But be this as it may, it is certain that Dr. Ewer admits no catholic body or organic centre of unity and catholicity distinct from the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches, and independent of them, and recognizes no catholicity but what these three churches agree in maintaining and possess in common. Neither of them, he contends, is by itself alone the Catholic Church; each is a catholic church, but no one of them is the Catholic Church herself. Whence, then, their quality of catholic churches? Particular or local churches are catholic because they hold from, depend on, and commune with a catholic centre of unity, life, and authority, which is distinct from and independent of themselves. This is not the case with the three churches named; they hold from and depend on no common organic centre, recognize no organic source of life independent of themselves, are subordinated to no authority not each one's own, commune with no centre of unity which each one has not in itself, and not even with one another. They are each complete in themselves, and are therefore not three inferior churches, subordinate to one supreme catholic apostolic church, but, if churches at all, three distinct, separate, and independent churches. If, then, no one of them is the one holy catholic apostolic church, no one of them is even a catholic church, and Dr. Ewer fails entirely to recognize any Catholic Church at all.
The author is deceived in his assumption that these three churches are particular or local churches, subordinated to the universal church. St. Mary's church, which is my parish church, is a catholic church, if the see of Rome is the Catholic Apostolic See; for it depends on it, and through the bishop of the diocese communes with that see, and through that see with every other particular catholic church, thus establishing in the unity and catholicity of the See of Rome, or, as the fathers said, the See of Peter, the unity and catholicity of all particular or local churches in communion with it. By coming into communion with St. Mary's church, one comes into communion with the one universal church, is in the catholic communion, and is a Catholic; but nothing of the sort can be affirmed either of the Greek Church or of the Anglican. They acknowledge no subordination to any other organic body in existence; they depend respectively on no ecclesiastical authority or organic centre independent of themselves; they commune neither with each other nor with the Church of Rome, which holds them to be both in schism, and one of them in heresy. Certain Anglican ministers would willingly commune with the Greek Church, but it repels them, and declares that sect to be not even a church. The three churches named cannot, then, be particular churches holding from a common centre of unity, and Dr. Ewer must take one of them as the Catholic Church and exclude the other two, or have no Catholic Church at all.
The fact that there are certain points, if you will, essential points, of agreement between these three bodies, does by no means make them one body. Agreement is not identity. Great Britain and the United States speak the same language; adopt the same Common Law, which governs their respective courts; agree to a great extent in their usages, manners and customs, and civil institutions; and throughout they have a far closer resemblance to each other than has the Anglican Church to either the Greek Church or the Roman Church; and yet, are they not one nation, with one national authority, and having one and the same national life. Eliminate from New York and New Jersey the points in which they differ, and retain only the points in which they agree, and would they be one state under one and the same state government? Not at all, because they are separate organizations, and, as states, are each independent of the other. The Eastern churches were once in communion with Rome under the supremacy of the Apostolic See, and then were one with the Roman Church; but having separated from that see, they are churches in schism indeed, but de facto independent. There was, down to the sixteenth century, a Catholic Church in England in communion with the Church of Rome or the Apostolic See; but the so-called Church of England is not its continuation, and, in the judgment of both the Roman Church and the Greek Church, is not a church at all, for it has no orders, no priesthood, no sacrifice; its so-called bishops and clergymen are only laymen, but for the most part educated, refined, and highly respectable laymen, devoted to the elegant pursuits of literature and science, the cultivation of private and public morals, and the interests and well-being of their families. But not to insist on this at present, we may affirm that, even supposing Anglicans have an episcopate, and that it resembles the Greek and Roman episcopates, it is no more identical with them than the government of Great Britain is identically that of Italy, Prussia, or Austria. These three states are all limited monarchies; they also all have parliamentary governments, and place the sovereignty in the nation, not in a particular family. But they are not one and the same monarchy, nor one and the same government, for they are politically separate and independent. It will not do to answer this by saying that each of these three episcopates hold equally from Jesus Christ, and are one in him; for that would either suppose the church to be in her unity and catholicity invisible, and without any visible organ or manifestation; or else that Christ has three churches, or three bodies, which the author can admit no more than we, for he professes to hold or believe ONE Holy Catholic Apostolic Visible Church.
In the beginning of the extract from Dr. Ewer's fourth discourse, the church is declared to be "an organism." An organism, we need not tell a man like him, is a living body, not a simple aggregation of parts, or an organization which, having no life in itself, depends on the mechanical, electric, or chemical arrangement of its several parts. In every living body or organism, there is and must be—as the older physiologists, and even the most recent and eminent, like M. Virchow, of Berlin, and M. Claude Bernard, of Paris, tell us, and by their researches and discoveries have proved—an original central cell, from which the whole organism proceeds, in which its vital principle inheres, and which is the type, creator, originator, and director of all its vital phenomena. The whole life, evolution, and course of the organism is originated and determined by this original central cell—this germ, or ovule, without which no organic life or living body is possible. This primitive cell or germ is never spontaneously generated, but is always generated by a living organism which precedes and deposits it, according to the old maxim, omne vivum ex ovo. [Footnote 161]
[Footnote 161: See a very learned and scientific essay in Le Correspondant, for October 25th, 1868, De l'Idée de Vie dans la Physiologie Contemporaine, by Dr. Chauffard, known to our readers by a very able essay On the Present Disputes of Philosophy, translated and published in this magazine for November last, though the types made us call him Dr. Chaufaid instead of Dr. Chauffard.]
It is the origin and law of the unity, evolution, or growth of the organism, and is the type and generator of all the innumerable cells which form the whole cellular system of the entire organism, whether normal or abnormal.
What we insist on here is that there is no organism without this original central cell or germ, and that this central cell, whence the unity of the organism is generated by a pre-existing organism, that is, by ancestors of the same species, and is neither self-generated nor made up by any possible mechanical or physico-chemical action or combination of parts, as Messrs. Virchow and Bernard have demonstrated. This principle or law of all organic life is universal, and applies to the church as an organism, notwithstanding her supernatural character, as to any of the organisms studied and experimented upon by physiologists in the natural order. The Creator does not work after one law in the natural order, and another and diverse or contradictory law in the supernatural order; and herein we discover the reason of the perfect accord of all the Creator's works, the perfect harmony of revelation and real science, and the aid revelation gives to science, and, in return, the aid that real science gives to the interpretation and clearer understanding of revelation. God is one, and works always after one and the same law in all orders, and is never in contradiction with himself.
The essential error of the non-catholic church theory is, that it denies the central cell or germ whence is evolved or produced the whole church organism, and assumes that the church derives her life from her members, and that she is constituted in her unity and catholicity as a living body by the combination of the several parts, or that the central cell is created by the organism, not the organism by the central or organic cell, which is as much as to say, multiplicity can exist without unity to produce it, or that dead or unliving parts can generate life and activity! No one need be surprised that men of clear heads and logical minds, trying to remove, on Protestant principles, the discrepancies between science and the Protestant religion, should rush into materialism and atheism. The principle the Protestant adopts in his non-catholic church theory is precisely the principle on which Mr. Herbert Spencer proceeds when he ascribes all the phenomena of life, or of the living organism, to the mechanical, electric, and chemical arrangement of material atoms. The same principle applied in theology leads inevitably to atheism; for, multiplicity given as prior to and independent of unity, no argument in favor of the divine existence can have any validity, nay, no argument to prove that there is a God can be conceived. Such is the terrible injury the non-catholic or Protestant church theory has done and is doing to both religion and science.