Short Reasons for Communion with the Church of England / Or, The Churchman's answer to the question, "Why are you a Member of the Established Church?"

by Thomas Tregenna Biddulph

REASON V.

I maintain communion with the Church of England, because her doctrines are fixed by articles of Religion, which appear to me to be derived from and perfectly conformable to the Scriptures of Truth.

I AM fully aware that some among the ministers of the church to which I belong, may have entered into her service without understanding or fully approving the articles to which they subscribed their assent and consent, and consequently may preach doctrines differing from those of the church whose ministers they are. The possibility of the supposed case appears from the painful necessity, under which a late Bishop of London was laid, of depriving an unsound clergyman of his office. But such ministers cannot do this without exposing their own ignorance or hypocrisy; nor can their own unbelief make the faith of the church of no effect. These articles I consider to be the bulwark of orthodoxy or true doctrine in our church,—the means of her preservation from apostacy in the lowest state of spiritual life to which she has been or may be reduced, and of providing for her recovery from such a state whenever God is pleased to breathe upon her. A declaration or subscription to the truth of the Bible would afford no security, as all who bear the Christian name, however heretical or unsound in opinion, pretend to derive their creed from the word of God. I conceive therefore that it is of high importance to have the principal articles of the Christian faith embodied in such a way, that no heretic can, without manifest dishonesty, subscribe to them. If the incumbent or minister of any parish be thus dishonest, having subscribed to what he never cordially believed, and preaching doctrines contrary to the articles he has subscribed, when his incumbency or ministry in that parish ceases by death or any other cause, the articles of the church remain in full force. But if no such test existed, and if the election to church preferment were vested in the people, a single incumbency might so corrupt the opinions of the congregation as to perpetuate heresy from generation to generation.

I continue therefore in the communion of the Church of England, because she has fixed principles, and those principles are, in my judgment, scriptural and “according to godliness.”