and Rome is not of that nature; for the English Church confessedly does
not come in her own name, nor can she reasonably be compared to the
Egyptian magicians or the prophets of Baal; is there any other type in
Scripture into which the difference between her and the Church of Rome
can be resolved? We shall be referred, perhaps, to the case of the false
prophets of Israel and Judah, who professed to come in the name of the
Lord, yet did not preach the truth, and had no part or inheritance with
God's prophets. This parallel is not happier than the former, for a test
was given to distinguish between them, which does not decide between the
Church of Rome and ourselves. This test is the divine accomplishment of
the prophet's message, or the divine blessing upon his teaching, or the
eventual success of his work, as it may be variously stated; a test
under which neither Church, Roman or Anglican, will fail, and neither is
eminently the foremost. Each Church has had to endure trial, each has
overcome it; each has triumphed over enemies; each has had continued
signs of the divine favor upon it. The passages in Scripture to which we
refer are such as the following: Moses, for instance, has laid it down
in the Book of Deuteronomy, that, "when a prophet speaketh in the name
of the Lord, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the
thing which the Lord hath _not_ spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it
presumptuously." To the same effect, in the Book of Ezekiel, the
denunciation against the false prophet is: "Lo! _when the wall is
fallen_, shall it not be said unto you, _where_ is the daubing wherewith
ye have daubed it?" And Gamaliel's advice to "refrain from these men,
and let them alone, for if this counsel or this work be of men, it will
come to nought," may be taken as an illustration of the same rule of
judgment. Hence Roman Catholics themselves are accustomed to consider,
that eventual failure is the sure destiny of heresy and schism; what
then will they say to us? The English Church has remained in its present
state three hundred years, and at the end of the time is stronger than
at the beginning. This does not look like an heretical or schismatical
Church. However, when she does fall to pieces, then, it may be admitted,
her children _will_ have a reason for deserting her; till then, she has
no symptom of being akin to the false prophets who professed the Lord's
name, and deceived the simple and unlearned; she has no symptom of being
a traitor to the _faith_.
However, there is a third type of rival teaching mentioned in Scripture,
under which the dissension between Rome and England may be considered to
fall, and which it may be well to notice. Let it be observed, then, that
even in the Apostles' age very grave outward differences seem to have
existed between Christian teachers--that is, the organs of the one
Church; and yet those differences were not, in consequence, any call
upon inquirers and beholders to quit one teacher and betake themselves
to another. The state of the Corinthian Christians will exemplify what
we mean: Paul, Cephas, and Apollos were all friends together, yet
parties were formed round each separately, which disagreed with each
other, and made the Apostles themselves seem in disagreement. Is not
this, at least in great measure, the state of the Churches of England
and Rome? Are they not one in faith, so far forth as they are viewed in
their essential apostolical character? are they not in discord, so far
as their respective children and disciples have overlaid them with
errors of their own individual minds? It was a great fault, doubtless,
that the followers of St. Paul should have divided from the followers of
St. Peter, but would it have mended matters, had any individuals among
them gone over to St. Peter? Was that the fitting remedy for the evil?
Was not the remedy that of their putting aside partisanship altogether,
and regarding St. Paul "not after the flesh," but simply as "the
minister by whom they believed," the visible representative of the
undivided Christ, the one Catholic Church? And, in like manner, surely
if party feelings and interests have separated us from the members of
the Roman communion, this does not prove that our Church itself is
divided from theirs, any more than that St. Paul was divided from St.
