The Church of England cleared from the charge of Schism Part 6

"But this being the greatest absurdity, it will appear that what follows is the teaching of the Fathers quoted.

"First; the episcopal authority and jurisdiction is contained in the keys, and in the power of binding and loosing, which is clear of itself.

"Secondly; it is evident from the Gospel History that Peter was the first in whom that power was shown forth and appointed. For, although Christ said to all the Apostles, 'Receive the Holy Ghost,' (John xx. 22,) and 'whatsoever ye bind,' &c., 'whatsoever ye loose,' &c. (Matt, xviii. 18); yet, what He said to Peter had gone before, 'I will give to thee the keys,'

&c. (Matt. xvi. 19).

"Thirdly; both these two, that is, both what was said to Peter and what was said to the Apostles, proceed equally from Christ: for He who said to Peter, 'I will give to thee,' and 'Whatsoever thou shalt bind,' said also to the Apostles, 'Receive ye,' and 'Whatsoever ye shall bind.'

"Fourthly; that is therefore true which Optatus says of Peter: 'For the good of unity, he alone received the keys of the kingdom of heaven, to be imparted to the rest.' For, in truth, these which were given to Peter in the 16th Matt. were to be imparted afterwards to the Apostles, Matt. 18th, and John 20th, but to be imparted not by Peter, but by Christ, as is clear.

"Fifthly; that also is true which Caesarius says, 'The Episcopate takes its beginning from Peter:' he being the first in whom, through the ministry of binding and loosing, the Episcopal power was shown forth, begun, entrusted.'

"Sixthly; hence, also, is true what Innocent says,--'that the Episcopate, and all the authority of that name, sprung from Peter,' because he, first of all, was appointed or set forth as Bishop.

"Seventhly; for this cause, Peter is called by the same Innocent the author of the Episcopate; not that he inst.i.tuted it,--not that the Apostles received the power of binding and loosing from him,--for the Scriptures everywhere exclaim against this; but that from him was made the beginning of establis.h.i.+ng that power among men, and of appointing or marking out the Episcopate.

"Eighthly; to make this clearer, and that it may be easily perceived what means that expression, 'through Peter,' which we read in Leo, we must review the tradition of the ancient Church, drawn from the Scriptures themselves.

"It is plain, then, that when the Lord asked the Apostles, 'Whom say men that I, the Son of Man, am?' Peter, the chief of all, answered in the person of all, 'Thou art the Christ:' and afterwards Christ said to Peter, thus representing them, 'I will give to thee,'--'Whatsoever thou shalt bind:' by which it appears that in these words, not Peter only, but in Peter, their chief, and answering for all, all the Apostles and their successors were endued with the Episcopal power and jurisdiction.

"All which Augustin includes when he writes, 'All being asked, Peter alone answered, Thou art Christ, and to him is said, I will give to thee, &c., as if he alone received the power of binding and loosing, the case really being, that he said that singly for all, and received this together with all, as representing unity.'[160] Than which nothing can be clearer."

He then quotes pa.s.sages from St. Cyprian and St. Augustin, which I have already brought; adding, "In Peter, therefore, singly, Cyprian acknowledges that all Bishops were inst.i.tuted, and not without reason; the Episcopate, as he everywhere attests, being one in the whole world, was inst.i.tuted in one. And this was done to establish 'the origin of unity beginning from one,' as he says.

"But most of all does Augustin set forth and inculcate the common tradition. For, not content with having said that once in the place above mentioned, he is very full in setting forth this view of that doctrine.

Hence he says, 'In Peter was the sacrament of the Church;'" and other pa.s.sages I have already quoted. "Whence, everywhere in his books against the Donatists, he says, 'The keys are given to Unity.'

"The sum, then, is this. The Apostles and Pastors of Churches being both one and many,--one, in ecclesiastical communion, as they feed one flock; many, being distributed through the whole world, and having allotted to them each their own part of the one flock; therefore, power was given to them by a two-fold ratification of Christ: first, that they may be one, in Peter their chief, bearing the figure and the person of unity, to which has reference that saying in the singular number, 'I will give to thee,' and 'Whatsoever thou shall bind,' &c.: secondly, that they may be many, to which that has reference in the plural number, 'Receive ye,' and 'Whatsoever ye shall bind:' but both, personally and immediately from Christ; since He who said, 'I will give to thee,' as to one, also said, 'Receive ye,' as to many: nevertheless, that saying came first, in which power is given to all, in that they are one: because Christ willed that unity, most of all, should be recommended in His Church.

"By this all is made clear; not only Bishops, but also Apostles, have received the keys and the power from Christ, in Peter, and, in their manner, through Peter, who, in the name of all, received that for all, as bearing the figure and the person of all."

