THE GIFT OF 
 
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3 1924 031 856 572 
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 http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924031856572 
 
Five Lectures 
 
 UPON THB 
 
 Church 
 
 DELIVERED IN 
 
 CHRIST CHURCH 
 
 HARTFORD, CONN. 
 
 BEFORE THE 
 
 CHURCH CLUB of the 
 DIOCESE OF CONNECTICUT 
 
 LENT, 1896 
 
THE TUTTLE, MOflEHOUSE & TAYLOR PRESS 
 NEW HAVEN, CONN. 
 
INTRODUCTORY. 
 
 The Church Club of Connecticut, composed of laymen 
 of the Protestant Episcopal Church in that diocese, exists, 
 not only for the purpose of cultivating personal acquaint- 
 ance, but also for the promotion of knowledge of all mat- 
 ters relating to the Church at large. 
 
 The following series of five lectures was conceived and 
 is presented as some contribution to that end. The Council 
 well understood that the scheme as carried out is too scant. 
 It would have been desirable to have had other branches of 
 the Church presented, and still more to have had such a 
 complete treatment of the reformations in the Church as 
 should have thrown full light upon its later development 
 and upon the present relations of those great divisions with 
 which we of this country are most familiar and most con- 
 cerned. So extensive a scheme in one season was found 
 impracticable ; but it is hoped that that here presented will, 
 as far as it goes, be found a properly ordered one. Cer- 
 tainly the Club has been most fortunate in securing lec- 
 turers of such notable fitness for the treatment of their 
 several themes. To each of them the Council renews the 
 expression of its appreciation and gratitude. It deeply 
 regrets that a disinclination to print by its distinguished 
 author prevents the presentation here of the concluding 
 and sixth lecture — a sermon by Rev. W. R. Huntington , 
 D.D., upon "Church Unity," from the text, "Grace be 
 with all them that love our lyord Jesus Christ in sincerity." 
 
 Jacob 1,. Greene, 
 
 President. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 I. The Primitive Church. 
 
 By Rev. Thomas Richey, D.D. i 
 
 II. The Greek Church. 
 
 By Rt. Rev. Charles R. Hale, . 29 
 
 III. The Roman Church. 
 
 By Rev. Prof. Samuel Hart, D.D., . . 73 
 
 IV. The English Church. 
 
 By Rt. Rev. Leighton Coleman, . . 107 
 
 V. The Protestant Episcopal Church in America. 
 
 By Rev. S. D. McConijell, D.D. . . . 143 
 
I. 
 
 THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 
 
 THE RKV. THOMAS RICHEY, D.D., 
 
 S. Mark'' s-in-the-Bowerie Prof essor of Ecclesiastical History, General 
 Theological Seminary, New York. 
 
THE PRIMITIVE CHURCH. 
 
 The notion tliat the Christian Cliurcli sprang 
 into life at the fiat of its Divine Founder, like 
 Minerva from the brain of Jupiter, fully armed and 
 equipped for action, while it may be accepted as a 
 matter of faith, is one that will not bear the test of 
 historical inquiry. It will be found upon exam- 
 ination that the Church like her Divine Head, in 
 her formation and growth, was made subject to the 
 same conditions of time and development which 
 prevail in all other forms of organic life. As the 
 Holy Child was hidden for nine months beneath an 
 early mother's breast, so the Christian Church, 
 while the process of gestation was going on, was 
 carried like the fcetus in the womb of the Jewish 
 dispensation until the time came for separation and 
 deliverance. The downfall of Jerusalem was the 
 birth-throe of the Church Catholic. 
 
 This principle, so often insisted upon by our Lord 
 in his earthly ministry, is never to be lost sight of 
 in dealing with the early history of the Christian 
 Church. The Lord Himself, according to the flesh, 
 was a Jew. His twelve apostles were in their turn 
 all Jews. St. James, the first bishop of Jerusalem, 
 was a Jew. His immediate successors, down to the 
 
— 4— 
 
 time wlien Jerusalem became a Gentile city, were 
 all of the stock of Abraham. The Christian 
 Church, in other words, for a whole generation was 
 part and parcel of the Jewish theocracy, wor- 
 shipped as the Jews worshipped, lived as the 
 Jews lived, with the same distinction between 
 clean and unclean meats, claimed as their own 
 all the rights and privileges of the twelve tribes of 
 the ancient Israel. So long as the temple stood, the 
 Christian community were looked upon in the 
 light of a Jewish synagogue, whose sole distinctive 
 characteristic was the custom of meeting together 
 apart, on the first day of the week, to draw the 
 bonds of brotherhood together by partaking of a 
 common meal, and calling to remembrance, with 
 hymns of praise and thanksgiving, the memory 
 of their risen lyord and Master. 
 
 St. Augustine, the great doctor and teacher of the 
 West, was accustomed to say that error is, for the 
 most part, neither more nor less than partial truth : 
 and Victor Cousin, the head of the Eclectic School 
 of Philosophy in Prance in the past century, tells 
 us that it is quite possible to be partial in our love 
 of truth, and if so we are sure to fall into error in 
 the pursuit of it : — a maxim which will be found to 
 hold good in the study of history quite as much 
 as in philosophy. 
 
 When a late writer, of well deserved repute for 
 his Greek learning, would have us believe that the 
 Christian Church was at the first a kind of club 
 or charity organization, like the Sussi/ia or com- 
 
mon mess wliicli Lycurgus adopted for Ms Spartan 
 common wealth, there is just enough truth in the 
 statement to furnish ground for the notion that 
 the Church in the beginning was of the nature 
 of a charity organization. Now that the Agape 
 or lyove-feast was at the first intimately associated 
 with " the breaking of the bread " in the Holy 
 Communion is a proposition which no one will 
 venture to dispute : it is beyond question moreover 
 that it was the serving of the tables connected with 
 the Agape which furnished the occasion for setting 
 apart a distinct order of the Christian ministry 
 different from that of the Apostles ; but to argue 
 from this, as Dr. Hatch does in his book on the 
 Organization of the Barly Christian Churches, that 
 the Church was at the first a form of charity 
 organization and nothing more, is to ignore the 
 principle which our Lord Himself laid down as the 
 basis of his own action and made a fundamental 
 rule of action for his disciples, that salvation is of 
 the Jews ; and to keep out of view the condition of 
 things by virtue of which the Christian community 
 formed part and parcel of the ancient commonwealth 
 of the Jewish theocracy. It is to be borne in 
 mind that " the breaking of the bread from house 
 to house " did not in the case of the Christian any 
 more than in the case of the Jewish believer take 
 the place of attendance upon the services of the 
 temple, so long as* the temple stood; nor did it 
 release the Christian, any more than it did the 
 frequenter of the Jewish synagogue, from his 
 
obligation to be present at, and take part in, the 
 appointed festivities . Tbe private celebration of tbe 
 Holy Communion in otber words was not regarded, 
 nor was it ever intended to be, any substitute for 
 tlie public service of tbe national sanctuary. Jesus, 
 according to the flesb, was a Jew, and as such felt 
 bound to fulfill to tbe letter the precepts of the 
 ceremonial as well as the moral law ; He came not to 
 destroy but to fulfill, and preferred, as He was bound 
 to do, "to place side by side with the old institu- 
 tions, the vital and regenerative seeds of the new, 
 and to leave it to time to develop the germ, and to 
 familiarize men with that which at first could not 
 but appear to them strange."* 
 
 When we are told by Vitringa, in like manner, 
 that the Christian Church was fashioned after the 
 model of the Jewish synagogue, and not after the 
 temple and its rites, it may be freely granted that 
 the Christian presbyter was only the Jewish 
 Zaken.1 or elder under another name. But it is again 
 a partial and one-sided view of the subject under 
 consideration, and does not as a theory of the 
 Christian ministry take in all the fadls, for, so long 
 as the temple was left standing, both presbyter and 
 elder were under obligation and felt bound to take 
 part in attending the Jewish feasts, and in offering 
 the accustomed sacrifices, prescribed by the Jewish 
 ritual. 
 
 It may be that the word Priest in its sacrificial 
 
 * Reuss on the History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic 
 Age, p. 248. 
 
— 7— 
 
 sense is not used in the New Testament in connec- 
 tion with the Christian ministry, but if so, it is for 
 the reason that so long as the Jewish temple and 
 priesthood still remained, and the obligation to 
 attend upon their services was in force, it was 
 neither lawful nor expedient to raise altar against 
 altar, nor to set up priesthood against priesthood : 
 when the time came, however, for both to be taken 
 out of the way, then we hear it declared in the 
 Bpistle to the Hebrews that " we," too, " have an 
 altar whereof they have no right to eat who serve 
 the tabernacle " (Heb. xiii, lo). It was needful to 
 prevent confusion that the old order should be 
 permitted to pass away before the new order is 
 allowed to take its place ; when the time had at 
 length arrived for the Holy City to be destroyed 
 and the offering of the daily sacrifice to cease, 
 it was then made manifest that the Holy Com- 
 munion, by virtue of its memorial charadler 
 and its connection with the paschal lamb, is of the 
 nature of a feast upon a sacrifice, and the pure 
 offering of the priesthood of Melchisedec is to take 
 the place of the bloody rites of the elder dispensa- 
 tion and of the line of Aaron. The course of Divine 
 Providence, working under the conditions of time 
 and experience, brings it to light that the Lord 
 Christ is not only a prophet who came into the 
 world to bring men to the knowledge of the truth, 
 nor was His ultimate aim only to establish a king- 
 dom that should last forever, but in ascending up on 
 high He entered into the heavenly places to appear 
 
— 8— 
 
 in the presence of God for us, and, by virtue of His 
 everlasting priesthood, Himself apply , through the 
 appointed channels of sacramental grace, the merits 
 of the blood once shed for the remission of sins in 
 baptism, and for the continual renewal of grace, 
 through the partaking of His blessed body and 
 blood, in the feast upon the sacrifice. Without some 
 such presentation of the Sacrifice once offered, 
 through the Eternal Spirit, and the application 
 of its merits in His everlasting priesthood to indi- 
 viduals existing under the conditions of time and 
 moral probation, the whole economy of grace, it is 
 not too much to say, would be like the play of 
 Hamlet with Hamlet left out. 
 
 It will be seen from what has been said, that the 
 forty years which intervened between the death of 
 Christ and the destruction of Jerusalem, like the 
 forty years between the deliverance of the elder 
 Church from Egypt and their entrance into the 
 promised land, were of the nature of a period of tran- 
 sition^ during which a process of education was 
 silently going on, until the days were accom- 
 plished, when the Christian Church passed from 
 under the discipline of the Law into the liberty of 
 the Gospel. 
 
 You will permit me, under this division of the 
 subjedl, to add one example more in illustration of 
 the way a half truth is capable of being used to 
 serve the purpose of a deadly error. It is often- 
 times claimed that since our Lord Himself did not 
 see fit to institute any system of church polity, nor 
 
— 9— 
 
 to give to his Apostles any prescribed form of wor- 
 ship, we are at liberty therefore to look upon such 
 things as in themselves indifferent. Now while it 
 is true that our L,ord did not Himself give to His 
 Church any system of polity, and did not prescribe 
 any fixed order of rites, it is ever to be remembered 
 that, before parting, He left to the Apostles a gift 
 greater than either of these, when before His depart- 
 ure he breathed upon them, and, in so doing, made 
 a corporate body, partaker of His own super- 
 natural life. It was by the formative instinct con- 
 nected with this sacramental bestowal of His own 
 incarnate life, that the Church, as a living body, was 
 to be enabled to adapt her polity to the changes 
 of time and circumstances, and to give liturgical 
 expression, in a form suited to all kinds and 
 conditions of men, to her devotional life. It has been 
 said by one to whom the whole Anglican communion 
 both in England and America owes an inestimable 
 debt of obligation, " that the various theories by 
 which ecclesiastical writers have striven to sub- 
 stantiate the Apostolical development of Bpisco- 
 pacy have tended to make us forgetful of the 
 divine vitality inherent in the process. The 
 organization of the post- Apostolic Church is not to 
 be regarded, ' we are told,' in the light of an 
 arrangement of human forethought by which the 
 Apostles, assembled in council, determined to give 
 stability to the Church which they were about to 
 leave behind them. . . . The mode of growth 
 matters not and may have varied in different places . 
 
— lO — 
 
 The /ad of the growing church assuming the Epis- 
 copal form as the consummating form of that 
 growth seems just to show that it was not of man, 
 but of God. It was not an arrangement, an insti- 
 tution, but a vital energy. God's vital energy 
 worked with the various communities of the grow- 
 ing Christendom in various ways, while the organ- 
 ism was forming : but everywhere the law of vital 
 growth was leading to the same result, so that the 
 succession of Episcopal to Apostolical regimen was 
 the universal charadleristic of the Church when 
 the Apostles were withdrawn, and it is as difl&cult 
 to trace the distinction between them and their im- 
 mediate successors, as it is to trace the change 
 from the form of vital existence to that which is 
 its necessary successor in physiological order. 
 Episcopacy was not a mere matter of Apostolic 
 order, but of organic development, accomplished 
 by the Divine Presence within the Church, so 
 as to be universal as soon as the Church became 
 a completely constituted society. The final growth 
 of the constitution as a universal necessary form 
 is in no way affected by the arguments or theories 
 of ecclesiastical historians as to the method by 
 which that growth was brought about."* 
 
 Without this formative instinct the historic 
 Episcopate would be a mere rope of sand. 
 
 * Benson: Epistle to the Romans, pp. ix-x. 
 
-II — 
 
 II. 
 
 In addition to this transitional period intervening 
 between the death of Christ and the destruction of 
 the Holy City, the student of early church-history 
 must be prepared to discriminate between the 
 Pentecostal era with its charismatical gifts and 
 its extraordinary ministry of Apostles, Prophets, 
 Teachers, etc., as something creative and super- 
 natural, and the post-Apostolic age, when govern- 
 ment under the form of organic law took the place 
 of the immediate presence of Christ with His 
 Church and people. The new creation in this 
 respect does not differ from the old. As at the 
 first, we have the creative work, when God, through 
 the agency of the Word, and by the operation of 
 the Holy Ghost, called order out of chaos, and then 
 left Nature, as we say, to take its course under the 
 form of organic law, so was it also in the calling 
 into being of the Church. Jesus, after His ascen- 
 sion into heaven did not all at once leave His Church 
 without some visible token of His presence. In the 
 eledlion of Matthias, by lot, to take the place of the 
 traitor Judas, it was Jesus Himself who determined 
 the result ; and when the time had come for the 
 extension of the Church beyond the limits of 
 Judea, the selection of St. Paul was made by our 
 Lord Himself, and was not left to the College of the 
 Apostles. Again, when in the Isle of Patmos St. 
 John had the veil withdrawn for a time, he saw 
 
-12- 
 
 Christ Himself walking in tlie midst of tlie golden 
 candlesticks, and received from His own lips tlie 
 message to tke seven ckurches in the Roman 
 province of Asia Minor. It is the farewell mes- 
 sage of the Great Head of the Church Himself, 
 after the work of organization had been completed 
 under His own direction, recognizing as His agents 
 the bishops of the churches, and setting His seal 
 upon the work of St. John, in substituting the 
 province with its metropolitical centre, for the 
 Apostolic College. 
 
 Nor is it to Christ Himself, only, as the Great 
 Head of the Church, that we see attributed 
 throughout ' the Pentecostal age a creative and 
 self-originating power. The same is true of the 
 economy of the Holy Spirit. He too, during the 
 whole of this creative epoch, appears in his own 
 proper character as a self-originating agent. This 
 is the explanation of Paul and Barnabas being 
 sent forth upon their missionary work among the 
 Gentiles, by prophets and teachers, and not by the 
 members of the Apostolic College at Jerusalem. 
 It is possible, let it be said in this connection, to 
 push the doctrine of the Apostolic succession to a 
 dangerous extreme, just as insisting upon the 
 necessity of sacramental grace it is possible to fall 
 into the mediaeval error of the opus operatum in 
 dealing with the transmission of the new life, 
 through the channels of material agents. Epis- 
 copalianism, pushed to an extreme, is to be avoided 
 quite as much as Romanism. Now it cannot be 
 
—13— 
 
 denied tliat we have in tlie New Testament unmis- 
 takable evidence of a form of ministration different 
 from that of the established order of Bishops, 
 Priests, and Deacons. When Jesus ascended 
 up on high, we are told in the Kpistle to the 
 Ephesians, (iv. 8-12), that "He led captivity- 
 captive and gave gifts unto men .... And 
 he gave some apostles, and some prophets, and 
 some evangelists, and some pastors and teachers, 
 for the perfecting of the saints, for the work of 
 the ministry, for the edifying of the body of 
 Christ." And in the Epistle to the Corinthians, 
 (i Cor. XII, 8-10), we have an indication of a 
 recognized rule of order in this ministry of the 
 Spirit : " first apostles, secondarily prophets, 
 thirdly teachers, after that miracles, then gifts of 
 healing, helps, governments, diversity of tongues." 
 But it will be noted that in both instances where 
 this extraordinary ministry is mentioned, it is in 
 connection with a plea for the unity of the Church. 
 So far from St. Paul claiming independent rights for 
 the Church at Antioch, either on the ground of his 
 own call to be the Apostle of the Gentiles, or the 
 manifest token of the presence and power of the 
 Holy Ghost in connection with the ministry of the 
 prophets and teachers by whom he had been sent 
 forth upon his mission, no sooner does he re- 
 turn from his first missionary tour than he goes 
 up to Jerusalem that he may by diligent inquiry 
 find out what course St. Peter, as head of the 
 Apostolic College, is likely to adopt towards the new 
 
—14— 
 
 departure. The adjusting of tlie relations between 
 the mother Church of the Gentile world and the 
 Church at Jerusalem, is a bit of history which is 
 well worthy of study, as illustrating the natural 
 course of events in opposition to mere theorizing 
 on the subject of church unity. How are the two 
 churches to be united? How are the vexed 
 questions of distinction of race and differences 
 of national customs, to be settled? The plan 
 adopted shows the practical good sense of the 
 great Apostle and the Christian way of settling 
 differences without surrender of principle ? Among 
 the trials which the Church in Judea was called to 
 bear, at the time, was that of famine. When St. 
 Paul went up a second time to Jerusalem to confer 
 with the pillars of the Church there, he did not go 
 empty-handed. He took up with him a contri- 
 bution from the Church at Antioch, towards the 
 alleviation of the sufferings of the brethren in 
 Judea. It was not, as Dr. Hort observes, a mere 
 charitable contribution, but over and above the 
 relief afforded it was a stroke of policy on the part 
 of Barnabas and himself admirably timed. It was to 
 effect a recognition of the primacy of the mother city 
 of the Jewish dispersion, on the part of the young 
 growing Gentile community, and " corresponded to 
 the half shekel which came from Jews scattered in 
 all lands for the support of the temple service." 
 The overture thus made had the desired effect, 
 in breaking down the middle wall of partition be- 
 tween Jew and Gentile. It was followed by a 
 
—15— 
 
 recognition on the part of James, and Peter, and 
 John, of St. Patil's divine commission to an inde- 
 pendent apostlesliip of tlie Gentiles. Now in all this, 
 it will be observed, there was nothing artificial, 
 nothing mechanical or unreal. Men adl out their 
 principles ; they confer together, they contend with 
 spirit ; they find fault with with each other ; they 
 make surrenders ; they give and take. The end is 
 brought about, not by trickery, nor by diplomacy, 
 nor by guile, but the operation of the Holy Spirit, 
 making men, notwithstanding their differences, to 
 be of one mind in an house. The churches of the 
 Gentiles acknowledge the headship of the Church 
 of Jerusalem, adopt the same form of organization, 
 have a common creed, and substantially the same 
 ritual. 
 
 We see at this time St. James in Jerusalem, sur- 
 rounded by his body of presbyters. When St. Paul 
 comes back to Antioch after his missionary tour 
 we find him setting out again to confirm the disci- 
 ples he has made, just as St. Peter makes a visitation 
 of the churches in Judea. Once congregations are 
 formed, and churches are established among the 
 Gentiles, St. Paul appoints presbyters over them. 
 When the time came for the charismatical gifts 
 bestowed for extraordinary purposes to be with- 
 drawn, the general outlines of ecclesiastical arrange- 
 ment had already been determined upon, not arti- 
 ficially, but were called into being to meet an exist- 
 ing want. The Episcopate slept for a time in the 
 Apostolate, for it was not desirable that Bishops 
 
— 16— 
 
 as a separate order should be placed over tlie 
 churclies, while the Apostles who had planted 
 them were still living. It was not until the 
 Apostles began to feel that their own departure 
 was near at hand, that they began to choose out 
 " select men," as they are called, to fill their place. 
 Thus, St. Paul placed Timothy at Ephesus and 
 Titus at Crete to take charges of the churches 
 there after his departure. They were to have the 
 oversight of presbyters and in them the Apostolate 
 pass into the Episcopate properly so called. We 
 have now reached a state of advancement where 
 Bishops take the oversight of the churches ; Pres- 
 byters are restricted to the charge of congrega- 
 tions ; Deacons are made responsible for the work 
 of practical administration. The organic body, in 
 other words, has passed through the stage of transi- 
 tion from nationalism to universalism ; the child 
 has grown to man's estate, and needs no longer the 
 aid of supernatural gifts, as in the Pentecostal 
 time ; the fathers to whom mission was origi- 
 nally given have fallen asleep, and their place is 
 taken by sons selecfted with care to take the over- 
 sight of the churches, as the Apostles had them- 
 selves been chosen with care for the work to 
 which they were set apart : when consecrated to 
 their of&ce they, too, receive the gift of the Holy 
 Ghost just as the Apostles, during the great forty 
 days, received from Christ, as the head of the 
 Church, the gift of His own incarnate life when 
 He breathed upon them. 
 
—17- 
 
 III. 
 
 As things came into existence before words, so 
 also there is a difiference between the logical and 
 chronological order of ideas. Words in themselves 
 are mere counters ; they have at first a general, 
 then a technical signification, as differentiation be- 
 gins to take effect, and specialism, under a more 
 complex condition of society, takes the place of 
 the embryonic stage of development. We have had 
 an example of what I mean, when the growth of the 
 Church, and the increasing burden imposed by the 
 serving of tables, compelled the Apostles to call for 
 a division of duty, and they asked the disciples to 
 choose out from among them " seven men of good 
 report, full of the Holy Ghost and wisdom," to 
 whom they might commit the work of the ad- 
 ministration of the common fund entrusted to 
 their keeping. It is commonly supposed that 
 this was a setting apart to the work of the diacon- 
 ate, in the later and technical meaning of the 
 word. But the men set apart do not receive the 
 name of deacons, while called to the work of ad- 
 ministration. All we are told is, that seven men 
 of " honest report," noted for their wisdom, were 
 created to take charge of attending to the distri- 
 bution of the fund out of which widows were cared 
 for, in order that the Apostles might give them- 
 selves continually to prayer and the ministry of the 
 Word. The difference between the two ministries 
 
— 18— 
 
 comes to light in the numbers associated with 
 each. The twelve Apostles represent the universal 
 ministry which Christ Himself ordained to go and 
 preach the Gospel to every creature ; the number 
 seven has to do with the Church as the body of 
 Christ and the economy of the Holy Ghost. The 
 general term "ministration," covers all that is 
 involved in the administration, whether in the way 
 of oversight generally, or attention to the care 
 of the poor in particular, — whatever called for 
 the peculiar gifts of wisdom in dealing with men 
 in a practical way, was the nature of the of&ce pro- 
 posed to be created. As a matter of fact, the per- 
 sons, afterwards spoken of as Presbyters, were the 
 parties to whom Paul and Barnabas brought their 
 donation from the Church of Antioch when they 
 came up to Jerusalem, while Deacons in the 
 more restricted meaning of the word appear 
 as the attendants of Bishops and act in the 
 capacity of assistants to them in the discharge of 
 the duties of their of&ce. 
 
 We meet the same difi&culty in dealing with the 
 word bishop in the New Testament ; it has at first 
 a general, afterwards a more restricted and tech- 
 nical signification. The reason is, that the 
 episcopate, in the sense of supervision, slept at 
 first in the apostolate, and presbyters were called 
 upon for the nonce to do double duty. When the 
 growth of the Church allowed of differentiation, 
 and specialism began to take effect, then the words 
 Bishop, Presbyter and Deacon began to assume a 
 
—19— 
 
 teclinical signification, and a particular sphere of 
 duty was assigned respectively to each. 
 
 There were many things which stood in the 
 way of the extension of the episcopate before the 
 close of the first century. So long as the Apos- 
 tles themselves lived, they naturally assumed the 
 general oversight of the churches they had planted. 
 Whatever they lacked, on account of absence, in the 
 extending of the kingdom, was supplied by the pres- 
 byter in charge, who acted, for the time being, as 
 both overseer and pastor of the flock. In the 
 case of the Gentile communities the converts were 
 neophytes and not fit to exercise the office of a 
 bishop. Then, so long as the line of separation 
 between Jews and Gentiles was kept up, the 
 Hebrew would resent the attempt to place a Gen- 
 tile over him, and the Gentile in turn would refuse 
 to accept a Hebrew. The communities fostered into 
 life under the care of prophets and teachers, were 
 content to go on without the ordinances of sacra- 
 mental growth until the time for organization placed 
 them within their reach. It took time for differ- 
 ences to get adjusted and prejudices to pass away 
 before bishops could be everywhere appointed. The 
 Church in Corinth is a case in point. It was a 
 place where much was made of speaking " in the 
 spirit," whether for edification, or not, made little 
 difference. The Greeks were a people who had 
 itching ears, and were always seeking after some 
 new thing ; they were fond of preachers like Apol- 
 los, renowned for his eloquence, and gift of speech. 
 
