THE ENGLISH PRESS AND THE PAN-ANGLICAN SYNOD.
On the 2d of July a certain, or rather uncertain, number of English, Irish, Scotch, Canadian, and American gentlemen met together in the long-desecrated chapel of Lambeth Palace; and on the 27th of the same month the same gentlemen, after listening to a discourse in St. Paul’s Cathedral from one of their number, the “Bishop of Pennsylvania,” bade each other farewell. During the twenty-five days that had intervened between these two dates the gentlemen in question had talked a great deal to and at each other, sometimes in public and sometimes with closed doors. A general sense of confusion concerning this assemblage seemed to pervade that portion of the public mind of London which paid any attention to it. The London newspapers, which must notice everything, from the arrest of a pickpocket to the reconstruction of an empire, could not agree upon the title to be given it. In the Morning Post it was spoken of as “The Lambeth Conference”; the Spectator called it “The Gathering of the Bishops”; the Times on one day entitled it “The Pan-Anglican Synod,” on another it spoke of it as “Episcopal Visitors”; the Pall Mall Gazette and the Saturday Review agreed upon “The Bishops at Lambeth” as a sufficiently safe and non-committal title; but the former, on one day, went so far as to venture to speak of the assemblage as “The Pan-Anglican Conference.” Nor did the reporters of the journals arrive at a consensus of opinion concerning the number of these gentlemen; one authority reporting them as numbering “something like eighty-five prelates,” while another placed the assemblage at “about one hundred,” and a third, with greater precision, spoke of “about one hundred bishops and four archbishops.” A still more notable diversity of opinion prevailed as to the purpose for which these gentlemen had come together—some of the writers in the journals insisting that the affair was a mere social gathering; others that it was a species of debating society composed exclusively of Anglican bishops; others that it was a conclave to devise combined action “to put down the Ritualists”; others that its purpose was to “sell out” to the pope, if peradventure he would buy; others that it covered a scheme for the “corporate unity” of the Protestant Episcopal Churches in Great Britain, Ireland, the colonies, and America, with the Archbishop of Canterbury as patriarch. The journals which care most for the respectability and perpetuation of the Anglican body besought the gentlemen to content themselves with talking, taking tea, and smoking in Mrs. Tait’s back garden, and not to attempt to do anything else. “We recommend the bishops,” said the Spectator, “not to attempt a pastoral, as they did last time; not to try their hands on points of creed; not to suppose that for any purpose of defining religious belief they will be strengthened by this concourse, if not rather weakened.” They might, perhaps, discuss “what concession could be made to pagan and heathen converts brought up under a very different morality from the Christian”—as, for instance, we suppose, whether a Turkish convert might not be permitted to indulge in his peculiar ideas regarding marriage, and whether a converted Thug should not be allowed to strangle a victim occasionally. Or they might even venture to discuss “the practicability or impracticability of church discipline”—that is, whether it be “practicable” or “impracticable” for a clergyman to refuse to marry a divorced person or to exclude an unrepentant murderer from the communion-table; or for a bishop to prevent one of his clergy from turning the communion service into a Methodist love-feast, or another from making it a close imitation of the holy sacrifice of the Mass. They might “discuss” these things, but they must not act upon them, and they must above all refrain from “discussing creeds.” “We strongly recommend the Pan-Anglican Synod,” exclaimed the Spectator, “to renounce entirely the superstition which attaches to such assemblages of bishops a sort of divine skill in discriminating truth from falsehood. Indeed, we believe them to be under very special incapacities for any such discrimination.” Honest and true advice, but hard for the so-called bishops to bear, as coming from a journal warmly attached to Anglicanism and edited by two prominent and zealous members of that church. No discussion of creeds! no discrimination of truth from falsehood! Why, here is the Anglican body throughout the English-speaking peoples, with a clergy no two of whom can agree upon the most vital dogmas of the Christian faith; who are disputing with each other and befogging the minds of their people with their discordant “views” upon the subject of baptismal regeneration; upon the sanctity and indissolubility of the marriage relation; upon the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist. If these were true bishops, if their church were really a church and anything but a state-born and worldly association, these bishops would not have separated without not only “discussing” but defining the faith and providing for its preservation and enforcement.
