.  The strong Evangelical revival of personal Christianity early in the century drew its inspiration from the truth on which St. Paul dwelt to the Corinthians (1 Cor. xi. 3), that “Christ is the Head of every man” in his own distinct individuality.  The great High-Church movement which followed – avowedly not to supersede, but to supplement it—was simply a realization, in view of the continuity of truth and life in the Church as a whole, of the later utter­ance of the same Apostle to the Ephesians (Eph. i. 22), that “Christ is the Head over all things to the Church, which is His body.”  The broader and larger conception of our Christianity, which is now developing itself – not least among the adherents of the High-Church movement – rather seems to take up the teaching of the Epistles to the Ephesians and Colossians on the “gathering up under one head” all humanity and all created being in Christ (Eph. i. 10; Col. i. 16–18), claiming for Him all knowledge and life, and seeing in His Gospel the interpretation of both.  The result has been to bring out, as in the ancient Creeds, the transcendent significance of the Incarnation; as, on the one hand, implying the completion of its purpose for the salvation of the world from the guilt and bondage of sin, through the Atonement, the Resurrection, the Ascension; as, on the other hand, throwing back its light on the pre-existence of the Son of God, and so on the true nature of the Godhead, and showing itself, as in the Divine counsels “ordained from the foundation of the world” – to be the consummation of the creation of humanity in that image of God, which is defaced but not destroyed by the sin of the present, and is to be restored perfectly in the future.  It preaches “Christ crucified,” deeply conscious of the burden of sin, with its fruits of suffering and death, under which we can see that all humanity groans, and hailing in Him the Saviour, who is the propitiation for our sins.  But it preaches also Christ the Eternal “Word of God,” incarnate in our humanity, to regenerate it in Himself, and to give us the capacity of the new life here and hereafter.  It is clear that the vivid consciousness of this supreme truth must determine the conception of the mission of the Church to humanity, and of humanity itself.

      These three movements of revival, showing themselves at first in the formation of schools and parties in the Church, and resulting accordingly in much controversy and conflict, because each was apt to assume itself to be all in all, are now undoubtedly being fused together, stirring the life of the whole body, and giving it much enlargement of idea and operation, and a wider conception of its own mission to the world.  For just in proportion as, under different aspects, they realize the One Headship, men come to see that it is greater than their own conception of it, and to discern the truth contained in the views taken of it by others.  Exaggeration and extravagance there are still, and always will be, in those who are incapable of this discernment.  But, in great degree, it is impressing itself on the great body of the Church, and in this lies much of the hope of the future.

      This expansion of idea is closely connected, both in cause and effect, with that extraordinary outward expansion of the Church (corresponding to the general “Expansion of England”), which has been the glory of this century, and especially of the last fifty or sixty years.  Few things are more remarkable in Church history than the development of the Church of England – once described, somewhat scornfully, by Macaulay as an institution “as purely local” to England, “as the Court of Common Pleas” – once supposed by many to derive its unity and authority simply from that recognition and support of it by the State, which we call “Establishment,” and to which, of course, this purely local character does attach – into a great “Anglican Communion,” having a worldwide extension and an independent life.  That development, moreover, although solid enough, has been marvellously rapid.  It belongs almost entirely to our own age; for it is little more than a hundred years since the first creation of an English Episcopate abroad, marking the first planting of an independent and self-governed Branch of our Church, beyond the narrow limits of our own shores.  Even when this beginning had been made, the progress was for many years slow.  At the opening of the present reign there were but seven of such bishoprics in the whole area of the British Empire, where now there are more than eighty, to say nothing of nearly the same number in the Sister Church in America.  Now we see everywhere vigorous and self-governing branches of the Church, still preserving a close unity with the Mother Church at home.  And this expansion brings with it a great variety of development.  The Sister Church in the United States, and the Churches of the three great groups of our Colonies, in North America and the West Indies, in Australasia, and in South Africa, are, as might have been expected, virtual reproductions in the English-speaking race, with independent variations and adaptations to various needs, of the old Church of England itself, only without the national recognition of Establishment, and with a more unfettered freedom.  But the growth of our Church has extended itself far beyond our own race, partly by direct missionary impulse from England, partly by corresponding missionary energy in the sister or daughter Churches.  In face alike of the ancient religions and civilisations of Asia, and of the comparative barbarism of Africa or Polynesia, new daughter Churches are springing up, which we rightly call “native Churches,” because, while they have been planted and watered by our English hands, they must gradually have a large independence of development, on lines of their own, and by their own ministry.  United with us in the essentials of Christian truth and Catholic order, they are not by any means to reproduce the formal Anglican constitution, which is here a natural growth, but which would be artificial and unreal for races and conditions of life wholly unlike our own.  The task of this varied and almost unbounded expansion has been a glorious, but a formidable task.  We cannot say that it has been adequately carried out, or that the Church of England has fully maintained, even in the “Greater Britain,” the spiritual leadership, which ought to be hers in English Christianity.  But still the expansion has been great already; and the undoubted awakening of a stronger missionary spirit gives promise of a more rapid progress in the next fifty years.  The growth of the Lambeth Conference, which is really, though not formally, a General Anglican Council, is a visible token of that expansion.  Fifty years ago it would have been thought impossible.  Even at its first conception, it was received with hesitation and division of opinion.  Now it has established itself as an indispensable part of our collective Church life – a manifestation to ourselves and to all men of emergence from insularity to a worldwide extension – an object lesson on the combination of spiritual unity with freedom and variety.

