THE INVITATION HEEDED.[176]
The above is the title of one of the best and most effective controversial works which we have had the pleasure to read for some time. For those who believe in any historical Christianity, the argument contained in it is direct and unanswerable. We pray God it may have a wide circulation and reach the numerous friends of its gifted author, who thus seeks, as many converts have done before him, to show to those he loves the blessed lights which guided him to the home of truth and peace.
Mr. James Kent Stone is the son of the Rev. Dr. John S. Stone, a highly respected minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church, favorably known for many years in Brooklyn as the rector of Christ's church, and now, we believe, at the head of an Episcopalian seminary in Cambridge, Mass. He received his academical education at Harvard College, and afterward spent two years at one of the universities of Germany. Returning to this country in 1862, he was appointed professor of Latin in Kenyon College, Ohio, in which office he remained until 1867, when he was made president of the institution. He was ordained a minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church in 1866, and shortly after received the degree of D.D. from Racine College, Wisconsin.
In the year 1868, he was elected to the presidency of Hobart College, Geneva, New York, where he remained only one year. In September, 1869, he resigned his position and his ministry, to seek retirement and prepare for his reception into the Holy Catholic Church. The 8th of December, 1869, the feast of the Immaculate Conception, was the happy day of his entrance into the communion of Christ, in obedience to the call of its chief pastor.
In the prefatory chapter the author gives us some insight into the trials of his own mind. Accepting what he had taken for granted as the high Anglican position, he felt himself master of the Roman question. Anglicans were, in his mind, true Catholics, the only true Catholics, and the Reformation was a return to primitive truth on the part of a favored few, who were to him the only witnesses of God upon earth. His intellect was too logical not to see that ritualism, with which he never allied himself, was inconsistent with any possible degree of Anglicanism.
"If the ritualists were right, the reformers were wrong. The great sin of schism could never have been justified by any such paltry differences as separate our 'advanced' friends from the great Roman communion. The only consistent course for men to take who believed in the sacrifice of the altar and in the invocation of saints was to go back, promptly and penitently, to the ancient church, which had proved its infallibility by being in the right after all."
In this position, to any unprejudiced eye, he stood upon an assumption of theology and history which it would seem that the slightest investigation should destroy. A church which begins by denying the faithfulness of Christ to his promises, and asserts for itself claims which render all antiquity a fable, ought not long to hold the love of an honest heart. It would be hard for any one to know what the English church really teaches; and if it teaches any thing, it certainly does so upon human authority, since infallibility is denied in itself, and in every other communion. When our eyes are once opened, we wonder we were so long deluded. The real reason why High-Churchmen do not become Catholics is, that they do not sincerely wish to know the truth, which calls to sacrifices and sad trials of the heart.
"If any man love father or mother more than me, he is not worthy of me." We believe that one earnest prayer for light, with a full determination to follow it at every cost without hesitation, would lead to the one home of truth every Anglican, and even every ritualist. But the misfortune is, that they will not offer any such prayer. The world of honor or affection in which they move is too dear to be renounced. Let us hear what Dr. Stone so feelingly tells of his own experience:
"Time went on; and I was not conscious of the smallest change in my theological opinions and sympathies; when all at once the ground upon which I had stood with such careless confidence, gave way. Like a treacherous island, it sank without warning from beneath my feet, and left me struggling in the wide waters. Thanks be to God that I was not left to perish in that cold and bitter flood, and that my feet so soon rested for ever on the eternal rock! How it came about—by what intellectual process my position had been undermined—by what unconscious steps my feet had been led to an unseen brink, I did not know. I was only aware of the sudden terror with which I found myself slipping and going, and the darkness which succeeded the swift plunge."