— 20 — 
 
 The Corintliians did not want a bishop, for they 
 were free livers and did not desire to be kept in 
 order. Now, next to the epistles of the Apostles 
 themselves, one of the most revered of the writings 
 of the Apostolic age, is the epistle which Clement 
 wrote, in the name of the Church of Rome, to the 
 Church in Corinth. It is a charming production, 
 full of the grace of meekness and Christian charity. 
 When St. Clement touches upon the order of 
 nature, his description rises into eloquence. 
 He goes on to tell the Corinthians how, in the 
 army we see gradation and subordination, rank 
 rising above rank. He reminds them of the elder 
 economy, with its three-fold order of High-priest, 
 Priests, and Levites. So he proceeds in his argu- 
 ment, heaping illustration upon illustration, that 
 he may put to shame the Corinthians for their 
 rivalry and jealousy and strife. It is in this epistle 
 that the famous passage is found, so often quoted, 
 when, in summing up his argument, the writer 
 goes on to blame the Corinthians for arbitrarily 
 deposing the presbyters set over them from their 
 office. " Our Apostles knew from the Lord Jesus 
 Christ," Clement says, " that there would be con- 
 tention about the dignity of the episcopate ; and 
 therefore being endowed with perfect foresight 
 they ordained such men, and afterwards gave com- 
 mand that when they should be deceased, other 
 approved men should succeed to their office. Those 
 who were constituted by them, or afterwards by 
 other selected men, with the approval of the whole 
 
— 21 — 
 
 Churcli . . . may not lawfully be deposed." Now 
 here, it will be observed, we have a notable example 
 of a still unformed phraseology, arising out of the 
 condition of the Gentile churches, to which I have 
 already alluded. The persons spoken of, in con- 
 nection with the oversight of the Church at Corinth 
 at the time, who had been deposed from of&ce, were 
 not bishops but presbyters. Clement knows noth- 
 ing of a separate and fixed title of ofi&ce for 
 him we are accustomed to call the bishop. His 
 epistle does not, and was not intended to, prove 
 the existence of a bishop, but the necessity for one, 
 to quell existing division and strife. Its testimony, 
 in other words, is of a negative kind ; and is valu- 
 able, not as proving that the episcopate was univer- 
 sally extended at the time, but for the provision made 
 for the perpetuation of the succession through men 
 selected for that purpose from the time of the 
 Apostles, and that the persons who have received 
 ordination from such are to be obeyed, whether 
 they be bishops or presbyters. We know from 
 the testimony of Hegesippus that the Church at 
 Corinth, before the middle of the second century, 
 had fallen into line, and had Domnus for its bishop. 
 The epistle of St. Clement is valuable from another 
 point of view. It bears witness to the existence 
 of the organic connection of the Jewish and the 
 Christian Church, to which I called attention at 
 the outset. The leading thought of the epistle 
 is the continuity of the Church under the Old and 
 New Covenants. Abraham, Clement argues, is 
 
— 22 — 
 
 our father ; Christians are the true Israel ; theirs 
 are the promised blessings of either covenant. 
 Therefore it is that when correcting the disorders 
 which had crept into the divine service, Clement 
 says : " We ought to do all things in their appointed 
 seasons. Those who make their oblations at the 
 appointed seasons are acceptable to God and 
 blessed ; for they who follow the instructions of 
 the Lord do not err. For to the High-priest his 
 own liturgies are given, and to the priests their 
 own place is allotted, and on the Levites their own 
 ministries are laid. The layman is bound by the 
 lay precepts. Let each of you, brethren, in his 
 order give thanks to God, walking reverently in a 
 good conscience, and not overstepping the appointed 
 limit of his service." It is plain from these words 
 of St. Clement, that the Christian Church, before 
 the close of the first century (A. D. 97), had its own 
 priesthood, its own eucharistic oblation, its own 
 liturgy, which had taken the place of the rites of 
 the elder dispensation, and were looked upon in 
 the light of the substance to the shadow, and were 
 not regarded as of a purely figurative character. 
 
 Tradition assigns to St. John the organization of 
 the Church under its Episcopal form throughout the 
 length and breadth of Asia Minor. Prior to this, 
 bishops were to be found in the chief cities in the 
 empire, — in Jerusalem, — in Antioch, — in Ephesus, 
 — in Crete, — and in Rome, where it is probable that 
 Linus had been placed by the joint authority of the 
 Apostles Peter and Paul, before their martyrdom ; 
 
—23— 
 
 the Church was now in the process of transition 
 from its national to its imperial stage. It had 
 taken possession of the chief cities of the empire, 
 and was like a city set upon a hill which could not 
 be hid. It had to be recognized as a power in the 
 world ; and at the same time it had to be prepared 
 for conflict, and thoroughly organized. 
 
 As under the elder economy, Joshua, in dividing 
 the land of Canaan after the twelve tribes had 
 taken possession, divided according to the lines and 
 measurements brought with the children of Israel 
 from their Egyptian sojourn, so, in the new, St. 
 John, instead of adopting a form of organization of 
 a purely artificial character, made choice of the 
 system of the Roman empire, which he found in ex- 
 istence in Asia Minor, as the basis of his organiza- 
 tion of the Church. It is the Roman province of 
 Asia, with its seven churches, which in the Book 
 of the Revelation is set before us as the model for 
 church extension throughout the world. And 
 why ? Because the Church has its mission to the 
 world as well as to individuals. " The leaves of 
 the tree are for the healing of the nations." 
 Guizot, whose witness is of the more value as he 
 was in sympathy a Presbyterian, tells us that had 
 it not been for the organization of the Church, and 
 the compact form of its hierarchical system of 
 arrangement, the world must have come to an 
 end under the shock of the barbarians, beginning 
 already to gather, like eagles hastening to the prey, 
 around the decaying empire. The provincial sys- 
 
—24— 
 
 tem, as it is called, is the unit of cliurcli organiza- 
 tion, and that not by reason of any preconceived 
 theory, but for the reason that the Roman empire 
 in its way is to be regarded in the light of a provi- 
 dential arrangement for the extension of the Church, 
 under its imperial form, quite as much as the Jew- 
 ish economy was an ordained means for the pre- 
 servation of its organic life. Not without reason 
 was the title on the cross written in Hebrew and 
 Greek and Latin. The province, and the city, and 
 the metropolitical idea of a centre, where the chief 
 magistrate is to reside, are all, in their measure, the 
 gift of the world to the Church ; and are to be recog- 
 nized as such, just as the family is to be accepted 
 as the unit of social organization. It was so at the 
 first, and has continued to be so, in all the ages, 
 from the second century until now. 
 
 Nor was it only in the charadler of an organizer, 
 that St. John was left to complete the work, which 
 the other Apostles had begun. St. John laid the 
 foundation of theology as a doctrinal system ; he is 
 par excellence the theologian of the Christian 
 Church. There is a tradition told by Rufi&nus, that 
 the Apostles before they left Jerusalem met 
 together ; and each in turn, commencing with St. 
 Peter, contributed an article to the Apostles' creed. 
 It is a tradition which bears witness to the belief 
 of the Church that the Baptismal Creed is an em- 
 bodiment of Apostolic teaching, but like the notion 
 that the Church sprang all at once into existence, 
 without regard to the conditions of time and 
 
—25— 
 
 growth, it will not bear tlie test of critical exam- 
 ination. It is true the Creed, commonly called the 
 Apostles', is, in its arrangement and the order of 
 its parts, an expansion of the baptismal commis- 
 sion to make disciples in the name of the Father, 
 the Son and of the Holy Ghost ; it is not true that 
 the expanded Creed is the result of any formal act, 
 either on the part of the corporate Aposto- 
 late, or of the whole Church. We owe the expan- 
 sion of the Creed, as well as the arrangement of its 
 articles, to the conflict which began when the faith 
 came into contact with the various schools of phil- 
 osophical teaching then existing in the world. It 
 was the oppositions of " science, falsely so called," 
 which forced the Church not to be content with com- 
 mitting the faith, once delivered, to the memory and 
 the fleshly tablets of the heart ; but to express in 
 logical form, and articulate in logical order, the faith 
 committed to her keeping, in opposition to new 
 forms of error arising from time to time. This as 
 Paulinus of Aquileia has expressed it is our defence 
 for the introduction of the disputed clause of the 
 Filioque into our Western Creed. " Ideas are not 
 formed and developed simply by virtue of their 
 inherent power and the germs of life they contain 
 naturally, but also under the influence of the obsta- 
 cles they encounter and by the very effort they 
 make to overcome them."* 
 
 When it is complained, as it sometimes is, that 
 the Church imposes creeds upon her members, the 
 
 * Reuss' History of Christian Theology in the Apostolic Age, p. 316. 
 
—26— 
 
 answer is plain. The Cliurcli of her own motion 
 has never made, much less invented, a Creed ; she 
 has stated explicitly what she held implicitly^ in 
 opposition to errors which have from time to time 
 arisen. More than this she has never done. The 
 first division of the Creed has been expanded to 
 meet the Gnostic heresies of the schools of ancient 
 philosophy in the post- Apostolic age. The second 
 division deals with the Arian attempt to deny the 
 divinity of the Eternal Logos, and the mystery of 
 the incarnation. The third division has to do with 
 the personal existence of the Holy Ghost, and the 
 economy of the Church, as the divinely ordained 
 instrument for the education and training of the 
 life given in the baptismal covenant. It is with 
 the Creed, in this respect, as with the orders of the 
 ministry, and the constitution of the Church itself. 
 Had the widows never complained about the way 
 they were treated in the serving of the tables, the 
 order of Deacons would never have been created. 
 If the matter of oversight had not been made a sub- 
 ject of division and strife. Bishops would not have 
 been needed to represent, as St. Ignatius puts it, the 
 principle of moral unity, and the necessity for its 
 recognition in the body of the Church : and in 
 like manner if error had never raised its head, the 
 Faith which the Church had held implicitly 
 from the beginning, would not have been formu- 
 lated to guard the deposit which had been com- 
 mitted to her keeping. In other words, it is of 
 the nature of the Divine plan in dealing with 
 
—ay- 
 moral agents to make evil tlie minister of good : it 
 is through conflict and trial that the kingdom is 
 compadled and knit together : error is used for the 
 greater confirmation of the truth. 
 
 Last but not least, it is to St. John we owe the 
 inception of the ideas of the divine liturgy. 
 Among the traditions of the Apostolic age none 
 is better authenticated than the statement of Poly- 
 crates, bishop of Ephesus, quoted by Eusebius, 
 that St. John, in the celebration of the holy mys- 
 teries, was accustomed to wear the diadem of the 
 Jewish High-priest. With this agrees the descrip- 
 tion of the Book of the Revelation where St. John 
 sees in vision " one like unto the Son of Man, 
 clothed with a garment down to His feet, and girt 
 about the paps with a golden girdle." In the 
 fourth and fifth chapters, we have the distinction 
 made between the first and second oblations. In 
 the former, St. John sees in vision the throne of 
 God as Creator and Maker of all things, and, on 
 either side of the throne, the representatives of the 
 old and the new dispensations. The bearers of 
 the throne are the four living creatures which 
 represent the highest forms of created life : before 
 the throne burn seven lamps which are the seven 
 operations of the Spirit of God : thunderings and 
 lightnings and voices are heard giving expression to 
 the voice of Nature, and amid them there is going 
 up unceasingly the Trisagion to the ever-blessed 
 Trinity, followed by the great act of adoration, 
 " Thou art worthy, O Lord, to receive glory, and 
 
—38— 
 
 honor, and power : for Thou liast created all things 
 and for Thy pleasure they are and were created ! " 
 
 In the scene which opens in the fifth chapter, 
 the Lamb, as it had been slain, is the great central 
 object of worship. The voices which ascend to 
 the throne are not the echoes of the voice of 
 Nature, but the voices of the redeemed who have 
 washed their robes and made them white in the 
 blood of the Lamb. It is the new song of the Chris- 
 tian Church, " celebrating the glory of Redemption 
 through the blood of the Lamb, and the sanctifica- 
 tion of the redeemed as kings and priests" unto 
 God, and ascribing blessing, and honor, and glory, 
 and power, unto Him who sitteth upon the throne 
 and unto the Lamb for ever and ever."* We have 
 here the framework on which the Liturgy of St. 
 Clement, now admitted to be the oldest and best 
 representative of the worship of the primitive 
 Church, was fashioned into shape in Bphesus and 
 Antioch in the post-Apostolic age. 
 
 Here I must be permitted to bring this introduc- 
 tory leAure to a close, leaving untouched much of 
 interest in the execution of the task you have 
 asked me to undertake. My object has been, not 
 to attempt an exhaustive view of the primitive 
 Church, but to suggest lines of thought which, if 
 followed out in detail, shall afford needed help in 
 the study of an intricate period of history, during 
 which the Christian Church was passing out of an 
 embryonic state into a condition of organic growth 
 and development. 
 
 * Gold on The Continuity of the Principle of Divine Worship. 
 
II. 
 
 THE GREEK CHURCH. 
 
 A LECTURE 
 
 DEWVERBD BEFORE THE CHURCH CI,TIB OE CONNECTICUT AT 
 CHRIST CHURCH, HARTFORD, FEB. 27, 1896. 
 
 BY 
 
 CHARI^ES R. HAIvE, 
 Bishop of Cairo, Bishop-Coadjutor of Springfield. 
 
"THE GREEK CHURCH." 
 
 Our subject this evening is what is commonly 
 called " The Greek ChurclL." The name is not a 
 very accurate one, nor is it the name by which the 
 greater part of the Christians to whom that appel- 
 lation is given prefer to be called. Although the 
 Church of England is larger than any or than 
 all of the churches sprung from her and in com- 
 munion with her, and it will probably be many 
 years before we equal her in numbers, we are not 
 willing to be styled " the English Church." And 
 yet, by far the largest part of the American Church 
 is of English descent and with scarce an exception 
 uses the English language. Of the one hundred 
 millions or more who make up the Orthodox East- 
 em Churches not more than eight millions are of 
 the Greek race, or speak the Greek tongue. 
 
 You will note that I spoke of Orthodox Eastern 
 Churches and this because the different parts mak- 
 ing up the unity of the Orthodox Eastern com- 
 munion have each as distinct life as have the dif- 
 ferent members of the Anglican communion. 
 When the term " Eastern Churches " is used with- 
 out further qualification, the Orthodox, so called 
 because holding fast to the decrees of the (Ecumeni- 
 cal Councils, are referred to. But beside the one 
 hundred millions of these, there are about six 
 
—32— 
 
 millions of Eastern Christians rejecting one or 
 more of these councils, the Armenian, the Syrian, 
 the Coptic and Abyssinian, and the Assyrian, or 
 East Syrian, often called Nestorian. Of the 
 Armenian Church, numbering about four millions, 
 a church which in our own time has added so 
 many to the noble army of martyrs (God bring its 
 terrible sufferings to a speedy end !) it is asserted, 
 by leading Greek and Russian theologians, who 
 have carefully studied the matter, that its belief on 
 all important points of doctrine is practically at 
 one with that of the Orthodox Churches. The 
 Armenians, being at war with the Persians when 
 the Council of Chalcedon met, were not there repre- 
 sented, and erroneous reports of its doings reaching 
 them, they denounced the council while, as there 
 is good reason for saying, holding fast the faith as 
 there established. As for the orthodoxy of the 
 East Syrians, Bishop Whittingham, of Maryland, 
 unsurpassed in learning by any divine of the 
 American Church, thus speaks :* 
 
 " Since there is reason to doubt whether the doc- 
 trine condemned by the Council of Ephesus and, in 
 consequence, by the whole Church throughout the 
 world, was held by Nestorius ; since it is certain 
 that it is not now held by the churches known as 
 Nestorian, . . . since the churches called Nes- 
 torian have constantly denied that they held the 
 error they have been called on to forsake ; since 
 they profess their faith in the Catholic Creed con- 
 
 * In a note to Palmer on the Church, American edit., vol, i, p. 388. 
 
—33— 
 
 formably with that of the Catholic Church, they 
 are not lightly to be rejected from the number of 
 the churches of Christ, but rather to be regarded 
 as brethren long alienated, not without some fault 
 on both sides." 
 
 If, the banner of the Cross having now for cen- 
 turies waved over many lands, in the East as well 
 as in the West, which were in the first ages under 
 the sway of heathenism, the term " Greek Church " 
 is now but a popular and inexact title for the 
 Orthodox Eastern churches, there was a time 
 when, with little exaggeration, it might have been 
 applied to the whole Church. As Dean Milman 
 says, in his History of Eatin Christianity,* " For 
 some considerable (it cannot but be an indefina- 
 ble) part of the first three centuries, the Church of 
 Rome and most, if not all, of the churches of the 
 West were, if we may so speak, Greek religious 
 colonies. Their language was Greek, their organi- 
 zation Greek, their writers Greek, their Scriptures 
 Greek, and many vestiges and traditions show 
 
 that their ritual, their liturgy, was Greek 
 
 So, too, was it in Gaul: there the first Christians 
 Were settled chiefly in the Greek cities which 
 owned Marseilles as their parent, and which retained 
 the use of Greek as their vernacular tongue." 
 
 Dr. von Dollinger thus speaks of Greek influ- 
 ence over men of other races in the early days of 
 the Church :f " The Eastern portion of the church 
 for a long time enjoyed a complete intellectual 
 
 * I, 32. t Lectures on the Reunion of the Churches, p. 39. 
 
 3 
 
—34— 
 
 supremacy ; the Westerns had to learn from their 
 Greek co-religionists, and to receive from them 
 ecclesiastical and theological education. All Latin 
 theological literature before St. Augustine is in 
 substance the application or imitation of Greek 
 models." 
 
 It is not difi&cult to see how happy it has been 
 for the Church that, in her early days, when the 
 God-given faith was to be defined and safe-guarded, 
 Greek culture had such precedence and the Greek 
 language was so widely used. Seneca complains 
 of the impossibility of duly representing Plato's 
 speculations in the Latin tongue, and so, had Latin 
 held the place of Greek in the Early Church, end- 
 less confusion of thought could hardly but have 
 arisen. We can see something of what might 
 have been, when we note the difiEculties that have 
 actually come from defective translations of Greek 
 formula into Latin phraseology. 
 
 Connected with the matter of language, which 
 naturally influenced, while in turn it was shaped 
 by, the intellectual character of those who used it, 
 is the difierence between the Greek and the Roman 
 mind, the former speculative, the latter pre-emi- 
 nently practical. And so, in those early days 
 when they were bound together in love, the Bast 
 occupied itself with questions of strict theology, 
 for which it was best fitted. The West showed its 
 practical good sense by accepting the definition of 
 the faith which the more acute mind of the East 
 had formulated. The titles given the Beloved 
 
—35— 
 
 Disciple in the Bast and the West are most sig- 
 nificant — in the latter St. John " the Evangelist," 
 in the former St. John " the Divine " (6 ©eoXoyof). 
 
 The six undisputed General Councils were all 
 held in the East, and were attended by very few 
 but Eastern bishops. But they defined the faith 
 for the whole Church, for all time. 
 
 In the same century in which the last of these was 
 held, Alexandria, Antioch, and Jerusalem fell into 
 the hands of the Moslem. Constantinople stood, 
 indeed, for hundreds of years longer. But large 
 parts of its patriachate shared the fate of the three 
 patriarchates already named. And the patriarchs 
 of Constantinople not seldom found the Byzantine 
 emperors anything but " nursing fathers " to the 
 Church. If, sometimes, the influence of the civil 
 power was helpful, more often it would seem it was 
 an injury. 
 
 But if the Eastern Church had now its sore 
 trials and great losses, it had also great consola- 
 tions and important gains. In the ninth century, 
 Cyril and Methodius, brothers born in Thessa- 
 lonica, after successful missionary labors in the 
 Crimea, carried the Gospel to the Sclavonic nation 
 of Moravia, and did much, through those they had 
 trained, to bring the Bulgarians to the faith of 
 Christ ; and just before the close of the tenth 
 century, Russia was numbered among Christian 
 nations. 
 
 The diversity of character between Easterns and 
 Westerns combined with various circumstances to 
 
-36- 
 
 bring about, from time to time, difficulties and mis- 
 understandings between them, sometimes even cul- 
 minating in a temporary breaking off of relations. 
 But tbese,* "however much they diminished the 
 glory of the church, did not altogether destroy the 
 principle of Christian charity. It was still univer- 
 sally held that the church formed but one spiritual 
 fraternity, that all Christians were members of the 
 same body, and that it was their duty to hold com- 
 munion with each other. When divisions arose, 
 excommunication consisted simply in a withdrawal 
 of communion. These withdrawals of commun- 
 ion were intended to procure the reformation of 
 the offending party, and the divided churches 
 . . . sincerely endeavored to be reunited to 
 their brethren in Christ." 
 
 But more and more the East had occasion to 
 distrust the West, to dread the persistent encroach- 
 ments of the Bishop of Rome. The one thing 
 which they saw — and it was no mere imagination — 
 in every act of the Bishop of Rome toward them, 
 was an attempt to extend his domination, and a 
 favorite means of trying to advance his power was 
 the use of spurious acts of councils, and other 
 forged papers, such as " The False Decretals," for 
 whose authenticity no one contends now, though 
 there has been no receding from the claims these 
 were used to support. 
 
 Such being the state of affairs, a separation be- 
 tween East and West was, humanly speaking, 
 sure to come. 
 
 * Palmer's Church History, American edition, p. 67. 
 
—31— 
 
 Soon after the middle of the ninth century, 
 Nicholas I, Bishop of Rome, who promulgated, or 
 at least recognized, the False Decretals, excommu- 
 nicated Photius, patriarch of Constantinople, and 
 the latter in turn excommunicating the former, 
 the Bastern and Western churches were for some 
 years dissevered. Again, in 1054, Leo IX of 
 Rome and Michael Caerularius of Constantinople 
 excommunicated each other and their adherents, 
 and from that year is usually dated the separation 
 of East from West. 
 
 Doubtless there was fault on both sides. Had 
 there been more of the spirit of Christian love, 
 there would have been a stronger determination 
 not to break the bonds of godly unity. It is pos- 
 sible to " speak the truth in love " without any 
 lack of fidelity to the truth. But, in the height of 
 argument, this is apt to be forgotten, and so we 
 read of many things said on one side and the other 
 which might better have been left unsaid. *" Never- 
 theless," as Dr. von DoUinger well declared at the 
 Second Conference at Bonn, " no one acquainted 
 with history can doubt that by far the greater 
 share of the blame rests with the West. . . 
 . An imperious despotism, attended by the 
 fear that the sight of the free Eastern church 
 might produce an unfavorable feeling toward papal 
 monarchy in the West, an evil ignorance of Chris- 
 tian antiquity, and especially of Greek tradition and 
 ecclesiastical literature, on the part of the Westerns, 
 
 * Reunion Conference at Bonn, 1874, pp. 23-25. 
 
-38- 
 
 these were tlie real causes of the schism. . . . 
 The schism was not the work of Photius, accord- 
 ing to the received Roman view, nor yet of Cae- 
 rularius. The communion of the two churches, 
 though momentarily interrupted, could still, with- 
 out much difl&culty, have been restored. Even 
 toward the end of the twelfth century, we find 
 popes and emperors treating with each other on 
 the assumption of an unbroken unity of the 
 church. Not till the beginning of the thirteenth 
 century did events occur of such importance as to 
 lead to a lasting schism and rooted hostility be- 
 tween East and West. The conquest of Constan- 
 tinople, the spoliation and desecration of the Greek 
 churches, the erection of the Latin empire, above 
 all, the part which Innocent III took throughout, 
 by supporting these acts of violence with the 
 whole weight of his authority and power, and 
 openly forwarding the subjugation and Eatinisa- 
 tion of the Eastern church, these are the deeds 
 which dug the chasm which has not been bridged 
 over to this day." The conquest of Constan- 
 tinople by the armies of the fourth crusade took 
 place in 1204, and for fifty-seven years, under the 
 Latin emperor there, Latin patriarchs with Latin 
 clergy displaced the lawful spiritual rulers and 
 clergy of the imperial city. When Michael 
 Palaeologus recovered the throne for its lawful 
 possessor, and brought the Eastern patriarch and 
 his clergy to their own again, it seemed to him 
 needful to strengthen his position by coming to 
 
—39— 
 
 terms with the pope. His envoys, therefore, at the 
 Council of Lyons in 1274, agreed to recognize 
 many of the papal claims. But the bishops, 
 clergy and people of the East, with scarce an ex- 
 ception, " held fast to the liberty wherewith Christ 
 had made them free," and the Synod of Lyons 
 effected no practical result, except to make the 
 aversion, if possible, stronger than ever. Again, 
 when Constantinople was tottering to its fall — 
 all the surrounding country in the hands of the 
 Turk, the emperor John Palaeologus craved the 
 help of the pope to ward off the impending disas- 
 ter. Accompanied by the patriarch of Constanti- 
 nople and other leading ecclesiastics, he attended 
 a council called by the pope at Ferrara, afterward 
 removed to Florence. Under the pressure laid 
 upon them, they yielded to the Latins at almost 
 every point. But on their return home on the 
 breaking up of the council, the extorted conces- 
 sions were, as with one mind, disavowed by 
 clergy and people, and in a very few years the 
 Eastern empire fell under the sway of the infidel, 
 because the Eastern Church would not be sus- 
 tained by a pontiff who, through force and fraud, 
 had come to dominate the churches of the West. 
 
 Let us consider now the present condition of the 
 Holy Orthodox Church of the East. This commun- 
 ion is made up at this time of no less than ten 
 independent churches, in full doctrinal accord, 
 though varying somewhat in discipline. First 
 must be mentioned the four patriarchates, of Con- 
 
— 40 — 
 
 stantinople, Alexandria, Antioch. and Jerusalem, 
 tlien the Church of Russia, then that of Cyprus, 
 then the Orthodox Church in Austro-Hungary, with 
 the churches of Montenegro, of the Greek king- 
 dom, and of Servia. The archbishop of Mt. Sinai 
 is sometimes considered autocephalous, but in the 
 latest Greek list that I have seen, he is accounted 
 as belonging to the patriarchate of Jerusalera. The 
 churches of Roumania and of Bulgaria claim an 
 independence which seems not as yet fully accorded 
 them. We shall consider them then as still part 
 of the patriarchate of Constantinople. The politi- 
 cal changes which have taken place in those parts 
 of late years are, it is to be hoped, not all that will 
 take place, and, meantime, some questions of 
 ecclesiastical jurisdiction can only be settled pro- 
 visionally. 
 
 The " Most Holy Archbishop of Constantinople, 
 New Rome, and CEcumenical Patriarch," Anthimus 
 VII, has under his jurisdiction, in Turkey in 
 Europe and part of Turkey in Asia, including the 
 Roumanian church and the Bulgarians, about 
 12,000,000 of the faithful, eighty metropolitans, 
 thirty other bishops in active service, seventeen 
 more who seem to be acting as suffragan bishops, 
 and fifteen retired bishops, of whom three have 
 been patriarchs of Constantinople. Several of these 
 statements call for explanation. The patriarchs of 
 Constantinople, notwithstanding the high-sound- 
 ing title " oecumenical," which they have borne 
 since early in the sixth century, have never claimed 
 
—41— 
 
 authority over the whole Church, indeed among 
 the Eastern patriarchs this patriarch has been but 
 primus inter pares^ with no more power outside of 
 his partriarchate than the archbishop of Canter- 
 bury has in the American Church. The titles of 
 metropolitan and archbishop in the East are for the 
 most part honorary. In many cases, when the 
 title was first given to the holder of a see, it had its 
 full meaning — the metropolitan of Ephesus had 
 once, we are told, almost as many suffragans as 
 there are days in a year ; not unnaturally the title 
 of metropolitan is continued to the holder of so 
 honored a see — though he has now but a feeble 
 flock. I have said that there are now three ex-pa- 
 triarchs of Constantinople. Not very long ago, 
 there were five ex-patriarchs living at one time. 
 The position of a patriarch under the Turk is no 
 enviable one. The more efficient and earnest he 
 is in doing his duty, the more surely will he come 
 into disfavor with the imperial power, which will 
 ere long make his position so intolerable that he 
 has no resource but to retire and let another be 
 chosen in his place. Perhaps, after a time, the 
 successor may be pushed aside and the predeces- 
 sor be called again to the patriarchal throne. Cyril 
 Eucar, in the seventeenth century, was five times 
 patriarch of Constantinople, and was then mur- 
 dered by the Turkish government. 
 
