But if this book is the monument of the faith of England in the sixteenth century, before 1534, it is at the same time a monument of the Roman faith, that is to say, of the faith of the Catholic Church. At that time, when the pontiffs were more than usually vigilant on account of the heresies which were springing up in the various countries of Europe, two popes, Leo X. and Clement VII., were not content with sanctioning the work of Henry VIII., but gave and confirmed to him the title of the "Defender of the Faith." England declared her belief; Rome, and through her the Catholic Church, answered: "Your faith is ours; we congratulate you on your able defence of it." Here was indeed unity and unanimity.
Is this all the light that we can gather from this source? This monument was erected in the midst of the religious life of England, between its Roman Catholic past, of more than a thousand years from the birth of the Anglo-Saxon Church, and its schismatic future, which would count more than three hundred years. Nowhere can one better stand to see the different policies and course travelled by England than here: once as the cherished daughter of the Roman Church, the sister of Catholic nations; and then how she has changed since she rebelled against Rome, and has gone on in her isolation, sufficient for herself, Christian in her own way, even while an oecumenical council was assembled.
The Roman Catholic past of England is known by the certain evidence of history; and from the monument of Henry VIII., which can well be considered its terminus, we propose to cast a hasty glance at its most distant events; and of these by far the most interesting are the glorious acts of the pontificate of Pope St. Gregory the Great, who sent missionaries to convert his dear English, although yet idolaters, and who chose their first bishop from the Benedictine monks of his convent at Rome. What unity, what unanimity between Rome and England in the time of the monk St. Augustine! It was the union of a daughter and mother: it was precisely the same union, the same faith, in the sixth as in the sixteenth century, until 1534.
The sixth century makes us go far back in the history of the church; but, in admiring the apostolic works of St. Augustine and his companion, we find about them precious and striking witnesses of a past yet more distant. St. Augustine convokes the bishops of the Britons to beg them to aid him in converting the Saxons to Christianity. He acknowledged, then, that the Britons were in the same communion, and professed the same Roman Catholic faith. Indeed, if the Britons were wrong in refusing their help, it was only because of their hatred against their oppressors, for the ancient British Church was never separated from the communion of the Roman Church, never lost the purity of the Catholic faith. [Footnote 40]
[Footnote 40: See The Monks of the West,
by M. le Comte de Montalembert.]
Pelagius, it is true, was a Briton, and his heresy, which he first sowed at Rome, was not long in reaching Great Britain, yet it never took deep root there. The British Catholics sent a deputation to the bishops of Gaul, urging them to send a number of missionaries to them. Pope Celestine, warned of the danger to the faith, sent St. Germain of Auxerre; the bishops of Gaul, assembled for this purpose, added St. Loup of Troyes. These two great bishops left their peaceful flocks in all haste to come to the rescue of the invaded folds; and while they were working so faithfully for the glory of God and of his holy church, all Catholic Gaul was praying most fervently for its sister, Great Britain. Pelagianism was vanquished and found no home in the land of Pelagius; it was in another land that it made its most deplorable ravages.
Thus it was in Great Britain that the bishops, who are established by the Holy Spirit to govern the church, [Footnote 41] triumphed over this sad and insidious heresy, when they were free to exercise their divine mission in that country, and when they were closely united to the centre of unity.
[Footnote 41: Acts xx. 28.]
There was something like it in the fourteenth century, when the heresy of Wickliff arose. He was condemned by the council of London, (1382,) although an Englishman, and one who had studied at Oxford, and who had been the principal of the College of Canterbury, at once the flatterer and the favorite of his sovereigns. His doctrine, which contained the germ of all the Anglicanism of the time of Elizabeth, caused considerable trouble in England; but, thanks to the firmness of the episcopate, these troubles are not to be compared with those from which Bohemia suffered, where John Huss taught the same heresy.
Before the Anglican "reform," which has created a system before unheard of, and which unites calumny with historical delusions, every Englishman was proud to claim for his country the honor of having preserved the faith always in its purity from the time that the gospel had first been preached there. [Footnote 42]