He then shows that this tradition had gone down even to his own times: "This holy and apostolic doctrine of the Episcopal jurisdiction and power proceeding immediately from, and inst.i.tuted by, Christ, the Gallic Church hath most zealously retained." "Therefore,[161] that very late invention, that Bishops receive their jurisdiction from the Pope, and are, as it were, vicars of him, ought to be banished from Christian schools, as unheard of for twelve centuries."

It is precisely "this very late invention" which is urged against the Church of England. Unless this be true, her position in itself, supposing her to be clear of heresy, with which, at present, I have nothing to do, is impregnable.

Such is the most Catholic interpretation by which Bossuet sets in harmony with the teaching of all antiquity a few expressions, which are all that I have been able to find that are even capable of being forced into accordance with the present Papal system, and which, as soon as they are so forced, contradict the whole history of Councils, and the whole life of the most ill.u.s.trious Fathers.

Now there is no doubt that Bellarmine's doctrine is the true logical development of the Papal Theory; it alone has consistency and completeness; it alone is the adequate expression of that prodigious power which was allowed to enthrone itself in the Church during the middle ages; it would fain account for it and justify it. Grant but its postulate, that the Pope is the sole vicar of Christ, and all which it requires must follow. On the other hand, that school which ranks Bossuet at its head, and which sought to limit, in some degree, by the Canons the power of the Roman Pontiff, and maintained that Bishops were, _jure divino_, successors of the Apostles, in a real, not in a fict.i.tious sense, however well-founded in what it maintained on the one side, was certainly inconsistent. It gave either too much or too little to the Roman See;--too much, if its own declarations about the succession of Bishops and the authority of General Councils be true, and founded in antiquity, as we believe; too little, if the Pope be indeed the only Vicar of Christ on earth, and the supreme Ruler of His Church; for then these maxims put their partisans very nearly into the position of rebels, and, in truth, brought the Gallican Church to the brink of a schism, in 1682. However this may be, that school is extinct; the ultramontane theory alone has now life and vigour in the Roman Church. It seems to absorb into itself all earnest and self-denying minds, while the other is left to that treacherous conservatism which would use the Church of Christ as a system of police, for the security of worldly interests.

What the ultramontane theory is, we see from Bellarmine. It proclaims that the government of the Church is a monarchy, concentrating in one person all the powers bestowed by Christ upon the Apostles. In this the student of history is bound to declare that it stands in point-blank contradiction to the decrees of General Councils, to the sentiments of the Fathers, and the whole practice of the Church for the first six hundred years; for much longer indeed than this, but this is enough. Well may Bossuet ask, "if the infallible authority of the Roman Pontiff is of force by itself before the consent of the Church,--to what purpose was it that Bishops should be summoned from the farthest regions of the earth, at the cost of such fatigues and expense, and Churches be deprived of their Pastors, if the whole power resided in the Roman Pontiff? If what he believed or taught was immediately the supreme and irrevocable law, why did he not himself p.r.o.nounce sentence? Or if he p.r.o.nounced it, why are Bishops called together and wearied out, to do again what is already done, and to pa.s.s a judgment on the supreme judgment of the Church? Would not this be fruitless? But all Christians have imbibed with their faith the conviction, that, in important dissensions, the whole Church ought to be convoked and heard. All therefore understand that the certain, deliberate, and complete declaration of the truth is seated not in the Pope alone, but in the Church spread everywhere."[162] "This too is certain, that when General Councils have been holden, the sentence of the Roman Pontiff has generally preceded them; for undoubtedly Celestine, Leo, Agatho, Gregory the Second, Adrian the First, had p.r.o.nounced sentence, when the third, fourth, sixth, seventh Councils were held. What was desired therefore was, not a Council for the Pontiff about to give judgment, but, after he had given judgment, the force of a certain and insuperable authority."