 I have myself seen the place where, seventy-five 
 years ago, the Patriarch Gregory, over four-score 
 years old, was, with three of his bishops and eight 
 
—42— 
 
 of Hs priests, hung on Easter day at the door of tlie 
 cliurcli where they had just been celebrating the 
 Paschal Feast. 
 
 A little more than a year since, Neophytus VIII, 
 an enlightened prelate, was forced by the govern- 
 ment to resign, on grounds which have never been 
 explained, his own organ, the Ekklhiastikk 
 AlStheia, having been allowed to refer to the mat- 
 ter only in the most guarded manner. 
 
 The patriarchate of Alexandria is now ruled 
 over by the most aged, as well as the senior, bishop 
 in the world, born in 1798 and consecrated in 1839, 
 ninety-eight years old and nearly fifty-seven years 
 a bishop. The venerable Sophronius, " Most Holy 
 Pope and Patriarch of the great divine city Alex- 
 andria, Libya, Pentapolis, and Ethiopia, and of all 
 the land of Egypt, father of fathers, pastor of pas- 
 tors, thirteenth apostle, and universal judge," has 
 under him, at this time, not more than two or three 
 bishops, and about five thousand of the faithful. 
 These latter are, for the most part, of the Greek 
 race, those Christians who are descendants of the 
 ancient Egyptians belonging to the Coptic Church, 
 to which we have alluded. The past year he cele- 
 brated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his coming 
 to the patriarchal throne of Alexandria. Notwith- 
 standing his advanced age, he takes a lively inter- 
 est in what goes on in the world. During twenty- 
 three years, I have received many most interesting 
 letters from him — eleven years ago I had the honor 
 of making his personal acquaintance and receiving 
 
—43— 
 
 most kindly attentions from him. At the jubilee 
 of his episcopate, I telegraphed my congratulations 
 to him, and not only received an answer by cable 
 but, in due time, a letter, telling me that " my 
 greetings had been among the first to arrive, and 
 that my name would be mentioned during the ser- 
 vices of that day, as one of his special friends." 
 When he heard of my consecration to the episco- 
 pate, he sent me his hearty congratulations, and 
 assured me of his prayers for myself and for those 
 committed to my charge. 
 
 " The Most Blessed and Holy Patriarch of the 
 divine city Antioch, Syria, Arabia, Cilicia, Iberia, 
 Mesopotamia, and all the East, father of fathers, 
 and pastor of pastors," Spiridion, resides chiefly in 
 Damascus, the principal city in his patriarchate. 
 He has under him eleven metropolitans and three 
 other bishops. Antioch was taken by the Saracens 
 in the seventh century, then by Crusaders, scarcely 
 more friendly to Eastern Christians, then in the 
 thirteenth century by the Sultan of Egypt — who 
 put to death, or led into captivity, the Christian 
 inhabitants. It is said that for hundreds of years, 
 until the beginning of this century, believers in 
 Christ were excluded from the place where dis- 
 ciples were first called Christians. It has been but 
 a few years since a church was built there, the 
 handful of Christians having till then worshipped 
 in a cave in the mountain side. 
 
 When I was in Damascus, Hierotheus, the late 
 patriarch, had but recently died. In calling upon 
 
—44— 
 
 the metropolitan who took his place until a suc- 
 cessor was appointed, I was greatly interested to 
 be introduced to an Arab bishop, and to learn 
 from him that there was another bishop of the 
 same race associated with him. There are said to 
 be about one hundred thousand Orthodox Chris- 
 tians in this patriarchate, not a few of them Arabs. 
 There is no place to which the heart of the 
 Christian turns with such interest as to Jeru- 
 salem, the city of the Great King. " The Most 
 Blessed and Holy Patriarch of the Holy City 
 Jerusalem, and of all Palestine, Syria, Arabia be- 
 yond Jordan, Cana of Galilee, and Holy Sion," 
 Gerasimus, has under him four metropolitans, 
 seven archbishops, including him of Mt. Sinai, and 
 seventy-five thousand of the faithful. Here again, 
 and in even larger proportion, I understand, than in 
 the patriarchate of Antioch, there are many Chris- 
 tians, of the Arab race. I was much impressed by 
 the fact that at every Eastern service which I at- 
 tended in Jerusalem, and they were many, part of 
 the service was said in Arabic as well as Greek, 
 except in two special services. The good Patriarch 
 Nicodemus was doing all in his power to provide 
 well-trained Arab priests to minister to their own 
 countrymen. For this end specially, he had re- 
 founded an ecclesiastical seminary at the monas- 
 tery of the Holy Cross, a short distance from 
 Jerusalem, and he was having text books prepared 
 for their use. When I asked one of his clergy, 
 who knew his wishes well, what I could send to 
 
—45— 
 
 tlie patriarch after leaving, to show ray appreci- 
 ation of his unbounded kindness toward me, I 
 was told that nothing would please him more than 
 gifts of books for the library of that seminary. I am 
 happy to say that I was able to interest such men 
 as Bishop lyightfoot. Bishop King, Bishop Words- 
 worth of Salisbury, Canon Liddon and Beresford 
 Hope, in the matter, so that together we sent a 
 very respectable collection of books to that library, 
 for which most grateful thanks were returned to 
 the donors. 
 
 What shall I say of Nicodemus, patriarch of 
 Jerusalem at the time of my visit there, eleven years 
 ago? Rather, what might I not say? Perhaps 
 instead of using words of my own, I might better 
 quote from a letter written me by Canon Liddon, 
 dated " Mount of Olives, Jerusalem, May 3, J885," 
 in which he says : " I have had the happiness of see- 
 ing a great deal of the Orthodox Patriarch .... 
 and I heartily echo your words about him. The 
 Patriarch is a very remarkable man .... as we 
 should say in Kngland, a strong man. He would 
 be distinguished in any position in life. As he 
 sits in his chair and receives visitors of all kinds, 
 with the resource and tact and dignity which are 
 his characteristics, I am reminded of Rafifaelle's 
 picture of Julius H, only there is an unworldiness 
 in the look as well as in the speech of Nicodemus, 
 which it is no lack of charity to say was wanting 
 in Julius. His personal ascendancy was, I think, 
 remarkably displayed in the way in which he 
 
-46- 
 
 awed by a look the unmanageable crowd in the 
 Chnrch of the Holy Sepulchre, on Baster Kve and 
 Easter Day and the impression one thus gained 
 about him is confirmed by conversation on any 
 subject of religious importance." 
 
 Some years since, Nicodemus was compelled, by 
 a serious attack of heart disease, to give up all 
 work and all care. He accordingly resigned the 
 patriarchal chair, and has since lived in retire- 
 ment on the Island of Halki, in the Sea of Mar- 
 mora, near Constantinople. He was worthily suc- 
 ceeded by Gerasimus, who is still patriarch. This 
 prelate was, when I was in Jerusalem, metropolitan 
 of Scythopolis, and showed me many kindnesses. 
 The patriarch, as you may remember, gave me 
 permission to use the Chapel of Abraham, in the 
 Churcji of the Holy Sepulchre, for the celebration 
 of the Holy Eucharist after the Anglican rite. 
 Gladly availing myself of this permission, which 
 has since been accorded to other Anglican 
 clergy, I kept up a daily celebration during the 
 remainder of my stay in the Holy City. On the 
 first of these days, Palm Sunday, 1885, I was in- 
 vited to dine with the patriarch, Gerasimus, and 
 other bishops. Gerr-iimus spoke of the service I 
 had held that morning. I said : "It will be a 
 pleasure for me to think of it as long as I live." 
 " So it will be to us,'''' was his hearty response. 
 
 I have frequent letters from the good Nicodemus. 
 On the day of my consecration, he wrote me a long 
 letter, assuring me of his prayers and blessing, 
 
—47— 
 
 and giving me godly counsel as to my work. 
 Some months since, lie described to me his habit 
 of life at Halki. " I live by myself," he writes, 
 " quiet and thankful. I attend the church of the 
 Island, and labor in teaching the Gospel for the 
 edification of Christians who know little of God's 
 word, which grows ever more full of delight as the 
 quiet of death draws near." 
 
 And quite recently, he writes : " Our I^ord God 
 knows that we never cease praying for you, and 
 I believe that you also pray for us. This is the 
 love of God, that we love one another. And 
 through prayer, we have fellowship with God, 
 with whom is the beginning and end of us all." 
 . . . . " Brother Charles, in Christ our God, I 
 have not words in which to express my thanks 
 and praise to our great God for the blessings I 
 receive from Him, the peace and rest both of soul 
 and body. Oh that, through your prayers, we 
 may be accounted worthy of His heavenly King- 
 dom, through the forgiveness of our sins by the 
 Divine mercy and compassion of the good and 
 loving God." 
 
 We come now to consider the great Church of 
 Russia, by far the largest National Church in the 
 world, with more than eighty million members, 
 four metropolitans (including the Kxarch of 
 Georgia) , sixteen archbishops, forty-three diocesan 
 bishops, thirty-eight vicar bishops, that is 
 assistant bishops without the right of succession, 
 and seven retired bishops, one hundred and eight 
 
-48- 
 
 in all. Althougli a vicar bishop cannot suc- 
 ceed in his own diocese, lie may be chosen to the 
 charge of any other diocese, and as a rule, every 
 diocesan bishop has been for a time, a vicar 
 bishop. There are nearly forty thousand parish 
 priests. It is claimed that St. Andrew, the first 
 called of the Apostles, preached the Gospel to the 
 wild Scythians as far north as the site of the city 
 of Kiefif. But Russia became a Christian country 
 a little more than nine hundred years ago, when 
 Yaroslav, prince of Kiefif, then the capital of 
 Russia, was baptized in the river Dnieper, and 
 thousands of his subjects followed his example, 
 I had the pleasure, on the feast of the Bpiphany, 
 1885, of assisting at Kiefif, in a commemoration of 
 this great event. At Vladimir's request, a bishop 
 was sent from Constantinople to be metropolitan 
 at Kiefif. Until the fall of Constantinople, the met- 
 ropolitans of Kiefif, at first Greeks, but after a time 
 Russians, were consecrated, or if already bishops, 
 were confirmed as metropolitans, by the CKcumeni- 
 cal Patriarch. Then, for an hundred years, there 
 was little more than a nominal dependence upon 
 Constantinople. In 1583, the Russian Church 
 was acknowledged to be autocephalous, and the 
 metropolitan of Moscow had the title of patriarch 
 given him. There were in all ten patriarchs, the 
 last, Adrian, dying early in the last century. 
 Since then, the ofiEce has been in abeyance, and 
 the affairs of the Church have been administered by 
 a Holy Governing Synod, established in 172 1. This 
 
—49— 
 
 synod consists of tlie metropolitans of St. Peters- 
 burg, KiefiF and Moscow, and tlie Exarch of 
 Georgia, with, several other bishops chosen by the 
 synod. There are usually from eight to ten mem- 
 bers in all. There is a throne for the Bmperor at 
 one end of the table, at which the members of the 
 synod sit. The Cross and the Book of the Gos- 
 pels at the other end. The Bmperor is very sel- 
 dom present, but is usually represented by a 
 layman, entitled the Ober-procurator, through 
 whose hands pass all communications between the 
 ecclesiastical and civil authorities, and who is con- 
 sulted on questions affecting temporalities, but he 
 has no voice in those that are doctrinal or 
 ecclesiastical. Until recently, two married priests 
 were members of the Holy Synod, the Principal 
 Chaplain of the Bmperor and the Chaplain 
 General of the Army and Navy. The change 
 was made shortly before my last visit to 
 Russia, and it seemed to me that it was made 
 in the interests of centralization. I was assured, 
 on inquiry, by a Russian friend that it was 
 done to secure the greater freedom of the 
 synod, that it was felt that both these priests, 
 living in close relations with the Bmperor, would 
 know his wishes, and might find it difi&cult not 
 to accede to them ; that it was considered that a 
 gathering of bishops alone could act more in- 
 dependently. And when I remarked that now the 
 parish priests, who are all married, while the 
 bishops are chosen from the comparatively few 
 4 
 
. —so- 
 celibate priests, wlio are engaged in educational 
 work and tlie like, would be unrepresented, I 
 was assured tbat tbat matter bad been attended 
 to, that there were always some made bisbops 
 after tbey bad become widowers, and wbo bad 
 been parisb priests, and tbat one or more of tbese 
 bisbops was always a member of tbe Holy Synod. 
 Wben a new bishop is to be chosen, the Holy 
 Synod sends the names of two or three priests to 
 the Emperor, for him to select one. I am told that 
 but once in this century has the Bmperor failed to 
 designate the first one named. The nomination is 
 then made by the synod, all the bishops present 
 at the capital taking part in it, and in due time 
 the consecration follows. It would seem that the 
 Russian Church is as free as in any other land 
 where church and state are at all connected. 
 
 It is sometimes said that the Russian clergy 
 are very ignorant. Let me quote, in answer to 
 this charge, a witness who cannot be supposed 
 to be biased in their favor, the Jesuit Gagarin, 
 who, in "Z(2: Russie serait-elle Catholiquef'' says :* 
 " The Russian clergy are not known. I would not 
 imply that they are perfect or irreproachable, but I 
 maintain that they are calumniated, and that they 
 are more cultivated and more moral than they 
 have the credit of being. They have in our day 
 made remarkable progress in sacred and scientific 
 learning." 
 
 The bishops and higher clergy generally are usu- 
 
—51— 
 
 ally men of great learning. And earnest efforts are 
 being made for the intellectual improvement of all the 
 clergy. In nearly every diocese there is a theologi- 
 cal seminary, where the children of the priests are 
 educated gratuitously, and others desiring to share 
 in the privilege, at small cost. In St. Petersburg, 
 Moscow, Kieff and Kazan are " Spiritual Acad- 
 emies," which might well be called theological 
 universities, and where every advantage is afforded 
 to picked students sent up from the theological 
 seminaries. One of these spiritual academies, that 
 at Kazan, makes a specialty of training mission- 
 aries for their work among ^the heathen. In con- 
 nection with this institution there is a Mission 
 Press, to which missionaries can come, or send from 
 any part of the mission field, and have the works 
 they have prepared, printed in the various tongues, 
 under careful supervision. 
 
 Important religious works are all the time issu- 
 ing from the press in Russia, the most of them 
 original, including commentaries on Holy Scrip- 
 tures, books on liturgies, church histories, biog- 
 raphies, and the like, whilst many are translations 
 of standard works — such as the writings of St. 
 Chrysostom, and of modern writers, Canon Robert- 
 son's Church History, Farrar's Life of Christ, 
 P^re Didon's Vie de J6sus Christ, etc., etc. I 
 understand that the Church Quarterly is with diffi- 
 culty sustained in England, and our Church Review 
 is, unhappily, a thing of the past. But I take a 
 very able bi-monthly Church Review published at 
 
—52— 
 
 St. Petersburg, and two monthly cliurcli maga- 
 zines having much of the nature of a review, and 
 I know of several others. While we have our 
 monthly Spirit of Missions^ they have a similar 
 publication twice a month. The Tserkovnie Vaistnik 
 or Church Messenger, a weekly published in St. 
 Petersburg, would compare not unfavorably with 
 The Churchvian or The Guardian. And this is 
 one of ow&r forty church newspapers published in 
 Russia. 
 
 A Russian Bible Society, which recently cele- 
 brated its twenty-fifth anniversary, is doing much 
 to circulate the Scriptures among the people, with 
 the hearty co-operation of the church authorities. 
 The Russian Church has been for many years car- 
 rying on extensive and successful mission work 
 among the heathen tribes of Siberia and among 
 the Mohammedans in Eastern Russia and Central 
 Asia. I have heard from an Bnglish friend of 
 mine who has often visited Russia, and knows 
 its language and its people well, of the wonder- 
 ful success of church work among the Tartars. 
 He tells of seeing in Tartar villages east of the 
 Volga, "where forty years ago there was not a 
 single Christian inhabitant. Christian churches, 
 built by private subscription and crowded with 
 Tartar peasants, singing the liturgy and other 
 ofl&ces of the church in their native tongue." But 
 time would fail me if I were to try to give, in a 
 single lecture devoted to that subject, an outline of 
 the activities of the Russian Church, thoroughly 
 
—53— 
 
 wide-awake as it is ; much less can I do justice to 
 it in a part of a lecture in which there is so much 
 else to be told. We must hasten on to tell of 
 other churches. 
 
 The Church in Cyprus established its right to 
 autonomy, which though claimed had been dis- 
 puted, in the council at Kphesus in 431. The 
 Orthodox Christians in that land number about one 
 hundred thousand, under " the Most Blessed and 
 Holy Archbishop of Nova-Justiniana and all 
 Cyprus," and three bishops. 
 
 In Austro-Hungary there are between three and 
 four millions belonging to the Orthodox Church, 
 under three metropolitans and ten other bishops. 
 
 That brave little country Montenegro, which has 
 for so many years withstood the Turk, has about 
 three hundred thousand inhabitants, members of 
 the Orthodox Church. Until about forty years 
 since, the metropolitan of Montenegro was also, 
 under the title Vladika, its ruling prince. He has 
 at this time, I understand, one bishop under him. 
 
 The Church in the Greek kingdom was, until 
 the Greek revolution, a part of the patriarchate of 
 Constantinople. When Greece became free, it 
 naturally desired to have a national church 
 of its own. In July, 1833, a national synod 
 was held at Nauplia, when it was declared 
 that " (i), the Eastern Orthodox and Apostolic 
 Church of Greece, which spiritually owns no 
 head but the Head of the Christian faith, our Lord 
 Jesus Christ, is dependent on no external author- 
 
—54— 
 
 ity, wliile she preserves tmsliaken dogmatic unity 
 witli all the Eastern Orthodox Churches. ... (2) 
 A permanent synod shall be established, consisting 
 entirely of archbishops and bishops, appointed by 
 the king, to be the highest ecclesiastical authority, 
 after the model of the Russian Church." The met- 
 ropolitan of Athens is, by virtue of his ofl&ce, presi- 
 dent of the Holy Synod. The people of Greece, 
 about two millions in number, with scarce an 
 exception, are members of the Orthodox Church. 
 The episcopate of the Greek kingdom numbers 
 about thirty. 
 
 We come now to the last of these churches, the 
 Servian Church — with about the same number of 
 members as in the Church of Greece. Its metropol- 
 itan has under him four other bishops. It has been 
 but very recently that the Servian Church has 
 regained its ancient position as a national church. 
 While Servia was under the dominion of Turkey, 
 its church was a dependency of the patriarchate of 
 Constantinople. The independence of the Bulga- 
 rian and Roumanian churches from the see of 
 Constantinople, though claimed, is not yet fully rec- 
 ognized, and probably will not be until the political 
 relations of those parts are more definitely settled 
 than they are at present. 
 
 Having considered the history and the present 
 condition of the Orthodox Eastern churches, let us 
 now inquire briefly into the doctrines held by them. 
 In treating of this matter, two of the authorities on 
 which I shall chiefly rely are the writings of Phil- 
 
—55— 
 
 aret, who died as metropolitan of Moscow in 1867, 
 after an episcopate of more tlian fifty years, and 
 tlie statements of Alexander Lycurgus, archbishop 
 of Syros and Tenos, who visited England in 1876, 
 and there held conferences with the well-known 
 Bishop Edward Harold Browne, then of Ely, after- 
 wards of Winchester, and other leading Anglican 
 theologians. Alexander Lycurgus was one of the 
 most scholarly prelates of the Church of Greece. 
 Philaret was not only one of the most remarkable 
 bishops of the century, but, before his consecra- 
 tion, he had been professor of divinity at the prin- 
 cipal theological school in Russia. So that one 
 could not wish for better authority than is afforded 
 by the words of these prelates. 
 
 Hear then what Philaret says in regard to the 
 Word of God :* " Everything necessary to salvation 
 is stated in the Holy Scriptures with such clear- 
 ness, that every one reading them with a sincere 
 desire to be enlightened, can understand them. 
 Every one has not only a right, but it is his 
 bounden duty, to read the Holy Scriptures in a 
 language which he understands, and edify himself 
 thereby." And again, f " Holy Scripture, being 
 the Word of God Himself, is the only supreme 
 judge of controversies and decider of misunder- 
 standings in matters of faith." And Methodius, 
 successor to Alexander Lycurgus in the see of 
 Syros and Tenos, whom I have the happiness of 
 
 * Comparative statement of Russo-Greek and Roman Catholic 
 doctrines. Paper No. IV of Russo-Greek Committee, pp. 4 and 5. 
 ■\ Ibid., p. 6. 
 
-56- 
 
 knowing, soon after lie became archbisliop, issued 
 a pastoral to his people, in whicli' he says : " Lay- 
 hold upon the Book of Life, the Book of Light, the 
 Book of the world's salvation. Study the Holy 
 Gospels, meditate upon them day and night, regu- 
 late your lives by their holy teaching, and happy 
 will you be." 
 
 I might quote many like passages' from the 
 writings of Bastern divines, but these will sufiS.ce 
 to show how fully in accord in this matter are the 
 Eastern Orthodox and the Anglican churches. And 
 since this is the case, that they so agree as to the 
 authority of Holy Scripture and the principles of 
 its interpretation, we may be prepared to find that 
 they are at one also as to other important points 
 of faith and practice, and that where there seems 
 to be a divergence, it may be due to modes of ex- 
 pression rather than to real disagreement. 
 
 Take the doctrine of the sacraments, for in- 
 stance. The Anglican Church, defining a sacra- 
 ment as "an outward and visible sign of an inward 
 and spiritual grace given unto us, ordained by 
 Christ Himself," acknowledges two sacraments. 
 The Eastern churches, defining a mystery, the 
 word they use instead of our word sacrament, as 
 "a visible sign of invisible grace," a *"holy act 
 through which grace, or, in other words, the saving 
 power of God, works mysteriously upon man," 
 ordinarily speak of seven. Holy Baptism, the Holy 
 
 * The Ivonger Catechism of the Russian Church, drawn up by Phil- 
 aret, Paper No. Ill of Russo-Greek Committee, p. 12. 
 
—57— 
 
 Eucliarist, Confirmation (or the Anointing), Peni- 
 tence, Ordination, Matrimony, and Prayer Oil 
 (the latter meaning the solemn anointing of the 
 sick for their recovery, following literally the in- 
 junction of St. James). Sometimes they say, as 
 did Alexander Lycurgus,* " There are many sacra- 
 ments, their number is indefinite, but they are not 
 all necessary to salvation. There are two sacra- 
 ments necessary to every man, Baptism and the 
 Holy Eucharist." The Eastern Orthodox churches 
 while asserting, as does the Anglican, that our 
 Lord is "verily and indeed" present in the Holy 
 Eucharist, have not attempted to define the mode 
 of that presence, believing it, to use Philaret's 
 language,f " a mystery to be apprehended by faith, 
 and not a matter to be speculated and dogmatized 
 upon, or reasoned about. All definitions or pre- 
 tended explanations," he goes on to say, " such as 
 the use of the word transubstantiation, are but 
 attempts to penetrate the mystery, and in so far 
 tend to overthrow the very nature of the sacra- 
 ment." The late bishop of Florida, the Rt. Rev. 
 Dr. Young, called the attention of Philaret to the 
 fact that in an English translation of his Longer 
 Catechism, the word transubstantiation occurred 
 repeatedly.f " Then the translation is incorrect," 
 was the reply ; "we took good care that the word 
 [meaning, of course, a word which might properly 
 
 * Quoted IB report of Russo-Greek Committee, in the Journal of 
 General Convention of 187 1. 
 
 \ Paper No. Ill of Russo-Greek Committee, p. 19. 
 X Paper No. Ill of Russo-Greek Committee, p. 19. 
 
-58- 
 
 be translated by tbat term] should not be in our 
 catecMsm." 
 
 The Eastern cburcbes, like tbe Anglican, give 
 tbe Holy Communion to all in both kinds. Pbi- 
 laret says on tbis,* " All Christians ought to com- 
 municate in the body and blood of Jesus under 
 the elements of bread and wine. ... If one 
 element in this sacrament had been sufi&cient, and 
 the other unnecessary, the Saviour would not have 
 instituted it in two kinds. The first inventors of 
 the communion in one kind were the Manicheans, 
 whom Pope Gelasius, in the end of the fifth cen- 
 tury, condemned by an interdict." And the reply 
 of the patriarch of Constantinople and his synod, 
 last August, to the encyclical of Leo XIII, of 
 which a translation has lately been published, saysf 
 " The One Holy Catholic and Apostolic church 
 . following the commandment of the Lord, 
 ' Drink ye all of this,' imparted to all of the sacred 
 chalice [as well as of the holy bread], but the 
 Papal church, from the ninth century onward, in- 
 novated in this also, by depriving the laity of the 
 sacred chalice, contrary to the ordinance of the 
 Lord and the universal practice of the ancient 
 church and the express prohibition of many an- 
 cient orthodox bishops of Rome." 
 
 Touching the life after death, Philaret says :J 
 " The condition of man's soul after death is fixed 
 
 * Paper No. IV of Russo-Greek Committee, p. 12. 
 
 t See the Church Eclectic, for February, 1896, p. 987. 
 
 t Paper No. IV of the Russo-Greek Committee, p. 15. 
 
—59— 
 
 by his internal state, and there is no sucli thing as 
 purgatory, in which sonls have to pass through 
 fiery torments in order to prepare them for blessed- 
 ness There is no need of any other kind of 
 
 purification when ' the blood of Jesus Christ 
 cleanseth us from all sin.' " * " No one has the 
 power to deliver sinners from torments by the 
 application of the works of supererogation of Jesus 
 Christ, and of the saints, because the merits of 
 Jesus Christ are not under the control of man, and 
 works of supererogation in the saints are impossible, 
 as they themselves are only saved by grace. The 
 doctrine of purgatory and of indulgences makes 
 the narrow path of salvation too broad. It is not 
 difficult for sinners to give gold and receive heaven, 
 and for the pastor to give heaven and get gold. 
 But it is not so easy to get to the real kingdom of 
 God, it is taken by force." And the reply of the 
 patriarch of Constantinople to the encyclical of 
 Leo XIII says : f " The papal church from the 
 twelfth century onward invented and heaped 
 together, in the person of the pope, as sole pos. 
 sessor of privilege, a multitude of innovations 
 touching purgatorial fire, touching a superabun- 
 dance of merits on the part of the saints, and the 
 distribution of them to those that need, and the like, 
 propounding also a perfect retribution for the 
 righteous before the general resurrection and judg- 
 ment." 
 
 * Paper No. IV of the Russo-Greek Committee, p. i6. 
 t See the Church Eclectic of February, 1896, p. 987. 
 