      V.  For, as has been seen, this visible expansion “in length and breadth” is, as usual, closely connected with expansion “in depth and height.”  It bids the Church go down deep to the ultimate foundation in Christ; it bids it rise to higher conceptions and hopes of its own mission for Him.

      Accordingly it has, on the one hand, forced upon us the all-important distinction between fundamentals, on which all must be at one, and the secondary development of idea and practice, in which variety according to various needs is a condition of vitality.  Unity cannot any longer be identified, as perhaps in our Church it was too apt to be identified, with uniformity.  The claim of freedom of variation within the necessary limits, put forward by our Church for herself in the sixteenth century, is seen to have a wide application.  In estimating, moreover, the essentials of faith and the condition of communion, the tendency of our time is undoubtedly towards simplicity – not the simplicity of vagueness and superficiality, but the simplicity of the deepest and most definite thought.  If a Church is to include all nations and characters, uniting dominant and subject races in one brotherhood, reviving old civilisations and civilizing barbarism, it is obvious that it must rest simply on the one foundation of “Christ as all in all.”

      On the other hand, this expansion has necessarily inspired higher and larger conceptions of what is the mission of English Christianity to the world.  It is not to be content with isolation for itself, still less to glory in it as a mark of purity and superiority.  A worldwide extension must carry with it an universal mission.  Nor is it to acquiesce, contentedly or despondently, in the present divisions which splinter up Christianity generally, and are among the chief hindrances to that extension of the Church of Christ over the whole world, of which the title “Catholic” is a claim and a promise.  Serious thinkers, even beyond her pale, have ascribed to the Church of England the capacity, and therefore the duty, of a “ministry of reconciliation.”  Certainly nothing is more remarkable in the recent proceedings of the Lambeth Conferences than the earnest desire to realize that idea – not only in regard to these divisions in our English Christianity itself, which are its shame and hindrance, but in relation to the divided Churches of Christendom.  On every side there is a reaching out towards reunion.  In one direction only is it barred, because in that direction a wholly different ideal of Church unity is inflexibly presented, and submission to it imperiously demanded.  The Roman ideal is a despotic spiritual empire over all Christendom, driven by the very nature of its pretensions to claim for its head a superhuman authority and infallibility.  The ideal of the Anglican Communion is a free federation of Churches, under the sole headship of Christ Himself, each having its own characteristics and variety of development, but all having communion with one another in Him.  The two are so absolutely incompatible, that union between those who hold to them is practically impossible.  But no one who reads the history of the past, or studies the nature and progress of humanity, will doubt with which of these two ideals lies the greater hope of the future.

      The basis of such federation, even more truly than the basis of Anglicanism, must be a basis simple and deep.  For the reunion of English Christianity itself, the Lambeth Conference laid down as a basis of faith, only the acknowledgment of Holy Scripture as the ultimate standard of truth; the acceptance of the two Creeds, substantially OEcumenical Creeds, of the West and the East; the preservation of the two great Sacraments as ordained by Christ Himself; and as a basis of Government, “the historic Episcopate” – that is, the Episcopate as a great, all but universal, fact, without insistence on any theory of its origin and its authority – taking for granted, moreover, that constitution of Synodical Government, which limits Episcopal autocracy, and unites all, clergy and laity alike, in the legislation of the Church.  Of these the first three are simply the embodiment of the essence of Christianity as such.  On the last, although it stands on a wholly different footing, yet certainly, if we consider Christendom as a whole, depends the only chance of anything like visible unity between the Churches of the world at large.  After all, the non-Episcopal Christianity of the world is but a fragment, although a considerable and important fragment; and for it the conditions of federation might be simpler than even the conditions of reunion.  How far this ideal of our Anglican Christianity is from any hope of realization is only too obvious.  But to have it before us, if it be indeed a true ideal, must exercise an infinitely important influence, not only on the Church policy of the future, but on the tone and character of our Church in the present.