In fact, on this theory, as we have seen above, St. Cyprian, St. Firmilian, St. Hilary of Arles, the African Bishops in 426, the Fathers of Chalcedon in 451, in pa.s.sing their famous 28th Canon, the Fathers of Ephesus in 431, in pa.s.sing their 8th, the Fathers of Constantinople in 381, in pa.s.sing their 2d and 3d Canons, and in the synodal letter addressed to the Pope and the Western Bishops, the Fathers of Nicea, in pa.s.sing their 6th, nay, all ancient Councils whatever, in all their form and mode of proceeding, were the most audacious of rebels. But what are we to say about the language of St. Gregory? Did he then betray those rights of St. Peter, which he held dearer than his life? When he wrote to Eulogius of Alexandria, "If your Holiness calls me Universal Pope, you deny that you are yourself what you admit me to be--universal. But this G.o.d forbid:" are we to receive Thoma.s.sin's explanation, that he meant, as Patriarch, he was not universal, but, as Pope, he was, all the time? or when he says to the same, "in rank you are my brother, in character my father," was Eulogius at the same time, as Bellarmine will have it, merely his deputy? "In the beginning, Peter set up the Patriarch of Alexandria, and of Antioch, who, receiving authority from the Pontiff (of Rome), presided over almost all Asia and Africa, and could create Archbishops, who could afterwards create Bishops."[163] And this, it appears, is the key which is to be applied to the whole history of the early Church. Those Bishops, Metropolitans, Exarchs, and Patriarchs, throughout the East, who had such a conviction of the Apostolic authority residing in themselves as governors of the Church, who showed it in every Council in which they sat, who expressed it so freely in their writings and letters: St. Augustin, again, in the West, himself a host, who speaks of a cause decided by the Roman Pontiff being reheard, of "the wholesome authority of General Councils," who a.s.sents to St. Cyprian's proposition, that "every Bishop can no more be judged by another, than he himself can judge another," with the single limitation, "certainly, I imagine, in those questions which have not yet been thoroughly and completely settled;" who, in a question of disputed succession, which more than any other required such a tribunal as the Papal, had it existed, appeals not to the authority of the Roman See, but to the testimony of the whole Church spread everywhere, not mentioning that See pre-eminently; or when he does mention "the See of Peter, in which Anastasius now sits," mentioning likewise "the See of James, in which John now sits:"--all these were nothing more, at the same time, than the Pope's delegates, and received through him their jurisdiction.

Can a claim be true which is driven to s.h.i.+fts such as this for its maintenance? Or can the truth of Christianity and the unity of the Church rest upon a falsehood? Is infidelity itself in such "a hopeful position,"[164] as regards Christianity, that it is really come to this, that we must either receive a plain and manifest usurpation, or be cast out of the house and kingdom of G.o.d? That we must reject the witness and history of the first six hundred years of the Church's life on the one hand, or be plunged into the abyss of infidelity on the other? If it be true that the Pope is Monarch of the Church, which is the present Papal theory, the Church of England is in schism. If it be not true, she is at least clear of that fatal mark. All that is required for her position is the maintenance of that Nicene Const.i.tution which we have heard St. Leo solemnly declare was to last to the end of the world, viz. that every province of the Church be governed by its own Bishops under its own Metropolitan. And who then but will desire that the successor of St. Peter should hold St. Peter's place? Will the Patriarch of Constantinople, or the Archbishop of Moscow, or the Primate of Canterbury, so much as think of a.s.suming it? Be this our answer when we are accused of not really holding that article of the Creed "one Catholic and Apostolic Church." Let the Bishop of Rome require of us that honour and power which he possessed at the Synod of Chalcedon, _that, and not a totally different one under the same name_, and we shall be in schism when we do not yield it. At present we have no farther separated from him than to fall back on the const.i.tution of the Church of the Martyrs and the Fathers.

But, it may be said, is the Catholic Church unanimous on the one hand, and the Anglican communion, restricted to one small province, left alone in her protest on the other? Did not she, whom they would call "the already decrepit rebel of three hundred years," submit from 596 to 1534 to that very authority which she now denies? It would be quite beyond my present limits to trace, as I had first purposed, the Roman Bishop's power from that point at which it stood when St. Gregory sent our Apostle Augustin into England, to that point which it had reached in the thirteenth century, and which it strove to maintain in the sixteenth. I can only now very briefly point out a few of the steps in that most wonderful rise. The two centuries, then, which succeeded St. Gregory, were even more favourable to this growth than those which went before. While the confusion and violence of secular governments by the breaking in and settlement of the various northern tribes were greater than ever,--while the ecclesiastical const.i.tution was all that yet held together the scattered portions of the shattered Western empire--the single Apostolical See of the West, whose Bishop was in constant correspondence with the spiritual rulers of these various countries, whose voice was ever and anon heard striving to win and soften into mercy and justice those temporal rulers, would be, as it were, "a light s.h.i.+ning in a dark place." The Bishops, everywhere miserably afflicted by their own sovereigns, found a stay and support in one beyond the reach of the feudal lord's violence. The benefit they thus derived from the Roman Patriarch was so great, that they would be disposed to overlook the gradual change which was ensuing in the relation between themselves and him, the deference which was deepening into subjection. Or, if here and there, what Leo would have called "a presumptuous spirit," such as Hincmar of Rheims, or our own Grossetete, in after times, set himself against the stream, it would all be in vain. However good his cause might be, if he did not yield, he would be beaten down like St. Hilary of Arles. Moreover, as the great heresy of Mahomet invaded and hemmed in three of the Patriarchal Sees of the East, their counterpoise to the originally great influence of the Roman See was removed. Political separation from the East, and the difficulty of communication, would of themselves greatly tend to this result. To this must be added the great increase of power which the house of Charlemagne, for their own political purposes, bestowed on the Roman See; it was worth while building up a popedom for an imperial crown. De Maistre says, "The Popes reign since the ninth century at least."[165] But it is a somewhat nave confession, "The French had the singular honour, one of which they have not been at all sufficiently proud, of having set up, humanly, the Catholic Church in the world, by raising its august head to the rank indispensably due to his divine functions; and without which he would only have been a Patriarch of Constantinople, miserable puppet of Christian sultans, and Musulman autocrats." Just, too, when it was most difficult to detect imposture, and to refer to the acts of ancient Councils, that singular counterfeit of the false decretals made its appearance, which so wonderfully helped the Roman Patriarchs in consolidating the manifold structure of their authority. This, indeed, a.s.sailed the Bishops of the West by their most reverential feelings, and added to the force of a great present authority, almost always beneficially exercised, the weight of what seemed an Apostolical tradition. Besides these causes, the Popes found in the several monastic orders throughout Europe the most unceasing and energetic pioneers of their power. From the very first there appears to have existed a desire to exchange the present superintendence of the local Bishop for the distant authority of the Pope.