— 6o— 
 
 Tlie Eastern cliurclies wishing to render to God 
 a reasonable service have provided that a lan- 
 guage " understanded of the people " should 
 always be used in the liturgy and other prayers. I 
 have taken part, again and again, in services said 
 in Greek, in Old Russian or Sclavonic, and in 
 Arabic. A friend has told me of his taking part 
 in such service said in the Tartar tongues. Bishop 
 Nicolai, in charge of the very successful Russian 
 mission in Japan, has sent me a photograph of 
 his cathedral at Tokio, and a beautiful copy of 
 the Liturgy of St. Chrysostom in Japanese used 
 therein. I understand that the same liturgy is 
 also used in Hebrew, in Turkish, in Georgian, 
 Wallachian, Finnish, Lettish, and Wallachian, and 
 in the dialects spoken by the natives of the Altai, 
 Kamchatka, and various tribes of Alaska. Besides 
 many of the versions already mentioned, I have it 
 also in English, French, German and Latin, but 
 these were prepared for purposes of study, and not 
 for public use. 
 
 Before I leave this branch of the question, I 
 would explain a not uncommon misapprehension. 
 One hears it said that, in Greece, the service is said 
 in ancient Greek, which the people do not under- 
 stand, and that the Sclavonic used in the churches in 
 Russia is unintelligible to the common people. In 
 both Greece and Russia, as with us, the language 
 of business and the newspapers is not thought the 
 most fitting for divine service. But the difference 
 between ancient Greek and modern Greek is very 
 
—el- 
 slight now, and daily becoming less, as, witli tlie 
 progress of education, ungrammatical expressions, 
 and the needless use of foreign words are done 
 away with, and the language of the day is becom- 
 ing much such as it was in the days of St. Chrys- 
 ostom. It is felt that an endeavor to go back to 
 classic days would be undesirable, since Chris- 
 tianity had brought in so many new ideas, and 
 modified the meaning of so many words. And the 
 difference between Sclavonic and modern Russian 
 is scarcely, if at all, more than between ancient 
 and modern Greek. I bought in St. Petersburg, 
 for one cent, a tiny booklet giving a list with 
 explanations of perhaps two hundred words from 
 the liturgy, being all that it was thought could 
 possibly give any difficulty to plain people. And 
 this list included such words as Amen, Angel, 
 Alleluia. 
 
 In the Orthodox Eastern churches the parish 
 priests must be married men. A priest cannot 
 marry, but before his ordination to the diaconate, 
 he has his choice to marry and be eligible for 
 parish work, or to take vows of celibacy and be a 
 chaplain or, if fitted for it, a professor. The 
 bishops are chosen from the celibate priests. The 
 reason for this rule is that as there is not the 
 means to give all the clergy a high education, it 
 seems better to give such training to a select body 
 who will be more likely to continue their studies 
 afterwards. This, parish priests, poorly paid, and 
 with the care of their parishes and of their families. 
 
—62— 
 
 would not often be able to do. The Easterns feel, 
 as we do, tbat married clergy are, ordinarily, better 
 able to sympatbize witb and help tbeir people, 
 tban celibates. And wliile tbe selection of tlie 
 bishops from the better educated class has certain 
 undeniable advantages, it is beginning to be felt 
 that it might be as well if a parish priest who had 
 shown eminent fitness for the episcopate could be 
 chosen to it. It has already been said, care is 
 taken to have as members of the Russian episcopate 
 one or more prelates who were parish priests, and 
 then, as widowers, became eligible to be made 
 bishops. 
 
 In the conference between the Archbishop of 
 Syros and Tenos, Bishop Harold Browne and 
 others, at the Palace, Bly, Feb. 4, 1870, the arch- 
 bishop stated that, " in his opinion, the Eastern 
 Orthodox and the Anglican churches were essenti- 
 ally agreed in basis, but that there were points on 
 which they differed." These points he divided into 
 " things to be discussed, things to be tolerated on 
 one side or the other, and one thing to be cor- 
 rected, viz : the doctrine as to the procession of the 
 Holy Ghost, commonly called the Filioque ques- 
 tion." It is generally known that there is a dif- 
 ference between East and West as to the correct 
 form of what is commonly called the Nicene Creed. 
 The Easterns undoubtedly hold to the original 
 phraseology, in saying : " I believe in the Holy 
 Ghost, the Eord, and Giver of life, Who proceedeth 
 from the Father." In the West, by steps which 
 
-63- 
 
 are not easy to trace, tlie words " and the Son " 
 (in I^atin Filioque) were added after the word 
 " Father." 
 
 In 1874, a Reunion Conference was held at 
 Bonn, on the Rhine, under the presidency of Dr. 
 von Dollinger. It was attended by leading mem- 
 bers of the Anglican, Oriental, and Old Catholic 
 churches, and considered those questions which 
 might seem to stand in the way of church unity. 
 At this conference, a thesis was agreed upon by 
 the Anglican and Old Catholics, as follows :* " We 
 agree that the way in which the Filioque was 
 inserted in the Nicene Creed was illegal, and that, 
 with a view to future peace and unity, it is much 
 to be desired that the whole church should set 
 itself seriously to consider whether the creed could 
 possibly be restored to its primitive form, without 
 sacrifice of any true doctrine expressed in the 
 present Western form." 
 
 The next year a second conference took place at 
 Bonn, again summoned by Dr. von Dollinger, and 
 was more largely attended by representative men. 
 In his letter of invitation, the learned president 
 declared,f "It is not the aim of the Conference to 
 arrive, by means of ambiguous phrases, which 
 each can then interpret as he pleases, at an appar- 
 ent agreement. Rather it will endeavor, by 
 thorough investigation and discussion, to estab- 
 lish such propositions as express with simplic- 
 
 * Reunion Conference at Bonn, 1874, p. 45, English edition, 
 t Reunion Conference at Bonn, 1875, p. liv, Bnglisli edition. 
 
-64- 
 
 ity and precision the substance of scriptural doc- 
 trine and patristic tradition, and for that very- 
 reason are calculated to serve as a bond and guar- 
 antee of tbe fellowship wliicli has been attained." 
 Th& M'kbg'ue question was the chief subject of dis- 
 cussion at this conference, and before it separated, 
 a statement in regard to the procession of the Holy 
 Spirit was drawn up, which was unanimously 
 accepted by the members of the conference, East- 
 ern and Western, showing that, in so far as they 
 were men fitted to speak for their respective com- 
 munions, there is no real difference of doctrine on 
 this point between the Anglican, Eastern, and Old 
 Catholic churches. 
 
 The Orthodox Eastern churches would be greatly 
 pleased if the Anglican churches would return to 
 what is confessedly the primitive form of the 
 Nicene Creed. They could greatly facilitate our 
 doing so if, by their patriarchs and Holy Synods 
 they would put themselves on record as consider- 
 ing such an act on the part of the Anglicans as 
 simply the correction of an error, which has in 
 some way crept into the iexi of the Nicene Creed, 
 and not as a question of doctrinal change. Such 
 declaration, on their part, would render compara- 
 tively safe an act which otherwise would involve 
 considerable risk of misunderstanding and mis- 
 representation, at home and abroad. 
 
 Although the Eastern churches and the. Angli- 
 can have so much in common, they have so long 
 lived apart that they are well nigh strangers to 
 
-65- 
 
 eacli other. They are beginning, in these days, to 
 try to learn something each of the other. Would 
 that each side were content to say of the other 
 only what they knew and not what they imagined. 
 Nicodemus of Jerusalem, in a letter I recently 
 received from him, thus writes me, " Bear in mind, 
 brother in Christ, what you have often expressed 
 to us, that there is need that we of the East know 
 you, and that you know us. . . . They cause 
 much harm, through their want of sympathy, 
 their unkind manner, and their thoughtlessness, 
 who, on your side, judge of us and our affairs, or 
 on our side of you and your affairs, yet pay little 
 attention to the real opinions of each." Much 
 that we hear of the Bast is from persons whose 
 opinions about ourselves we should be sorry to 
 have any one take. 
 
 While there has been, in times past, little knowl- 
 edge of and little intercourse with the Basterns, 
 there has been, from time to time, some inter- 
 change of thought. It seems a matter of happy 
 omen that in the first liturgical work put out by 
 authority in the Bnglish language, the Litany, 
 drawn up by Cranmer in 1544, incorporated in the 
 first book of Bdward VI five years later, and 
 which we still use with hardly a verbal change, 
 one of the prayers appended is "A Prayer of St. 
 Chrysostom," the golden-mouthed patriarch of 
 Constantinople, whose familiar words I have often 
 heard in Greek and Russian churches. It is 
 worthy of note, too, that this is the only prayer in 
 
—66— 
 
 our prayer book, except the Lord's Prayer, to 
 whicli the author's name is appended. 
 
 In the early part of the next century, the Kng- 
 lish ambassador at Constantinople was able to 
 show kindness to the then patriarch, who was not 
 slow to express his gratitude therefor. A corre- 
 spondence ensued between this patriarch, Cyril 
 lyucar, and Abbot, archbishop of Canterbury. 
 Would that the far more learned and saintly 
 Andrews, bishop of Winchester, who, in his Greek 
 Devotions, prays in the very language of St. Chrys- 
 ostom's liturgy, for " the stability of the holy 
 churches of God, and the union of them all," had 
 been the Bnglish primate ! 
 
 During the Great Rebellion in Bngland, Dr. 
 Isaac Basire, archdeacon of Northumberland, 
 travelling in the Bast, was twice invited by the 
 metropolitan of Achaia to preach to his assembled 
 suffragans and clergy. He was also most courte- 
 ously entreated by the patriarchs of Constanti- 
 nople, Antioch and Jerusalem, and met, he tells us, 
 with much " success in spreading among the Greeks 
 the Catholic doctrine of our church." The patriarch 
 of Jerusalem gave him his patriarchal seal, as a 
 pledge of his affection, and to " express his desire 
 of communion with our old Church of Bngland." 
 
 Covel and Brown, Bnglish chaplains at Con- 
 stantinople, in the latter part of the seventeenth 
 century, and Paul Ricaut, British consul at 
 Smyrna, about the same time, did something to 
 make known in Bngland the doctrine and the con- 
 
-67- 
 
 dition of the Eastern churclies. In tlielast decade 
 • of that century, several Greek youths received, with 
 the sanction of the authorities of their own and of 
 the English Church, a part of their education at 
 Oxford. About 1720, an interesting correspond- 
 ence was carried on for a time between non-juring 
 bishops and Eastern ecclesiastics, which, however, 
 bore little fruit.* 
 
 Perhaps the next intercourse between the Angli- 
 can and the Eastern churches was through the 
 mission of the Rev. Drs. Robertson and Hill, in 
 1829-30, to Greece, a mission of love to a sister 
 church, rendering her kindly unobtrusive help in 
 the education of the young and the ignorant, help 
 which has been most gratefully acknowledged. 
 Dr. Robertson was ere long called to other work. 
 As the bishop of Long Island has well expressed 
 it, in a recent letter to the metropolitan of Athens, 
 " During all the half-century of Dr. Hill's labors 
 in Athens, he was not only the public representa- 
 tive but also a living epistle of the American 
 Church, to the brethren of the Eastern Church." 
 
 In 1836, the Rev. Horatio Southgate was sent 
 out from this country to investigate the state of 
 Mohammedanism in Turkey and Persia. Natur- 
 ally, in doing this, he was brought into relations 
 with the Christians of those lands, and four years 
 later he was again sent out to visit them^ charged 
 to assure their bishops and clergy that "the 
 
 * See "The Orthodox and the Nonjurors." George Williams, Riv- 
 ingtons, 1868. 
 
—68— 
 
 American bishops wished most scrupulously to 
 avoid all efifusive intrusion within the jurisdiction 
 of their Episcopal brethren . . their great desire 
 being to commend and promote a friendly inter- 
 course between the two branches of the Catholic 
 and Apostolic Church, in the hope of mutual ad- 
 vantage." In 1844, he went out again, this time 
 as a bishop, that he might treat as an equal with 
 equals. He met with considerable success," but 
 was a man in advance of his times ; the church 
 was not ready to sustain such work, and after a 
 few years he came home. 
 
 In 1 84 1, an Anglican bishop was sent to Jeru- 
 salem, specially charged by the archbishop of 
 Canterbury * " not to intermeddle in any way with 
 the jurisdiction of the ecclesiastical dignitaries of 
 the Bast, but to show them due reverence, and to 
 be ready on all occasions and by all the means in 
 his power to promote a mutual interchange of re- 
 spect, courtesy and kindness." The archbishop 
 expressed also the " hearty desire to renew that 
 amicable intercourse with the ancient churches of 
 the East which has been suspended for ages, and 
 which if restored may have the effect, with the 
 blessing of God, of putting an end to divisions which 
 have brought the most grievous calamities on the 
 Church of Christ." The history of the Jerusalem 
 bishopric, for many years, was a sad one, but 
 there is no question but that now under good 
 Bishop Blyth, the spirit of the original instruc- 
 
 * The Ortliodox and the Nonjurors." George Williams, pp. xii, xiii. 
 
-69- 
 
 tions, fully endorsed by the present arctbisliop, 
 will be carefully followed out. 
 
 In the General Convention of 1862, a joint 
 committee was appointed to consider the ex- 
 pediency of opening communication with the 
 Russo-Greek Church, and to collect authentic in- 
 formation bearing upon the subject. And, in July, 
 1863, ^ corresponding committee was appointed in 
 the lower house of the Convocation of Canterbury. 
 Between 1862 and 1867, a number of important 
 pamphlets were issued by the Russo-Greek com- 
 mittee, under the able editorship of the Rev. Dr. 
 Young, its secretary. After Dr. Young was made 
 bishop of Florida, I was appointed to succeed him 
 as secretary of the Russo-Greek committee, and 
 wrote the reports presented to the General Con- 
 vention of 1871 and 1874. And when the Joint 
 Commission on Bcclesiastical Relations, replaced, 
 with larger powers, the Russo-Greek committee, 
 I was, in 1877, made secretary of the commission, 
 and wrote the reports up to last year. 
 
 The Eastern Church Association was formed in 
 England in 1874, with a view of giving Anglicans 
 trustworthy information as to Eastern Christians, 
 and to disseminating among these latter correct 
 views on the Anglican churches. After almost ten 
 years, from various causes, the operations of this 
 association, of which I had the honor to be one of 
 the earliest members, were suspended. I am happy 
 to say that the association has recently been re- 
 vived, and is doing a good work. 
 
— 70— 
 
 And when we speak of helps to us in the West, 
 to understand the churches of the East, the name 
 should not be forgotten of John Mason Neale, who 
 went to his rest August 6, 1866, after having 
 taught us alike the history, the theology, and the 
 hymns of the Eastern Church, taught us, too, of the 
 joys of Paradise, upon which he has now entered, 
 and of "Jerusalem the Golden," which he and we 
 " with eager hearts expect." He wrote much, and 
 wrote well, and no topic was more congenial to 
 him, than that which treated of the restoration of 
 unity between East and West. George Williams 
 and R. F. Littledale were able fellow-workers in 
 the good cause. 
 
 It is not long since when few, if any, in East or 
 West, desired a true union between their respec- 
 tive churches. But there has been a change. As 
 Prof. Ossinin, of St. Petersburg, said at the second 
 conference at Bonn :* "Dr. von Dollinger was per- 
 fectly right in saying that there was a time when 
 the object was to make the difference as sharp as 
 possible, and the chasm between us as deep as pos- 
 sible. But we enter upon the question in an alto- 
 gether different spirit now. We sincerely wish for 
 an understanding, and rejoice over each step that 
 brings us nearer to one another." When not only 
 a few, but the great body of leading men on both 
 sides, approach the questions at issue in such spirit, 
 the diflSculties will, by God's blessing, be speedily 
 overcome. God speed the day ! 
 
 * Reunion Conference at Bonn, 1875, p. 52, English Edition. 
 
—71— 
 
 September 21, 1872, Anthimus VI, patriarcli of 
 Constantinople, wrote me as follows :* " Now, when 
 the base designs of evil-minded men, surrounding 
 the Church of God, do not cease on every side to 
 hurl against her the poisonous darts of unbelief, it 
 seems to me that the present is the fitting time to 
 quench, by mutual concession, the feelings of 
 division of the churches, one from the other, which 
 have till now held sway — for reasons known only 
 to the Ivord — on account of dogmatic differences ; 
 and that we should hold out friendly hands, in order 
 to join together, by the help of the Almighty, 
 what have been separated, and to fulfil the words 
 of our Saviour, which He spake, calling upon His 
 Heavenly Father just before His willing death, 
 ' That all may be one.' (St. John, xvii, 21.)" 
 
 The enemies of Christianity are even more bit- 
 ter and persistent in their attacks upon the truth 
 now than they were twenty years ago, and the 
 argument the patriarch draws in behalf of unity 
 is therefore even stronger than ever. 
 
 Let us try to really understand our brethren of 
 the Bastern churches, and form our ideas in regard 
 to them not from careless reading, but from careful 
 study — study of trustworthy authorities. Let us, 
 if we have the opportunity, study not only books, 
 but men. Our clergy and laity, traveling in the 
 East, should try to enter, as fully as may be possi- 
 ble, into the spirit of the people and their church. 
 As Easterns find it hard to conceive our position as 
 
 * General Convention Journal, 1874. 
 
—72— 
 
 to the Filioque^ and on other points, so doubtless 
 we misunderstand them. Literal misunderstand- 
 ings are surely the chief cause of such estrange- 
 ment as exists. When each church fairly and 
 fully realizes what the other intends, in word and 
 deed, the time of reconciliation will doubtless be 
 close at hand. God will surely then give each 
 church grace to do away with whatever may hinder 
 godly union and concord, and in the words of 
 Anthimus, which I have just quoted, to " quench, 
 by mutual concession, the feelings of division . . . 
 which have till now held sway." 
 
 Let me close in the words of the now almost 
 centenarian patriarch of Alexandria, Sophronius, 
 written to me in April, 1873 : 
 
 * " Until the Lord vouchsafes the fulfilment of 
 the great work of unity, many inconveniences and 
 stumbling blocks will exist among us, and many 
 misconceptions on either side and misrepresenta- 
 tions will arise . . . but mutual patience and 
 forbearance, enkindled and enflamed by Christian 
 love, and by the inestimable importance of the 
 great and God-pleasing ends at which we aim, can 
 remove all such." God grant that they may ! 
 
 * General Convention Journal, 1874. 
 
III. 
 
 THE ROMAN CHURCH. 
 
 THK RKV. SAMUKI. HART, D.D., 
 
 Professor of Latin in Trinity College, 
 Hartford, Conn. 
 
THE ROMAN CHURCH. 
 
 The words, tiieChurcli of Rome, bring together 
 into our thoughts two of the great factors in the 
 world's history. At first they might appear to 
 make almost a contradiction in terms ; while later 
 on we shall see that there are many to whom the 
 terms seem practically synonymous. Rome con- 
 notes for us the fourth great world-empire, the 
 legs of the huge image bestriding the Bast and 
 the West, the nondescript beast devouring the 
 whole earth and treading it down and breaking it 
 in pieces. Rome tells of the sturdy patriotism, 
 the " piety and ancient faith," the self-restraint 
 and obedience to law that made the little city on 
 the Tiber great and strong; it tells of the 
 decline when the old principles were gone and the 
 brutal strength was left for a while to show what 
 "power unguided by wisdom" can do ; it tells of 
 the deeper degradation of the days when the his- 
 torian saw on his pages simply the record of the 
 wrath of gods against the once happy republic. 
 Rome reminds us of the scenes in Nero's garden 
 and in the Flavian amphitheatre, where the Church 
 received her baptism of blood and the seed of her 
 growth was sown in the fires and on the sand. 
 Rome suggests the thought of the strong arm that 
 .was extended to Antioch and Smyrna and Bithy- 
 nia, to Carthage and the Egyptian deserts, to Lyons 
 
-76- 
 
 and Britain, to crusli those wlio said that there was 
 another king than Caesar. But Rome tells us as 
 well of a company of Christians in early days, to 
 whom St. Paul wrote before any Apostle had visited 
 them, whose faith was spoken of throughout the 
 whole world, some of whom were saints in the 
 imperial household, obedient to the new law of the 
 Saviour's love, and holding to a purer faith and a 
 holier obedience than had been known even in the 
 bright days of the city's childhood. So in spite of 
 untoward circumstances, and in spite of cruel perse- 
 cutions, there grew up in the world's capital a branch 
 of the Church of God. In its early days it must 
 have seemed like a little foreign colony in the great 
 city ; its members were in large part Jews, who 
 were forced to live apart from others, and the 
 language used by an Apostle in addressing them, 
 and by themselves in their worship, was that of 
 Greece ; but sustained by suffering and aided by 
 persecution, it became a worthy branch of the 
 Catholic Church. Taught by the great Apostle to 
 the Gentiles and honored by his two-fold imprison- 
 ment and his death by the sword, perhaps also by 
 the crucifixion of another who had been the head 
 of the apostolic college, the Church of Rome, long 
 before the Emperor and the Empire made profes- 
 sion of its faith, because it was the Church of the 
 imperial city, became the leading and most influ- 
 ential part of the Church in the Western world. 
 That might have seemed to be taking place in 
 the fulfilment of prophecy which had taken place 
 
—n— 
 
 before. By the side of each of the ancient empires of 
 Assyria and Persia and Greece, had grown up that 
 which was in one way to displace and destroy it 
 and in another way to save the results of its work 
 and to hand them on to the ages that were to come. 
 Rome had been the heir of the language and the 
 culture of Greece, as these had succeeded to the 
 vigor of Persia, this to the grandeur of Assyria ; 
 Rome had added to all these her system of law 
 and had provided for the ready intercourse of all 
 the countries which she had brought under her 
 sway ; and the new King had come with His new 
 Kingdom, the stone cut out without hands that 
 was to become a great mountain and fill the whole 
 earth, the heir of all the ages that were past, the 
 everlasting kingdom of Him Whom all dominions 
 should serve and obey. Why should not the 
 empire of Rome be merged in the Kingdom of 
 Christ and yield to it ? 
 
 For a long time there was much in the growth 
 and progress of the Church of Rome that told of 
 true spiritual life. She had faithful teachers and 
 faithful martyrs ; her bishops, though few of them 
 were great men and some of them made serious 
 mistakes, were, as a rule, defenders of the faith ; 
 from her vantage-ground she was able to encour- 
 age and support others who were less brave or less 
 strong than herself ; and as she felt the pulse of 
 the great empire, she was saved from some dangers 
 which beset the few Christians in remote provinces. 
 But, after all, Rome was Rome ; and the instinct 
 
-78- 
 
 of rule was deeply planted there. " Remember," 
 said the most Roman of the Roman poets, ad- 
 dressing his own people, " Remember to rule the 
 nations with thy sway, to spare those who submit, 
 but to war against the proud."* 
 
 The gentler law of Christ had been proclaimed 
 and had been accepted in form ; but it could not — 
 at least it did not — overcome the harsher law 
 under which the great city had come to have 
 " dominion over the kings of the earth." So even 
 in earlier days, and even when the Church of Rome 
 was right, she sometimes afi&rmed her position as 
 if she were the sole lawgiver, and in such way as 
 to repel humble men from the truth. Thus 
 the great Cyprian of Carthage rightly rebuked 
 Stephen of Rome for his arrogance, and Firmilian 
 of Cappadocia wrote to the same bishop in right- 
 ful independence from his barbarous home, using 
 great freedom of speech. It was but natural, one 
 might say, for the bishop of the imperial city to 
 feel great confidence in his position ; it was but 
 natural that he should bear some sort of responsi- 
 bility for those who had not his advantages of posi- 
 tion ; it was but natural that he should entertain 
 appeals from or against those who could not look 
 at things in as broad and unprejudiced a way as 
 he could. It was, in fine, natural that the Roman 
 should rule ; and presently, when the seat of the 
 
 *"Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento ; 
 Hae tibi erunt artes : pacisque imponere morem, 
 Parcere subjectis, et debellare superbos." 
 
 — Virgil, Aeneid, vi. S51. 
 
—79— 
 
 world-empire was removed to the Bast, and the 
 bishop of the old capital was unchecked by a 
 superior civil authority, the bishop began to 
 rule and was expected to rule as he had not been 
 able to rule before. Yes, it was natural that it 
 should be so ; and though the Church was not put 
 into the world to do things in the natural and easy 
 way, she soon began at Rome to carry on the old 
 empire rather than to advance the new, to be sat- 
 isfied with the principle of the former order of 
 things rather than to seek to mould things on 
 models of a different kind. We can see this now, 
 as we turn back the pages of history and note how 
 early there was a swerving from the principles of 
 the religion of the Divine Master, so that there 
 began to grow up a Roman monarchy within the 
 Roman Church, in the same way and with the 
 same disastrous results as when noisome tares 
 grow up among the wheat. 
 
 Thus there is one painful aspect of the history 
 of the Church of Rome which forces itself very 
 soon upon the attention of the careful student, and 
 which becomes more and more prominent as the 
 years pass on. We may not forget that Church's 
 testimony to the truth, its missionary labors, the 
 holy lives of its members, the service which in 
 many ways it rendered to the Master. We may 
 not forget the way in which it weathered the storm 
 that worked ruin for the empire of the West, and 
 conquered spiritually the nations that had brought 
 destruction upon the tottering fabric built up to 
 
—So- 
 ruinous lieiglit by the Caesars and their suc- 
 cessors. We, whose ancestors in far-ofif parts of 
 the continent of Europe and in the islands at the 
 world's end were influenced for good by the words 
 and the works of good men who came from the 
 great capital, cannot forget and must not belittle 
 all this. But on the other hand we may not 
 close our eyes to the dark shadows that begin to 
 fall across the picture as the Church's ideal gives 
 way to the world's maxims of what it calls success 
 and progress. We see it as we look back, some- 
 times unconsciously followed, sometimes excused, 
 sometimes openly adopted, with ever renewed 
 claims of authority and ever increasing demands 
 for obedience. In spite of the testimony of 
 the voices of the earlier Church, in spite of the 
 decrees of Councils — for these were either ignored 
 altogether or persistently perverted and made to 
 deny themselves — Rome claimed to have been 
 founded by the chief of the Apostles, to have as a 
 continued heritage for her bishops an authority 
 which, if he ever had it, belonged to him person- 
 ally and was incommunicable, and in fine to be to 
 the Church universal what the imperial city in 
 the time of her power had been to the world. Nay, 
 she went further, and carried her claims beyond 
 what even this parallel would warrant. The city 
 had extended over large parts of the world, had 
 had its colonies and its citizens from the Euphra- 
 tes to the Irish Sea, and had sought to push its 
 boundaries further yet, but the city had not claimed 
 
—Si- 
 te be tlie world ; the Churcli of Rome, however, as 
 lier power was acknowledged more widely, began 
 to claim that sbe was tbe wbole Cburcb, and to 
 arrogate to herself alone the title of Catholic. It 
 is the story — one dislikes to say it, but one must — 
 of a persistent and arrogant assertion of authority 
 and demand for obedience, ever resisted but never 
 withdrawn.* 
 
 You will not ask me at this time to go into the 
 argument from Holy Scripture and consider the 
 meaning of our Lord's words which have been so 
 interpreted as to form a basis for the Roman sys- 
 tem. You will not ask me to show how concep- 
 tions of the Church which St. Luke and St. Peter 
 and St. Paul never entertained, unless it may have 
 been in some dark vision of prophecy, were so 
 often repeated that they began to be believed. Nor 
 can I quote the words of universal Councils declar- 
 ing the position of Rome to have been a precedency 
 of honor given it because of its political position, 
 and denying almost in express terms any thing of 
 divine right, or even of wide extent, in this its 
 authority. Before the sixth century, " the vague 
 and indeterminate influence and priority of the 
 Roman pontiff" — I am using the words of a learned 
 writer of our own day — " began to be transformed 
 into a monarchy over Western Christendom, at 
 first partly constitutional, but gradually assuming 
 the form of a despotism." And this was accom- 
 plished although, as the same author goes on to 
 
 * See Dr. Littledale's Petrine Claims. 
 
