Dr. Ewer, no doubt, intends to reject, and honestly believes that he has rejected, this destructive theory, which, universally applied, results in nihilism; but we fear that he has not. He includes the one catholic church in what he calls the three particular churches—the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican. Each of these, he says, is a catholic church, but no one of them is the Catholic Church. Whence, then, do they or can they derive their character of catholic? The Catholic Church, according to him, is an organism. If an organism, it must have a central cell, an organite, or organic centre, originated not by itself, from which all in the organism proceeds, or in which, in the language of St. Cyprian, all "takes its rise," and therefore on which all the parts depend. This central cell, which in the church we may call the central see or chair, and which the fathers, whether Greek or Latin, call the Chair of Peter, and since it is the origin of all the parts, is evidently prior to them and independent of them. They do not constitute it, but it produces, sustains, and governs them. On no other conditions is it possible to assert or conceive the unity and catholicity of the church as an organism. Particular churches are Catholic by holding from and communing with this central see or the organic centre, not otherwise.
But Dr. Ewer acknowledges no such central cell or central see. His organism has no organic centre, and consequently is no organism at all, but a simple union or confederacy of equal and independent sees. Rome, Constantinople, or Canterbury is no more a central see or organic centre of the church than any other see or diocese, as Caesarea, Milan, Paris, Toledo, Aberdeen, London, or Armagh, and to be in the unity of the church there is no particular see, mother and mistress of all the churches, with which it is necessary to commune. The several sees may agree in their constitution, doctrine, liturgy, and discipline, but they are not integrated in any church unity or living church organism. This is the theory of the schismatic Greeks, and of Anglicans and Protestant Episcopalians, and is simply the theory of independency, as much so as that of the New England Congregationalists, but it admits no organic unity. It is also the theory which Dr. Ewer himself appears to assert and defend. By what authority is he able to pronounce any one of the three churches named a catholic church, since no one of them holds from a catholic centre, or a central unity, for he recognizes no such centre or unity? The only unity of the church he can admit is that formed by the combination of the several parts, a unity formed from multiplicity. He holds that we need a great catholic reformation, a combination of the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches, which shall "evolve unity from multiplexity." Here, it seems to us, is an unmistakable recognition, as the basis of his catholicity, of the non-catholic church theory, and a virtual denial of the unity and catholicity of the church; for from multiplicity can be evolved only totality, which, so far from being unity, excludes it altogether.
Recognizing no central see, centre and source of the unity and catholicity of the church, how can Dr. Ewer determine what churches are in schism or what are in union, what are catholic and what are not? What criterion of unity and catholicity has he or can he have? He says the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican are catholic, and he confines the Catholic Church to them. But how can he call them catholic, since they have no common organic centre, and have no intercommunion? We can find in his discourses no answer to this question but the fact that they have certain things in common. Why confine the Catholic Church, then, to these three alone? Why exclude Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and the Swiss, the Dutch, and the German Reformed communions? All these have something in common with the Roman, Greek, and Anglican communions, and even profess with them to believe the Apostles' and Nicene creeds. The Methodists have bishops, priests or elders, and deacons, as the Anglicans, and adopt the same articles of faith. The churches named have presbyters, and so have Presbyterians, the continental Reformed, and the Lutheran churches; some of the Lutheran churches even have bishops. There is something in common between these and the churches the author claims to be catholic. Why, then, does he exclude them from the list of communions of which the Catholic Church is composed? Or why, indeed, exclude any one who professes to hold the Christian church and the Apostles' and Nicene creeds? And why not reject as non-catholic everything which all these do not agree in holding? Does he not say that catholic means all, not a part, and why exclude from the all any who acknowledge Christ as their Lord and Master, and profess to be members of his church? The author has no criterion in the case but his own private judgment, prejudice, or caprice. He has no other rule, having rejected the apostolic or central see, for interpreting the quod semper, quod ubique, et ab omnibus creditur of St. Vincent of Lerins. The all with us means all those, and those only, who are, and always have been, in communion with the central or Apostolic See, and obedient to its supreme authority; but Dr. Ewer, who admits no such see, has, and can have, no authority for not including in the all, the omnibus, all who profess to follow Christ or to hold and practise the Christian religion. His catholicity is, then, the creature of his own private judgment, prejudice, or caprice; and his catholic church is founded on himself, and is his own arbitrary construction or creation. This is not the rejection of Protestantism, but is rather Protestantism gone to seed.
Throughout the whole of Dr. Ewer's reasoning, except where he is simply following Catholics in pronouncing and proving Protestantism a blunder and a failure, and answerable for the rationalism and unbelief in revealed religion now so prevalent among scientific, intelligent, clear-headed, and honest-minded men, there is the implied assumption that catholicity precedes the church, and that we are to determine not what is catholic by the church, but the Catholic Church by what we have, without her, determined to be catholic. This is not a Catholic but a Protestant method. We must first find the One Catholic Apostolic Church, and from her learn what is catholic, and who are catholics and who are not. This is the only scientific rule, if we acknowledge a Catholic Church at all.
