Nay, I will go further. I can conceive a person to reject Catholicism without logically rejecting Christianity. He would indeed reject the divine certainty which guarantees and proposes to us the whole revelation of the day of Pentecost. But, as Catholic theologians teach, the infallible authority of the Church does not of necessity enter into the essence of an act of faith. [Footnote 66] It is, indeed, the divine provision for the perfection and perpetuity of the faith, and in hac providentia, the ordinary means whereby men are illuminated in the revelation of God; but the known and historical evidence of Christianity is enough to convince any prudent man that Christianity is a divine revelation. It is quite true that by this process he cannot attain an explicit faith in all the doctrines of revelation, and that in rejecting Catholicism he reduces himself to human and historical evidence as the maximum of extrinsic certainty for his religion, and that this almost inevitably resolves itself in the long run into rationalism. It is an inclined plane on which, if individuals may stand, generations cannot. Nevertheless, though the alternative in the last analysis of speculation be Catholicism or deism, the practical alternative may be Catholicism and fragmentary Christianity.
[Footnote 66: De Lugo,—De Virtute Fidei Divinae, disp. i., sect. xii. 250-53. Viva, Cursus Theol., p. iv., disp. i., quaest. iv., art. iii. Ripalda, De Ente Supern., disp. xx., seet. xxii. 117.]
I have said this to show how far I am from sympathizing with those, if any there be, and I can truly say I know none such, who regard the giving way of any lingering truth in the Church of England under the action of unbelief with any feeling but that of sorrow. The Psalmist lamented over the dying out of truths. "Diminutae sunt veritates a filiis hominum," and I believe that every one who loves God, and souls, and truth must lament when a single truth, speculative or moral, even of the natural order, is obscured; much more when any revealed truth of the elder or of the Christian revelation is rejected or even doubted. Allow me also to answer, not only for myself, which is of no great moment, but for an eminent personage to whom you have referred in your pamphlet. I can say, with a personal and perfect knowledge, that no other feeling has ever arisen in His Eminence's mind, in contemplating the troubles of the Anglican Church, than a sincere desire that God may use these things to open the eyes of men to see the untenableness of their positions; coupled with a very sincere sorrow at the havoc which the advance of unbelief is making among the truths which yet linger in the Church of England.
3. It is, however, but reason that I [{299}] should rejoice when whatsoever remains in it of imperfect truth is unfolded into a more perfect faith: and that therefore I desire to see not only the conversion of England, but the conversion of every soul to whom the more perfect truth can be made known. You would not respect me if I did not. Your own zeal for truth and for souls here speaks in my behalf. There are two kinds of proselytism. There are the Jews whom our Lord condemned. There are also the Apostles whom he sent into all the world. If by proselytizing be meant the employing of unlawful and unworthy means, motives, or influences to change a person's religion, I should consider the man who used such means to commit lèse-majesté against truth, and against our Lord who is the truth. But if by proselytizing be meant the using all the means of conviction and persuasion which our divine Master has committed to us to bring any soul who will listen to us into the only faith and fold, then of this I plead guilty with all my heart. I do heartily desire to see the Church of England dissolve and pass away, as the glow of lingering embers in the rise and steady light of a reviving flame. If the Church of England were to perish to-morrow under the action of a higher and more perfect truth, there would be no void left in England. All the truths hitherto taught in fragments and piecemeal would be still more vividly and firmly impressed upon the minds of the English people. All of Christianity which survives in Anglicanism would be perfected by the restoration of the truths which have been lost, and the whole would be fixed and perpetuated by the evidence of divine certainty and the voice of a divine Teacher. No Catholic desires to see the Church of England swept away by an infidel revolution, such as that of 1789 in France. But every Catholic must wish to see it give way year by year, and day by day, under the intellectual and spiritual action of the Catholic Church: and must watch with satisfaction every change, social and political, which weakens its hold on the country, and would faithfully use all his power and influence for its complete removal as speedily as possible.
4. But lastly, I am afraid we have reached a point of divergence. Hitherto I hope we may have been able to agree together; but now I fear every step of advance will carry us more wide of each other. I am unable to consider the Church of England to be "in God's hands the great bulwark against infidelity in this land." And my reasons are these:
1.) First, I must regard the Anglican Reformation, and therefore the Anglican Church, as the true and original source of the present spiritual anarchy of England. Three centuries ago the English people were in faith unius labii: they were in perfect unity. Now they are divided and subdivided by a numberless multiplication of errors. What has generated them? From what source do they descend? Is it not self-evident that the Reformation is responsible for the production of every sect and every error which has sprung up in England in these three hundred years, and of all which cover the face of the land at this day? It is usual to hear Anglicans lament the multiplication of religious error. But what is the productive cause of all? Is it not Anglicanism itself which, by appealing from the voice of the Church throughout the world, has set the example to its own people of appealing from the voice of a local and provincial authority?