They took the Spectator’s advice. They took it all the more readily, perhaps, because the Times pointed out to them that “these highly respectable gentlemen from the antipodes and the tropics, from the Transvaal and the Falls of Niagara,” must make up their minds that to eat “a dinner at the Mansion House” was the most important work they would have to perform, and that in “the social assemblages” that would follow they would “find more benefit than from their public conferences.” The Times frowned upon the suggestion that the Primate of All England countenances, even tacitly, the suggestion that he should be recognized as the metropolitan of the Anglican Church; the Saturday Review ridiculed the opinion that “the reliance of the independent communities upon England might be regulated and strengthened by declaring that the Archbishop of Canterbury was a patriarch, and Lord Penzance, we suppose, family lawyer all round,” and went to the extent of comparing the church to an “Odd-fellows’ society.” In the face of chaff like this the gentlemen from the antipodes and Niagara Falls, as well as those from Lincolnshire and Edinburgh, turned a deaf ear to the appeals alike of Ritualistic working-men and Low-Church green-grocers, and wisely contented themselves with eating the lord mayor’s dinner, going to sober evening parties, preaching sermons in London churches, and devoting a few hours each week to the discussion, in church-congress fashion, of such thrilling and vitally important themes as “Voluntary Boards of Arbitration,” or “the position of Anglican chaplains on the Continent of Europe and elsewhere.” To cap the climax, during the session of the conference the first anniversary of “the Reformed Episcopal Church of England” was held in Newman Hall’s church in London. The Reformed Episcopal Church of England, it may not be generally known, was imported into England from the United States, and had its birth by the secession of Bishop Cummings, Mr. Cheney of Chicago, and some others from the Protestant Episcopal Church. The Reformed Episcopal Church of England has a bishop—one Mr. Gregg—and at this anniversary meeting Bishop Gregg said:
“The Church of England might be likened to a ship. When he joined it he thought he was going straight to a Protestant port, but he afterwards found that the ship had turned its head, had altered its course, and was now bound straight for Rome. For this reason, as he did not want to go to Rome, he thought it best to come out of it. Some people had asked, ‘Why not remain in it and endeavor to alter its course? Why not try to reform it?’ His answer was that others had tried to do it and had failed, and therefore he had come to his present conclusion. After denouncing the evils of sacerdotalism Dr. Gregg said that he considered the present Prayer-book was the cause of many of the existing evils. The Reformed Episcopal Church had therefore entirely revised it, freed it from all sacerdotalism, had thoroughly uprooted all its dangerous dogmas, and the revised edition now in press would shortly be issued.”
The bishops at Lambeth were so fearful of disobeying the injunctions of the Spectator not to “discuss creeds,” or to attempt to “discriminate between truth and error,” that they did not even venture to rebuke Bishop Gregg or to take any steps against this schism. Indeed, how can they be sure that he is not right and that they are not wrong?
The first Pan-Anglican Synod, convoked eleven years ago, the London Times says, “excited some curiosity, mingled with more ridicule and remonstrances.” But it discharged its “apparent functions” to the satisfaction of all concerned. That is—
“It afforded to a great many hard-working gentlemen the opportunity of taking a holiday under the guise of an episcopal progress. A certain number among them it enabled to render an account in person to their constituents in England of the value they had received for the funds entrusted to their hands, and to beg for more. Over and above these material objects, the synod professed its aim to preserve Anglican churchmen throughout the world in theological harmony. This, too, it accomplished, at least negatively. English churchmen were able to testify that Protestant bishops from the east and from the west resembled each other very closely in demeanor and in their forms of thought. They even had, surmounting the obstacles of their local accent, the very tone of voice which no other body of clergy throughout the civilized world can boast, and which gives Church-of-England ministers a virtual monopoly of the clerical sore throat. Our visitors, whose episcopal residences and cathedrals are scattered over the globe, carried home, we believe, an equally good report of church conservatism in the mother-country.”
But the subtle mind of the late Bishop of Winchester, who was the reputed author of this episcopal picnic, had deeper views at bottom. He intended the first Pan-Anglican Synod as an answer to the sneer that the Church of England is a local accident, without any principle of spiritual authority, growth, or development. The synod was held, but the Bishop of Winchester was disappointed: the bishops would do nothing; they would not even order Bishop Colenso to the stake; and, “as clergymen, what they manifested above all else was that the Anglican Church in England and the Anglican Church out of England resemble each other almost to identity. The special peculiarities of the Church of England come into even more prominence abroad than at home. We are more impressed with the spirit of the state church carved out by King Henry VIII. when we meet with its foreign professors than we are in the country of its birth.” How biting is this sarcasm, and how deeply it must cut into the heart of the Anglican or the American Episcopalian who stills fancies that the mind of England is true to Anglicanism!
The Lambeth Conference which has lately ended was as barren of results as was its predecessor. On the day before its first meeting a number of the American and colonial bishops went down to Canterbury, where Dr. Tait, perhaps as an undress rehearsal of his anticipated elevation to the post of Protestant Pope, had “the chair of St. Augustine” brought forth, enthroned himself in it, and delivered a discourse. The audacity of this performance was extreme; perhaps the thoughts which it must have suggested to the spectators will yield their proper fruit. In face of the disjecta membra of a creed before him Dr. Tait had the extreme rashness, not to use a harsher term, to say in this discourse that he and his hearers “had advantages which the great St. Augustine had not,” for “they stood nearer to the pure, primitive Christianity of the apostles than St. Augustine stood, ...” and that St. Augustine’s faith, which is that of the whole Catholic Church to-day, was “a sort of semi-pagan Christianity.” St. Augustine preached in England in the sixth century, Dr. Tait talks in the nineteenth; which is “nearer,” chronologically, “pure, primitive Christianity,” and which is nearer, doctrinally, the faith that St. Augustine received from Rome or that which Dr. Tait has received from Henry VIII. and Queen Elizabeth?