—82— 
 
 say, " tHe Churcli at large was conscious that 
 its rights were being steadily encroaclied on, and 
 that no sacred charter, no immemorial prescrip- 
 tion, could be truly alleged as the warrant for the 
 new claims, almost as successfully as they were 
 persistently put forward."* We must pass by all 
 this, and ask what was the result of it all. Centu- 
 ries rolled on, whose history in Western Burope is 
 in large part the history of the claims of the 
 Roman Church, of resistance to them or of more 
 or less tardy submission ; and at last the will 
 and the conscience of Burope were awakened. 
 What was it that led to the revolt — very wicked 
 if it was not very necessary — against established 
 ecclesiastical authority, which we call the Reforma- 
 tion? 
 
 That Reformation had, generally speaking, three 
 forms : the Protestant movement on the Continent, 
 the Catholic movement in Bngland, and the coun- 
 ter Roman movement which found expression in 
 the Council of Trent. If we ask for the causes 
 of all these, they are many and deep-seated and 
 hard to trace ; it will not be unfair for our present 
 purpose to ask what was the occasion of each. 
 The straw that floats on the surface of the stream 
 tells us nothing of the nature or the source of 
 the forces that drive it on ; but it does tell us the 
 direction and the rapidity of the resultant of these 
 forces. And it is no insignificant fact that the 
 working of the Roman system and the outcome of 
 
 * Petrine Claims, p. 203. 
 
-83- 
 
 the papal claims for a thousand years or more was 
 an imperative demand for a reformation on the 
 basis of morals. There were historical and theo- 
 logical reasons below; but the surface question 
 was practically this : Shall Christian men continue 
 to submit to the papal monarchy, or shall they free 
 themselves from it that they may obey the moral 
 law of the Ten Commandments and the Sermon 
 on the Mount ? It was the sale of indulgences 
 that roused the Saxon monk to rebellion and fired 
 the train that lay waiting for the match and led 
 to an explosion that convulsed a continent. And 
 while an indulgence does not mean by its strict 
 definition a permission to sin, it does mean release 
 from at least a part of the consequences of sin ; and 
 if this can be had for money, then the law of sin 
 and righteousness and of their consequences is set 
 aside, and an indulgence practically means permis- 
 sion to transgress the moral law with more or less 
 impunity. 
 
 The occasion of the final rejection of the papal 
 yoke by the Church and realm of England was the 
 question submitted by the King to the learned 
 canonists, whether an act, confessedly against the 
 written law of God, can be made permissible and 
 lawful by a license from the Bishop of Rome. 
 It was no question whether a divorce should be 
 granted ; it was a question whether a horrible 
 crime had been committed.* And the Council of 
 
 * Historians speak so constantly of tie "divorce" of Henry 
 VIII. from Queen Catharine, that it is necessary to remind oiirselves 
 
-84- 
 
 Trent was summoned in consequence of persistent 
 demands for a moral reformation "in head and mem- 
 bers " ; and tliougli it met too late and acted too 
 cautiously and did too little, and tliougli it was far 
 from being that General Council to which Luther 
 and the English bishops had appealed, yet the very 
 fact that it was summoned bears witness to what 
 had been the result of ten centuries of the Roman 
 monarchy. An ecclesiastical power, called relig- 
 ious and calling itself divine, meeting with oppo- 
 sition to be sure, but practically carrying every- 
 thing before it, and yet turning kings and bishops 
 and scholars and common people against itself be- 
 cause it was universally believed to have tampered 
 with the moral law — what could this be thought but 
 a manifestation of the lawless one, who could not be 
 revealed while the old empire stood in its strength, 
 but whose nature and purposes were now made 
 manifest ? 
 
 And this — one says it with sorrow and with hor- 
 ror — marks altogether too plainly the system of 
 the Church of Rome. It rests, more than most 
 people know, on cunningly devised and yet con- 
 stantly exposed forgeries; its credentials are largely 
 false, and one of the first things that the contro- 
 
 that there was no question at all as to a divorce. Catharine had been 
 married to Henry's older brother, Arthur Prince of Wales. No one 
 in those days doubted that it was forbidden by the law of God that a 
 woman should marry her deceased husband's brother. The question 
 was whether Henry, having acted contrary to the divine law under a 
 papal dispensation, was not guilty of incest, so that his marriage to 
 Catharine was void ab initio. 
 
-85- 
 
 versialist needs to learn is that he must not trust 
 the quotations or the references of a Roman oppo- 
 nent. The stupendous fraud of the False Decre- 
 tals, at first (we may charitably hope) accepted 
 uncritically, but still used long after their valueless- 
 ness has been exposed and acknowledged, is the 
 leading but by no means the only example. For 
 now more than a thousand years it has been in 
 existence, and for seven hundred years it has been 
 bearing its full harvest. It is a spurious collection 
 of " nearly a hundred letters written in the names 
 of earlier bishops of Rome, from Clement and 
 Anacletus, the contemporaries of the Apostles, 
 with some letters from supposed correspondents of 
 the popes and the acts of some hitherto unknown 
 councils."* They were fabricated to provide pre- 
 cedents for those who wished to find arguments in 
 support of the claims of the clergy ; and it would 
 seem that the advancement of the papal interests 
 as such was outside of the thought of the original 
 writers. But they were found to be of great ser- 
 vice in this direction, and as such they have been 
 unscrupulously used ; and complicated and com- 
 bined with other forgeries, they are preserved and 
 are of force in the Decretals, a work, says a learned 
 scholar, " saturated through and through with 
 deceit and error and forgeries, which, like a great 
 wedge driven into the fabric of the Church, grad- 
 ually loosened, disjointed, and disintegrated the 
 
 * Robertson, Church History, ii. 284. 
 
—86— 
 
 wliole of its ancient order."* What wonder that 
 a system supported by such evidence should lead 
 to results which startle the conscience of those who 
 have been brought up to reverence the truth as 
 something dearer than life? These results are 
 seen everywhere, from the great misrepresentations 
 of history to the false quotations, such as one made 
 not long ago by an archbishop in our own country, 
 professedly from St. Augustine, but in reality from 
 a sermon noted by the Benedictine editors as spu- 
 rious, and a passage in the sermon which they 
 specially mark as not in the manuscripts.f Much 
 that is good and true may, through God's mercy, 
 be kept in a system thus faulty and wrong ; but 
 that Church has much to answer for against which 
 the universal conscience of Christian men cries 
 out as perverting the moral law. Here is the first 
 great ground of defense for the Reformation three 
 hundred years ago ; and when we read of the con- 
 troversies on the Continent concerning Justifica- 
 tion, or the arguments in England with reference to 
 Transubstantiation, the discussions of learned men 
 about them and the excited fury of the multitudes 
 who cried out sometimes on the one side and some- 
 
 *[ Von DSllinger] Janus, p. 122. 
 
 t From a pastoral letter of the late Archbishop of New York : 
 " St. Augustine wrote: ' Thou, O Mary, art the one hope of sinners; 
 in thee, besides the hope of pardon, is the blessed expectation of heav- 
 enly reward.' " The words are to be found in the Appendix to vol- 
 ume V. of the Benedictine edition of St. Augustine's works, col. 
 323 F., among the Sennones Supposilitii, and of these particular 
 words it is noted " desunt in MSS." 
 
-87- 
 
 times on tlie otlaer, it is well to remember tliat 
 what had first roused scholars and laymen was the 
 moral question, and that, had moral abuses been 
 corrected, the way would in all probability have 
 lain open for a peaceful and godly reformation in 
 matters of doctrine and of order. Few of us can 
 apply the test of right belief and right organiza- 
 tion ; but few of us need to err in regard to mat- 
 ters of truth and plain duty. 
 
 Throughout what we call the Middle Age of 
 European History, the Roman Church was in 
 reality the Church of Rome itself and its subur- 
 bicarian provinces, gradually attempting to exer- 
 cise the authority of a monarch over every part of 
 the Church to which her power or her claims could 
 reach. She gained dominion over the national 
 Churches of Burope, though with constant protest 
 and frequent resistance ; and even in England, 
 where, as every student of history knows, her 
 advance was in spite of recurring opposition from 
 the Crown and from all three estates of the realm 
 — the peers, the clergy, and the people — she 
 became mistress in many things temporal and in 
 most things spiritual. The Reformation and the 
 counter-Reformation led, among other things, to 
 the establishment of the modern Roman Church, 
 which is almost as distinctly a post-Reformation 
 sect as any of those whom we class under the gen- 
 eral head of Protestants. On the Continent the 
 national Churches were practically destroyed, 
 though not in all cases immediately, and depart- 
 
—88— 
 
 ments of the Roman Churcli took their places. 
 The bishops ceased to hold office as by divine com- 
 mission, and were reckoned as priests exercising 
 certain special functions by authority from the one 
 bishop at Rome. But in England, where the 
 Church had, by God's good providence, reformed 
 herself without losing the Catholic faith, the Catho- 
 lic ministry, or the Catholic worship, there was no 
 break made in the reigns of Henry VIII., Edward 
 VI., or Mary, or in the early part of the reign of 
 Elizabeth. Until the year 1570, when Elizabeth 
 had been eleven years on the throne, there was no 
 separate Roman community in England. Those 
 who were opposed to the changes made under 
 Edward VI. and continued under Elizabeth had 
 not withdrawn from communion with those who 
 had favored these changes. In the English 
 Church they remained until they were persuaded 
 that their duty to the Pope was paramount to their 
 allegiance to their national Church; and in 1570 
 the English sect of the Roman Catholics was 
 founded by the withdrawal of the adherents of the 
 Bishop of Rome from the Church of England. At 
 that time, secret conspiracy of the most shocking 
 kind having failed to effect the death of the queen 
 or to alienate her subjects, she was formally excom- 
 municated and her subjects were absolved from 
 their allegiance, so far as these ends could be 
 attained by a papal bull. In a sense the schism 
 was not formally completed till the year 1850 ; for 
 before that time the Roman bishops in England 
 
-89- 
 
 had titles from foreign cities, wtereas in tliat year 
 the Pope made a claim of dividing England into 
 dioceses, other than those of the ancient Church 
 of the land, and appointed bishops to them.* It 
 is from the Roman Catholic Church in England 
 that the Roman Catholic Church in this country is 
 derived, her episcopate being traced back through 
 the first Bishop of Baltimore, consecrated by a single 
 bishop, a man without a diocese and who labored 
 under most serious canonical disqualifications.f 
 
 But it is enough to have pointed out in this con- 
 nection these few historical facts. The important 
 question for us now is, Where does the Church of 
 Rome stand to-day ? what are her claims, and what 
 right has she to the spiritual allegiance of our- 
 selves or of other Christians in our day and our 
 land? An answer to these questions has been 
 suggested in part by what has been said already ; 
 but it will not be amiss to look at the present 
 state of things in another light. 
 
 When we ask what are the marks of the Church 
 of God, we cannot go astray if we look for a reply 
 to what St. Luke, in the second chapter of the 
 Acts of the Apostles, tells us of the Christians of 
 
 *'B\.\i.nVs Dictionary of Sects, fferesies, etc., s. v. "Roman Catho- 
 lics." 
 
 t The Roman Catholic succession in this country is through the 
 Rt. Rev. Dr. John Carroll, consecrated in the chapel of Lulworth Castle 
 in England, August 15th, 1790, by the Rt. Rev. Dr. Charles Walmes- 
 ley. Bishop of Rama in partibus infidelium and Vicar Apostolic, two 
 priests uniting -with him in the laying-on of hands. Bishop Walmes- 
 ley, it is said, had shed blood, and was thus canonically disqualified 
 from acting as a consecrator. 
 
—po- 
 ttle very earliest days. He says of them that 
 "they contimied stedfastly in the doctrine (that 
 is to say, the teaching) of the Apostles, and in the 
 fellowship, and in the breaking of the bread, and 
 in the prayers." There we have been taught to 
 read the four marks of the Church, and there to 
 find the test which may be rightly applied at any 
 time to any branch of the Church. It is a test 
 from which the Bnglish Church and ou.r own have 
 never shrunk, and by which they have attempted 
 to discover and correct their deficiencies and errors, 
 lyet us ask whether the modern Church of Rome 
 can be said to continue steadfastly in the four things 
 which marked the Church of the earliest days. 
 
 As to the doctrine — the teaching — of the Apos- 
 tles, we may acknowledge with thankfulness that 
 the Roman Church has never formally denied any 
 article of the Christian faith ; and if, as we believe, 
 the sufi5.cient statement of that faith is to be found 
 in the Creeds which we call respectively the 
 Apostles' and the Nicene, then she has never 
 failed to hold and to teach all that is necessary for 
 a Christian man to believe for his soul's health. 
 For a long while indeed the Roman Church was a 
 bulwark of the faith. Partly because the mind 
 and the language of the practical Western people 
 were not capable of apprehending and expressing 
 the subtle distinctions which caused so much con- 
 troversy in the Bast ; partly because the Roman 
 Church, in her lack of theologians, followed those 
 whom she knew to be the great teachers in other 
 
—91— 
 
 parts of the world ; partly because lier few theolo- 
 gians did hold firmly to the truth ; and partly 
 because, with her imperial instinct, she saw the 
 necessity of unity ; in the age of the General 
 Councils she maintained and enforced the faith. 
 Then came the time of her great Doctors, Ambrose 
 and Augustine and Jerome and Gregory — only 
 one of them, by the way, a Bishop of Rome;* 
 defenders of the faith indeed, but called to fight 
 rather on the outworks than on the walls them- 
 selves, they have their own glory and deserve the 
 honor in which they are held by the Church Catho- 
 lic. St. Augustine cotitended for the doctrine of 
 free grace, while yet he held to the doctrine of 
 sacramental grace to be sought and used in the 
 Church ; but he found their sufficient expression 
 in words contained in the third division of the 
 Creeds, and while he believed his teaching neces- 
 sary for the due defense of the faith, he did not 
 hold it a part of the faith itself. But the modern 
 Church of Rome — the Trentine or Tridentine 
 Church, it were sometimes well to call it — has not 
 contented herself with that which satisfied apos- 
 tolic men and the Fathers of the Councils and her 
 own great Doctors. She has not directly denied 
 any article of the faith, but she has done what is 
 almost worse ; she has denied the sufficiency of the 
 ancient articles, and has added to those which, in 
 common with the rest of the Catholic Church, she 
 
 *Tlie full list of Doctors of the Clmrcli includes nineteen theolo- 
 gians, only two of whom — Leo and Gregory — were Bishops of Rome. 
 
—92— 
 
 once held to be tlie sufficient statement of the faith. 
 I do not speak now of the clause " and the Son," 
 added to the confession that the Holy Ghost pro- 
 ceedeth from the Father ; that at least has been 
 accepted by all the West, and is thought by many 
 to be the belief of the most holy and learned men 
 of the Kast, being rather an explanation of the 
 faith than an addition to it. But the Roman 
 Church has thrice — and twice within the memory 
 of a large part of those who are here present — 
 made additions to the professions of her faith and 
 laid new obligations of belief upon those who 
 would be her faithful members. 
 
 First, after the close of the Council of Trent, in 
 1564, Pope Pius IV. set forth a creed in twelve arti- 
 cles in addition to those of the Nicene Creed, as 
 articles most certainly to be accepted and believed, 
 made binding on all ecclesiastics under the solem- 
 nity of an oath, later propounded to all converts 
 from other communions, and in fact "to be 
 received and observed throughout the world." 
 Among the articles thus put on an equality 
 with those which up to that time had been held to 
 be the sufficient expression of the faith of Chris- 
 tendom, are the acknowledgment of the truth of 
 the decrees of the Council of Trent in regard to 
 original sin and justification, the scholastic state- 
 ment of the doctrine of transubstantiation, the 
 declaration that the power of indulgences has 
 been left by Christ in the Church, and the further 
 declaration that the " holy catholic and apostolic 
 
—93— 
 
 Roman Churcli is the mother and mistress of all 
 Churclies." And it is the ancient faith thus 
 enlarged by the addition of some things histori- 
 cally untrue, some things as to which there is 
 room for fair differences of opinion or of state- 
 ment, and some things which, even if they are 
 true, are not matters of prime importance, which 
 is called the " true catholic faith, without which 
 no one can be saved." This was bad enough, and 
 marked the Tridentine Roman Church as being in 
 spirit, if not formally, schismatical ; but at least 
 this claimed for its support the authority of a 
 council asserting itself to be universal. It was 
 made almost incalculably worse when in 1854, 
 only forty-two years ago. Pope Pius IX., on his 
 own authority, without the pretense of the sup- 
 port of a council, declared that it should thereafter 
 be necessary to salvation to believe and confess that 
 the blessed Virgin Mary, the mother of our Lord, 
 was conceived and born without the taint of origi- 
 nal sin, and therefore needed no redemption ; and 
 thus a doctrine denied by many early writers, held 
 to be permissible by but a few at different times, 
 undreamt of by apostles and apostolic men, became, 
 in the teaching of the Roman Church, as necessary 
 to believe as that the Son of God took man's nature 
 or that He rose from the dead. And still later, in 
 1870, twenty-six years ago, it was decreed in the 
 Vatican Council — not by it, for it is a Pope-made 
 article as truly as the last — " that the Roman Pon- 
 tiff, when in discharge of his supreme apostolic 
 
—94— 
 
 authority lie defines a doctrine to be held by the 
 universal Church, is possessed of infallibility, and 
 that such definitions may not be questioned " ; and 
 this, without any warrant of Scripture, utterly in 
 the face of history, and without the slightest hope 
 that it will be of any value to the Church in any 
 puzzling question, as indeed, if it has existed from 
 the first, it has been utterly useless. So then, the 
 articles of the Christian faith, as taught in the 
 Roman Church to-day, are twenty-six : the twelve 
 of the ancient Creeds, the twelve of Pius IV., 
 and the two of Pius IX.; and an infallible Pope 
 may at any time add more. Nor is it necessary 
 to show, or even to assert, for these new articles 
 authority from Scripture or from ancient writers ; 
 once indeed it was claimed for new doctrines that 
 they were implicitly contained in God's Word 
 written and were implicitly held by the Fathers of 
 the Church, and labored arguments were framed as 
 to development, its possibilities and limitations ; 
 but now it is held that the teaching of the Bishop 
 of Rome may be of the nature of an entirely new 
 revelation, and may simply be attached, and that 
 by a slender thread, to what has been taught be- 
 fore. Is this continuing steadfastly in the teaching 
 of the Apostles ? 
 
 The fellowship of the Apostles, which forms the 
 second mark of the Church, I do not suppose 
 meant primarily, as St. Luke used the phrase, the 
 formal organization of the Christian body ; that 
 organization had not been completed at the time of 
 
—95— 
 
 which, he wrote. But it serves sufficiently well to 
 bring to mind the fact that organic connection with 
 the Church of the Apostles and the maintenance of 
 the apostolic ministry is a mark of the true 
 Church in any age. Here again the modern 
 Roman Church has the formal episcopal succession, 
 though, as has been suggested, she has been care- 
 less about it, notably in the case of her episcopate 
 in this country, and though she has made her three 
 greater orders to be priests, deacons, and sub-dea- 
 cons, with no mention of bishops.* Yet how differ- 
 ent is her organization from that which grew up 
 under the hands of the Apostles or as a result of 
 their guidance and instruction ! How different is 
 her doctrine of the ministry from that of St. 
 Ignatius of Antioch and St. Cyprian of Carthage, 
 the maintainers of the organization of their days, 
 as they would be the supporters of that which we 
 have received in this remote part of the world ! one 
 bishop claiming to succeed St. Peter in a see which 
 he never held and a city which perhaps he never 
 visited, asserting a fullness of power and authority 
 which St. Peter never imagined he had and which 
 the other apostles would never have yielded to him, 
 declaring himself sole representative of Jesus Christ 
 on earth, and pretending to give to all other bish- 
 ops, or to withhold from them, that which is theirs 
 
 *Canones et Decreta Concilii Tridentini, sessio xxiii. , c. ii. , where 
 the seven orders are enumerated thus : priests, deacons, sub-deacons, 
 acolytes, exorcists, readers, doorkeepers. It should be stated, how- 
 ever, that in Canon vii. of the same session it is declared that "bish- 
 ops are superior to presbyters." 
 
-96- 
 
 by divine authority ; while tlie Churcli is changed 
 into the form of an earthly monarchy and claims 
 the prerogatives and the rewards of earth. St. 
 Cyprian held that all the Apostles were the same 
 as St. Peter, while unity was taught by placing one 
 at the head of a college of equals, and that each 
 bishop is the successor of all the Apostles ; the 
 modern Roman Church teaches that there was 
 really but one Apostle and that there is really but 
 one bishop, in whom dwell all apostolic and all 
 episcopal power and without whose consent such 
 power cannot be exercised by others. And to 
 know how that power is sought and obtained and 
 taken away, one may wholesomely read what has 
 just been published in the life of Archbishop and 
 Cardinal Manning. An English paper, quoting 
 the letter which Mgr. Talbot wrote to Dr. Manning, 
 telling how he had electioneered for him and 
 " almost driven " the Pope to name him Arch- 
 bishop of Westminster, says that it " may well 
 make us doubt whether a Prime Minister may not 
 be quite as good a person to make bishops as a 
 Pope " ; and we may well doubt whether any elec- 
 tion by convention or council in our Church could 
 conceivably be more unworthy of the dignity of 
 the ofl&ce or the solemnity with which any one 
 should be designated to it. And to have Pius IX. 
 speak of a device of his for removing an obnoxious 
 bishop as a "divine coup d'Haf — I will not in 
 this sacred place translate his words more lit- 
 erally — is to learn the utter contempt with which 
 
—97— 
 
 spiritual ofl&ce is treated by those wlio deal with all 
 things spiritual after the manner of the kingdoms 
 of earth. The Church of Rome is not to-day con- 
 taining steadfastly in the Apostles' fellowship. The 
 personal and ofi&cial claims of the Pope forbid us to 
 grant that. The solemn and dignified protests of 
 the ancient Orthodox Church of the East, recently 
 repeated in the hearing of the world in reply to 
 the Pope's encyclical ; the strong denials on 
 the part of the great Anglican Communion, 
 to-day the missionary Church of the world ; the 
 indignant shouts that rise from a divided Protest- 
 antism ; all testify against these claims, and call 
 heaven and earth to witness that to them is due 
 the breaches in the Church's present order. Nay, 
 Rome has not continued in the Apostles' fellow- 
 ship, and it has driven others from it or kept them 
 from following it. In it there would be little place 
 for the Twelve themselves, if they were to revisit 
 the earth. 
 
 The early disciples, we are told, continued stead- 
 fastly in the breaking of the bread; and from that 
 day to our own it has been one of the distinguish- 
 ing marks of the Christian Church, and in fact its 
 great external mark of union with Christ and of 
 unity within itself, that it has continued regularly 
 and constantly that memorial of the Passion and 
 Death of Christ which He commanded His Church 
 to continue until He should come again. Here 
 again the Roman Church in form appears to obey 
 the I/ord's command, while in fact she explains a 
 
-98- 
 
 great part of it away. On innumerable altars slie 
 offers daily tlie eucliaristic sacrifice, using a form 
 of liturgy wHcli in its essential parts can be traced 
 back to apostolic days, and sbe lays upon all ber 
 people the duty of constant attendance at tbis great 
 act of worsbip. But even the form of tbe liturgy 
 itself sbe bas brougbt into great confusion ; sbe 
 bas adopted an explanation of tbe boly mystery 
 wbicb involves strange pHlosopbical ideas and is 
 to tbe ordinary mind utterly unintelligible ; and 
 after enforcing tbis doctrine of transubstantiation 
 on learned and lay folk by torture and tlie stake, 
 sbe bas found a method, we are told, of adapting it 
 to otber pbilosophical notions to-day ; sbe bas 
 invented and adopted a theory of concomitance, as 
 it is called, in accordance with which she with- 
 holds tbe cup of salvation, the sacrament of the 
 Lord's Blood, from the lay-people, so that they 
 never receive all that Christ commanded, unless it 
 be possibly certain sovereigns on tbe day of their 
 coronation, and even from the priests at nearly 
 every time except when they themselves celebrate 
 the eucharist ; she has made it the practical rule 
 that her people prepare to receive the sacrament of 
 unity and life only once a year. From a revulsion 
 against an unscriptural doctrine of the Holy Com- 
 munion and a following of the practice of infre- 
 quent reception, taught by the Roman Church while 
 it had spiritual power in England, that Church 
 and our own, after some three centuries, are but 
 recovering ; and we solemnly protest against Rome 
 
—99— 
 
 that in this particular also she has not followed 
 the teaching or the practice of the Apostles. 
 
 And in regard to the prayers of the Church, 
 that fourth mark of the true disciples, we are forced 
 to speak in like words. If a Roman church is 
 almost the last place where we can look for a daily 
 or a weekly or even a monthly communion-service 
 for the congregation gathered together, so it is 
 almost the last place where we can look for daily 
 common prayer offered by the congregation. It 
 was but natural, of course, that in the early days 
 when Latin was spoken wherever the Roman 
 power had extended, or when at least all converts 
 to Christianity were taught to understand it to 
 some extent, before the languages of Europe had 
 crystallized into their several forms, that ecclesias- 
 tical Latin should be the religious language of the 
 Western world; but it is absurd and wicked to 
 say that the language which displaced the Greek 
 in which the early Church of Rome worshipped 
 God and read its epistle from St. Paul, is never 
 to be itself displaced, whatever the vicissitudes of 
 " times, places, and men's manners." The Latin 
 services have long ago become services in a strange 
 tongue, even to those who speak the Romance lan- 
 guages ; that they are absolutely so to those who 
 have Bnglish for their vernacular needs no proof; 
 and for this and other reasons the ancient daily 
 ofi&ces of the whole congregation have become in 
 the Roman Church the community devotions of 
 those who live together in religious institutions or 
 
-lOO- 
 
 tlie private devotions of the priests to be read eacli 
 day but not necessarily in church or at any 
 appointed time. Now the ancient prayers in these 
 ofiS.ces, because they are ancient, are addressed to 
 God alone ; some of them are the self-same col- 
 lects and prayers as we use year by year and day 
 by day in our services. With them are some 
 prayers that we should not be willing to use, while 
 yet I suppose that some of us could not say that 
 it was absolutely wrong to use them, those namely 
 in which God is asked to hear the prayers of the 
 saints on our behalf; and others go farther, and 
 ask the saints to pray to God for us ; but there is 
 not in any public or formal service-book of the 
 Church of Rome, either Missal or Breviary, any 
 prayer to any saint in the form of a prayer to God, 
 asking the saint to do for us what none but God 
 can do. But prayers of this latter kind are found 
 in abundance in the modern books of private 
 devotion, written in the vernacular and put into 
 the hands of the people for use either at home or 
 in connection with the Latin services in church ; 
 and there is little doubt, I fear, that few of the 
 prayers of the laity in the Roman Church are 
 addressed to Almighty God. The blessed Virgin 
 and other saints are asked to grant forgiveness of 
 sin and spiritual grace, temporal blessings, succor 
 in the hour of death, and mercy in the day of judg- 
 ment. It is therefore a serious question whether 
 there is not a large number of those who profess 
 themselves Christians, who never consciously pray 
 
-lOI- 
 
 to Christ or to the eternal Father, or look to any- 
 Divine Person for mercy or for help. One does 
 not know how bad this is till one looks at such a 
 book as Iviguori's " Glories of Mary," or reads the 
 Te Deum, rewritten and made to agree in its every 
 verse with " We praise thee, O Mary."* For 
 these reasons, or rather for reasons of which these 
 words must serve as the suggestion, we cannot 
 think of the Tridentine or modern Roman Church 
 as continuing steadfastly in the prayers of the 
 apostolic Church. 
 
