The issue in 1564 of the canons of the council of Trent marks a very
definite epoch in the history of the Christian Church. Up till that
time, in spite of the schism of East and West and of innumerable
heresies, the idea of the Church as Catholic, not only in its faith but
in its organization, had been generally accepted. From this conception
the Reformers had, at the outset, no intention of departing. Their
object had been to purify the Church of medieval accretions, and to
restore the primitive model in the light of the new learning; the idea
of rival "churches," differing in their fundamental doctrines and in
their principles of organization, existing side by side, was as
abhorrent to them as to the most rigid partisan of Roman
centralization. The actual divisions of Western Christendom are the
outcome, less of the purely religious influences of the Reformation
period than of the political forces with which they were associated and
confused. When it became clear that the idea of doctrinal change would
find no acceptance at Rome, the Reformers appealed to the divine
authority of the civil power against that of the popes; and princes
within their several states succeeded, as the result of purely political
struggles and combinations, in establishing the form of religion best
suited to their convictions or their policy. Thus over a great part of
Europe the Catholic Church was split up into territorial or national
churches, which, whatever the theoretical ties which bound them
together, were in fact separate organizations, tending ever more and
more to become isolated and self-contained units with no formal
intercommunion, and, as the rivalry of nationalities grew, with
increasingly little even of intercommunication.
It was not, indeed, till the settlement of Westphalia in 1648, after the
Thirty Years' War, that this territorial division of Christendom became
stereotyped, but the process had been going on for a hundred years
previously; in some states, as in England and Scotland, it had long been
completed; in others, as in South Germany, Bohemia and Poland, it was
defeated by the political and missionary efforts of the Jesuits and
other agents of the counter-Reformation. In any case, it received a vast
impetus from the action of the council of Trent. With the issue of the
Tridentine canons, all hope even of compromise between the "new" and the
"old" religions was definitely closed. The anathema of the Roman Church
had fallen upon all the fundamental doctrines for which the Reformers
had contended and died; the right of free discussion within the limits
of the creeds, which had given room for the speculations of the medieval
philosophers, was henceforth curtailed and confined; and the definitions
of the schoolmen were for ever exalted by the authority of Rome into
dogmas of the Church. The Latin Church, which, by combining the
tradition of the Roman centralized organization with a great elasticity
in practice and in the interpretation of doctrine, had hitherto been the
moulding force of civilization in the West, is henceforth more or less
in antagonism to that civilization, which advances in all its
branches--in science, in literature, in art--to a greater or less degree
outside of and in spite of her, until in its ultimate and most
characteristic developments it falls under the formal condemnation of
the pope, formulated in the famous Syllabus of 1864. Considered from the
standpoint of the world outside, the Roman Church is, no less than the
Protestant communities, merely one of the sects into which Western
Christendom has been divided--the most important and widespread, it is
true, but playing in the general life and thought of the world a part
immeasurably less important than that filled by the Church before the
Reformation, and one in no sense justifying her claim to be considered
as the sole inheritor of the tradition of the pre-Reformation Church.
If this be true of the Roman Catholic Church, it is still more so of the
other great communities and confessions which emerged from the
controversies of the Reformation. Of these the Anglican Church held most
closely to the tradition of Catholic organization; but she has never
made any higher claim than to be one of "the three branches of the
Catholic Church," a claim repudiated by Rome and never formally admitted
by the Church of the East. The Protestant churches established on the
continent, even where--as in the case of the Lutherans--they approximate
more closely than the official Anglican Church to Roman doctrine and
practice, make no such claim. The Bible is for them the real source of
authority in doctrine; their organization is part and parcel of that of
the state. They are, in fact, the state in its religious aspect, and as
such are territorial or national, not Catholic. This tendency has been
common in the East also, where with the growth of racial rivalries the
Orthodox Church has split into a series of national churches, holding
the same faith but independent as to organization.
A yet further development, of comparatively recent growth, has been the
formation of what are now commonly called in England the "free
churches." These represent a theory of the Church practically unknown to
the Reformers, and only reached through the necessity for discovering a
logical basis for the communities of conscientious dissidents from the
established churches. According to this the Catholic Church is not a
visibly organized body, but the sum of all "faithful people" throughout
the world, who group themselves in churches modelled according to their
convictions or needs. For the organization of these churches no divine
sanction is claimed, though all are theoretically modelled on the lines
laid down in the Christian Scriptures. It follows that, while in the
traditional Church, with its claim to an unbroken descent from a divine
original, the individual is subordinate to the Church, in the "free
churches" the Church is in a certain sense secondary to the individual.
The believer may pass from one community to another without imperilling
his spiritual life, or even establish a new church without necessarily
incurring the reproach of schism. From this theory, powerful in Great
Britain and her colonies, supreme in the United States of America, has
resulted an enormous multiplication of sects.
It follows from the above argument that, from the period of the
Reformation onward, no historical account of the Christian Church as a
whole, and considered as a definite institution, is possible. The stream
of continuity has been broken, and divides into innumerable channels.
The only possible synthesis is that of the Christianity common to all;
as institutions, though they possess many features in common, their
history is separate and must be separately dealt with. The history of
the various branches of the Christian Church since the Reformation will
therefore be found under their several titles (see ROMAN CATHOLIC
CHURCH; ENGLAND, CHURCH OF; PRESBYTERIANISM; BAPTISTS, &c, &c.).
(W. A. P.)