I do not here forget all you have done to provide ascetical and devotional books for the use of the Church of England, both by your own writings, and, may I not say it, from your neighbor's vineyard?
With truth, then, I can say that I rejoice in all the operations of the Holy Spirit out of the Catholic Church, whether in the Anglican or other Protestant bodies; not that those communions are thereby invested with any supernatural character, but because more souls, I trust, are saved. If I have a greater joy over these workings of grace in the Church of England, it is only because more that are dear to me are in it, for whom every day I never fail to pray. These graces to individuals were given before the Church was founded, and are given still out of its unity. They are no more tokens of an ecclesiastical character, or a sacramental power in the Church of England, than in the Kirk of Scotland, or in the Wesleyan connexion; they prove only the manifold grace of God, which, after all the sins of men, and in the midst of all the ruins he has made, still works in the souls for whom Christ died. Such, then, is our estimate of the Church of England in regard to the grace that works not by it, nor through it, but in it and among those who, without faults of their own, are detained by it from the true Church of their baptism.
And here it is necessary to guard against a possible misuse of what I have said. Let no one imagine that he may still continue in the Church of England because God has hitherto mercifully bestowed his grace upon [{296}] him. As I have shown, this is no evidence that salvation is to be had by the Church of England. It is an axiom that to those who do all they can God never refuses his grace. He bestows it that he may lead them on from grace to grace, and from truth to truth, until they enter the full and perfect light of faith in his only true fold. The grace they have received, therefore, was given, not to detain them in the Church of England, but to call them out of it. The grace of their past life lays on them the obligation of seeking and submitting to the perfect truth. God would "have all men to be saved, and to come to the knowledge of the truth." [Footnote 63] But his Church is an eminent doctrine, and member of that truth; and all grace given out of the Church is given in order to bring men into the Church, wheresoever the Church is present to them. If they refuse to submit to the Church they resist the divine intention of the graces they have hitherto received, and are thereby in grave danger of losing them, as we see too often in men who once were on the threshold of the Church, and now are in rationalism, or in states of which I desire to say no more.
[Footnote 63: 1 Tim. ii. 4.]
2. Let me next speak of the truths which the Church of England still retains. I have no pleasure in its present trials; and the anonymous writer who describes me as being "positively merry" over its disasters little knows me. If I am to speak plainly, he seems to me to be guilty of one of the greatest offences—a rash accusation against one whom he evidently does not know. I will further say that I lament with all my heart whensoever what remains of truth in the Anglican system gives way before unbelief.
I do not, indeed, regard the Church of England as a teacher of truth, for that would imply that it teaches the truth in all its circumference, and in all its divine certainty. Now this is precisely what the Church of England does not, and, as I will show presently, has destroyed in itself the power of doing. I am willing to call it a teacher of truths, because many fragmentary truths, shattered, disjointed from the perfect unity of the Christian revelation, still survive the Reformation, and, with much variation and in the midst of much contradiction, are still taught in it. I have been wont always to say, and to say with joy, that the Reformation, which has done its work with such a terrible completeness in Germany, was arrested in England; that here much of the Christian belief and Christian order has survived. Until lately I have been in the habit of saying that there are three things which missionaries may take for granted in England: first, the existence of a supernatural world; secondly, the revelation of Christianity; and thirdly, the inspiration of Scripture. The Church of England has also preserved other doctrines with more or less of exactness, such as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the incarnation, baptism, and the like. I will not now enter into the question as to what other doctrines are retained by it, because a few more or a few less would make little difference in the final estimate a Catholic must make of it. A teacher of Christian truths I gladly admit it to be. A teacher of Christian truth—no, because it rejects much of that truth, and also the divine principle of its perpetuity in the world. Nevertheless, I rejoice in every fragment of doctrine which remains in it; and I should lament the enfeebling or diminution of any particle of that truth. I have ever regarded with regret the so-called Low-Church and Latitudinarian schools in the Anglican Church, because I believe their action and effect is to diminish what remains of truth in it. I have always regarded with joy, and I have never ceased to regard with sympathy, notwithstanding much which I cannot either like or respect, the labors of the High-Church or Anglo-Catholic party, because I believe that their action and effect are "to strengthen the things which remain, which were ready [{297}] to die." For myself, I am conscious how little I have ever done in my life; but as it is now drawing toward its end, I have at least this consolation, that I cannot remember at any time, by word or act, to have undermined a revealed truth; but that, according to my power, little enough as I know, I have endeavored to build up what truth I knew, truth upon truth, if only as one grain of sand upon another, and to bind it together by the only bond and principle of cohesion which holds in unity the perfect revelation of God. A very dear friend, whose friendship has been to me one of the most instructive, and the loss of which was to me one of the hardest sacrifices I had to make, has often objected to me, with the subtlety which marks his mind, that my act in leaving the Church of England has helped forward the unbelief which is now invading it. No doubt he meant to say that the tendency of such an act helped to shake the confidence of others in the Church of England as a teacher of truth. This objection was, like his mind, ingenious and refined. But a moment's thought unravelled it, and I answered it much in these words:
I do not believe that by submitting to the Catholic Church any one can weaken the witness of the Church of England for the truth which it retains. So far as it holds the truth, it is in conformity to the Catholic Church. In submitting to the Catholic Church, I all the more strongly give testimony to the same truths which the Church of England still retains. If I give testimony against the Church of England, it is in those points in which, being at variance with the truth, the Church of England is itself undermining the faith of Christianity.