Peter, nor is it our duty to leave our place and join them;--nothing
would be gained by so unnecessary a step;--but our duty is, remaining
where we are, to recognize in our own Church, not an establishment, not
a party, not a mere Protestant denomination, but the Holy Church
Catholic which the traditions of men have partially obscured,--to rid it
of these traditions, to try to soften bitterness and animosity of
feeling, and to repress party spirit and promote peace as much as in us
lies. Moreover, let it be observed, that St. Paul was evidently superior
in gifts to Apollos, yet this did not justify Christians attaching
themselves to the former rather than the latter; for, as the Apostle
says, they both were but ministers of one and the same Lord, and nothing
more. Comparison, then, is not allowed us between teacher and teacher,
where each has on the whole the notes of a divine mission; so that even
could the Church of Rome be proved superior to our own (which we put
merely as an hypothesis, and for argument's sake), this would as little
warrant our attaching ourselves to it instead of our own Church, as
there was warrant for one of the converts of Apollos to call himself by
the name of Paul. Further, let it be observed, that the apostle reproves
those who attached themselves to St. Peter equally with the Paulines or
with the disciples of Apollos; is it possible he could have done so,
were St. Peter the head and essence of the Church in a sense in which
St. Paul was not? And, again, there was an occasion when not only their
followers were at variance, but the Apostles themselves; we refer to the
dissimulation of St. Peter at Antioch, and the resistance of St, Paul to
it: was this a reason why St. Peter's disciples should go over to St.
Paul, or rather why they should correct their dissimulation?
We are surely bound to prosecute this search after the promised Teacher
of truth entirely as a practical matter, with reference to our duty and
nothing else. The simple question which we have to ask ourselves is, Has
the English Church _sufficiently_ upon her the signs of an Apostle? is
she the divinely-appointed teacher to _us_? If so, we need not go
further; we have no reason to break through the divine rule of "being
content with such things as we have"; we have no warrant to compare our
own prophet with the prophet given to others. Nor can we: tests are not
given us for the purpose. We may believe that our own Church has certain
imperfections; the Church of Rome certain corruptions: such a belief
has no tendency to lead us to any determinate judgment as to which of
the two on the whole is the better, or to induce or warrant us to leave
the one communion for the other.
5
One point remains, however, which is so often felt as a difficulty by
members of our Church that we are tempted to say a few words upon it in
conclusion, and to try to show what is the true practical mode of
meeting it. And this perhaps will give us an opportunity of expressing
our general meaning in a more definite and intelligible form.
It cannot be denied, then, that a very plausible ground of attack may be
taken up against the Church of England, from the circumstance that she
is separated from the rest of Christendom; and just such a ground as it
would be allowable for private judgment to rest and act upon, supposing
its office to be what we have described it to be. "As to the particular
doctrines of Anglicanism, (it may be urged,) Scripture may, if so be,
supply private judgment with little grounds for quarrelling with them;
but what can be said to explain away the note of forfeiture, which
attaches to us in consequence of our isolated state? We are, in fact,
(it may be objected,) cut off from the whole of the Christian world;
nay, far from denying that excommunication, in a certain sense we glory
in it, and that under a notion, that we are so very pure that it must
soil our fingers to touch any other Church whatever upon the earth, in
north, east, or south. How is this reconcilable with St. Paul's clear
announcement that there is but one body as well as one spirit? or with
our Lord's, that 'by this shall _all men know_,' as by a note obvious to
the intelligence even of the illiterate and unreasoning, 'that ye are My
disciples, if ye have love one to another'? or again, with His prayer
that His disciples might all be one, 'that the world may know that _Thou
hast sent Me_, and hast _loved them_ as Thou hast loved Me'? Visible
unity, then, would seem to be both the main evidence for Christianity,
and the sign of our own participation in its benefits; whereas we
English despise the Greeks and hate the Romans, turn our backs on the
Scotch Episcopalians, and do but smile distantly upon our American
cousins. We throw ourselves into the arms of the State, and in that
close embrace forget that the Church was meant to be Catholic; or we
call ourselves _the_ Catholics, and the mere Church of England _our_
Catholic Church; as if, forsooth, by thus confining it all to ourselves,
we did not _ipso facto_ all claim to be considered Catholics at all."