 And in this connection we may not omit one 
 other thing, of which no one should speak without 
 profound sorrow. I have said that at the close of 
 the Middle Age the immediate occasion of the 
 demand for a reformation was in every case a 
 moral one, and turned on the conviction that the 
 teaching and the practice of the Roman Church 
 were not in accordance with the moral law of God. 
 To-day, as then, this is a matter of which the simple 
 and the uneducated, if their consciences have not 
 been perverted, may judge. The theologian must 
 instruct us as to doctrine and discipline and wor- 
 ship; the scholar may help us to understand obscure 
 sayings or difficult problems ; but the conscience 
 of man, especially when it has been trained for 
 centuries, as has that of our Anglo-Saxon race, 
 can generally be trusted to discern between truth 
 and lying, between honesty and fraud. The moral 
 teaching of the modern Roman Church knows no 
 
 *As in Tosti's Psalter of Mary. 
 
— 102 — 
 
 such plain lines of distinction in these matters as 
 we were taught at our mother's knees. The moral 
 theology of Alphonso de Liguori, accounted a 
 doctor of the Church and thus ranked with St. 
 Augustine and St. John Chrysostom, which is the 
 great text-book for those who have commissions as 
 confessors, is full of things which fill every right- 
 minded person with horror. The ways in which 
 falsehood can be used without really telling a lie ; 
 the ways in which the property of others can be 
 taken without stealing ; the way in which the letter 
 of the Ten Commandments can be broken without 
 committing deadly sin — I do not know whether 
 we should be thankful that the books which con- 
 tain such things are in Latin, and therefore not 
 likely to be read by many of us, or should wish 
 that they were in our own language, that all might 
 know the evil and be on their guard against it. 
 For on the one hand it harms any one to read about 
 things which, if allowed, would weaken his sense 
 of right, or about things which he is sure as he 
 reads he ought not to know, and on the other hand 
 it is almost necessary that we should have some 
 direct information as to the moral teaching of a 
 system which demands our religious allegiance. 
 Right teaching may co-exist and does co-exist with 
 imperfect obedience and failure to reach the ideals 
 of life ; but we do not expect to find true religion, 
 either in theory or in practice, where formal 
 attempts are made to break down the strictness of 
 the moral law. And the whole penitential system 
 
— 103— 
 
 of the Churcli of Rome seems almost to be framed 
 witii tlie design of cauterizing tlie conscience, to 
 use St. Paul's word,* and depriving it of tlie power 
 of making moral distinctions. We dare not refrain 
 from uttering a protest against tHe system wHcli 
 deals tlius with truth, and duty.f 
 
 Such in general is the present status, historical, 
 theological, practical, of the Church of Rome. I 
 have not willfully exaggerated, nor have I meant 
 to ignore the good which that Church has done 
 and is doing in the world. I have not forgotten 
 that she has been the mother of saints and of 
 martyrs, that she has held up the torch of God's 
 truth at times and in places when its light could 
 not else have been seen, and that she has often 
 maintained the^ause of the oppressed against the 
 tyrant and the merciless. But she meets us to- 
 day with the assertion that she is the only Church 
 of Christ, and with the demand that we render to 
 her that spiritual obedience which we would ren- 
 der to Christ Himself. That assertion and that 
 demand we are bound to examine and consider in 
 the light of God's written Word, by the testimony 
 of the early Church, by the unimpeachable records 
 of history, and by applying the tests of faithful- 
 ness to ancient teaching and to unchangeable laws 
 of right. If we find that the Roman Church of 
 our day will not endure the test, then we may not 
 
 *I. Timothy, iv. 2. 
 
 t On this topic, and on the whole subject, see Littledale's Plain 
 Reasons against Joining the Church of Rome. 
 
— 104 — 
 
 listen even to the persuasive voice of tlie present 
 pontifif, bidding us find that unity of the Church 
 for which we pray, and in the interests of which 
 we would gladly do and suffer, by submitting to 
 him as pontiff or as patriarch and acknowledging 
 the claims of that great world-monarchy, a world- 
 monarchy even if it is called and is a Church, over 
 which he rules. Nay, he is in no sense the patri- 
 arch of the English-speaking peoples ; any power 
 tha:t he pretends to have over us is but a mark of a 
 tyranny ; any submission that we make to him is 
 but a mark either of ignorance or of cowardice. 
 We may well reply in the same calm and digni- 
 fied and sure tone in which the representatives 
 of the ancient and Orthodox Greek Church, as 
 has already been noted, have replied to the letter 
 of the Pope of Rome, that we dare not surrender 
 our position, and that we must hold to the faith and 
 order and practice of the Primitive Church. 
 
 And when, as we are compelled thus to write 
 and to speak of a great body of Christian men and 
 of a great branch of the Christian Church, the 
 question is put to us, "Are there not with you, 
 even with you, sins against the Lord your God ? " 
 we will not deny that we have failed to use many 
 opportunities, that we have not rightly valued or 
 rightly used all parts of our goodly heritage, that 
 we are far from doing our duty as a branch of the 
 Catholic Church of Christ. But at the very least, 
 it cannot be said that the English Church or our 
 own has ever shut the door irrevocably in the face 
 
— 105— 
 
 of reform, has ever made claim of absolute iner- 
 rancy, or has arrogated to herself authority over 
 all the Church of God. Even the Church of the 
 East, with her great antiquity and her uncompro- 
 mising adherence to the faith, has never made it 
 impossible to ask herself whether it might not be 
 that in some things she had failed to keep to the 
 apostolic pattern, or that in some way she might 
 better serve the Master. But until the modem 
 Church of Rome ceases to be the modern Church 
 of Rome, the Church of the Councils of Trent and 
 of the Vatican, the Church of the infallible Pope, 
 " the ghost of the Roman Empire, sitting robed 
 and crowned upon the sepulchre thereof," we can- 
 not hope for a change in her ; we must do our 
 work as best we may in estrangement from that 
 great Church which has, in attempting to excom- 
 municate the rest of Christendom, excommunicated' 
 herself; we must pray that the great Bridegroom 
 of the Church will bring back His wanderers, 
 that so at His return He may present His Catho- 
 lic Church to Himself, all glorious, " not having 
 spot or wrinkle or any such thing, but holy and 
 without blemish." The bright visions of prophets 
 and Apostles and holy men are yet to be fulfilled ; 
 God hasten the time, and grant to every part of 
 His One Holy Catholic and Apostolic Church, and 
 to each of us the members of that the mystical 
 body of His Son, to have a part in the glories that 
 shall then be revealed ! 
 
 Soli Deo gloria. 
 
IV. 
 
 THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 Rt. Rev. I^EIGHTON COI^KMAN, S.T.D., I,I,.D., 
 Bishop of Delaware, 
 
THE ENGLISH CHURCH. 
 
 The multiplicity of organizations and institu- 
 tions wliicli so preeminently marks our own era, 
 enforces all the more the necessity of inquiring 
 into their origin, character, and stability. There 
 is no quarter where such investigation is so essen- 
 tial as that which is occupied by the religious 
 organisms of the day, which abound, alas I in 
 such bewildering and injurious profusion. Most 
 surely it becomes us to know of a certainty the 
 genesis, the authority, and the elements of per- 
 petuity which may be claimed for establishments 
 which have so supremely and so intimately to do 
 with the very constitution and with the most 
 important conditions of all human society, both as 
 to its individual constituency and the community 
 at large. 
 
 It is one of the chief purposes of the course of 
 L/Cctures in which I have the valued honour of par- 
 ticipating, to demonstrate anew the firmness of the 
 ground upon which stands that branch of the 
 Church Catholic under whose auspices these 
 Lectures are delivered. 
 
 To some of our fellow-citizens she seems as one 
 only out of many associations claiming men's 
 confidence and cooperation, and insisting upon 
 modes and objects of life which, in not a few 
 
— no — 
 
 instances, are in sliarp antagonism to common 
 methods and natural impulses. It is, therefore, 
 incumbent upon her, when thereto challenged, to 
 prove the rightfulness of these claims as made by 
 herself, else to abandon what otherwise were but 
 arrogant and detestable pretensions. 
 
 As an integral part of this proof, she must show 
 her identity with the Catholic Church ; with that 
 Church which from the dawn of Christianity has 
 been everywhere and at all times with true 
 believers. 
 
 This she has to do by what we may call pro- 
 gressive proof; inasmuch as Christianity, and 
 hence the Church, did not come to our shores for 
 many centuries after they had been known else- 
 where. Thus it is that we commence by setting 
 forth the fact that we are identical in all essential 
 particulars with, and are a lineal descendant from, 
 what is known as the Church of Bngland ; whose 
 loyal sons formed the first real settlement in our 
 borders, and were the actual beginning of what is 
 now our great Republic. This fact is all the more 
 emphasized by the very terms of the royal char- 
 ters granted these early colonists, who in these 
 instruments were charged with the duty of propa- 
 gating the Gospel as received by this same Church 
 of England. 
 
 Into the details of this portion of our proof, I 
 am not now called upon to enter. This belongs 
 rather to the lecturer who is to follow me. Suffice 
 it to say, that the proposition which I have 
 
— Ill — 
 
 af&rmed is one that is capable of tlie most incon- 
 trovertible demonstration. 
 
 It remains for me to prove tbat the Churcli of 
 England is a veritable branch of the Church 
 Catholic. 
 
 This essay will carry us back to such remote 
 periods of history as are difficult to include in 
 records as full of accuracy as we would fain have 
 in a matter of such transcendent importance. 
 However, we are in possession of sufficient evi- 
 dence of an unquestionable character to prove that 
 as early as the year of our Lord 314 there were in 
 the British Province bishops and other clergy 
 whose orders and orthodoxy were such that they 
 were admitted without dispute to seats in the 
 council of the Church which assembled in that 
 same year in the city of Aries. 
 
 Upon so well-established a fact, it is simple and 
 safe to base the assumption that long before this 
 date the Church, in her integrity, was established 
 in that province. Indeed, it does no violence to 
 the ordinary methods of historical research to give 
 our adherence to the theory that not later than the 
 year 250 the Church was planted there by mis- 
 sionaries from Gaul.* 
 
 As to her history previous to that time, the 
 accounts are too legendary to warrant any positive 
 assertion ; although the probabilities are, I think, 
 largely in favour of Britain being among the places 
 visited by the earliest missionaries of the new 
 
 * See reference to the churcli at Silchester on page 7. 
 
— 112 — 
 
 religion, belonging either to the Churcli of other 
 parts, or to the army of Rome. 
 
 Be that as it may, we can securely take it upon 
 ourselves to af&rm that the first reliable records 
 which we have, disclose the fact of a Church exist- 
 ing there in integrity and strength, which has 
 never ceased to exist there, and which is present 
 there to-day under the name of The Church of 
 England. 
 
 This affirmation involves, of course, the neces- 
 sity of further proving that in all the various 
 changes which have since intervened she has never 
 forfeited her right to be deemed Catholic, and 
 therefore, one with all the other branches of the 
 Body of Christ. 
 
 I might with propriety, I think, claim that the 
 burden of proof lies with those who make the con- 
 trary assertion ; the presumption evidently being 
 that no break has occurred in the continuity of her 
 Catholicity. 
 
 However, one enters with a light heart upon the 
 discharge of such a task as I have thus so willingly 
 assumed. 
 
 And, perhaps, now upon the threshold of further 
 evidence, it were well to say that it will not be so 
 much incumbent upon me to prove that the Church 
 of England is, and always has been, a portion of 
 the Catholic Church, as that she has been, and — of 
 course — is, such a portion independently of any 
 relations which she may at any time have borne to 
 what is known as the Church of Rome. For, as 
 
—US- 
 it is not necessary to remind some of my hearers, 
 tliere are those who contend that she had her ori- 
 gin with the latter Church, and that, when she 
 broke with her at the Reformation, she lost her 
 Catholic continuity. 
 
 But one need not proceed with any lighter heart 
 with the argument as thus foreshadowed. 
 
 There can be no such claim to Roman origin or 
 authority prior to the arrival of St. Augustine in 
 the Isle of Thanet in the year 596. Among other 
 proofs to this effect — in addition to that contained 
 in the presence of the British bishops at Aries, 
 already adduced — one may cite a fact only recently 
 brought to light,* viz., that in the little church of 
 Silchester, uncovered in 1893, there are evidences 
 of the building having been erected not later than 
 the middle of the fourth century — the earliest yet 
 found in Britain, if not in Europe. 
 
 The language in which St. Jerome testifies, about 
 A. D., 390, as to the orthodoxy of the British 
 Church at a period when heresy was very prevalent, 
 gives no impression of her subserviency to any 
 other Church. " The Britain," he says, " worships 
 the same Church, observes the same rule of faith, 
 as other nations." 
 
 Most of the important Cornish saints, to whom is 
 owing the dedication of a number of church build- 
 ings, lived anterior to St. Augustine or St. Gregory. 
 Exeter seems to have been a Christian city at 
 least as soon as the middle of the fifth century. 
 
 *See " The Church Times " (London) of January 17, 1896. 
 
—114— 
 
 Early in the sixth century — or nearly a hundred 
 years before the time of the Italian Mission — we 
 find in Wales a diocesan episcopate, with monastic 
 establishments in the several sees. St. Patrick, 
 consecrated in all probability by a Galilean bishop, 
 had died about the same time, namely, 493, after 
 having become fairly entitled to the name of 
 the Apostle of the Irish. St. Columba, an abbot of 
 one of St. Patrick's churches, after having founded 
 thirty-seven churches in Ireland, came on a mis- 
 sion to the Northern Picts in the year 563 ; and by 
 reason of his labours among them well earned the 
 title of the Apostle of Scotland. From lona, the 
 head of other monasteries — in Scotland and Ire- 
 land — there went forth from time to time devoted 
 bands of evangelists, who ministered through the 
 larger part of pagan England. 
 
 These facts are adduced — and many similar ones 
 could easily be added — not to prove that Britain was 
 in no wise indebted for her Christianity to Rome. 
 She may have been considerably indebted to her 
 in this respect, and the debt ought ever to be 
 acknowledged gratefully. They are reviewed for 
 the purpose of showing that in many quarters and 
 to a large extent the early Church in these parts 
 was planted from other sources — chiefly, perhaps, 
 Galilean — and that there was a vigour of initiation 
 which we could scarcely expect to find in her iso- 
 lated condition. The very fact that Ethelbert 
 allowed the missionaries from Rome to repair^ as 
 well as to build, churches in all parts of the king- 
 
—115— 
 
 dom of Kent, presupposes, of course, an already 
 existing ecclesiastical organization in those same 
 parts. They, doubtless, did much to solidify and 
 enlarge it ; but they were building upon founda- 
 tions which others had laid before them. 
 
 In pursuing this line of argument, one comes 
 before long to periods of her history where one is 
 confronted with the assertion that the Church of 
 England, or the Anglo-Saxon Church, as before 
 existing, lost both her independence and her 
 Catholicity ; that she either became a branch of 
 the Roman Church, else subsequently, at the 
 Reformation, sank to the level and condition of a 
 sect or a dissenting organization. 
 
 If this were true, we ourselves would be in no 
 better condition, and would be justly liable to the 
 charge of arrogance and hypocrisy. 
 
 But, happily, the very contrary is true. For 
 example, the Council of Whitby, in 664, in decid- 
 ing to conform in certain ecclesiastical customs to 
 the use of the Roman Church rather than to the 
 Scoto-Irish use, did not in any way acknowledge, 
 nor intend to acknowledge, the supremacy of that 
 church over the Church in Northumbria, any 
 more than our American Church, in adopting, 
 substantially, the Communion ofi5.ce of the Church 
 in Scotland, ceded one iota of her own independ- 
 ence. 
 
 Theodore, the seventh Archbishop of Canter- 
 bury, to whom the English Church is so greatly 
 indebted in many ways, owes his nomination to 
 
— ii6— 
 
 Pope Vitalian ; and yet when Wilfrid, Bisliop of 
 York, appealed to tlie Pope against Theodore, tlie 
 decision in tlie case was ignored by both bishops 
 and king ; and at other times and in other ways 
 Theodore resolutely maintained the independence 
 of his jurisdiction.* 
 
 Neither is it true that any Synods of the Eng- 
 lish Church ever yielded unconditional obedience 
 to Rome. The claims of the latter to supremacy 
 were disallowed throughout the whole of the 
 Anglo-Saxon period. While paying that respect 
 which was eminently due to so ancient and honour- 
 able a see, her right to interfere and dictate in the 
 affairs of this now already well-established Church 
 was stoutly and persistently denied. 
 
 With the Normans came, in the eleventh cen- 
 tury, Norman ideas of what was owing to the Pope 
 and his decrees, ideas which were all the more 
 operative because of what William the Conqueror 
 himself owed for the moral support that he had 
 received from Rome in his invasion of England. 
 
 It was not long, however, before the king real- 
 ized his mistake, as the encroachments by the 
 Pope upon his royal prerogatives became the more 
 numerous and audacious. On this account, he 
 took measures to separate the ecclesiastical and 
 civil jurisdictions ; which measures, however, only 
 
 * "He," says Bede, " was the first Archbishop whom all the English 
 Church obeyed." " Before his time," says the Anglo Saxon Chroni- 
 cle, "the Bishops had been Romans; but from this time they were 
 English." 
 
—117— 
 
 made opportunity for sacrilegious aggressions on 
 the part of some of his successors. 
 
 The Pope having once obtained a foothold in 
 England, it was not easy to dispossess him. From 
 this time on for several centuries, there was but 
 little intermission in the struggle on the one side 
 for Supremacy, and on the other for Independence 
 and Autonomy. 
 
 Into the details of this bitter and protracted con- 
 test, with its varying fortunes, we have not time 
 to enter. The quarrel between Henry and Becket, 
 and the murder of the latter — after which event, 
 the monarch abolished the Constitutions of Clar- 
 endon* — tended to increase and consolidate the 
 Papal power, which may be said to have reached 
 its climax during the reign of the worthless John, 
 I 200-1209. 
 
 It went on waning, not rapidly but gradually, 
 until the beginning of the 14th century, when 
 Parliament adopted unanimously a remonstrance to 
 Pope Boniface VIII, repudiating his jurisdiction 
 in any " temporal matter whatsoever." May we 
 not, even at such a distance from his death, trace 
 herein some result of the stand taken against these 
 encroachments by Grossetete (d. 1253) the bishop 
 of what was then the enormous diocese of Lincoln, 
 a prelate whose fame for scholarship and reforma- 
 tory zeal was universal ? 
 
 * These Constitutions had been enacted with especial reference to 
 safeguarding the liberties of both Church and State against Papal 
 encroachments. 
 
— ii8— 
 
 At tlie Parliament of Carlisle, held in 1307, the 
 first definitely anti-papal legislation took place, 
 although but little came of it for a while. Never- 
 theless, it was a starting-point, from which the 
 ecclesiastical reformers of the day went forward 
 with the greater courage and confidence. 
 
 They were all the more strengthened in their 
 crusade by reason of the evident decline at this 
 time in the Papacy, largely, if not chiefly, conse- 
 quent upon the removal of the Papal chair from 
 Rome to Avignon, whereby the Popes became 
 little better than vassals of the kings of France. 
 
 Fresh acts of legislation were passed in succes- 
 sive reigns, the most effective in the way of secur- 
 ing the Church's independence being the Statute 
 of Praemunire in the time of Richard II. (1392). 
 By its terms, it became hereafter illegal for any 
 English subjedl to lodge an appeal at Rome for 
 any cause, whether civil or ecclesiastical. There 
 was thus removed any lawful ground upon which 
 Papal supremacy could be intruded or acknow- 
 ledged. 
 
 The passage of such a statute at a time when 
 among many men there was still a lively dread of 
 Rome's spiritual power, gives evidence enough of 
 the extent to which she had oppressed Bngland, 
 and of how burdensome her rule appeared to Par- 
 liamentary representatives. 
 
 Witness is borne by more than one pope to the 
 assertions made both by the Church and State of 
 their independence of Rome. It may suffice to 
 
—I IP- 
 quote from one sucli, belonging to a period some- 
 what earlier than that which we have already- 
 reached, and from one belonging to a later period. 
 In a letter addressed by Pope Paschal II (1099- 
 II 18) to the King of England and the English 
 bishops, he says : " From the Apostles St. Peter 
 and St. Paul, the custom has been handed down 
 to us, that the more weighty affairs of the Church 
 should be managed or reviewed by our See. 
 
 " But you, in despite of this long-established 
 custom, settle among yourselves the business 
 relating to Bishops without ever consulting us." 
 
 " You will not allow the oppressed to make their 
 appeal to the Apostolic See." . . . . " You 
 venture without our knowledge to celebrate Coun- 
 cils and Synods." 
 
 " You see, therefore, that you have encroached 
 greatly on the authority of the Papal See, and 
 lessened its dignity. You even presume without 
 our sanction and knowledge to make translations 
 of Bishops — an unwarrantable liberty, as such 
 affairs ought not to be attempted except by our 
 authority." * 
 
 In a letter from Pope Martin V (141 7-143 1) to 
 Chicheley, Archbishop of Canterbury, he says, 
 referring to the Act of Provisors, one of the Anti- 
 Papal Statutes : " By means of this execrable 
 Statute, the King of England disposes of the 
 
 * See Ingram's "Rome and England," pp. 6i, 62. Townsend's 
 " Ecclesiastical and Civil History," vol. ii, p. 344. 
 
— 120 — 
 
 Churcli with his provisions and appointments as 
 if lie were the Vicar of Christ. He makes laws 
 for the Churches, Benefices, Clerics, and the 
 Ecclesiastical Order, draws the cognisance of 
 Ecclesiastical causes into his temporal Courts ; 
 and in a word arranges about Clerks, Benefices, 
 and the concerns of the hierarchy as if the care 
 of the Church had been entrusted to him, and 
 not to St. Peter." * While this charge discloses 
 unwarrantable interference by the King in spiritual 
 affairs, it yet goes to prove his independence of the 
 Pope. 
 
 It is not to be denied that " Bishops and other 
 members of the Church of England often acknow- 
 ledged themselves to be in obedience to Rome, 
 and often spoke of Rome as being the mother 
 of the English Church, yet the protest was con- 
 tinually made, that if Rome's unchristian and 
 oppressive treatment of the Church of England 
 continued, her commands would be resisted." f 
 
 In King Edward's Charter, Glastonbury (973), 
 the language is : — " This, too, I command above 
 all things ; on the curse of God, and by my 
 authority, saving the right of the Roman Church 
 and that of Canterbury.'''' 
 
 In 1240, the rectors of Berkshire declared that 
 as the Roman Church has its own inheritance, 
 
 *See Collier's "Ecclesiastical History," vol. iii, p. 341; vol. ix, 
 p. 51 ; Ingram's " Rome and England," pp. 116-118. 
 
 f'The Anglican Brief Against Roman Claims." By Moore and 
 Brinckman, pp. 278, 279. 
 
— 121 — 
 
 the management of whicli pertains to the Pope, 
 other churches also have their inheritances . . . 
 which are in no way liable to be taxed by or to be 
 tributary to the Roman Church?'' 
 
 Similar evidence is abundant, all going to show 
 that while there was the closest intercommunion 
 between Rome and Bngland, and while even indi- 
 vidual prelates and others may at times have 
 acknowledged the Papal supremacy, there yet was 
 continually drawn, by authoritative representatives, 
 the distindlion between the Church of Rome and 
 the Church of Bngland ; the subserviency to the 
 former being in almost every instance in the in- 
 terest of some corrupt or personal scheme. The 
 nationality of the latter may, in a certain sense, or 
 to a certain extent, be said to have been destroyed 
 towards the middle of the fifteenth century ; but it 
 was only by individual adlion, under some such 
 pressure as I have already described. This, how- 
 ever, cannot be fairly accounted as in any way the 
 action of the Church itself The Papal intrusion, 
 even to the very time of Henry VIII, was simply 
 a tolerated one, entirely against the letter and 
 spirit of existing statutes. 
 
 We have now reached the period of what is 
 known as that of the Reformation. 
 
 Into the discussion of so prolific a theme I do 
 not propose to enter, except so far as it may relate 
 to the main purport of this ledture, namely, to 
 exhibit the Catholic continuity of the Church of 
 England. 
 
— 122 — 
 
 The Reformation, like all other historical fads, 
 will be judged according to the standpoint from 
 which it is viewed ; not many of us, I fear, being 
 able to divest ourselves wholly of the bias or 
 prejudice so frequently accompanying such dis- 
 cussions. I shall at least endeavour to free myself 
 from this embarrassing and damaging comparison. 
 
 It may not be amiss, as introductory to what I 
 shall have to say more in detail, to quote a few 
 general remarks from some acknowledged authori- 
 ties. 
 
 Dr. DoUinger was at least the equal, perhaps the 
 superior, in ecclesiastical learning of his Roman 
 contemporaries. In his Lectures on the Reunion of 
 Churches, he writes : " The condition of things 
 had become intolerable, and a great purification 
 in the sixteenth century had become a pressing 
 need. The process might have been accom- 
 plished without the divisions which grew out of 
 it ; but, historically considered, the Reformation 
 was inevitable." " If," he says in another place, 
 " the Church had been as it is now, there would 
 have been no Reformation." 
 
