Dr. Ewer would evade the force of this conclusion, which the common sense of mankind unhesitatingly accepts, by resorting to what is known as "the branch theory." The Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches are not one or another of them exclusively the Catholic Church, but they are catholic churches, because branches of the One Catholic Church. But branches suppose a trunk. Where there is no trunk there are and can be no branches; for the trunk produces the branches, not the branches the trunk. Where, then, is the trunk of which the three churches named are branches, especially since the author says we are not to look beyond them for the Catholic Church? We let him answer in his own words:
"Permit me to close this part of my discourse by an illustration of the Catholic Church. We will take, for the sake of simplicity, a tree. For eight feet above the soil its trunk stands one and entire. Somewhere along the ninth foot the trunk branches into two main limbs. We will call the eastern the Greek limb, and the western we will call the Latin. Six feet further out on the Latin limb, that is to say, fifteen feet from ground, that western limb subdivides into two vast branches. The outmost of the two we will call the Anglican branch, the other we will call the Roman. These two branches and the Greek limb run up to a height of nineteen and a half feet from the ground. There they are, the three great boughs, each with its foliage, Anglican at the west, Roman in the centre, Greek at the east. If now you shield your vision from all but the top of the tree, there will appear to you to be three disconnected tufts of vegetation; but lo! the foliage and the flowers are the same. But remove now the shield from before your eyes, and behold in the whole tree a symbol of the Catholic Church—one organism from root to summit."
This assumes that the trunk is the primitive undivided church, or the church prior to the separation of the Eastern churches from the jurisdiction of the Roman see. But does that undivided church, the trunk church, still exist in its integrity? No. For if it did, there would be no difficulty. It ceased to exist in the ninth century, and now there is no undivided church. Then that has fallen into the past. Then there is no present living trunk, but branches only. Branches of a trunk that has ceased to live can be only dead branches. The alleged branches communicate with no living root, and have no intercommunion; they therefore are not and cannot be one living organism. The author himself half concedes it, for he continues:
"A church that is one like the trunk of that tree for the first nine centuries—that the Western subdividing at the fifteenth century into Anglican and Roman. As a fact, the unity of the organism is not broken; intercommunion between its three parts is simply suspended for a time—suspended until that differentiation shall take place in God's one church which, as Herbert Spencer so admirably shows, is the law of all growth; a differentiation which means, in its last issue, not a complete sundering, but the eventual unity of multiplexity, the harmony of co-ordinate parts. Did it not mix the metaphor somewhat, I would go on and complete the illustration by supposing sundry branches of this tree to be cut off from time to time and inserted into vases of water standing round about the great tree. Being without root, those cut longest ago are all dead; while only the most recently cut are green with a deceptive life, themselves soon to wither and die. These cut branches, standing trunkless and rootless about the living tree, would be apt symbols of the Protestant sects.
"We have found, then, what the Catholic Church is."
There can be no suspension of intercommunion of the branches so long as their communion with the root, or organic cell, through the trunk, is not suspended; for through communion with that they intercommune. But any interruption of that communion is not only the suspension, but the extinction of intercommunion. The restoration of intercommunion once extinct cannot be affected except by a living reunion of each with the root or organic cell of the organism. Probably, then, the author has been too hasty in exclaiming, "We have found what the Catholic Church is." He seems to us to have found neither unity nor catholicity.
Dr. Ewer seems to forget that the church never has been and never can be divided. Has not he himself said that she is one, and does he need to be told that one is indivisible, or that its division would be its death? The tree with successive branches which he adduces in illustration is, no doubt, a living organism; but it can illustrate only the unity and catholicity of the central and ruling see, and the particular churches holding from it. Branch churches are admissible only as particular churches produced by and dependent on the organic centre, or apostolic see, mother and mistress of all the churches of the organism. But we have already shown that the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches are not particular churches, for they are independent bodies, subordinate to or dependent on no organic centre which each has not in itself. As the Catholic Church is one, not three, and as we have shown that it is neither the separated Greek Church nor the Anglican, it must be the Roman See and its dependent churches, in which is the primitive, original, productive, and creative life of the church, since, as we have seen, it can be no other. We have refuted the "branch theory" in refuting the author's assumption that the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches hold from and are subordinate to the one universal church, which, as independent of them, has no existence.
The failure of the author to find the Catholic Church is due to the fact that, from first to last, though he calls the church one, he really recognizes no church unity, since he recognizes no visible centre of unity whence emanates all her life, activity, and authority. Till the ninth century the East and West were united, and the church was one; but it had no centre of unity at Rome any more than at Antioch, at Alexandria, or Constantinople, in the successor of St. Peter in the See of Rome any more than in any other patriarch or bishop. Hence no church could be convicted of schism, unless its bishop refused to commune with another, or another refused to commune with him; but which was the schismatic was indeterminable, unless the whole church should come together in General Council and settle the question by vote. This is the author's theory of unity, a unity which has no visible centre. It is the common Anglican theory, and appears to some extent to be that of the schismatical Greeks. But this theory makes the unity of the church a mere collective federative unity, or an aggregation of parts, which is simply no unity at all, and at best only a union. The unity of the church implies that all in the church proceeds from unity, and is generated, upheld, and controlled by it. The unity is the origin of the whole organism, and what does not proceed from it or grow out of it is abnormal—a tumor, or an excrescence to be exscinded. Hence the impossibility of arriving at the unity of the church by aggregating the parts which have lost it or have it not. It is impossible to assert the unity of the church without asserting a central see, and its bishop as its visible manifestation. There is, we repeat, no organism without the central cell, and no visible organism without a visible centre of unity. The author would do well to study anew the treatise De Unitate Ecclesiae of St. Cyprian, to which we have already referred.
There is and can be no visible unity of the church without a central see, the centre and origin of unity, life, and authority; and when you have found that see, you have found the Catholic Church, but not till then. Every see, or particular or local church in communion with that see; and dependent on it, is in the unity of the church and catholic; and every one not in communion with it is out of unity and not catholic, nor any part of the Catholic body. Admitting that there is the Catholic Church, the only question to be settled is, Which is that See? Reduced to this point, the controversy is virtually ended. There is and never has been but one claimant. Rome has always claimed it, and nobody in the world has ever pretended or pretends that it is any other. Constantinople and Canterbury have disputed the supremacy over the whole church of its pontiff; but neither claims nor ever has claimed to be itself the central organic see, the visible centre of the church organism, and organ of its life and authority.