A church dictionary

by Walter Farquhar Hook

Had this addition been made, the seventeenth Article would doubtless have taught the doctrine of the final perseverance of all the elect. The wish to make it do so imported a consciousness that the reformed Anglican Church held no such doctrine.

Nor was this consciousness ill-founded. The homily on “Falling from God” as we might anticipate from its very title, distinctly asserts, in both its parts, the moral possibility, in the elect, of finally departing from grace given, and of thus perishing everlastingly.

The doctrine of the possibility of the elect finally falling away, says Faber in his work on “Election,” from grace to perdition; a doctrine which, in truth, is nothing more than the inevitable and necessary result of that ideality of election, which, from primitive antiquity, has been adopted by the Anglican Church, is very distinctly and very affectingly propounded also in her admirable and sublime burial service.

“Spare us, Lord most holy, O God most mighty, O holy and merciful Saviour, thou most worthy Judge eternal, suffer us not, at our last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from thee.”

The prayer before us is couched in the pluralizing form, and the persons who are directed concurrently with the officiating minister to use it, are those identical persons who, having been chosen in the course of Divine providence, and brought by baptism into the pale of the visible Church, have thence been declared to be the elect people of God.

Consequently those who, in the judgment of the Church of England, are the elect people of God, are nevertheless directed to pray, that the Lord would not suffer them, at their last hour, for any pains of death, to fall from him.

Hence, as the English Church understands the term elect, it is possible, from the very necessity of such a prayer, that those who are elect may not only for a season fall away from God and be afterward renewed by repentance, but may even fall away from him totally and finally.

PERSON. (See Trinity.) On the awful subject of the persons in the Trinity we shall merely quote the Athanasian Creed. “The Catholic faith is this. That we worship One God in Trinity, and Trinity in Unity; neither confounding the Persons, nor dividing the substance. For there is One Person of the Father, another of the Son, and another of the Holy Ghost.

“But the Godhead of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, is all One: the glory equal, the majesty co-eternal.”

The application of the term “Persons” to the sacred Three has been objected to; but it is defensible on the ground of the impossibility of finding a phrase equally expressive, and less objectionable. Archbishop Tillotson well says, “Because we find the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost spoken of in Scripture as we should speak of three Persons, therefore we call them Persons; and since the Holy Spirit of God in Scripture hath thought fit, in speaking of these three, to distinguish them from one another, as we use in common speech to distinguish three several persons, I cannot see any reason why, in the explication of this mystery, which purely depends upon Divine revelation, we should not speak of it in the same manner as the Scripture doth.” Precision in speaking of objects of faith seems, beyond this, impossible. That the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost are three, distinguished from each other in Scripture, is clear; as it is also that there is but one God. Why, then, refuse the word “Persons,” used with due reverence and humility, by which we only understand a peculiar distinction in each, making, in some way, a difference from the other two? Indeed the objection was despised as a bad one by even Socinus himself.