"Archdeacon Jolly thought not. What the Church of England especially prided herself upon was the breadth of her views. No view could be broader than the one just stated, and therefore, none more likely to meet with the sanction of the privy council, which, he apprehended, was the real point to be kept in view in the discussion of this interesting question. (Hear, hear.)
"Dean Blunt concurred in the opinion that breadth and the privy council were kindred ideas. Still, it might be asked, could even the doctrinal elasticity of that tribunal become sufficiently expansive to embrace the enormous hypothesis of his learned friend? He ventured to think that it could. Let it be supposed that some clergymen of the Church of England—say the Archbishop of Canterbury—should publicly teach that there was no God. The case being brought before the privy council, it might be reasonably assumed that that supreme arbiter of Anglican doctrine would deliver some such judgment as the following:
'We find that the Church of England is not opposed to the existence of a God. At the same time, we cannot overlook the fact that the nineteenth article, in affirming that all churches, even the apostolic, have erred in matters of faith, obviously implies that the Church of England may err also in the same way. Therefore the Church of England may err in teaching that there is a God. We conclude, that whilst, on the one hand, the archbishop has taken an extreme or one-sided view of the teaching of the church; on the other, for the reason assigned, it is undoubtedly open to every clergyman either to believe in or to deny the existence of a God.'
"Archdeacon Theory would be disposed cordially to approve the judgment which the learned dean anticipated. He had always maintained that it was the duty of every Anglican to doubt the existence of God. (Uproar.) Let him not be misunderstood. Speaking for himself, he had a moral and intellectual conviction that there was a God. He was not disputing the objective truth of the existence of a God: about that he could not suppose that a single member of Convocation could entertain the most transitory doubt. He was speaking only of their duty as members of the Church of England, and not at all of their obligation as Christians; two things which might happen in a particular case to be as wide apart as the poles, and to involve distinct and opposite responsibilities. Now, as members of the Church of England, he believed it was their duty to doubt, not only the existence of God, but also every separate article which the Church of England now taught, or might teach hereafter; and the more emphatically the Church of England appeared to teach, the more imperative was their duty to doubt. For, referring to the ingenious argument which Dean Blunt had put into the mouth of their national oracle, it was clear that the Church of England in denying her own infallibility, laid all her members under the religious obligation of doubting everything she taught. Fallibility, properly defined, was not simply liability to err, it was the state of error. As infallibility is a state of certainty, which does not admit of error; so fallibility is a state of doubt which does not admit of conviction. Now, the Church of England, in proclaiming her own fallibility, did so with a peremptoriness which elevated this part of her teaching, and this alone, to the dignity of dogma. For, whereas, in propounding other Anglican tenets, she so adjusted her definitions of doctrine as to leave the choice of possible and opposite interpretations to the discretion of her members; when speaking of this, the fundamental axiom of her whole theological system, she rose for the moment to the authority of a teacher, and consented to put on the robe of infallibility, in order to promulgate with greater force the dogma of her own liability to error."
Here is the key to the first scene. The discussion is maintained at considerable length, and carries us over the whole ground of the authority of the English church to teach divine truth; and in the course of it, some representative of each of the most prominent schools of theological opinion in the establishment takes occasion to express his mind. Dr. Viewy holds that since heresy is the choice of one's creed, as opposed to the submission of the will to authority, no Anglican can be guilty of heresy who obeys the teachings of his ecclesiastical superiors; and hence, in the Church of England, it might be conditionally, but could not be necessarily, heresy to deny the existence of God. As that church is taunted by her enemies with holding and rejecting every imaginable creed, the only safe course for a clergyman is to centre the whole of his obedience in that one bishop or rector, under whom, for the time being, he may find himself placed.