What increases the force of this argument is, that St. Augustine seems,
at least at first sight, virtually to urge it against us in his
controversy with the Donatists, whom he represents as condemned, simply
because separate from the "orbis terrarum," and styles the point in
question "quæstio facillima," and calls on individual Donatists to
decide it by their private judgment.[19]
Now this is an objection which we must honestly say is deeply felt by
many people, and not inconsiderable ones; and the more it is openly
avowed to be a difficulty the better; for then there is the chance of
its being acknowledged, and in the course of time obviated, as far as
may be, by those who have the power. Flagrant evils cure themselves by
being flagrant; and we are sanguine that the time is come when so great
an evil as this is, cannot stand its ground against the good feeling and
common-sense of religious persons. It is the very strength of Romanism
against us; and, unless the proper persons take it into their very
serious consideration, they may look for certain to undergo the loss, as
time goes on, of some whom they would least like to be lost to our
Church. If private judgment can be exercised on any point, it is on a
matter of the senses; now our eyes and our ears are filled with the
abuse poured out by members of our Church on her sister Churches in
foreign lands. It is not that their corrupt practices are gravely and
tenderly pointed out, as may be done by men who feel themselves also to
be sinful and ignorant, and know that they have their own great
imperfections, which their brethren abroad have not,--but we are apt not
to acknowledge them as brethren at all; we treat them in an arrogant
John Bull way, as mere Frenchmen, or Spaniards, or Austrians, not as
Christians. We act as if we could do without brethren; as if our having
brethren all over the world were not the very tenure on which we are
Christians at all; as if we did not cease to be Christians, if at any
time we ceased to have brethren. Or again, when our thoughts turn to the
East, instead of recollecting that there are sister Churches there, we
leave it to the Russians to take care of the Greeks, and to the French
to take care of the Romans and we content ourselves with erecting a
Protestant Church at Jerusalem, or with helping the Jews to rebuild
their temple there, or with becoming the august protectors of
Nestorians, Monophysites, and all the heretics we can hear of, or with
forming a league with the Mussulman against Greeks and Romans together.
Can any one doubt that the British power is not considered a Church
power by any country whatever into which it comes? and if so, is it
possible that the English Church, which is so closely connected with
that power, can be said in any true sense to exert a Catholic influence,
or to deserve the Catholic name? How can any Church be called Catholic,
which does not act beyond its own territory? and when did the rulers of
the English Church ever move one step beyond the precincts, or without
the leave, of the imperial power?
"pudet hæc opprobria nobis
Et dici potuisse, et non potuisse refelli."
There is indeed no denying them; and if certain persons are annoyed at
the confession, as if we were thereby putting weapons into our enemies'
hands, let them be annoyed more by the fact, and let them alter the
fact, and, they may take our word for it, the confession will cease of
itself. The world does not feel the fact the less for its not being
confessed; it _is_ felt deeply by many, and is doing incalculable
mischief to our cause, and is likely to hurt it more and more. In a
word, this isolation is doing as much as any one thing can do to
unchurch us, and it and our awakened claims to be Catholic and Apostolic
cannot long stand together. This, then, is the main difficulty which
serious people feel in accepting the English Church as the promised
prophet of truth, and we are far indeed from undervaluing it, as the
above remarks show.
But now taking the objection in a simply practical view, which is the
only view in which it ought to concern or perplex any one, we consider
that it can have legitimately no effect whatever in leading us from
England to Rome. We do not say no legitimate tendency in itself to move
us, but no legitimate influence with serious men, who wish to know how
their duty lies. For this reason--because if the note of schism on the
one hand lies against England, an antagonist disgrace lies upon Rome,
the note of idolatry. Let us not be mistaken here: we are neither
accusing Rome of being idolatrous nor ourselves of being
schismatical,--we think neither charge tenable; but still the Roman
Church practises what looks so very like idolatry, and the English
glories in what looks so very like schism, that, without deciding what
is the duty of a Roman Catholic toward the Church of England in her
present state, we do seriously think that members of the English Church
have a providential direction given them, how to comport themselves
toward the Church of Rome, while she is what she is. We are discussing
the subject, not of decisive proofs, but of probable indications and of
presumptive notes of the divine will. Few men have time to scrutinize
accurately; all men may have general impressions, and the general
impressions of conscientious men are true ones. Providence has
graciously met their need, and provided for them those very means of
knowledge which they can use and turn to account. He has cast around the
institutions and powers existing in the world marks of truth or
falsehood, or, more properly, elements of attraction and repulsion, and
notices for pursuit and avoidance, sufficient to determine the course of
those who in the conduct of life desire to approve themselves to Him.