It was for this reason I always lamented the legalizing of the sacramentarian errors of the Low-Church party by the Gorham Judgment; and that I lament now the legalizing of the heresies of the "Essays and Reviews," and the spreading unbelief of Dr. Colenso. I believe that anything which undermines the Christianity of England is drawing it further and further from us. In proportion as men believe more of Christianity, they are nearer to the perfect truth. The mission of the Church in the world is to fill up the truth. Our Divine Lord said, "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil;" and St. Paul did not overthrow the altar of the Unknown God, but gave to it an object of divine worship and a true adoration. For this cause I regard the present downward course of the Church of England and the Christianity of England with great sorrow and fear. And I am all the more alarmed because of those who are involved in it so many not only refuse to acknowledge the fact, but treat us who give warning of the danger as enemies and accusers.
One of my critics has imagined, that I propose to myself and others the alternative of Catholicism or atheism. I have never attempted to bring any one to the perfect truth by destroying or by threatening the imperfect faith they might still possess. I do not believe that the alternative before us is Catholicism or atheism. There are lights of the natural order, divine witnesses of himself inscribed by the Creator on his works, characters engraven upon the conscience, and testimonies of mankind in all the ages of the world, which prove the existence and perfections of God, the moral nature and responsibility of man anterior to Catholicism, and independently of revelation. If a man, through any intellectual or moral aberration, should reject Christianity, that is Catholicism, the belief of God and of his perfections stands immutably upon the foundations of nature. Catholicism, or deism, is indeed the only ultimately logical and consistent alternative, though, happily, few men in rejecting Catholicism are logically consistent enough to reject Christianity. Atheism is an aberration which implies not only an intellectual blindness, but a moral insensibility. The theism [{298}] of the world has its foundation on the face of the natural world, and on the intellect and the heart of the human race. The old paganism and modern pantheism are reverent, filial, and elevating compared with the atheism of Comte and of our modern secularists. It would be both intellectually and morally impossible to propose to any one the alternative of Catholicism or atheism. Not only then do I lament to see any truth in the Church of England give way before unbelief, but I should regard with sorrow and impatience any attempt to promote the belief of the whole revelation of Christianity by a mode of logic which undermines even the truths of the natural order. The Holy See has authoritatively declared that the existence of God may be proved by reason and the light of nature, [Footnote 64] and Alexander VIII. declared that men who do not know of the existence of God are without excuse. [Footnote 65] Atheism is not the condition of man without revelation. As Viva truly says in his comment on this declaration, atheists are anomalies and exceptions in the intellectual tradition of mankind.
[Footnote 64: "Ratiocinatio Dei existentiam, animae spiritualitatem, hominis libertatem, cum certitudine probare potest." Theses a SS. D. N. Pio IX. approbatae, 11 Junii 1855. Denzinger's Enchiridion, p. MS. Ed. 1856. ]
[Footnote 65: Viva, Propos. damnatae, p. 372. Ripalda, De Ente Supernaturali. disp. xx., s. 12, 59. ]