If the Roman, Greek, and Anglican churches are no one of them the Catholic Church, they can be catholic, that is, be in the catholic organism, only by communing with the organic centre from which the life, activity, and authority of the organism proceeds, in which is the source and centre of the unity and catholicity of the church. But all particular churches in communion with the organic centre, and obtaining their life from it, exist in solido, and commune with one another. The three churches named do not commune with one another; they are, as we have seen, three distinct, separate, and independent bodies, and foreigners to one another. Then only one of them, if any one of them, can be a catholic church. The other two must be excluded as non-catholic. What the author has to determine first of all, since he restricts the Catholic Church to the three, is, in which of these three is the original, organic, or central cell, or central see, whence all the others proceed, or from which they take their rise. But instead of doing this, he denies that any one of the three is the Catholic Church, and contends that it is all three in what they hold in common or agree in maintaining. The meaning of this is, that no one of them contains the organic cell, that there is no central organic see, as we hold the See of Peter to be, and therefore no church organism one and catholic. But this is to deny the Catholic Church, not to assert it. In attempting to include in the One Catholic Apostolic Church non-catholic and foreign elements, Dr. Ewer, therefore, manifestly loses the Catholic Church itself.
Dr. Ewer, notwithstanding his vigorous onslaught upon Protestantism, remains still under the influence of his Protestant training, and has not as yet attained to any real conception either of unity or of catholicity. Unity is indivisible; catholicity is illimitable, or all that is contained in the unity; and both are independent of space and time. The unity of the church is her original and central organic principle, or principle of life; the catholicity of the church is inseparable from her unity, and consists in the completeness of this organic principle, and in its being always and everywhere the complete and only principle of church life. The unity of the faith is in the fact that it, like the church, has its central principle out of which all in it grows or germinates, and on which all in it depends; the catholicity of the faith is in the fact that this faith is complete, the whole faith, and is always and everywhere believed and taught by the One Catholic Church, is always and everywhere one and the same faith, always and everywhere the truth of God. The catholicity of the church depends in no sense on diffusion in space or the number of her members. The church is catholic, not because she is universally diffused in space, but because she is the one only church, and includes in her organism all that is essential to the church as the church, or the mystic body of Christ, to the entire church life for all men and for all times. Catholic means all, rather than universal, or universal only because it means all; and hence the church was as truly catholic on the day of Pentecost as she is now, or would be were all nations and all men included in her communion, as the human race, in the order of generation, was as complete and entire when there was no individual but Adam, as it will be when the last child is born. Time has no effect on either the unity or catholicity of the church; for she is always living in her unity and catholicity, an ever-present church, in herself the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. She is in time and space, but not of them, nor, in her internal organism, affected by the accidents of either. The primitive church, the mediaeval church, and the church of to-day are identically the same, and the distinctions these terms imply are distinctions only in things externally related to her, not in herself. Such must be the church if one and catholic, holy and apostolic.
The central life of the church, the source of all the vitality, force, and authority of the organism, of which—to use the figure we have already so many times used—the central cell is the organ, and which gives it all its generative force and governing power, is Jesus Christ himself, who is the forma of the church, as the soul is the forma of the body, or its organic principle; for the church is the body of Christ, and is nothing without him, and if separated from him would instantly die, as does the body when separated from the soul. But we are treating of the church, in which the unity of Christ is made manifest in her visible unity, and therefore of the visible, not of the invisible church. That the invisible unity might be manifested, St. Cyprian argues, in his De Unitate Ecclesiae, Christ established a central chair, the Chair of Peter, whence all might be seen to take its rise from one. This chair, the visible centre of unity, is to the church organism, as we have seen, what the central or organic cell is to every organism or living body in the natural order; but Jesus Christ, whom it manifests or represents in the visible order, is the living force and generative power of the central chair, as the soul is of the organic cell of the human organism. So much we must affirm of the Christian church, if we call it, as Dr. Ewer does, "an organism."
This organic central cell generates or produces not many organisms, but one only. So the Chair of Peter, the central cell of the church organism, can generate only one organism. Christ has one body and no more. That only can be the Catholic Church in which is, as its centre, the Chair of Peter, or, as we have before said, the organic central see, which may justly be called the Holy See, the Apostolic See, "the mother and mistress of all the churches," as in the living body the original central organic cell is the mother and mistress of all the secondary or inferior cells generated in the evolution of the organism. Here, again, theology and physiology coincide in principle.
We may now ask, Does the Greek schismatic church, as we call it, contain this central organic see? Certainly not; for she admits no such see, or, if she does, she confesses that she contains it not, and the Roman Church does. The Greek schismatic, as we call him, recognizes no church unity in the sense we have explained. He recognizes only diocesan, metropolitan, or patriarchal unity. Does the Greek Church, then, commune with this central see? No. For it communes with no see or church outside of itself. How is it with the Anglican Church? It does not any more than the Greek Church claim to possess it. It does not pretend to find it in the see of Canterbury, York, Dublin, or Armagh, and indeed denies both the necessity and existence of such see. She denounces the Roman see because she claims to be it; and Dr. Ewer tells us, in his reply to Mr. Adams, that the Protestant Reformation rendered noble service to the Anglican Church by delivering it from papal tyranny and oppression. Well, then, does the Anglican Church commune with the central or organic see, or Chair of Peter? No. For she communes with no see beyond herself. Then she is not the, or even a, catholic church. There remains, then, only the Roman Church, which is and must be the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, if such church there is; for it can be no other. The reverend doctor's attempt, then, to find a catholic church which is not the Roman Church, or a catholicity which is "broader and deeper" than what he, as well as other Protestants, calls "Romanism," seems, like Protestantism itself, to have failed.