I am afraid, then, that the Church of England, so far from, a barrier against infidelity, must be recognized as the mother of all the intellectual and spiritual aberrations which now cover the face of England.
2.) It is true, indeed, that the Church of England retains many truths in it. But it has in two ways weakened the evidence of these very truths which it retains. It has detached them from [{300}] other truths which by contact gave solidity to all by rendering them coherent and intelligible. It has detached them from the divine voice of the Church, which guarantees to us the truth incorruptible and changeless. The Anglican Reformation destroyed the principle of cohesion, by which all truths are bound together into one. The whole idea of theology, as the science of God and of his revelation, has been broken up. Thirty-nine Articles, heterogeneous, disjointed, and mixed with error, is all that remains instead of the unity and harmony of Catholic truth. Surely this has been among the most prolific causes of error, doubt, and unbelief. So far from the bulwark against it, Anglicanism appears to me to be the cause and spring of its existence. As I have already said, the Reformation placed the English people upon an inclined plane, and they have steadily obeyed the law of their position, by descending gradually from age to age, sometimes with a more rapid, sometimes with a slower motion, but always tending downward. Surely it would be unreasonable to say of a body always descending, that it is the great barrier against reaching the bottom.
I do not, indeed, forget that the Church of England has produced writers who have vindicated many Christian truths. I am not unmindful of the service rendered by Anglican writers to Christianity in general, nor, in particular, of the works of Bull and Waterland in behalf of the Holy Trinity; of Hammond and Pearson in behalf of Episcopacy; of Butler and Warburton in behalf of Revelation, and the like. But whence came the errors and unbeliefs against which they wrote? Were they not generated by the Reformation abroad and in England? This is like the spear which healed the wounds it had made. But it is not the divine office of the Church to make wounds in the faith that it may use its skill in healing. They were quelling the mutiny which Protestantism had raised, and arresting the progress of the Reformation which, like Saturn, devours its own children.
Moreover, to be just I must say that if the Church of England be a barrier against infidelity, the Dissenters must also be admitted to a share in this office and commendation. And in truth I do not know among the Dissenters any works like the Essays and Reviews, or any Biblical criticism like that of Dr. Colenso. They may not be very dogmatic in their teaching, but they bear their witness for Christianity as a divine revelation, for the Scriptures as an inspired book, and, I must add further, for the personal Christianity of conversion and repentance, with an explicitness and consistency which is not less effectual against infidelity than the testimony of the Church of England. I do not think the Wesleyan Conference or the authorities of the three denominations would accept readily this assumed superiority of the Anglican Church as a witness against unbelief. They would not unjustly point to the doctrinal confusions of the Church of England as causes of scepticism, from which they are comparatively free. And I am bound to say that I think they would have an advantage. I well remember that while I was in the Church of England I used to regard Dissenters from it with a certain, I will not say aversion, but distance and recoil. I never remember to have borne animosity against them, or to have attacked or pursued them with unkindness. I always believed many of them to be very earnest and devoted men. I did not like their theology, and I believed them to be in disobedience to the Church of England; but I respected them, and lived at peace with them. Indeed, I may say that some of the best people I have ever known out of the Church were Dissenters or children of Dissenters. Nevertheless, I had a dislike of their system, and of their meeting-houses. They seemed to me to be rivals of the Church of England, and my loyalty to it made me look somewhat impatiently upon them. But I remember, from [{301}] the hour I submitted to the Catholic Church, all this underwent a sensible change. I saw that the whole revelation was perpetuated in the Church alone, and that all forms of Christianity lying round about it were but fragments more or less mutilated. But with this a sensible increase of kindly feeling grew upon me. The Church of England and the dissenting communions all alike appeared to me to be upon the same level. I rejoiced in all the truth that remains in them, in all the good I could see or hope in them, and all the workings of the Holy Spirit in them. I had no temptation to animosity toward them; for neither they nor the Church of England could be rivals of the imperishable and immutable Church of God. The only sense, then, in which I could regard the Church of England as a barrier against infidelity, I must extend also to the dissenting bodies; and I cannot put this high, for reasons I will give.