      VI.  To the progress of English Christianity, in itself and in its service to the whole Church of Christ along the lines here indicated, there are two main hindrances.  Looking to English Christianity as a whole, there is the disintegration and confusion caused by our religious divisions – felt only too keenly at home, but felt even more painfully in the fields of its expansion.  For divisions, in spite of the sincerest professions, are but too apt to become antagonisms: they not only fritter away our spiritual strength, but waste it by friction.  Moreover, they must tend to impair the true proportion of the faith.  Each sect comes into existence in order to emphasize some one element of Christian doctrine or order.  It can hardly fail to make this emphasis disproportionate; for unhappily under these conditions the lesser points of our differences are allowed to obscure the greater points of our universal agreement.  No doubt there is often, perhaps generally, some happy forgetfulness of these divisions in face of the conflict against heathenism and sin.  But it is not absolute and universal.  The witness of our English Christianity is therefore confused and discredited, both to the Church and to the world.  If only these divisions could be, wholly or partially, removed – even if the bitterness of conflict and estrangement could be mitigated – no one can doubt that the effectiveness of that witness would be multiplied tenfold.  What human probability there is of this, who can tell?  But at least it is right that the Church of England, from which the secessions of these divided bodies have taken place, – on grounds, moreover, which in many cases have been almost entirely removed – should earnestly strive against such division in prayer, and reiterate invitation to consider and promote some measure of reunion.

      Looking to the Church of England itself, we find unfortunately some reproduction within her own pale of these religious divisions – always undermining her unity and effectiveness of power – from time to time breaking out into virulence of conflict, and threatening actual disruption.  But over and above these, and perhaps not unconnected with them, there is a still greater hindrance, in her undoubted difficulty of origination, or even adaptation, to meet new needs, and rise to new opportunities, due mainly to that loss of self-government, to which I have already referred.  Perhaps in any case a certain over-conservatism, afraid of bold ventures, distrustful of new enthusiasms, averse to great schemes of advance, might be among her characteristics.  But the present conditions almost force that over-conservatism upon the Church: for the want of constitutional means of right innovation makes it the best safeguard against vagary and error, against internal division and conflict.  Conservative of the great simple essentials of faith and order, she has always been, and I trust always will be.  But if she is to fulfill her obvious mission of expansion, and her possible ministry of reconciliation, at home and abroad, she must unite with this conservatism of the old some greater elasticity in her methods of thought and action, with a view to the new developments to which she is and will be called.  Had this been hers in the past, she might have been spared some of the secessions, which have withdrawn from her so much of the vital Christianity of England.  Till it is made possible to her now, it is certain that her advance must be greatly hampered, and her witness for her characteristic principles must lose the freshness of right adaptation to the present.

      Still, in spite of these hindrances, it is hard to doubt that there is a great future for English Christianity in general, and especially for it as represented in the Church of England.  The advance towards it will, no doubt, bring out prominently the characteristics of that general advance of English power and influence, of which it is a chief determining and inspiring element.  Its expansion will have in it much of that natural and half-unconscious growth which Sir John Seeley has traced in the general “Expansion of England.”  It will probably be tentative, partial, gradual, sometimes almost involuntary: determined at each moment by the force of practical needs and opportunities, rather than by great preconceived schemes of policy; bolder, therefore, in action than in origination, and liable to friction, irregularity, vicissitude; always more careful to recognise truths and principles which appear to be genuine, than to weld them together into logical consistency; inclined accordingly, almost to excess, to leave opinions to develop themselves freely, and to trust, in case of conflict, to natural (or supernatural) selection for “the survival of the fittest.”  But, if it be faithful to that harmony of individuality and unity, which gives it vitality and comprehensiveness, the advance will be real and probably continuous.  For it will be in accordance with what must be the spirit of the Christianity of the future – simple in its basis, various in its superstructure, inclusive of all who hold firmly to the Divine Headship of the Lord Jesus Christ, as the secret alike of individual and collective life, and the supreme reality in the relation of the finite to the Infinite.

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