 Canon Dixon, who in his justly esteemed " His- 
 tory of the Church of England," gives ample 
 evidence of his desire to be candid and impartial, 
 says : " The study of the English Reformation, 
 not pursued without considerable labour, has led 
 me to the conclusion that at the time of the 
 Papal jurisdiction a reformation was needed in 
 many things : but that it was carried out on the 
 
—las- 
 whole by bad instruments and attended by great 
 calamities." * 
 
 Hore, in his History of the Church of England, 
 while acknowledging the licentious character of 
 the king, whose character he not inaptly sets over 
 against that avarice and wickedness of the long 
 series of Popes which so largely brought about the 
 Reformation, contends that " nothing in the world 
 affords a stronger proof of an overruling Provi- 
 dence than the English Reformation. The Church 
 of England lay at the king's mercy ; and if 
 Henry was an arbitrary despot in civil matters, 
 what could be expected of him in matters afifedl- 
 ing the Church ? Yet unlike the other Churches 
 of the Teutonic race, we preserved our Catholic 
 identity, and no one can honestly say that we owe 
 this to the piety of Henry VIII, to the honesty 
 of Crumwell, or to the fortitude of Cranmer." f 
 
 It was the period of The New Learnings and 
 men's eyes were being widely opened to the neces- 
 sity of a rehabilitation of the Church. The body 
 was to remain ; but its clothing was to be changed, 
 from dross to gold again. It was, we may say, 
 but a mere accident that Henry had, even through 
 his divorce, anything to do with the movement — a 
 movement, it ought to be remembered, which had 
 its origin with the clergy of the day. Its purport 
 and result were identically the same ; namely, not to 
 found a new church, but to restore the Church 
 
 *Vol. I, p. 7. 
 
 t "History of the Church of England,'' pp. 229, 230. 
 
— 124 — 
 
 already founded to its independence and orthodoxy. 
 In 1534, both. Convocations declared " that the 
 Bishop of Rome had no greater jurisdiction con- 
 ferred upon him by God in this Kingdom of 
 England than any other foreign Bishop." 
 
 I am not now concerned to enter into a discussion 
 of all that followed the Reformation. If I were, 
 I might specify not a few things which from our 
 present point of view appear deplorable, both as to 
 methods or appliances and as to consequences. 
 My sole objedl in dealing with this great event is 
 to prove the contention that the Church with 
 whose history I have all along been dealing never 
 lost her identity nor individuality, albeit her liberty 
 was for a season curtailed, and her doctrine con- 
 taminated : that she did not for a moment cease to 
 be what she has been from the beginning — a true 
 branch of the Church Catholic, and the authorized 
 and accredited representative of Christianity to the 
 people of Bngland : that at the Reformation she 
 no more lost her autonomy than has the State lost 
 hers in the various changes or so-called reforma- 
 tions, through which she has likewise passed. 
 
 Bear with me if I seem to be unduly reiterating 
 what I have already said ; but it is so important to 
 the congruity of my theme, and the opposite con- 
 tention is still so much pressed upon our notice, 
 that one cannot too strenuously maintain the truly 
 historical position of our ecclesiastical Mother. 
 
 We do not deny, nor seek to deny, the fadl that 
 although, for example, the decisions of the Synod 
 
—125— 
 
 of Wliitby (664) and the reforms of Theodore, 
 Archbisliop of Canterbury (668-690), united the 
 different elements into a national Cburcli, it was 
 upon what one may call a double foundation — 
 partly Celtic, and partly Roman. It may even be 
 acknowledged — a point as to which, however, there 
 are differences of opinion — that her Holy Orders 
 may be, at least to some extent, an amalgam of the 
 early indigenous Holy Orders and the Roman 
 Orders through St. Augustine. 
 
 What then ? It simply follows that Britons, 
 and Celts, and Scots and, later. Englishmen — all, 
 in the course of time, were assimilated into what 
 is known as the Church of England. Perhaps, it 
 might have been done sooner if, instead of sending 
 S. Augustine, S. Gregory had come himself, for, 
 so far as one can judge, the latter exceeded the 
 former in wisdom and toleration. 
 
 It may not be stridtly correct to designate the 
 Church by her present name until after the days 
 of Theodore, unless we mean by its employment to 
 designate her as the Church of the English 
 peoples. When these various peoples became one 
 kingdom, then she was truly the Church of Eng- 
 land. We are, however, to remember that the 
 unification of the Church preceded that of the 
 nation. Indeed, the one was no inconsiderable 
 cause of the other. 
 
 These remarks are made here — even though 
 they may again appear to be an unnecessary repe- 
 tition — to emphasize the fact that ecclesiastical 
 
— 126 — 
 
 identity is not necessarily constituted out of abso- 
 lute oneness of ingredients ; but tbat it may be 
 none tbe less real when its several parts have been 
 contributed from various sources, and have even 
 undergone some changes in the process of assimi- 
 lation. 
 
 It was this amalgamated national cburcli that 
 underwent the Reformation. Whatever Henry 
 VIII was, he was not a fool. A scholar of no 
 mean theological learning,* he never entertained 
 the idea of forming a new church. Nor did this 
 idea enter the heads of any of his contemporaries. 
 The title " Head of the Church " was conferred 
 upon him not by any ecclesiastical legislation, but 
 by an act of Parliament ; and even when so con- 
 ferred it was with the saving clause — ^inserted by 
 the Convocations — " in so far as is allowed by the 
 laws of Christ." And with this the king con- 
 fessed himself entirely content.f 
 
 I hardly know anything that gives me a lower 
 idea of a man's unreliability as an instructor in 
 matters historical than for him to assert that Henry 
 VIII founded the Church of England. It clearly 
 demonstrates either his ignorance or untruthful- 
 ness ; and thus his utter unfitness to teach or 
 dogmatize. By the action of the Privy Council, 
 upholding the judgment in the Bishop of Lincoln's 
 case by the Archbishop of Canterbury (1890), the 
 
 * He had been originally educated by his elder brother, Arthur, 
 with a view to his taking Holy Orders. 
 
 t Since the year 1553, the title has had no legal existence. 
 
— 127 — 
 
 higiiest secular court of tlie land preserves tlie 
 liberties of the Ciiurcli, and establishes her his- 
 torical continuity. 
 
 As an illustration to this same effect, I may men- 
 tion that I lately saw in an English journal an 
 account of a nine hundred and ninety-nine years' 
 lease of some property made by the Church of 
 England to the crown, which property had recently 
 reverted, by the ordinary process of law, to its 
 original owner. If this Church were founded by 
 Henry VIII, how could she make a lease six hun- 
 dred years before she had an existence ? 
 
 Another similar illustration occurs to my mind 
 that came under my observation during a tem- 
 porary residence in Bngland. In the year looi, a 
 battle was being fought at Pinhoe (near Bxeter) , 
 and the Saxons were short of arrows. The priest 
 of the village volunteered to ride to Exeter for 
 arrows and reinforcements. These having arrived, 
 the Danes were defeated. In grateful recognition 
 of this patriotic service, it was decreed that a cer- 
 tain sum (a mark — now equivalent to thirteen 
 shillings and sixpence) should be given annually 
 to the priest and his successors from the public 
 funds. Although this action was taken more than 
 five hundred years before the reign of Henry VIII, 
 the payment of this same annual sum is still con- 
 tinued to the Church of England vicar — evidence, 
 surely, of the continuity and identity of the Church 
 which he serves. 
 
 It may sufl&ce on this point to adduce — even if 
 
—128— 
 
 out of its clironological order, — one other argu- 
 ment, and, to my mind, a very strong one : based 
 upon tlie language employed in the Magna 
 Charter, granted by John in the year 12 15. The 
 exact words are : " We have granted to God, and 
 by this, our present charter, have confirmed for 
 us and our heirs forever that The Church of 
 England shall be free, and shall have all 
 her whole rights and liberties inviolable." It 
 will be observed that there is no mention of the 
 Church of Rome in England, nor of any church 
 as a part or representative of the Church of Rome. 
 It is simply wonderful that any one, in the face of 
 such documents, can declare that the Church of 
 England had no independent existence prior to 
 the reign of Henry VIII. As the late Professor 
 Freeman wrote, " There is no point at which it 
 can be said. Here the old church ends, here the new 
 begins."* 
 
 I trust that I have not only established the fact 
 of such existence, but also of her Catholic contin- 
 uity to that same period. Whatever separation 
 ensued was not from the Catholic Church, but 
 only of one branch from another branch ; the 
 great separation of the Eastern and Western por- 
 tions having taken place nearly five centuries 
 before. If now, or subsequently, there were any 
 fresh schism, the schismatical body must be that 
 body which caused the schism, viz : the Roman 
 Church. 
 
 *See his " Disestablishment and Disendowment," pp. 21-36. 
 
— 129 — 
 
 It would seem to be quite unnecessary to pro- 
 ceed to the proof of these same facts as concerns 
 the periods subsequent to that of Henry VIII. 
 The only serious assault made upon the claim now- 
 reasserted has been that which well goes under the 
 name of The Nag's Head Fable. Perhaps, I ought 
 not to use the term serious in connection there- 
 with, nor to waste additional time in referring to 
 it. No Roman controversialist of to-day who has 
 any regard for his reputation will be so rash as to 
 question the validity of Archbishop Parker's con- 
 secration. When we have the opinion in its favour 
 of such an authority as Dr. Dollinger, we can well 
 afford to ignore the utterances to the contrary of 
 unlearned and prejudiced foes. Indeed, the valid- 
 ity of Roman orders is so vulnerable a point in 
 controversy, that it would seem the part of wisdom 
 for our opponents to maintain silence in regard to 
 the whole matter.* To quote again from Dr. Dol- 
 linger, while writing upon this question : " The 
 Orders of the Roman Church could be disputed 
 with more apparent reason." 
 
 There remains, I think, but one other important 
 particular in which to prove the Catholicity of the 
 
 * It is a cause for devout thankfulness to note how within a few 
 months past a disposition has been shown on the part of Roman 
 ecclesiastics to inquire more candidly and charitably into the question 
 of the validity of Anglican orders. This is notably the case with M. 
 Portal, the result of whose laborious investigations was published 
 under the pseudonym of Fernand Dalbus. M. Portal's work has so 
 far extended itself as to include the publication of a weekly periodi- 
 cal, La Revue Anglo-Romaine, in which the cause of Christian unity 
 is being advocated with marked ability and sweetness. 
 
— 130— 
 
 Clmrcli of England. I refer to lier so-called 
 Establishment by tbe State. If this could be 
 demonstrated, her Catholic continuity might with 
 reason be called into question. I have already, in 
 passing, had occasion to deny the assertion, and to 
 contend, on the contrary, that the Church existed 
 before the State. So that one may safely say that 
 the Church was the means of unifying and estab- 
 lishing the State out of the seven or eight little 
 principalities which had previously existed. Green, 
 in his " History of the English People," covers 
 this ground completely, showing conclusively how 
 Theodore, by his work of organization, uncon- 
 sciously effected a most important political work. 
 " It was," he says, " the ecclesiastical synods 
 which by their example led the way to our 
 national Parliaments, as it was the Canons enacted 
 in such synods which led the way to a national 
 system of law."* 
 
 The establishment of the Church was really the 
 growth, by degrees, of centuries. " It took place," 
 as has been well said, " in men's minds and hearts 
 before she was publicly recognized or established 
 as the Church of the country." f And again, 
 " She was established just as the churches of 
 Corinth, Galatia, Ephesus, and Rome were estab- 
 lished ; not by human might, power, kingly 
 decree, or legislative enactment, but by evangel- 
 
 * Page 39. 
 
 t " The Bnglishman's Brief on behalf of His National Church," p. 12. 
 
—131— 
 
 istic labors of faithful, earnest missionaries, blest 
 and prospered of God in tbeir work.* 
 
 There is absolutely no foundation for the notion 
 — However so common it may be — that at some par- 
 ticular time tbe Legislature of England selected 
 one religious community out of a number of relig- 
 ious communities then existing, endowed it with 
 large possessions, and gave exceptional privileges 
 to its members and oflEcers. 
 
 What then, it may be asked, is meant by the 
 phrase, " By law established " ? I will answer in 
 the well-weighed words of another : " Nothing 
 more is to be understood by this phrase than that 
 the Church's Constitution, Doctrine, Liturgy, and 
 various Offices having been drawn up and agreed 
 to by her own representatives, received the sanc- 
 tion of the State, and that the observance of 
 them is enforceable by law on those who are her 
 ministers or members. Further, that she is pro- 
 tected in the enjoyment of her rights, privileges, 
 and endowments, by the law of the land, and that 
 hers is the recognized ecclesiastical organization 
 and form of worship through which the heads of 
 the State perform all public religious acts."f 
 
 As somewhat germane to my avowed subjedt, it 
 may not be amiss at this point to add a word or 
 two concerning the matter of Endowments and 
 Tithes as appertaining to the Church of England. 
 It is ignorance in regard to these points that has 
 
 * Idem. 
 
 t " The Englishman's Brief," p. 13. 
 
—132— 
 
 in many instances led to prejudice, and even 
 enmity, against her. 
 
 Witli reference to her Endowments, it may suf- 
 fice to say that the State has given nothing what- 
 ever of them ; and therefore, of course, has no 
 manner of right to dispossess her of them. 
 Church-people — except as will be noted presently — 
 built the churches, and, without any exception, 
 Church-people have endowed and maintained them. 
 In a public meeting held a few years ago at Birm- 
 ingham, two bishops, each of whom had been in 
 the ministry for forty-seven years, were asked 
 whether at any one time during this whole period 
 they had received any stipend from the State. 
 " Never a penny," was the reply made by both. 
 A priest, who had been in the ministry for fifty- 
 four years, was asked the same question, and his 
 answer was : " Not the fraction of a bad farth- 
 ing." 
 
 No act of Parliament took the property of the 
 Church from one religious body and handed it over 
 to the other at the Reformation. The Cathedrals, 
 Parish Churches, and other property of the Church 
 never belonged to the Roman Church ; but always 
 to the Church of Bngland. 
 
 By an Act of Parliament passed after the Great 
 Fire in 1666, when St. Paul's and eighty-six city 
 churches were destroyed, a proportion of the coal 
 tax was appropriated to their rebuilding. In 18 18, 
 a grant of one million of pounds was made for the 
 erection of new churches, and a few years later a 
 
—133— 
 
 further grant of ^500,000 was made for the same 
 object. 
 
 So far as I know, these gifts are the only ones 
 received from the State for ecclesiastical purposes.* 
 
 The truth about Tithes is simply this : that as 
 Christianity gradually spread through England, 
 devout persons were moved to make provision for 
 its permanent maintenance through the support 
 of the clergy, either by the setting apart of lands 
 for their use, or by a portion of the produce of the 
 land being granted for this purpose. Such pious 
 provisions in many instances were made long 
 before their payment could be enforced by law. 
 Indeed, much of the land thus granted to the 
 Church was uncultivated and unappropriated, and 
 was given before the days of united England. 
 
 In the language of the late Lord Selbome, 
 " Tithes never were the property of or payable to 
 the State. They never entered into, nor were 
 granted out of, the general public revenue, and 
 never became part of it under any law, ecclesiasti- 
 cal or temporal, which recognized either the obli- 
 gation to pay or the right to receive them. They 
 have been for ages real property by law. Their 
 nature has been and is the same, whether in the 
 hands of ecclesiastical or of lay tithe-owners." 
 
 Blackstone says : " The clergy have precisely 
 the same right to the tithes as the heir-at-law has 
 to his ancestor's estate ; and the proprietor has no 
 
 * See "The Church and her Story," by G. F. H. Nye, and " Church 
 Endo-wments," by Sir John Conroy, Bart. 
 
—134— 
 
 more reason to complain tliat his land is not tithe- 
 free than he has that his neighbour's field is not his 
 own." * 
 
 And the late Professor Freeman declared that 
 " Church property is not national property except 
 in the same sense in which all property is national 
 property, "f — If at any time an ungodly Parliament 
 should lay its sacrilegious hands upon this prop- 
 erty, and, under the name of Disendowment, rob 
 the Church of what her loving children have given 
 her, the tenants of such property would not be — 
 unless all law and equity were set at defiance — 
 any better ofi" than now, nor have any just reason 
 for expecting to be. Tithes are not a burden upon 
 the tenant. If they were abolished, he would, on 
 that account, have to pay so much more rent. 
 
 They do not belong to the landlord. When he 
 bought or inherited the land, he did not buy nor 
 inherit the tithes, but the land subject to the tithes. 
 If he purchased the land, he paid so much the less 
 for it. 
 
 If, therefore, the Church were disendowed, the 
 tithes would still have to be paid ; only, to another 
 — a reputed owner. 
 
 In what I have already said, it has been my aim 
 to show, by a historical review — necessarily some- 
 what general in its character — the grounds upon 
 which the assertion is made that in tracing our 
 ecclesiastical lineage to the Church of England, 
 
 * Vol. II. p. 25 (1809 edition.) 
 
 t "Disestablishment and Disendowment," p. 16. 
 
—135— 
 
 we are justified in claiming to be a veritable 
 brancb of the Cburcb Catbolic. In that portion 
 of my lecture just completed, I have intended to 
 show our Mother's innocence of any charge of 
 Erastianism or of unfairness in the matter of her 
 financial possessions. 
 
 It may be well for us in the few minutes still 
 remaining to consider further her claims upon our 
 confidence and gratitude, as also her relation to 
 our own development in a Catholic direction. 
 
 This influence of hers was early seen when, in 
 the comments of her prelates upon our " Proposed 
 Prayer Book," as also upon our proposed legisla- 
 tion, she took exceptions to some things which 
 were contrary to Catholic doctrine and usage. I 
 allude particularly to the matter of tampering 
 with and rejecting the Creeds, and the matter of 
 the rights and independence of bishops, in regard 
 to which her advice in the main was followed by 
 our representatives. 
 
 The immediate effect upon ourselves of our 
 acceding to these suggestions from abroad was the 
 granting of that measure of the Episcopate which 
 was necessary to our infant Church, if in extending 
 it here we were to follow the ancient canons as to 
 the number of consecrators. There is neither need 
 nor room for my entering now into the causes or 
 consequences of our failure to receive the Episco- 
 pate from our Mother Church. But in reviewing 
 her influence upon us, it must be admitted that her 
 unswerving adherence to this feature of Ecclesias- 
 
—136— 
 
 tical Polity was very potent in enabling us to 
 maintain our own fidelity to it, even under the 
 exceptionally trying condition of our wants in this 
 respect and tHe various temptations to resort to 
 expedients whose adoption would have vitiated our 
 Catholic continuity. 
 
 In matters of discipline also, we are the debtors 
 of the Church of England. The question of Mar- 
 riage and Divorce — so intimately and necessarily 
 allied to the very foundations of human society — 
 has been dealt with more in accordance with God's 
 Word than, I am persuaded, would have been the 
 case had we been left to the unrestrained influence 
 of our new country. It is true that as to the Table 
 of Affinity or Prohibited Degrees, our own Church 
 has not, with the concurrence of both Houses of the 
 General Convention, taken affirmative action. But 
 so far back as the year 1808, the House of Bishops 
 did take such action — which action has never been 
 repealed. And some of us who feel ourselves gov- 
 erned by it, and are in other directions endeavour- 
 ing to free the American Church from any 
 complicity with the pestilential and scandalous 
 views upon this whole subject which are so preva- 
 lent in our midst, are certainly very much helped 
 and comforted by the position occupied in this 
 respedl by the Church of our Fatherland. 
 
 We need not hesitate to acknowledge our great 
 and constant indebtedness to very many of her 
 sons in the matter of Theological Literature. The 
 conditions and resources of our own country do not 
 
—137— 
 
 as yet admit of such leisure for thorougli and con- 
 tinuous study and research as is afforded in 
 England. We are hoping for better days in this 
 respedl, and some little provision has already been 
 made looking to this result ; but for some years 
 yet we must be largely dependent upon our Eng- 
 lish brethren for aid in this most important 
 quarter. 
 
 And how helpful has been the influence upon 
 our Church-life and our individual life of such 
 men — as have arisen from time to time in our 
 Mother's emergencies ! As we contemplate such 
 characters as those of Wesley and Pusey, and see 
 how, notwithstanding the great strain upon them 
 to turn their backs upon the good old Church of 
 England — one in this direction, and one in that — 
 they remained loyal in their attachment to her, 
 who does not feel himself the stronger to resist the 
 same pressure iq. both of these same diredlions 
 which is still at times brought to bear upon the 
 Church ? 
 
 When one further studies the biography of such 
 men as Keble and Church, and, bearing in mind 
 their extraordinary gifts and acquirements, notes 
 how with more than contentment they remained — 
 the one for over thirty years, and the other for 
 over twenty years — in small and secluded villages, 
 giving to their peasant parishioners the very best of 
 their labours, is not a wholesome rebuke adminis - 
 tared to one whose love of notoriety, or of the 
 multitude's applause, or of social distractions. 
 
—138— 
 
 tempts one to repine if one's lot be cast in some 
 lowly place ? 
 
 And wliat courage comes to one when, marking 
 the career of the really venerable Archdeacon 
 Denison * — who but recently celebrated his Jubilee 
 as Vicar at East Brent — one learns how consist- 
 ently deep conscientious convictions as to religious 
 duty may be maintained with the utmost charity 
 to those from whom we are, unfortunately, obliged 
 to differ. 
 
 Nor do the laymen of the English Church 
 afford less conspicuous examples of those charac- 
 teristics whose exhibition exerts a helpful influ- 
 ence. Not to go back of our own days, we may 
 cite as affording illustrations of consecrated 
 wealth, of tireless devotion to the cause of Chris- 
 tian philanthropy, and of stout maintenance of 
 the Church's rights and privileges, the names of 
 the late William Gibbs — the munificent friend of 
 Keble College — of the late Lord Shaftesbury, and 
 of the late Lord Selborne. 
 
 In citing these few names — both clerical and 
 lay — as belonging to men who, in the English 
 Church, have aided us to a better life, I do not 
 mean to imply that our own Church, even in its 
 short history, has been without similar examples ; 
 but that, in studying the relations of the one 
 Church to the other, we must acknowledge that the 
 very causes which have gone towards producing 
 
 * Since the delivery of the lecture, this faithful servant of the Church 
 has been called to his rest. 
 
—139— 
 
 these lovely and honoured careers are largely owing 
 to the help which in this respect we at home have 
 received from the older and more fully equipped 
 Church abroad. 
 
 In a more general way, we may also recognize, 
 all the more clearly and impartially now at this 
 distance from the passionate excitement engen- 
 dered by it, the great benefits conferred upon the 
 Church in America by what is known as the 
 Oxford Movement. It is not within my purpose 
 to enter into any details at this point ; but, in 
 estimating the influence of the one Church upon 
 the other, the effect of so far-reaching a movement 
 cannot properly be ignored. 
 
 While I trust that I possess, at least to the 
 extent of my ability, that patriotic love for my 
 native land and Church which it is so desirable on 
 every account to cultivate, I must own to some 
 surprise at the not infrequent unreadiness on the 
 part of some of my fellow-citizens and Churchmen 
 to render what is due in imitation and praise to 
 our mother land and Church. We do not so 
 esteem and treat our natural mother. Why should 
 we hesitate to admire and follow our civil and 
 ecclesiastical mother ? not blindly, nor for fashion's 
 sake ; but from that filial confidence and rever- 
 ence to which her age and services in our behalf 
 may well entitle her. May we prove ourselves not 
 altogether unworthy of this exalted relationship ! 
 
 Together, there is, surely, a mission before us 
 of magnificent design and proportions : one that 
 
— 140 — 
 
 I verily believe does not belong in tlie same 
 measure of opportunity and gifts to any other 
 division of tlie Catholic Ciiurcli. It is no less tlian 
 to aid in restoring Christian Unity, and, through, 
 this means, to contribute the most essential and 
 potent factor in the evangelization of the world. 
 
 By the hands of our bishops — first at Chicago, 
 and afterwards, in larger numbers, at Lambeth — 
 there has been delivered to the Christian world a 
 scheme for promoting such unity that remains to- 
 day the only one which bids fair to challenge the 
 attention of all who honestly yearn for the accom- 
 plishment of so great an end. 
 
 It is for the various branches of the Anglican 
 Communion to maintain lovingly and loyally the 
 unchangeable verities of the Catholic Faith, and 
 such pradlices of the Catholic Church as are 
 authoritatively rejoined — and then to tarry the 
 Lord's leisure, until, in the day of His power, the 
 sheep that have erred and strayed shall be gath- 
 ered into the one fold under the One Shepherd, 
 and all His flock shall be members one of another. 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 It may be interesting, as giving some idea of 
 what the Church of England is now doing finan- 
 cially, to quote a few statistics from the official 
 Year book of that Church lately published by the 
 S. P. C. K. During the year 1894, the amount of 
 money given for the maintenance, enlargement. 
 
—141— 
 
 and improvement of the Voluntary Day Scliools 
 was /i,2i5,o95. 
 
 Tlie contributions for the support of assistant 
 clergy was ;^596,45o; for church-buildings, 
 ^1,140,256 ; for Missions at home and abroad, 
 ;^464,262 ; Lay-Helpers and Church expenses, 
 ^1,120,015; for the support of the poor, endow- 
 ment of benefices, parsonage-houses, etc., ^1,023,- 
 697. The whole amount for such purposes raised 
 in 1894 parochially and by voluntary gifts — not 
 including much that was sent independently to 
 societies and that was received from the Ecclesias- 
 tical Commissioners, etc. — was ;^5,85i,986. 
 
V. 
 
 THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL 
 
 CHURCH IN AMERICA. 
 
 Rev. S. D. McCONNEIvI., D.D., 
 
 Rector Holy Trinity Church, Brooklyn, N. Y. 
 
THE PROTESTANT EPISCOPAL CHURCH 
 
 AND 
 
 THE CHURCH OF THE UNITED STATES. 
 
 " American Christianity is weak to-day because 
 it has no recognized voice. There is no national 
 note about it. Whether Protestant or Catholic it 
 is the religion of specialists, and has no national 
 or race significance. In a certain sense it fails to 
 carry the weight of God behind it. To restore its 
 broken self-consciousness, to gain a national con- 
 ception of Christianity, to make the religion of 
 the people as significant as their politics, this is 
 the direction in which the immanence of God in 
 human society takes on a character of nationality. 
 The Church to-day in America no longer satisfies 
 anybody who considers its possibilities and com- 
 pares them with its performances. ■ And this dis- 
 satisfaction is largely due to the smallness of the 
 conception of what Christianity is. There is no 
 unity in conception in its discordant systems : 
 nothing which arouses the enthusiasm of human- 
 ity ; nothing which heartens one to believe in 
 Christianity itself."* 
 
 I have quoted above the words of one of the 
 most careful and candid students of contemporary 
 
 * Ward, "Church in Modem Society," p. 77. 
 10 
 
— 146 — 
 
 social life. It is because wHat he says is true that 
 the question which we have before us is so diffi- 
 cult. That body known at law as the " Protestant 
 Episcopal Church in the U. S. A." has relations 
 with the whole people and with the religious life 
 of the whole people of this country. To dream 
 of absorbing them all is to act as those who 
 ignore the facts of life in the interest of theories. 
 We cannot absorb them, we must make terms 
 with them. But, on the other hand, we have rela- 
 tions which we must not even wish to ignore with 
 the Catholic past ; with the Catholic present ; with 
 Doctrine and with Truth. This defines our task 
 as a Church, — to do our duty with our eyes wide 
 open to the present facts, but remembering that 
 there are facts in the past also ; to live as brethren 
 with our neighbors, but at the same time to so act 
 as not to break with brethren across the sea. Surely 
 it is a task which requires judgment and a sound 
 mind, the spirit of wisdom and ghostly strength, 
 and in the conduct of which we may well pray to 
 be saved from " all ignorance, pride and preju- 
 dice." 
 