"In other words, since to obey any two ecclesiastical authorities at the same moment involved the risk of being pronounced a heretic by either one or the other—because no two clergymen are exactly of the same belief—the only effective safeguard against the possibility of heresy was personal obedience to one clergyman at a time. When first ordained to the office of the diaconate, from which he had been subsequently elevated to unmerited dignities, he found himself in the diocese of a low-church bishop—he might say a very low-church bishop—so low that any further descent into the regions of a purely negative theology would have left no doctrinal residuum whatever. He at once decided, in virtue of his principle of obedience to authority, to teach his flock the religion of his bishop, which, by careful analysis, he resolved into two articles of belief—the denial of dogma, and the assertion of self. (Dean Pompous audibly whispered, 'Highly unbecoming.') But here he had met with a difficulty in starting; for it happened that his rector was a Puseyite; and that, consequently, in the main, whatever the bishop taught to be true, the rector taught to be false, and whatever the bishop taught to be false, the rector taught to be true. The case, as convocation knew, was so common in this country, as to form, perhaps, the rule in a majority of parochial cures. His principle, however, suggested an easy escape from the embarrassing position. He applied it thus: manifestly more obedience was due to a bishop than to a rector; yet a certain quantum of obedience was due to a rector, if only because a bishop had appointed him. It became, so to speak, a question of proportion rather than of theology, and was soluble, not by the thirty-nine articles, but by the rule of three; and, after working it out with religious care, the following commended itself to him as the solution of the problem. He would preach low-church doctrines on the Sundays, denying the sacramental view and all its consequences, as the homage of clerical obedience due to the bishop; but he would teach high-church doctrines during the week, without abating a single tenet, in discharge of the proportionate measure of obedience due to the rector. This practice gave rise, he was bound to admit, to some excitement in the parish, and led to the popular conviction that, however excellent his teaching might be in detail, there was a want of unity about it when looked at as a whole. Yet when he explained to his parishioners the purity of the motive which induced the apparent contradictions, and proved to them that his duplex system was designed only to reflect justly and proportionately the two aspects of Christianity exhibited by their bishop and their rector, the whole parish at once applauded the delicacy of his conscience, while it ceased not to question the value of his teaching. And so things went on with tolerable harmony for the space of a year; when, unhappily, both the bishop and the rector died about the same time; the former being quickly replaced by a high-church bishop, appointed by a friend in the cabinet, and the latter by a low-church rector, nominated by Mr. Simeon's trustees. It now became his duty, in consistency with his principle of obedience to personal authority, to invert the order and portion of his teaching. He would continue to give the Sundays to the bishop, and the week-days to the rector; but on Sundays he must now be a Puseyite, and on week-days an Evangelical; and this simple inversion, so equitable in itself, and inspired solely by the desire of submitting himself to his superiors, created such discord in the parish, that finally he was entreated, as the only means of restoring peace, to resign his cure of souls.
"Dean Pliable concurred, in the main, with the principle of the learned divine who had just resumed his seat, that obedience to authority was the first duty of a clergyman; but he utterly differed from him in his application of the principle, which appeared to him to be equally servile and injudicious. That principle he conceived to be most effectually carried out, not by abject submission to this bishop or that, this rector or that—which might be both possible and convenient, if, in the Church of England, as in the Church of Rome, every bishop and every rector taught the same Christianity—but in the larger and nobler aim of faithfully representing at one and the same time all the Christianities taught by all the bishops and all the rectors of the Church of England. In other words, since every one confessed that it was impossible to teach a uniform theology in the Church of England, whose highest tribunal had ruled that her clergy might teach either of two opposite doctrines—and therefore both alternately—he was brought to the conviction that the only course open to Anglicans solicitous about theoretical unity was to profess at the same moment every doctrine held within their communion, and all their contradictories. (Great uproar: a well-known preacher was heard to exclaim—"He would convert us into ecclesiastical acrobats.")
"Dean Critical inquired, with a touch of irony in his voice and manner—'Could any of his reverend friends undertake to inform him what was the authority of the Church of England?' Hitherto the debate had gone only to show what it was not. Dr. Theory had maintained that there was no such thing. Dr. Viewy and Dean Pliable had each of them proved that it did not reside in the bishops and clergy, unless, indeed, it might be supposed to exist in equal measure in every one of them; but, as they were unhappily in direct opposition to one another on many fundamental doctrines, this was equivalent to saying that no authority to decide Christian doctrine existed in the Church of England. If there really were any such authority, convocation could hardly be more usefully employed than in defining its nature and fixing its limits.
"Archdeacon Jolly observed, without rising from his seat—'What say you to the Archbishop of Canterbury?' (Some laughter, which was immediately suppressed.)
"Dean Critical reminded the venerable archdeacon that the Archbishop of Canterbury was not alluded to in their formularies in any such character, and feared, it must be said without disrespect, that he had no more power to determine a disputed point of doctrine than his amiable lady, whose hospitality many of them had enjoyed. It was a lamentable fact that his Grace had no more authority over the people of England, nor over a single individual out of his own household, than … (a voice exclaimed, 'the King of the Sandwich Islands,' a suggestion which was greeted with mingled applause and disapprobation.)