(A. H.*)
C. The Modern Church
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.)
[1] Upon the spread of the Church during the early centuries see especially Harnack’s Mission und Ausbreitung des Christenthums in den ersten drei Jahrhunderten. An interesting parallel to the spread of Christianity in the Roman empire is afforded by the contemporary Mithraism. See Cumont’s Les Mystères de Mithra (1900), Eng. tr. The Mysteries of Mithra (1903).