The great orders, indeed, were themselves so many suspensions of the Episcopal system. With reason do the statues of their founders adorn the nave of St. Peter's, not only as witnesses of the Church's exuberant life, but as those whose hands, more than any others, have helped to rear that colossal central power, of which that fane is the visible symbol. Thus the Papal structure was so gradually built upon the Patriarchal, that no one age could accurately mark where the one ended and the other began, but all may see the finished work. It requires no microscopic eye to distinguish the authority of St. Leo or St. Gregory from that of St. Innocent the Third. The poet spake of a phantom what is true of a great reality:--

"Mobilitate viget, viresque acquirit eundo, Ingrediturque solo, et caput inter nubila condit."

That power, for which the heroic and saintly Hildebrand died in exile,[166]

if exile there could be to him who received the heathen for his inheritance, and the utmost parts of the earth for his possession; for which our own St. Anselm, forced against his will to the Primacy, stood unquailing in the path of the Red King, most furious, if not the worst, of that savage race, whose demon wrath seemed to justify the fable of their origin; for which St. Bernard, the last of the Fathers in age, but equal to the first in glory, wrote and laboured, and wore himself out with vigils, and wrought miracles; for which our own St. Thomas shed that n.o.ble blood, which sanctifies yet our primatial Church, an earnest of restoration and freedom to come; that power, for which St. Francis, the spouse of holy poverty, so long neglected since her First Husband ascended up on high, and St. Dominic--

l' amoroso drudo Della fede Cristiana, il santo atleta, Benigno a' suoi, ed a' nemici crudo;[167]

and one greater yet, the warrior saint, Ignatius, raised their myriads of every age and of both s.e.xes, armed in that triple mail of poverty, chast.i.ty, and obedience, "of whom the world was not worthy;"--that power, to which have borne witness so many saintly Bishops, poor in the midst of poverty, and humble in the exercise of more than royal power,--so many scholars, marvellously learned,--so many, prodigal of labour and blood, who are now counted among the n.o.ble army of martyrs,--so many holy women, who have hidden themselves under the robe of the first of all saints, and followed the Virgin of virgins in their degree;--that power is, indeed, the most wondrous creation which history can record, and one to which I am not ashamed to confess that I should bow with unmingled reverence, had not truth a yet stronger claim upon me, and did not the voice of the early Church, its Fathers, Councils, and Martyrs, sound distinctly in my ears another language. Still, human and divine, ambition and Providence, are so mingled there, that I would not utter a word more than truth requires. I should even be compelled to give up the strongest individual conviction, acknowledging the weakness and liability to err of any private judgment; acknowledging, moreover, that a single province of the Church, if opposed to all the rest, is certain to be in error, were it not that, besides the voice of antiquity, we have witnesses the most legitimate, the most time-honoured, the most unswerving in their testimony,--witnesses who take away from our opponents their proudest claim,--nay, a claim which, if real, would be irresistible,--that of being, by themselves, the Catholic Church.