Now, whether or no what we see in the Church of Rome be sufficient to
warrant a religious person to leave her, (a question, we repeat, about
which we have no need here to concern ourselves,) we certainly think it
sufficient to deter him from joining her; and, whatever be the
perplexity and distress of his position in a communion so isolated as
the English, we do not think he would mend the matter by placing himself
in a communion so superstitious as the Roman; especially considering,
agreeably to a remark we have already made, that even if he be
schismatical at present, he is so by the act of Providence, whereas he
would be entering into superstition by his own. Thus an Anglo-Catholic
is kept at a distance from Rome, if not by our own excellences, at least
by her errors.
That this is the state of the Church of Rome, is, alas! not fairly
disputable. Dr. Wiseman has lately attempted to dispute it; but if we
may judge from the present state of the controversy, facts are too clear
for him. It has lately been broadly put forward, as all know, that,
whatever may be said in defence of the _authoritative documents_ of the
faith of Rome, this imputation lies against her _authorities_, that they
have countenanced and established doctrines and practices from which a
Christian mind, not educated in them, shrinks; and that in the number of
these a worship of the creature which to most men will seem to be a
quasi-idolatry is not the least prominent.[20] Dr. Wiseman, for whom we
entertain most respectful feelings personally, and to whom we impute
nothing but what is straight-forward and candid, has written two
pamphlets on the subject, toward which we should be very sorry to deal
unfairly; but he certainly seems to us in the former of them to deny the
fact of these alleged additions in the formal profession of his Church,
and then, in the second, to turn right round and maintain them. What
account is to be given of self-contradiction such as this, but the fact,
that he would deny the additions, if he could, and defends them, because
he can't? And that dilemma is no common one; for, as if to show that
what he holds in excess of our creed is in excess also of primitive
usage, he has in his defence been forced upon citations from the
writings of the Fathers, the chief of which, as Mr. Palmer has shown,
are spurious; thus setting before us vividly what he looks for in
Antiquity, but what he cannot find there. However, it is not our
intention to enter into a controversy which is in Mr. Palmer's hands;
nor need we do more than refer the reader to the various melancholy
evidences, which that learned, though over-severe writer, and Dr. Pusey,
and Mr. Ward adduce, in proof of the existence of this note of dishonor
in a sister or mother, toward whom we feel so tenderly and reverently,
and whom nothing but some such urgent reason in conscience could make us
withstand so resolutely.
So much has been said on this point lately as to increase our
unwillingness to insist upon a subject in itself very ungrateful; but a
reference to it is unavoidable, if we would adequately show what is the
legitimate use and duty of private judgment, in dealing with those notes
of truth and error, by which Providence recommends to us or disowns the
prophets that come in His name.
What imparts an especial keenness to the grief which the teaching in
question causes in minds kindly disposed toward the Church of Rome, is,
that not only are we expressly told in Scripture that the Almighty will
not give His glory to another, but it is predicted as His especial grace
upon the Christian Church, "the idols He shall utterly abolish"; so
that, if Anglicans are almost unchurched by the Protestantism which has
mixed itself up with their ecclesiastical proceedings, Romanists, also,
are almost unchurched by their superstitions. Again and again in the
Prophets is this promise given: "From all your filthiness, and from all
your idols will I cleanse you"; "Neither shall they defile themselves
any more with their idols"; "Ephraim shall say, What have I to do any
more with idols?" "I will cut off the names of the idols out of the
land." And the warning in the New is as strong as the promise in the
Old: "Little children, keep yourselves from idols"; "Let no man beguile
you of your reward in a voluntary humility and worshipping of angels";
and the angel's answer, to whom St. John fell down in worship, was "See
thou do it not, _for_ I am thy fellow-servant; worship God."[21]
It is then a note of the Christian Church, as decisive as any, that she
is not idolatrous; and any semblance of idolatrous worship in the Church
of Rome as plainly dissuades a man of Catholic feelings from her
communion, as the taint of a Protestant or schismatical spirit in our
communion may tempt him to depart from us. This is the Via Media which
we would maintain; and thus without judging Rome on the one hand, or
acquiescing in our own state on the other, we may use what we see, as a
providential intimation to _us_, not to quit what is bad for what may be
worse, but to learn resignation to what we inherit, nor seek to escape
into a happier state by suicide.
