"'The Church of England,' said the Dean of Bristol, 'is created by the law, upheld by the law, paid by the law, and may be changed by the law, just as any other institution in the land.'
"That was his first proposition, and here was the second:
"'I cannot desire you to accept either what I affirm, or what the church affirms, as undoubtedly true, or the only true interpretation of the mysteries of God.'
"It was pleasant to see the conclusions at which they had arrived in a former debate embraced with so much energy of conviction by one of the highest functionaries of their national church. And now, accepting these conclusions as indisputable, and harmonizing perfectly with the life and history of that church, he was led to ask, 'If the authority of the English Church be purely human, can her orders be divine?' This was the question he should propose for their consideration, and without another word of preface, he would submit the following motion to their vote: 'That this meeting, being unanimous on the point that authority can have no existence in the Church of England, desires to pass to the discussion of the cognate question, "Are English orders human or divine?"'"
The discussion as to the validity of these orders is pretty exhaustive, and the arguments are put with a terseness and effect quite beyond adequate praise. The hand of a master in dialectics is evident from beginning to end. Instead of attempting a summary, which would necessarily fall far short of doing justice to this part of the pamphlet, we shall let the ritualistic clergyman give the following account of himself:
"I call myself a Catholic priest, because I am either that or a ridiculous impostor, and I object to be considered in that light. I claim the power of the keys, because they belong to the priestly office, and I will not allow that the clergy of any other church have more power than I have. I can consecrate the host, though I am not quite sure what that means, because I should be only a Protestant minister if I could not, and a Protestant minister is the object of my contempt. I can absolve from sin, though the English clergy never knew they could do it, because the commission was given to somebody, and, therefore, it must have been given to me. I teach the Church of England what she ought to hold, and instruct the Church of Rome what she ought to retract, because I clearly perceive the deficiencies of the one, and detect the excesses of the other. I assert that my doctrines are part of God's truth, but I communicate with those who flatly deny them, because, when I am taunted with this, I can always reply, that it is the mark of a self-willed man to seek another communion in order to quiet his conscience. I countenance, by remaining in the Church of England, all the mortal heresies which have ever existed in her, but I tell my accusers that I only remain in her in order to remove them. I am in communion with no church in the world, but I invite them all to come into communion with me, and indicate the terms on which I will permit them to do so. I am not in schism, though I dwell in solitude, because the other Christian bodies refuse to associate with me; and I am not in heresy, though I every day communicate with heretics, because I do it only for their good. I do not obey my bishop, but I propose to him to obey me, which he foolishly declines to do. All churches have erred, but I am ready to teach them all, if they will only listen to me; and though the perfect idea of Christianity has perished from the earth, I am able to restore it at any moment, whenever I shall be requested to do so. I remain in the Church of England, though she allows most of her clergy to teach lies, because I do not choose to quit her; and I refuse to enter the Church of Rome, though she forces all her priests to teach truth, because I do not choose to obey her. I prefer to obey myself, because I find no other authority worthy to be obeyed; and, though I admit that this position has its disadvantages, I must positively decline to exchange it for any other."
The conclusion of the meeting is thus stated:
"Dr. Easy said he could not permit his friends to depart, as they now manifested their intention to do, without thanking them both for their attendance on that occasion and for the part which they had taken in a discussion of great interest and importance. He would not abuse his privilege as their host by adding to the discourse of the archdeacon more than a few brief words. They had arrived, he supposed, at a common conviction on the two great questions of authority in the Anglican Church, and the real character of her orders. It was at once their wisdom and their safety to insist that both were purely human. Any other theory, as the archdeacon had clearly proved, would expose not only themselves but their common Christianity to contempt and ruin. Either ordination, as it existed in the English Church, was not a rite intended to produce a supernatural effect, except in a sense which might with equal justice be applied to the orders of Mr. Spurgeon or Mr. Newman Hall; or, if it was, the Reformed and Protestant ministry established by Elizabeth and inaugurated by Parker, which had never displayed the faintest trace of any such effect, was a failure so portentous, that they must remain for ever silent in the presence of any scoffing infidel who should use it as an argument against the truth of Christianity.
"He trusted, therefore, that they were about to separate that night with this practical conclusion, that the idea of a catholic priesthood, one in doctrine and divine in endowments, existing in the English Church, was not only a contradiction of her whole history, but absolutely inconsistent with the belief that Christianity was true. Either that foolish notion must be abandoned, or they must honestly admit that, at least, the English Church was a delusion. For if any man could deliberately maintain, as a small party among them desired to do, that the entire body of the English clergy had been, from the beginning, a supernatural caste, though it was undeniable that they had always exactly resembled the laity in all their habits, principles, and actions; that they had received a special vocation from Heaven to teach the same unvarying doctrine, though no two of them could ever agree together what that doctrine was; that they possessed the faculty of retaining or remitting sin, though, for three centuries, they had never once attempted to use it, and had bitterly derided the assumption of it by the clergy of another community; that they were clothed, by the transforming grace of orders, with angelic purity and virginity, though they and their bishops had ever been even more impatient of a life of continence than any other class of human society; that they were able to call down God upon a human altar, though their own founders began their career by pulling down altars, and their own tribunals ruled that the English Church denied their existence; that the chief function of their ecclesiastical life was to offer the daily sacrifice, though the Church of England had carefully obliterated every trace of that mystery from the national mind; and, finally, that the highest spiritual privilege of their flocks was to adore the consecrated host, though their own prayer-book expressly declared it was 'idolatry to be abhorred of all faithful Christians.' If, he said, any man could seriously affirm the series of propositions here enumerated, and many more like them, he should be ready to admit, what it would no longer be possible to deny, that neither religion nor history had any real meaning, and that modern Christianity had been more fertile in childish conceits and preposterous delusions than any system of heathen mythology with which he was acquainted.
"If, on the other hand, they were content to believe with the whole nation, that the English clergy were simply the representatives of the English reformation; that they were Protestant ministers, not Catholic priests; that they were distinguished in nothing from other men, except as having undertaken to remind them, from time to time, of truths which all were too apt to forget; they would then assume the only character which really belonged to them, or in which either their own communion or any other would ever consent to recognize them. In that case, they would no longer expose either themselves or their religion to the world's contempt, nor unwittingly furnish the unbeliever with a fatal argument against the truth and the reasonableness of Christianity. The Church of England had never been the home of the supernatural, as all mankind knew from her own history; and to try to introduce so strange an element into such a receptacle would be a far more dangerous experiment than to 'pour new wine into old bottles.' They might as well attempt to inclose the lightning which could shiver rocks in the hands of an infant, as to make the English Church the shrine of mysteries which she had existed only to deny."