On the next day, July 2, the conference opened at Lambeth Palace. There were “something like eighty-five prelates present,” of whom forty-three were from the colonies and the United States. It seems that there are ten bishops unattached, living in and around London, who had expected to be invited and who were disgusted at being left out; but it is explained that “the primate felt that the line must be drawn somewhere, and these prelates had no jurisdiction, even of a delegated character,” so he drew it at them. Before entering the chapel to receive holy communion the bishops adopted the following declaration:
“We, bishops of Christ’s Holy Catholic Church, in visible communion with the churches of England and Ireland, professing the faith delivered to us in Holy Scripture, maintained by the primitive church and by the fathers of the blessed Reformation, now assembled by the good providence of God at the archiepiscopal palace of Lambeth, under the presidency of the Primate of All England, desire, first, to give hearty thanks to Almighty God for having thus brought us together for common counsel and united worship; secondly, we desire to express the deep sorrow with which we view the divided condition of the flock of Christ throughout the world, ardently longing for the fulfilment of the prayer of our Lord, ‘That all may be one, as thou, Father, art in me and I in thee, that they may also be one in us, that the world might believe that thou hast sent me’; and, lastly, we do here solemnly record our conviction that unity will be more effectually promoted by maintaining the faith in its purity and integrity—as taught in the Holy Scriptures, held by the primitive church, summed up in the creeds, and affirmed by the undisputed general councils—and by drawing each of us closer to our common Lord by giving ourselves to much prayer and intercession, by the cultivation of a spirit of charity and a love of the Lord’s appearing.”
Is it not extraordinary that men of intelligence will persist in befogging themselves with phrases about “the deep sorrow” with which they view the divided condition of the flock of Christ throughout the world, and their longing for the fulfilment of the prayer of our Lord for the unity of his people? The flock of Christ is not divided; it has never been divided, and can never be divided for the reason that he not only prayed for its unity but willed its unity, and provided infallible means for the preservation of its unity.
The communion service over, Dr. Thomson, the Archbishop of York, pronounced a somewhat remarkable discourse, in which Catholic truth, Protestant error, and fanciful theory were strangely mixed, from the words of St. Paul, “But when Peter was come to Antioch I withstood him to the face, because he was to be blamed.” He exposed the fallacy of the theory that the great apostle of the gentiles and the first Supreme Pontiff were in antagonism to each other, and he did this ably; but he ended his sermon with the following absurd passage:
“More than one writer has been pleased to point out that in the first century there were three periods, in which three apostles—Peter, Paul, and John—predominated in succession; and they think they can trace the same succession in the larger field of church history, so that the Petrine period ends at the Reformation, and the Pauline succeeds it, whilst the time of St. John is supposed to be the beginning. There is something fanciful in this arrangement. Yet pardon the fancy for the truth that underlies it. And when Peter falters, impulsive, and is inconsistent with himself, and Paul withstands him to the face, let the third apostle enter on the scene and remind us that we can afford to use the largest charity whilst we hold still the firmest trust. His contribution to the eternal diapason of the church’s faith and love shall be this: ‘Whosoever shall confess that Jesus is the Son of God, God dwelleth in him and he in God.... And this commandment have we from him, that he who loveth God love his brother also’ (1 John iv. 15, 21).”
It will not do to set up St. Paul as the John the Baptist of Luther and Henry VIII.’s Reformation; nor will it do to assume that Peter, whose province it is to confirm the faith of his brethren, “falters and is inconsistent with himself,” or that the church has waited until now to understand the words of St. John.
But here the curtain falls upon the public proceedings of the conference. They retired from the profane sight of men, and, shut up in company with “four reporters pledged to secrecy,” and who duly gave to the journals every day accounts of all that happened, they spent a few hours of each day in discussing “not creeds,” but “modern forms of infidelity”; “the best mode of maintaining unity among the various churches of the Anglican communion”; “Voluntary Boards of Arbitration for churches to which such an arrangement may be applicable”; “the relation to each other of missionary bishops and of missionaries in various branches of the Anglican community acting in the same country”; and “the position of Anglican chaplains and chaplaincies on the Continent of Europe and elsewhere.” Nothing could be less interesting than much of this; and the prelates were no doubt glad when all was over, and when they closed their meetings by a sermon from the Bishop of Pennsylvania in St. Paul’s Cathedral.
As is plain from the comments already given by the leading organs of English opinion, the second Pan-Anglican Synod attracted even less attention and more general contempt than the first. When men come to ask themselves what has been accomplished by the twenty-five days’ session besides tea and talk, what is the only answer? It is this: the synod ended, as it began, in nothing.