6.
And in such a state of things, certain though it be that St. Austin
invites individual Donatists to the Church, on the simple ground that
the larger body must be the true one, he is not, he cannot be, a guide
of _our_ conduct here. The Fathers are our teachers, but not our
confessors or casuists; they are the prophets of great truths, not the
spiritual directors of individuals. How can they possibly be such,
considering the subject-matter of conduct? Who shall say that a point
of practice which is right in one man, is right even in his next-door
neighbor? Do not the Fathers differ with each other in matters of
teaching and action, yet what fair persons ever imputed inconsistency to
them in consequence? St. Augustine bids us stay in persecution, yet St.
Dionysius takes to flight; St. Cyprian at one time flees, at another
time stays. One bishop adorns churches with paintings, another tears
down a pictured veil; one demolishes the heathen temples, another
consecrates them to the true God. St. Augustine at one time speaks
against the use of force in proselytizing, at another time he speaks for
it. The Church at one time comes into General Council at the summons of
the Emperor; at another time she takes the initiative. St. Cyprian
re-baptizes heretics; St. Stephen accepts their baptism. The early ages
administer, the later deny, the Holy Eucharist to children.[22] Who
shall say that in such practical matters, and especially in points of
casuistry, points of the when, and the where, and the by whom, and the
how, words written in the fourth century are to be the rule of the
nineteenth?
We have not St. Austin to consult; we cannot go to him with his works in
our hand, and ask him whether they are to be taken to the letter under
our altered circumstances. We cannot explain to him that, as far as the
appearance of things goes, there are, besides our own, at least two
Churches, one Greek, the other Roman; and that they are both marked by a
certain peculiarity which does not appear in his own times, or in his
own writings, and which much resembles what Scripture condemns as
idolatry. Nor can we remind him, that the Donatists had a note of
disqualification upon them, which of itself would be sufficient to
negative their claims to Catholicity, in that they refused the name of
Catholic to the rest of Christendom; and, moreover, in their bitter
hatred and fanatical cruelty toward the rival communion in Africa.
Moreover, St. Austin himself waives the question of the innocence or
guilt of Cæcilian, on the ground that the _orbis terrarum_ could not be
expected to have accurate knowledge of the facts of the case;[23] and,
if contemporary judgments might be deceived in regard to the merits of
the African Succession, yet, without blame, much more may it be
maintained, without any want of reverence to so great a saint, that
private letters which he wrote fourteen hundred years ago, do not take
into consideration the present circumstances of Anglo-Catholics. Are we
sure, that had he known them, they would not have led to an additional
chapter in his Retractions? And again, if ignorance would have been an
excuse, in his judgment, for the Catholic world's passing over the crime
of the Traditors, had Cæcilian and his party been such, much more, in so
nice a question as the Roman claim to the _orbis terrarum_ at this day,
in opposition to England and Greece, may we fairly consider that he who
condemned the Donatists only in the case of "quæstio facillima," would
excuse us, even if mistaken, from the notorious difficulties which lie
in the way of a true judgment. Nor, moreover, would he, who so
constantly sends us to Scripture for the notes of the Church Catholic,
condemn us for shunning communions, which had been so little sensitive
of the charge made against them of idolatry. But even let us suppose
him, after full cognizance of our case, to give judgment against us;
even then we shall have the verdict of St. Chrysostom, St. Basil, and
others virtually in our favor, supporters and canonizers as they were of
Meletius, Bishop of Antioch, who in St. Augustine's own day lived and
died out of the communion of Rome and Alexandria.[24]