Let it never, then, be forgotten, that any argument which would prove the Church of England to be in schism would condemn likewise the Eastern and Russian Church. It is not the Catholic Church against a revolted province, as our adversaries would have us believe; it is the one Patriarch of the West, with his Bishops, against the four Patriarchs of the East, with theirs, and that great and, as yet, unbroken phalanx of the North, which Constantinople won to the faith of old, and which now promises to beat back the tide of heresy and infidelity from the beleaguered Sees of the East. On this point of schism, at least, they bear witness with us. The causes, adverted to above, which were so influential in exalting the great fabric of Roman power in the West, did not act upon the East,--nay, acted in the inverse direction. The See of Constantinople still remains where the Council of Chalcedon placed it, where the Emperor Justinian recognised it to be, the second See of the world: and it has ever since refused to admit that Rome was _first_ in any sense in which itself was not _second_. This may serve to set in a clear light the vast difference between the legitimate power of the First See, and the claim to give jurisdiction to all Bishops. The systems, of which these are expressions, are in truth antagonistic. Constantinople maintains still that const.i.tution of the whole Church which St. Gregory accused its Bishops of undermining. The evil which he foresaw has come from his own successors: "the cause of Almighty G.o.d, the cause of the Universal Church," the privileges and rights of Bishops and Priests, as against one "Universal Pope," are borne witness to now, as they have ever been, by the immutable East. Here, at least, are no sympathies with the heresiarchs of the sixteenth century: the Synod of Bethlehem has anathematised Luther and Calvin as decidedly as the Council of Trent. Here was no Henry the Eighth fixing his supremacy on a reluctant Church by the axe, the gibbet, the stake, and laws of premunire and forfeiture: no State using that Church as a cat's-paw for three hundred years, and ready now to offer it up a holocaust to the demon of liberalism.

Here is the ancient Patriarchal system, the thrones of Constantinople, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem, subsisting still. Here is the same body of doctrine, the same seven sacraments, the same Real Presence, the same mighty sacramental and sacerdotal system, which Lat.i.tudinarian and Evangelical, statesman and heretic, dread while they hate, as being indeed the visible presence of Christ in a fallen world,--the residence of a spiritual power which controls and torments the worldling, while it disproves and falsifies the heretic. Here is all that the Roman Catholic claims as tokens of the truth for himself: but there is one thing more, the same protest that we make against the monarchical, as distinct from the patriarchal, power, the same appeal back to early Councils, and the unambiguous voice of those who cannot be silenced or corrupted, the Fathers of the Church. In the Fathers of the undivided Church, the East and the North and the West, so long severed, meet: we are not alone, who have with us, on the very point which divides us from our Mother Church, the still unbroken line of successors from St. Athanasius and St. Chrysostom. There is no break in the descent or in the doctrine of the Eastern Churches.

There is the same dogmatic, the same hierarchical fabric, subsisting now as when St. Gregory addressed Anastasius of Antioch, and Eulogius of Alexandria. It may suit the purposes of unfair Roman controversialists to brand them as schismatics, and overcome, by calling them a name, their own most formidable opponents: but history cannot be so overcome. They have _never_ admitted the Papal sway, any more than the Fathers who pa.s.sed the 28th Canon of Chalcedon: they have, indeed, admitted the Roman _Primacy_, as those same Fathers admitted it; for the very system, for which they are witnesses, is not complete without the Bishop of Rome stands at the head of it: the _due_ honour of Rome is involved in the due honour of Constantinople; and, we may add, the due honour of Canterbury: the same temper, the same persons, who reject the one, hate the other. What we say they never have admitted is, that which has really worked the disunion of the Universal Church, as St. Gregory foretold it would, the doctrine which is the centre of the present Papal system, which alone makes all its parts cohere, and justifies all its acts, and triumphs over all appeal to argument, and all testimonies of antiquity, viz., that, "the Pope is set over the whole Christian world, and possesses in its completeness and plenitude that power which Christ left on earth for the good of the Church."[168] They have never for a moment admitted that the Bishops of the Universal Church were the Pope's delegates, and received their jurisdiction from him. _We_ fight, it must be admitted, at some disadvantage with our opponents. The long subjection which our Church yielded to Rome, the manifold obligations under which we lie to her, the complete unsettling of the ecclesiastical and doctrinal system in the sixteenth century, the horrible vices of those who effected the change, the connection with those whose doctrine has now worked itself out into Socinianism, infidelity, and anarchy, the inability we have ever since been under of shaking ourselves completely clear of them, the thoroughly unsatisfactory position of the state towards us, as a Church, at present,--all these things are against us,--all these things tell on the mind which really lives and dwells on antiquity, and looks to the pure Apostolic Church. Still, though they weaken, they do not overcome our cause. But from all these objections the witness of the Eastern Churches is free. They were never subject to Rome, but to their own Patriarchs; they derived not their Christianity from her: the Priesthood, and the pure unb.l.o.o.d.y sacrifice, and the power to bind and to loose, remain undisputed among them: the Eastern mind cannot conceive a Church without them. They have received no reformation from those whose lives were a scandal to all Christian men: they are not mixed up with the Lutheran or Calvinistic heresy: nor has Erastianism eaten out their life.

