3.) If the Church of England be a barrier to infidelity by the truths which yet remain in it, I must submit that it is a source of unbelief by all the denials of other truths which it has rejected. If it sustains a belief in two sacraments, it formally propagates unbelief in five; if it recognizes an undefined presence of Christ in the sacrament, it formally imposes on its people a disbelief in transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the altar; if it teaches that there is a church upon earth, it formally denies its indissoluble unity, its visible head, and its perpetual divine voice.
It is not easy to see how a system can be a barrier against unbelief when by its Thirty-nine Articles it rejects, and binds its teachers to propagate the rejection, of so many revealed truths.
4.) But this is not all. It is not only by the rejection of particular doctrines that the Church of England propagates unbelief. It does so by principle, and in the essence of its whole system. What is the ultimate guarantee of the divine revelation but the divine authority of the Church? Deny this, and we descend at once to human teachers. But it is this that the Church of England formally and expressly denies. The perpetual and ever-present assistance of the Holy Spirit, whereby the Church in every age is not only preserved from error, but enabled at all times to declare the truth, that is the infallibility of the living Church at this hour—this it is that the Anglican Church in terms denies. But this is the formal antagonist of infidelity, because it is the evidence on which God wills that we should believe that which his veracity reveals. Do not be displeased with me. It appears to me that the Anglican system, by this one fact alone, perpetually undoes what it strives to do in behalf of particular doctrines. What are they, one by one, when the divine certainty of all is destroyed? Now, for three hundred years the Anglican clergy have been trained, ordained, and bound by subscriptions to deny not only many Christian truths, but the divine authority of the
the living Church of every age. The barrier against infidelity is the divine voice which generates faith. But this the Anglican clergy are bound to deny. And this denial opens a flood-gate in the bulwark, through which the whole stream of unbelief at once finds way. Seventeen or eighteen thousand men, educated with all the advantages of the English schools and universities, endowed with large corporate revenues, and distributed all over England, maintain a perpetual protest, not only against the Catholic Church, but against the belief that there is any divine voice immutably and infallibly guiding the Church at this hour in its declaration of the Christian revelation to mankind. How can this be regarded as "the great bulwark in God's hand against infidelity?"
It seems to me that the Church of England, so far from being a bulwark against the flood, has floated before it. Every age has exhibited an advance to a more indefinite and heterogeneous state of religious opinion within its [{302}] pale. I will not go again over ground I have already traversed. Even in our memory the onward progress of the Church of England is manifest. That I may not seem to draw an unfavorable picture from my own view, I will quote a very unsuspected witness. Dr. Irons, in a recent pamphlet, says: "The religion of the Church has sunk far deeper into conscience now than the surviving men of 1833-1843 are aware of. And all that Churchmen want of their separated brethren is that they accept nothing, and profess nothing, and submit to nothing which has 'no root' in their conscience." [Footnote 67] If this means anything, it means that objective truth has given place to subjective sincerity as the Anglican rule of faith. You will know better than I whether this be the state of men's minds among you. To me it is as strange as it is incoherent, and a sign how far men have drifted. This certainly was not the faith or religion that we held together in the years when I had the happiness of being united in friendship with you. Latitudinarian sincerity was not our basis, and if the men of 1833 and 1843 have arrived at this, it is very unlike the definite, earnest, consistent belief which animated us at that time. You say in your note (page 21) kindly, but a little upbraidingly, that my comment on your letter to the "Record" was not like me in those days: forasmuch as I used then to join with those with whom even then you could not. It was this that made me note your doing so now. It was this which seemed to me to be a drifting backward from old moorings. For myself, it is true, indeed, that I have moved likewise. I have been carried onward to what you then were, and beyond it. What I might have done then, I could not do now. What you do now seems to me what you would not have done then. I did not note this unkindly, but with regret, because, as I rejoice in every truth, and in every true principle retained in the Church of England, it would have given me great joy to see you maintaining with all firmness, not only all the particular truths you held, but also the impossibility of uniting with those who deny both those truths and the principles on which you have rested through your laborious life of the last thirty years.
[Footnote 67: "Apologia pro vita Ecclesias Anglicanae," p. 22.]
And now I will add only a few more words of a personal sort, and then make an end. It was not my fate in the Church of England to be regarded as a contentious or controversial spirit, nor as a man of extreme opinions, or of a bitter temper. I remember indeed that I was regarded, and even censured, as slow to advance, somewhat tame, cautious to excess, morbidly moderate, as some one said. I remember that the Catholics
used to hold me somewhat cheap, and to think me behindhand, uncatholic, over-English, and the like. But now, is there anything in the extreme opposite of all this which I am not? Ultramontane, violent, unreasoning, bitter, rejoicing in the miseries of my neighbors, destructive, a very Apollyon, and the like. Some who so describe me now are the same who were wont then to describe me as the reverse of all this. They are yet catholicizing the Church of England, without doubt more catholic still than I am. Well, what shall I say? If I should say that I am not conscious of these changes, you would only think me self-deceived. I will therefore only tell you where I believe I am unchanged, and then where I am conscious of a change, which, perhaps, will account for all you have to say of me.