"I remembered how St. Augustine, 'one of the profoundest thinkers of antiquity,' even for four years after he had become a catechumen under St. Ambrose, was entangled in the meshes of his Manichæan heresy. I admitted instantly that I, too, might be under a spell; that my case might be—I do not dare to say like that of the great saint and father, but that of the Donatists or the Gnostics; since I was certainly not more positive in my convictions than they, neither could I furnish myself with any satisfactory reason for believing that I was blessed with greater light. And then the hand of God drew back the veil of my heart; and I saw for the first time, and all at once, how utterly steeped I had been in prejudice, how from the beginning I had, without a question or suspicion, assumed the very point about which I ought reverently to have inquired with an impartial and a docile mind. I had studied the Roman controversy; so I thought—if in my short life I could fairly be said to have studied any thing; but how had I studied it? Had there ever been a time when it was an open question in my mind whether the claims of the Roman Church were valid? Had I begun by admitting that the pope might be right? Had it ever crossed my thoughts that the church in communion with the see of Peter might be indeed the one only Catholic Church of our Lord Jesus Christ? And had I ever resolved, with all my soul, as one standing on the threshold and in the awful light of eternity, to begin by tearing down every assumption and divesting myself of every prejudice, and then, wherever truth should lead the way, to follow—'leave all and follow'? Alas! never. I had studied simply to combat and refute. The suggestion that 'Romanism' might after all be identical with Christianity was preposterous. The papacy was the great apostasy, the mystery of iniquity; it was the master-piece of Satan, who had made his most successful attack upon the church of God by entering and corrupting it. The rise of the papal pretensions was matter of the plainest history; and every well-instructed child could point out how one fiction after another had been grafted into the creed of that apostate church, until now the simple faith of early days was scarce recognizable under the accumulated error of centuries. 'History'—who wrote that history? 'Well-instructed child'—why, that was the very point at issue!
"I saw that I had been guilty of what Bossuet calls 'a calumny,' and what I now acknowledged to be an act of injustice, namely, of charging upon Catholics inferences which I had myself drawn from their doctrines, but against which Catholics indignantly protest. I could not say with St. Augustine that 'I blushed with joy;' but with shame I blushed, 'at having so many years barked, not against the Catholic faith, but against the fictions of carnal imaginations. For so rash and impious had I been, that what I ought by inquiring to have learned, I had pronounced on, condemning.... I should have knocked and proposed the doubt, how it was to be believed, not insultingly opposed it as if believed.'
"This is the 'plunge' I spoke of. I used the word because it expressed, as well perhaps as any other, the terrifying rapidity which marked the steps of my intellectual crisis. Upon some men the discovery of a life-long error may break gradually; truth may be said to have its dawning; but to me it came with a shock. The rain descended and the floods came; my house fell; and great was the fall of it.
"Then followed a sense of blank desolateness. I was groping among ruins; and wherewith should I go to work to build again? I do not mean that I faltered. Thank God that he kept me true, and suffered me not to shrink from the sharp agony which I perceived was possibly in store for me! To borrow words of the great father from whose experience I have already drawn, 'God gave me that mind, that I should prefer nothing to the discovery of truth, wish, think of, love naught besides.' But the task of reconstruction seemed almost helpless.
"And so I set my face forward with desperate earnestness; and in due time—it may seem, a very short time—I had not a trace of doubt left that I had all along been a vain enemy of the one, catholic, and apostolic church. Why not in a short time? Why not in a month, or a week, or a day? Is it any reflection upon truth that she surrenders herself quickly to a soul whose every nerve is strained in her pursuit? Is it any argument against the church of God that it is easily identified? Surely, if there be a kingdom of heaven upon earth, it must be known by marks which cannot be mistaken. Yes! I knew it when I had found it. And I found it as in the parable, like a treasure hidden in a field—in the self-same field up and down which I had wandered for years, and where I had often trampled it under my feet. And when I had found it, I hid it, scarce daring to gaze at its splendor, and crying, as St. Augustine cried, 'Too late, alas! have I known thee, O ancient and eternal truth!' And then, for joy thereof, I went and sold all that I had, and bought that field."