Yet, if we are schismatics, so are they, and on the same ground. Moreover the Roman Church has again and again treated with them as parts of the true Church. It is only in comparatively modern times, that as the hope of re-union became fainter, the line of denying their being members of the One Body has been taken up. I have seen even so late as the time of Clement the Eighth a letter of that Pope to the Czar, in which he treats him as already belonging to the Church. Moreover the Eastern Church has put forth the best and most convincing sign of Catholicity, _life_: to her, _since her separation from Rome_, and to this particular attention must be claimed, is due the most remarkable conversion of a great nation to the Faith which has taken place in the last eight hundred years--Russia with her Bishops, her clergy, her monasteries, her convents, her Christian people, her ancient discipline, her completely organised Church system, her whole country won from Paganism by the preaching of Monks and Missionary Bishops, is a witness to the Greek Church (which who shall gainsay?) that she is a true member of the One Body. The Patriarch of Constantinople exercised that charge which the Council of Chalcedon gave him, and ordained Bishops among the barbarians, and the Spirit of G.o.d blessed their labours, and the whole North became his spiritual offspring. Rome cannot show, since she has been divided from the East, a conversion on so large a scale, so complete, so permanent. And on that great ma.s.s she has. .h.i.therto made no impression. It is a complete refutation of her claim to be _by herself_ Catholic, that there exists out of her communion a Body of Apostolic descent and government, with the same doctrinal system as her own, with the ascetic principle as strongly developed, with the same claim to miracles,--with all, in fact, which characterises a Church; a Body, moreover, so large, that, supposing the non-existence of the Roman Communion, the promises of G.o.d in Scripture to His Church might be supposed to be fulfilled in that Body.[169] And this Body, like ourselves, denies that particular Roman claim, for which Rome would have us and them to be schismatic. And it has denied it not merely for three hundred years, but from the time that it has been advanced. Truly all that was deficient on our side seems made up by the Greek Church. And this living and continuous witness of a thousand years is to be added to that most decisive and unambiguous voice of the whole undivided ancient Church.

I have, throughout these remarks, considered the Church of Christ to be what, at the Councils of Nicea, Ephesus, and Chalcedon, she so manifestly appeared, one organic whole; a Body, with One Head, and many members; as St. Gregory says, Peter, and Paul, and Andrew, and John; a kingdom with One Sovereign, and rulers, an Apostolic College appointed by that Head, with a direct commission from Himself. I believe that no other idea about the Church prevailed up to St. Gregory's time. It follows that all so-called national churches, unless they be subordinate to the law of this kingdom, are so many infringements of the great primary law of unity, in that they set up a member instead of the Body. St. Paul, in the 12th chapter of the 1st Epistle to the Corinthians, has clearly set forth such, and no less, to be the unity of Christ's Body. Certainly it is a difficulty, that we must admit this essential law to be at present broken. But I do not think it fair to argue against a provisional and temporary state, such as that of the Church of England is confessed to be--which, too, has been forced upon her--as if it were a normal state, one that we have chosen, a theory of unity that we put forth over against the ancient theory, or the present Roman one. Nay, thousands and ten thousands feel, the whole rising mind of the Church feels, that we are torn "from Faith's ancient home," that we groan within ourselves, waiting until G.o.d in his good time restore a visible unity to His Church, till the East and the West and the South be one again in the mind of Christ. Who but must view it as a token of that future blessing, that public prayers have been offered up in France and Italy for such a consummation? Let us begin to pray for each other, and we must end by being one. Let _us_, too, pray that the clouds of error and prejudice, the intense blind jealousy on one side, the cruel and disingenuous temper on the other, may be subdued by the Spirit of G.o.d, who in some great and blessed Pentecost shall draw long alienated hearts together, and mould them into a union closer than has ever been, against an attack the last and most terrible of the foretold enemy, the tokens of whose coming are at hand.

