“The Church of England,” said Laud, “is Protestant.” And Mr. Gladstone, true to “the church of his birth and his country,” protests, like her, against the church which made his country a Christian nation. The Ritualists, the latest sect within her, still boast that they “help to keep people from the Church of Rome,” and reject the imputation of sympathy with her as an insupportable calumny.[190] “They will give communion in Westminster Abbey to an Unitarian, flatter Jansenists and Monophysites, remain in communion with bishops whom they themselves proclaim to be heretics; but one thing they will not do—tolerate the creed of the church to which they owe every fragment and crumb of truth that remains to them.” “Take the great Anglian divines,” writes Mr. Marshall: “Bull scorned and preached against the Catholic Church; Barrow wrote a book against it; Sandys called the Vicar of Christ ‘that triple-crowned thief and murderer’; Hooker sent for a dissenter on his death-bed; Morton, Bramhall, Andrews, and the rest avowed the opinion that the Protestant sects of the Continent were as true churches as their own. Episcopal ordination, as the late Mr. J. Keble confessed, was not made a condition for holding Anglican preferment until the latter half of the XVIIth century; and it was then adopted as a weapon against the growing power of the dissenters. Then Anglicans who had always argued as Protestants against the church began to argue as Catholics against dissent.”
At the present time, however, the English episcopate seems veering round again to the Protestant quarter, against the pseudo-Catholic innovations of a portion of the clergy. The Church Herald, which, up to the time when it ceased to exist, a few weeks ago, had been protesting for many months previously, with good reason, against the implacable opposition offered by the Anglican bishops to the so-called “Catholic revival,” gravely told its readers, while asserting once more that “no one trusts the bishops,” and that “of influence they have and can have next to none,” nevertheless that “their claims as Catholic bishops were never so firmly established.” (!) Certainly Anglican logic is peculiar. Their bishops were never more vehemently opposed to the Catholic faith; but no matter, “never were they more truly Catholic.” (!)
“I have very reluctantly,” says Dr. Lee (as reported in the John Bull), “come to a conclusion which makes me melancholy—that the passing of the Public Worship Bill has to all intents and purposes sealed the fate of the Church of England.” Its end, he thinks, is very near, because no church can last unless it be a true portion of the one family of God—not a mere human sect, taking its variable opinion from the civil government, and its practice from a parliamentary officer without the faintest shadow of spiritual authority. “The point that gravely perplexes me,” he writes, “with regard to the new law, is that our bishops, one and all, have, with their eyes open and deliberately, renounced their spiritual jurisdiction, which, for both provinces and every diocese, is placed in the hands of Lord Penzance, ex-judge of the Divorce Court.” For which reason certain Ritualist papers lament it as “strange and sad” that Dr. Lee should say of the bishops and their bill exactly the same after their victory as they themselves had said before it. These papers, after the example of some learned Anglican professors, etc., are ready enough beforehand to threaten, in the event of such and such a decision, to “reconsider their position.” The decision is made; they then discover that, after all, it is not so very serious, and compose themselves, for the third, or fourth, or fifth time, just where they were before.
It is stated that the first case under the Public Worship Regulations Act is now being brought before Lord Penzance. It is a suit against the Rev. J. C. Ridsdale, incumbent of S. Peter’s, Folkestone. According to the new law, three inhabitants made a representation to the Archbishop of Canterbury as to the manner in which the services were conducted at S. Peter’s. A copy of the representation was forwarded to Mr. Ridsdale, and, no agreement to abide by the decision of the archbishop having been made, the proceedings will be determined by the judge, from whom there is an ultimate appeal to her Majesty in council. There are, it is said, three cases pending under the new law; and fresh proceedings are about to be commenced against the clergy of S. Alban’s, Holborn. The bill bids fair to be as one-sided in its application as it avowedly was in its intention. “The Puritan triumph in the XVIIth century,” said the Bishop of London, “would not be more disastrous than a pseudo-Catholic triumph now,” and the rest of the episcopal bench are evidently of the same mind.
Nor can it be matter of much surprise that such repression should be exercised against men, many of them truly earnest and self-denying, who are the means of reviving a certain amount of Catholic doctrine as well as practice (however illegal) in their communion, when Dr. Lee is able to write as follows to an episcopal correspondent: “The Catholic faith, Archbishop Tait, in the presence of his suffragans, frankly declared that neither he nor they believed, and his grace—to give him all credit—has done his worst to get rid of it.”
Here again can we wonder at the result, even to her highest dignitaries, of the uncertain teaching of a church which, from its very beginning, was intended to be a compromise?
And, again, how can a church which is essentially a compromise be expected to sympathize with that unchanging church which is “the pillar and ground of the truth”?
II.
To return to Father Tondini’s essay. We come now to consider the newest among the sects, the so-called Old Catholics, who, after the manner of many other schismatics, appropriate the name of “Catholic” with an affix of their own, which is a proof that theirs is a base metal, unworthy of the “image and superscription of the King” or his appointed vicegerent.
Mr. Gladstone’s judgment of these people is thus expressed: “When the cup of endurance,” he says, “which had so long been filling, began, with the Council of the Vatican in 1870, to overflow, the most famous and learned living theologian of the Roman communion, Dr. von Döllinger, long the foremost champion of his church, refused compliance, and submitted, with his temper undisturbed and his freedom unimpaired, to the extreme and most painful penalty of excommunication. With him many of the most learned and respected theologians of the Roman communion in Germany underwent the same sentence. The very few who elsewhere (I do not speak of Switzerland) suffered in like manner deserve an admiration rising in proportion to their fewness.