But the Roman Catholic, who seems to escape this difficulty, and points to his communion as one organic whole, falls into another. Grant that it is one, but it is at the expense of ceasing to be Catholic: it has lost all the East and the North, and part of the West. Thus, in this choice between difficulties, it seems the least to suppose that the unity of Christendom may be for a time suspended, during which the several parts of Christ's Body retain communion with the one Head, and thence derive life, though active communion with each other is suspended. A less difficulty, I say, than to cut off, not merely our own Church, but the seventy millions of the Eastern Church, having a complete inward ident.i.ty with the Roman, from the covenant of salvation, merely because that intercommunion is prevented by a claim to spiritual monarchy, which was unknown in the best ages of the Church, and has been resisted ever since it was set up. If this view be true, we should expect that the several parts, though living, would yet be languis.h.i.+ng, and far from that healthy vigour which they ought to possess; that the Great Head would give manifold warnings of the injury done to His Body. Now, it is very remarkable that the circ.u.mstances, no less of the Latin than of the Eastern and the Anglican Church, exactly agree to this expectation. I need not speak on this point of the second and third; but I cannot help thinking that they who have suffered themselves to be driven by fearful scandals out of our bosom, who have brooded over acknowledged but unrelieved wants, till the duty of patient long-suffering has been forgotten, close their eyes to the state of France, Spain, and Italy, under what they have now learnt to call _by itself_ the "Catholic" Church. Yet are there tokens abroad which men of less spiritual discernment might lay to heart. Does the "obscene rout" of Ronge and Czerski, bursting forth from the bosom of the Roman Church, awake no misgiving? Fearful, when viewed by Scripture and antiquity, as the state of England is, (an argument which is now being used against our communion with such effect on tender and loving minds,) he must be bold who would venture to say that the relation of the French Church to the French nation in the last century, or its relation even now, greatly as the present French Church is to be admired and sympathised with, does not offer as much ground for fearful apprehension, as much reason to dread, lest the terms on which victory is promised to the Church over the world have been essentially broken. I fear there is no doubt that two-thirds of the French capital are not _Christian_, in any sense of the word; and probably the proportion is as great in the larger towns. How did this state of things arise? How has nearly the whole intellect of that country become infidel? From the French Revolution, it will be answered. But how could that great Satanical outburst have ever taken place, had the Church of Christ, free from corruption, as those who have left us believe, and throned in the possession of sixteen hundred years, with its numberless religious houses, its unmarried clergy, and great episcopate, been discharging its functions, I do not say aright, but with any moderate efficiency? Surely the acts of the States General were as bad as those of Henry the Eighth; yet its members were Catholics, in full communion with the Roman See. Surely the ecclesiastical legislation of Napoleon was as uncatholic as that of a House of Commons; yet it was sanctioned by Concordat with the Pope. But if manifold corruptions did not unchurch the Gallican communion in the last century,--if the ma.s.s of a great nation, which the Church once completely possessed, but has now surrendered to active unbelief, does not invalidate her claim to be a pure communion at present, why are such things alleged as so fatal a mark against us? G.o.d forbid that one should mention such things without the deepest sorrow; but when our troubles, and difficulties, and relations with the state, and the alienated hearts of our people, and the absence of external discipline and inward guidance, and the misery of our divisions, are alleged to prove that we are out of the pale of the Church, these things ought to be weighed on the other side. There ought not to be different measures on different sides of the Channel. I forbear to speak of the state of Spain, Portugal, and much of Italy; but I imagine that the worst deeds of the Reformation were at least paralleled by what the Church has had to endure there from the hands of her own children. I believe that our own most sad corruptions have, too, their counterpart among Churches in communion with the Apostolic See.

But to conclude. As our defence against the charge of Schism rests upon the witness of the ancient Church, thus fully corroborated by the Eastern Communion, so our whole safety lies in maintaining the clear indubitable doctrine of that Church. I have avoided the whole question of _doctrine_ in these remarks, both as leading me into a wider field than that which I am obliged to traverse so cursorily at present, and as distinct from the question of Schism, though very closely connected with it. No one can deny that it is not sufficient for our safety to repel one single charge: but this charge was the most pressing, the most specious, and one which requires to be disposed of before the mind can with equanimity enter upon any other. My conclusion is, that upon the strictest Church principles,--in other words, upon those principles which all Christendom, in its undivided state, recognised for six hundred years, which may be seen in the Canons and Decrees of Ec.u.menical Councils, our present position is tenable at least till the convocation of a really Ec.u.menical Council. The Church of England has never rejected the communion of the Western, and still less that of the Eastern Church: neither has the Eastern Church p.r.o.nounced against her. She has only exercised the right of being governed by her own Bishops and Metropolitans. There is, indeed, much peril of her being forced from this, her true position,--a peril lately pointed out by the author of "The real Danger of the Church of England." I need say little where he has said so much, in language so well-timed, so moderate, and from a position which cannot be misrepresented. I will only add, that I cannot conceive any course which would so thoroughly quench the awakened hopes of the Church's most faithful children, as that her rulers, which I am loth even to imagine, at a crisis like the present, should seek support, not in the rock of the ancient Church, in which Andrewes, Laud, and Ken, took refuge of old,--not in the unbroken tradition of the East and West, by which, if at all, the Church of Christ must be restored,--not in that great system which first subdued and then impregnated with fresh life the old Roman Empire, delaying a fall which nothing could avert, and which lastly built up out of these misshapen ruins all the Christian polities of Europe,--not in that time-honoured and universal fabric of doctrine to which our own Prayer-book bears witness, but in the wild, inconsistent, treacherous sympathies of a Protestantism, which the history of three hundred years in many various countries has proved to be dead to the heart's core. Farewell, indeed, to any true defence of the Church of England, any hope of her being built up once more to an Apostolical beauty and glory, of recovering her lost discipline and intercommunion with Christendom, if she is by any act of her rulers, or any decree of her own, to be mixed up with the followers of Luther, Calvin, or Zuingle: with those who have neither love, nor unity, nor dogmatic truth, nor sacraments, nor a visible Church among themselves: who, never consistent but in the depth of error, and the secret instinct of heresy, deny regeneration in Baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit in Confirmation and Orders, and the power of the keys in absolution, and the Lord's Body in the Eucharist. That is the way of death: who is so mad as to enter on it? When Protestantism lies throughout Europe and America a great disjointed ma.s.s, in all the putridity of dissolution,

"Monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens, _cui lumen ademptum_,"

judicially blinded, so that it cannot perceive Christ dwelling in his Church, while she grows to the measure of the stature of the perfect man, and making her members and ministers His organs--who would think of joining to it a living Church? Have we gone through so much experience in vain?

Have we seen it develop into Socinianism at Geneva, and utter unbelief in Germany, and a host of sects in England and America, whose name is Legion, and who seem to be agreed in nothing else but in the denial of sacramental grace, and visible unity; and all this at the last hour, in the very turning point of our destiny, to seek alliance with those who have no other point of union but common resistance to the tabernacle of G.o.d among men? A persuasion that nothing short of the very existence of the Church of England is at stake, that one step into the wrong will fix her character and her prospects for ever, compels one to say that certain acts and tendencies of late have struck dismay into those who desire above all things to love and respect their spiritual mother. If the Jerusalem Bishopric, promoted, (at the instance of a foreign minister, not in communion with our Church,[170] and who has recorded in the strongest terms his objection to _her_ apostolical episcopacy,) by two Bishops on their private responsibility, without any authority from the Church of which they are indeed most honoured, but only individual rulers, be the commencement of a course of amalgamation with the Lutheran or Calvinistic heresy, who that values the authority of the ancient undivided Church, will not feel his allegiance to our own branch fearfully shaken? The time for silence is past. There is such a thing as "propter vitam vivendi perdere causas." It must be said publicly that such a course will lead infallibly to a schism, which will bury the Church of England in its ruins. If she is to become a mere lurking-place for omnigenous lat.i.tudinarianism; if first principles of the faith, such as baptismal regeneration, and priestly absolution, may be indifferently held or denied within her pale,--though, if not G.o.d's very truths, they are most fearful blasphemies,--the sooner she is swept away the better. There is no mean between her being "a wall daubed with untempered mortar," or the city of the living G.o.d. I speak as one who has every thing commonly valuable to man depending on this decision; moreover, as a Priest in that communion, whose const.i.tution, violently suspended by an enemy for one hundred and thirty years, yet requires that every one of her acts, which bind her as a whole, should be a.s.sented to by her Priesthood in representation, as well as by her Episcopacy. If the grace of the sacraments may be publicly denied by ministers of the Church, nay, by a Bishop ex cathedra, with impunity, in direct violation of the most solemn forms to which they have sworn obedience, while the a.s.sertion of Christ's Real Presence in the Eucharist draws down censure on the most devoted head, the communion which endures such iniquity requires the constant uninterrupted intercession of her worthier children, that she be not finally forsaken of G.o.d, and perish at the first attack of antichrist.

R. CLAY, PRINTER, BREAD STREET HILL.

NOTES

[1] Bellarmin. de Rom. Pont. Lib. iv. 25; iv. 24; i. 9.

[2] De Maistre, du Pape. Liv. i. ch. i.

[3] S. Cyprian de Unit. Ecc. 12.

[4] "Development," &c. p. 22.

[5] Thoma.s.sin, Part i. lib. i. ch. 4. De l'ancienne discipline de l'Eglise.

[6] St. Cypr. de Unit. 4. Oxford Tr.

[7] Quoted by Thoma.s.sin, _ut sup._

[8] Ibid.

[9] S. Aug. Tom. v. 706, B.