 My predecessors in this lecture course have 
 sufl&ciently traced the history of this Church up to 
 the present. They have vindicated her claim to 
 Catholicity. My theme is to be, The place of the 
 Episcopal Church in the Christian life of the 
 people of the United States. 
 
 The Christian people of this country may, for 
 the purpose before us, be fairly divided into three 
 
—147— 
 
 classes or groups. These are so broadly distin- 
 guished from each other by striking differences of 
 method or spirit that they can hardly be confused. 
 
 I. The Roman Catholics. 
 
 The religious life of these is so remote from, 
 and in many regards so unintelligible to the rest 
 of the community that they are practically strang- 
 ers. But the marks of the Church of Rome are 
 plain. In the first place it is a foreign institution. 
 It has never become naturalized here, and in the 
 nature of the case never can be. By its very title 
 it acknowledges a foreign allegiance. This allegi- 
 ance is irrevocable. When that duty conflicts 
 with any other whatsoever the other must go to the 
 wall. This is true whether the other duty be 
 political, social, or religious. That Church has 
 never swerved from this attitude. To do so would 
 be suicide. Ecclesiastically her " note " is author- 
 ity, and its corresponding obedience. Obedience 
 to the Church is her organizing principle. Her 
 members are taught that by doing so they cannot 
 be wrong, while by not doing so they cannot be 
 right. Personal religion has its root in and 
 springs from ecclesiastical relation. It is begun 
 in a sacrament, fed by ordinances, sustained by 
 sacramental grace, and guided by a priesthood. 
 
 The members of this Church, while they are 
 members of the community, lead their religious 
 life apart from their fellow-citizens, and the virtues 
 and the faults of the life are both but little under- 
 stood. In any practical view of the ecclesiastical 
 
—148— 
 
 problem they need not be considered. I tHink Mr. 
 Hutton was right when he wrote in his Essays 
 that " Romanism and Protestantism are not, as is 
 generally supposed, varieties of the same religion. 
 They are different religions." 
 
 II. Protestants. 
 
 This group includes the large majority of the 
 Christian people of the country. The hundred or 
 more of religious bodies which constitute it differ 
 widely among themselves in their statements of 
 the Christianity which they hold. They are 
 organized in very dissimilar ways, and have strik- 
 ing characteristics which distinguish them from 
 one another, but they are all united by still more 
 distinctive qualities. Their common watchword is 
 "Justification by Faith." By Faith for this pur- 
 pose is meant, not a body of doctrine or a creed, 
 but the personal act by which each individual 
 establishes relations through Christ with Almighty 
 God. The " notes " of this group are ecclesiasti- 
 cal liberty and personal religious experience. It 
 includes those Churches which are largest and 
 best known in the land as well as the latest born 
 of sects. It has been so long practically in pos- 
 session of the field that it has stamped its general 
 features on the popular notion of religion. When 
 the ordinary newspaper writer speaks of Chris- 
 tianity, this as a rule is what he has in mind. Its 
 foundation principle is individualisTn in religion. 
 It relegates the Church to a subordinate or at 
 least a secondary place. As Rome stands for the 
 
—149— 
 
 exclusive corporate idea of religion, so " Protes- 
 tantism " lias for its differentiate the idea that 
 each soul is primarily isolated from all others, 
 establishes personal relations with God, and then 
 draws toward other souls like-minded with itself. 
 " The Roman is embodied faith. Baptism, confir- 
 mation, penance, mass, ordination, unction, vows, 
 indulgences, — at every point the massive masonry 
 of the Roman ritual overarches and closes in the 
 religious life of the individual soul. The Protes- 
 tant faith is a protest not merely against the abuse 
 of this machinery, but against the machinery itself." 
 
 III. The Protestant Episcopal Church, together 
 with a few other very small bodies like-minded 
 with herself. 
 
 The " note " of this group is that it lays empha- 
 sis equally upon the work of the Church and the 
 work of the individual in the complex process of 
 salvation. It insists that the Church has, by 
 Christ's ordinance, a definite and essential part to 
 perform in the task of rescuing persons and re- 
 deeming society. It demands of each individual 
 and of each generation its proper share of activity, 
 but at the same time keeps in mind the fact of the 
 solidarity of all individuals and of all generations. 
 This leads it to exploit the idea of the Church, not 
 for the sake of its authority but for the sake of its 
 use. Its well marked type of religion, its mode of 
 worship, its manner of practical life, its doctrinal 
 attitude can only be understood by keeping in 
 mind this double relation. As distinguished from 
 
— 150— 
 
 " Protestantism," it insists upon its possession of a 
 class of facts and practices whicli are Catholic ; as 
 against " Rome " it is protestant through and 
 through. 
 
 The peculiar burden has been laid upon us for 
 several generations of keeping open the communi- 
 cation of the Protestant world with the past. A 
 certain inflexibility and self-constraint which is our 
 characteristic of temper has been partly the cause, 
 and still more the result of this necessity. 
 
 It is speaking within bounds to say that a defer- 
 ence and consideration has been accorded to our 
 Church out of all relation to its size and weight. 
 There is a general agreement on all hands that the 
 " Episcopal Church " has something to say in the 
 ecclesiastical debate, which is worth attending to. 
 She has been and is at this moment the interpreter 
 of Catholicity to the English-speaking people. So 
 long as Protestantism is in a purely protesting 
 mood it cares little for, or dislikes this Church, 
 but when it passes to the temper of construction 
 it meets Episcopacy. 
 
 But in any communication which we may have 
 to make to the American Sectarianism there are 
 two things which we will do well to remember. 
 The first is that, speaking generally, they have 
 not gone out from us. If they have separated 
 themselves from the Church Catholic, it has not 
 been from our branch of it. If we should counsel 
 them to forget the past, make submission to the 
 mother from whom they had separated, and if 
 
—151— 
 
 they should take us at our word, they would go 
 back to the Church of Rome, from which five- 
 sixths of them seceded. With the exception of 
 the Methodists and the Reformed Episcopalians 
 they owe no historical allegiance to Canterbury. 
 Any actual relation for us with the great mass of 
 American Protestants must be looked for not in 
 the past but in the future. 
 
 The second thing is to consider what we possess 
 which they will accept, and not alone what we 
 would be glad to give. It may well be that some 
 of the things for which we have been most strenu- 
 ous will prove to be things which the Church of 
 the future will not value sufficiently to even quar- 
 rel with us for maintaining. 
 
 Now, there is at present no Church of the 
 United States. If any man chooses to call ours 
 " The American Church," because it was first on 
 the ground, or because it has a traditionary pre- 
 scription, I will not gainsay him. Calling it so 
 does not make it so. I wish it did. What actu- 
 ally exists is not the American Church, but the 
 material for the same. The material is amor- 
 phous, chaotic. No one who observes it carefully, 
 however, can fail to see that the creative spirit is 
 moving upon it. It may be " evening and morn- 
 ing " more than once, but in the end the outcome 
 will be that order which God pronounces " very 
 good." 
 
 The beginning of a movement has now set in 
 which we may reasonably hope will issue in an 
 
—152— 
 
 American Churcli. It is but trutli to say that the 
 movement is not very intelligent or even self-con- 
 scious. But the restlessness and dissatisfaction 
 with the present ecclesiastical condition is the first, 
 and a necessary step to farther ones. The Chris- 
 tian people are growing ill at ease in their secta- 
 rian tabernacles, wherein indeed they have found 
 the holy Presence, but which are buildings evi- 
 dently planned for nomads, and not for the people 
 of a great and stable nation in its own land. The 
 tents are all of foreign manufacture. The time 
 approaches apace for the building of the American 
 Temple. To this enterprise what have we to con- 
 tribute ? I know of course that there are some 
 who at this point feel bound to proclaim : " The 
 Temple of the Lord, the Temple of the Lord, the 
 Temple of the Lord are we ! " Once again I can 
 but say that I wish the calling of a thing thus 
 and so could make it thus and so. Our Church is 
 not the American temple of the Lord. She holds 
 in her hands some things without which I believe 
 that fair edifice cannot be built. But if she demand 
 unwarranted terms for the impartation of her 
 treasure, she may well remember that the people 
 can still assemble in the tabernacles as they do 
 now, and that they can still meet God there as 
 they do now. 
 
 What has the " Protestant Episcopal Church " 
 to contribute to the " Church of America ? " 
 When the Christian people begin to move to- 
 gether with their gifts in their hands to build 
 
—153— 
 
 again the temple, what may we bring ? First of 
 all, we cannot bring the people. They are not 
 with us. The stones, the living stones, the goodly 
 stones to be builded into that fane must be brought 
 in the main from outside the narrow quarry in 
 which we work. To leave tropes, the Christian 
 people of the United States are for the most part 
 outside of our Church ; but they are Christians, 
 and both will and ought to have a voice. But 
 when they become constructive instead of protes- 
 tant, they will discern the necessity of what this 
 Church of ours possesses. When a great struc- 
 ture is to be builded there is need of material, 
 there is need of enthusiasm, there is need of labor, 
 — but there is also need of an Architect's plan. 
 This is what we have to offer. What is that plan ? 
 Whence is it derived ? Why should we expect it 
 to be adopted rather than another ? What is its 
 origin? its essence? its obligation? 
 
 I reply, the plan is " Episcopacy." But I 
 hasten to add that the term Episcopacy is wofully 
 misconceived when it is thought of only as a thin 
 line of men called by a peculiar name and follow- 
 ing one another in such an order of time that a 
 gap at any point must interrupt and bring to an end 
 God's work among men. This is paltry. Epis- 
 copacy to be worth fighting for, or to be worth 
 hoping for, must be something incalculably more 
 comprehensive than that. And it is. The Epis- 
 copate, to speak accurately, is one element in that 
 complex conception which is best expressed as the 
 
—154— 
 
 " Churcli Idea." The Churcli Idea is the law of 
 Biology applied to the Church. Its essence is, 
 that in order for an organism to live it must live 
 continuously. It cannot die and come alive again. 
 And in order to realize its own life it must be 
 guided by the laws of its own organic structure. 
 What is the structural plan of that organism 
 called the Church ? And whence comes it ? 
 
 Two theories concerning it have been exploited, 
 both of which seem to me to be inapplicable to the 
 present situation. 
 
 I. The first is that of direct Divine establish- 
 ment; that either our Lord, during the great 
 Forty days in which He spoke to His disciples of 
 the things concerning the Kingdom of God, dis- 
 played to them a " pattern " for the organization 
 of the Church which they were instructed to 
 reproduce with exactitude ; or that, wanting this 
 model, they were guided by the Holy Spirit in 
 their official acts as they were in their written 
 words, in a manner vouchsafed to none since their 
 time, in such wise that the Faith and the Order 
 of the Church were both, and once for all, " deliv- 
 ered to the saints." To this way of thinking 
 Episcopacy is of Divine institution in the same 
 way as is the Family, the two Sacraments or the 
 Ten Commandments. This theory has been held 
 by good and holy men in all ages of the Church. 
 Ignatius accepts it with all the naivete of a child. 
 Cyprian advocates it with savage devotion. It 
 became the accepted theory of the Western 
 
—155— 
 
 Church until it was abandoned in the interest of 
 Papacy. In the Church of England Laud revived 
 it as soon after the Reformation as there was any 
 soil in which to plant it, persecuted for it, and suf- 
 fered martyrdom for it. The nonjuring Bishops 
 forfeited fortune and imperilled life for it. Sea- 
 bury accepted both the office and the theory at 
 their hands.* Newman revived it again in Eng- 
 land, and illuminated it with the light of his 
 genius. Denton wrote its classic.f Liddon sus- 
 tained it with his splendid lucidity.^: Canon Gore 
 has said a last, though hesitating, word for it.|l 
 
 It is the characteristic of all this way of think- 
 ing that they regard Christianity as being essen- 
 tially an Organized Society. They mark off the 
 "Church" from the "World" by a sharp line. 
 They have mightily forwarded ecclesiastical em- 
 pire. They estimate the value of men and things 
 according as to how they " edify the Church." 
 They see their theory plainly working in the Acts 
 of the Apostles and the " Teaching of the Twelve." 
 It is to them the key which unlocks the Church's 
 history and the principle which concludes her 
 future. 
 
 2. The second theory seems to be radically dif- 
 ferent. According to it our Lord did not organize 
 his Church, or fix its institutions ; nor were the 
 first generations of his disciples either commis- 
 
 *Beardsley, " I/ife of Bistop Seabury," p. 232. 
 
 t "The Grace of the Ministry considered as a Divine Gift." 
 
 t "A Father in God." 
 
 II "The Ministry of the Christian Church," Canon Gore. 
 
-156- 
 
 sioned or empowered to fix them, in perpetuam. It 
 maintains tliat His Apostles were those who, from 
 being servants, had become trusted friends ; that 
 they were in possession of His spirit and filled 
 with zeal to convey the personal blessedness with 
 which He had endowed them ; that they drew 
 together into a society as a consequence of being 
 possessed of a common spirit ; that this Society 
 was originally of the nature of a family ; that 
 beside the adoptive rite of Baptism and the rite of 
 the Supper there were no statutory regulations of 
 Divine obligation ; that the development of the 
 Christian Churches was gradual ; that the elements 
 of which they were composed were already in 
 existence in the arrangements of the Synagogue, 
 in the Hebrew Eldership, in the offices and cus- 
 toms of local courts, guilds and crafts, in familiar 
 legal and administrative customs. It is contended 
 that while the spirit and temper which moved the 
 first generation of Christians was immediately of 
 Christ, and their purpose clearly understood, their 
 methods were the outcome of men's judgment, to 
 which the Son of Man was willing to entrust 
 the fortunes of His Church ; that while the meth- 
 ods which they adopted, and the institutions they 
 founded have all that weight of authority which 
 comes from prescription, they have no Divine 
 quality which precludes their modification upon 
 sufficient cause being shown. 
 
 This theory, as applied to the Episcopate, 
 asserts that it is, in the familiar phrase, " neces- 
 
—157— 
 
 sary not to the being but to the well-being of the 
 Church." This theory, like the other one, has had 
 the support of powerful names in all ages. Ire- 
 naeus presumes it as simply as Ignatius does the 
 opposite. Jerome* and Origen assert and act 
 upon it. In the Church of England Cranmer,t 
 Jewell, J Whitgift, Andrews, || Bramhall, Usher,§ 
 Bancroft, Cosin,^ Hooker,** all subscribed to it. 
 
 Says Bishop Andrews, " Though our govern- 
 ment be of Divine right, it follows not that a 
 Church cannot stand without it. He must needs 
 be stone-blind that sees not Churches standing 
 
 without it It is not to damn your Church 
 
 to recall it to another form that antiquity was 
 better pleased with." 
 
 Hooker states the whole philosophy: "The 
 whole Church visible being the true original source 
 of power, it hath not ordinarily allowed any other 
 than Bishops alone to ordain, but there may be 
 sometimes very just and sufficient reason to allow 
 ordination to be made without a Bishop." 
 
 * ' ' These words are alleged that it may appear that Priests among 
 the Blders were even the same as Bishops were. But it grew by little 
 and little that the whole charge and care was appointed to one Bishop 
 within his precinct, that the seeds of dissension might be rooted out. ' ' 
 
 fCranmer's answer to the "King's Question:" "A Bishop may 
 make a Priest, by the Scripture, and so many princes and governors 
 also, .... and the people before Christian princes were commonly 
 did elect their own Bishops and Priests." 
 
 I " Def. of Apol.," Part II., Ch. V., Biv. i. 
 
 II Second Letter to Du Moulin. 
 
 g "Judgment of the late Bishop of Armagh," etc. N. Bernard, 
 London, 1657, p. 125. 
 1[ "Answer to an Abstract," etc., 1584, p. 58. 
 **"Eccl. Pol.," 7, 14. 
 
—158— 
 
 Bishop White held the same view, both before 
 his consecration and after, in common with most 
 Churchmen of his time. 
 
 Bishop Lightfoot wrote its classic in his essay 
 on the Christian Ministry, and Dr. Hatch has said 
 its last word in his Bampton lycctures on " The 
 Organization of the early Christian Churches." 
 
 The holders of this theory, like those of the 
 other, think they see it exemplified in the New 
 Testament. They believe it to be the only practi- 
 cal working theory of the Church in the present, 
 and that it has been acted upon in all the past. 
 
 Now, it is commonly assumed that between these 
 two ways of regarding the constitution of the 
 Church every one must elect. He must choose 
 the one, and reject the other. It is Divine, or it is 
 human. It came down from Heaven, or it came 
 up from men. Our Church's Order is an inherit- 
 ance from the Apostles, or it is not. It is the pat- 
 tern given in the mount, or it is a human device. 
 We must retain our divine prerogatives or confess 
 that we are a sect like the others. The partisans 
 of each view assert that they are mutually exclu- 
 sive. The debate has been carried on for centuries. 
 The one side conceives of Christianity as being 
 primarily a Divine Organization ; the other thinks 
 of it as a Divine Energy. Which is true ? 
 
 Has not the time come for a higher, broader, 
 truer conception, which will include within itself 
 both the others, and merge them into one which 
 will better fit the facts of the past, and the condi- 
 
—159— 
 
 tions of tlie present, — a wider and more scientific 
 view whicli is gradually but surely emerging into 
 sight, and which the world is, under God's leading, 
 only now beginning to apprehend. It seems clear 
 to me that it is time thrown away to discuss the 
 question, " is Episcopacy of Divine Origin ?" The 
 real question is, has it any divine quality now ? 
 
 The Church, God's " new creation," may fairly 
 be expected to follow the same general order of 
 origin and development as has His old creation. 
 But a profound change has passed over men's 
 ways of thought about the whole universe.* 
 
 The watchword of the present age is the term 
 " Evolution." Let no one shrink from the phrase. 
 It connotes that set of facts and forces with which 
 the Church is more closely concerned just now 
 than with any others whatsoever. Under its con- 
 trol science has been reconstructed from top to 
 bottom. History has been re-written ; institutions 
 have been re-examined ; life has been studied at its 
 beginnings ; social and political organisms have 
 been summoned to give an account of themselves. 
 It is idle to think that ecclesiastical institutions 
 will be exempt. So conspicuous an object cannot 
 hope to be passed by. Will it endure the test ? 
 Only " those things which cannot be shaken will 
 remain." I believe that the spread of the evolu- 
 tionary way of thinking among Christian people 
 will bring them to see the rationale of the Church. 
 
 * John Fiske, ' ' The Idea of God. ' ' 
 
— i6o — 
 
 Wlien tlie present habit of scientific thouglit 
 began to prevail in its account of tbe creation of 
 tbe world, it vexed tbe souls of devout men because 
 it seemed to empty tbe long-drawn-out process of 
 all Divine quality. Tbey had thought of God as 
 dwelling remotely in space, from which he had 
 made sudden special creative incursions. They 
 fancied that great events were not reverently 
 thought of unless their entrance upon the stage of 
 life was marked by a striking transformation of 
 the scenery.* 
 
 In the progress of Revelation we have thought 
 of God as working in the same way. That He 
 only appeared when the mountain smoked and the 
 pattern was given to Moses, that He withdrew into 
 high heaven to appear again at the Incarnation 
 and at Pentecost. We have asked, " Who shall 
 ascend into heaven to bring Christ down from 
 above ?" forgetting that " the word is nigh thee, 
 even in thy mouth and in thy heart." The shock 
 given to this inadequate way of thinking about 
 God's relation to the material universe has been 
 beneficent. We have learned to see God working 
 under the form of Nature's activity. Our rever- 
 ence has returned to us reinforced by the recovery 
 of the Scriptural truth of an ever-present God, '' of 
 whom are all things and in whom are all things." 
 If one had been a spectator at Creation he would 
 not have seen God's hand or heard God's voice. 
 The indwelling power would have been visible 
 
 * lyOtze, "Microcosm," vol. ii, p. 130. 
 
— i6i— 
 
 only in tlie form of material phenomena, for God 
 would still have hidden Himself If one had been 
 present when God was beginning the establish- 
 ment of His new Kingdom, all that he could have 
 seen would have been ordinary men engaged in 
 ordinary activities — moving from place to place, 
 teaching, preaching, organizing, experimenting 
 under the conditions of ordinary men. 
 
 What distinguished them from all who preceded 
 them was their new consciousness of a spiritual 
 presence. " It seemed good to the Holy Ghost, 
 and to us " is their formula. The same spirit 
 which in the old creation brooded over unconscious 
 matter, in the new brooded over conscious souls. 
 But as in the first, so in the second, the Spirit 
 wrought with intractable material. Order comes 
 from chaos always slowly, but it is none the less 
 Divine order when it comes. The disciples were 
 men, with prepossessions, experiences, habits of 
 thought, familiar customs, familiar forms of pray- 
 ing, working, speaking, acting. 
 
 The promise of the Master that the " Spirit shall 
 fill you with all truth " was spoken in the plural. 
 No man or one generation has ever been capable 
 of receiving all of Christ's truth. The company 
 to whom the promise was given includes us also, 
 and the generations yet to come. The Church, 
 the bride, the Lamb's wife, is not yet perfect. 
 The realization of the ideal is to be sought in the 
 future, not the past. The perfedl realization of all 
 truth and all order depends upon the conjoint 
 II 
 
— 162 — 
 
 action of " the Holy Ghost and us " through all 
 time. The truth of Christ is always greater than 
 the Church of any one age — even the primitive 
 one — can receive in its entirety. It must be so to 
 be incapable of exhaustion. But of the truth 
 which englobes and informs Christian society, 
 some has been precipitated in a deposit of Faith 
 and Order. The question is of this Depositum. 
 Is it human ? or Divine ? Can any institution be 
 Divine whose origin and development is traceable 
 to natural methods ? 
 
 I answer : the antithesis is not legitimate. The 
 facts and forces of human life cannot be parcelled 
 out and labelled with the words natural or super- 
 natural. " In Him we live and have our being." 
 Had the Ten Commandments no Divine sanction 
 for the generations which preceded Moses ? Has 
 the human conscience no Divine authority because 
 the rudiments of a moral sense are discernible in a 
 dog ? Is a man's kinship to God on the one side 
 broken because on the other hand he is related to 
 the brutes that perish? Is the Divinity of Jesus 
 impossible because He was the son of a woman ? 
 Is human government vacated of Divine obligation 
 because it is achieved and enacted by men ? Is 
 the world not of God's creation because the story 
 of its slow becoming has been read off the rocky 
 pages of its strata ? Is the Churc/i's Order desti- 
 tute of Divine quality because the process through 
 which it has come into being is capable of being 
 traced ? 
 
—163— 
 
 The answer to all these is the profound truth of 
 St. Paul : " There is no power but of God — the 
 powers that be are ordained {reTSYftivae) of God." 
 Whatever is found to be clearly a human obliga- 
 tion will be found also to be a Divine one. This 
 is really the question concerning Bpiscopacy as 
 we believe in it. It is simply an application to a 
 particular of the general test which Christianity 
 has always faced. "It is a question of fact. In 
 the end victory belongs to facts, and he who con- 
 tradicts them runs his head against a wall." 
 
 Will Episcopacy bear this test? The test is 
 twofold : can it (i) show an unbroken continuity 
 of development, and (2) has it been and is it now a 
 " power " within St. Paul's definition ? 
 
 The first of these inquiries I pass by, simply 
 saying that it is answered in the afiErmative by 
 every historian whose reputation is such as to 
 entitle him to an opinion, be his bias what it may. 
 The time has passed for dwelling on this. Proofs of 
 an " unbroken succession " drawn out in the spirit 
 of a conveyancer examining a title to real estate 
 are of small consequence. The real question is 
 the second one : Is it a present power, or is it 
 spent force ? 
 
 This is really the question as between us and 
 those who do not possess our idea of the Church. 
 They think us to be contending for an antiquarian 
 fad. We believe we are contending for the main- 
 tenance of a Divine " power?'' It is a question of 
 present fact. If we can present the Church in 
 
— 164 — 
 
 such wise as to show its spiritual potency, we may- 
 rest easy as to its divine sanction. That will 
 make its own way. It will be seen to be, like all 
 constant forces, " of God." But if not, then he 
 who contemplates its arrangements adoringly as a 
 " Divine Institution " and he who traces its " evo- 
 lution," both waste their time. The one becomes 
 an ecclesiastic, and the other an antiquarian, and 
 both are barren. 
 
 Will it bear the test ? 
 
 The unique, characteristic quality of God's 
 Church is just this : it is the only Society known 
 among men which embraces at once the living and 
 the dead! The Holy Catholic Church is the 
 Communion of Saints. This is why men love it 
 and accord it a consideration which they do to no 
 other society whatsoever. It stands for what is 
 abiding in a fluctuating existence. Those " loved 
 long since and lost awhile," together with our- 
 selves and our children, may all dwell in it to- 
 gether. This is what gives it its pathos. It binds 
 the generations together. For a Church then to 
 break with the past is fatal, not so much to her 
 doctrine or her order as to her practical usefulness. 
 In proportion as the breach with the past is nar- 
 row or wide, in the same proportion is she de- 
 prived of that one quality for which men value 
 her. If the breach be absolute the Church dies, 
 not as a penalty but as a consequence of having 
 violated God's eternal law. 
 
-i65- 
 
 Now, througli what channel will the unbroken 
 current of spiritual forces flow ? What cord can 
 bind the Christian generation together? 
 
 There have been tried just three : 
 
 The first is the chain of succession through the 
 Bishops of Rome. This ligature does bind, but 
 it strangles the generations one after another. 
 
 The second is Continuity through Creeds. This 
 is the line, themselves being the witnesses, that 
 the non-Episcopal Churches seek to maintain. 
 They examine the minister who asks recognition, 
 not as to the validity of his commission, but as to 
 his subscription to a body of doctrine. This 
 method cannot escape, and has not escaped from 
 one or other of two opposite dangers. Dogmas, 
 when used as an organizing principle, either 
 harden into fetters, or dissolve into ropes of sand. 
 Dr. Hunger, the author of " The Freedom of 
 Faith^'' said, " The clergy of the Episcopal Church 
 are more ready than any men I know to receive 
 new truth. I think it is because they feel that 
 their continuity is not through the line of doctrine 
 as ours is ; they are therefore not afraid of break- 
 ing with their past by modifying their theological 
 statement." Our Church's attitude toward Doc- 
 trine is the most valuable part of her Catholic 
 heritage. The truth has made her free. Few 
 realize with what longing many look to her free- 
 dom, as they sit fast bound in the bondage of Con- 
 fessions. 
 
— 166— 
 
 Ttie third way is Continuity through living men. 
 Christianity is so essentially a personal affair tliat 
 it can only be passed on by tbe contact of living 
 hand with hand. This is what Episcopacy means. 
 Even " tactual succession," which lends itself so 
 readily to caricature, may be justified scientifically. 
 It is the living, personal quality of the bond 
 which binds together the past, the present and the 
 future. It is only by insisting upon the essential 
 necessity of this living contact of persons that 
 Christianity can be saved from becoming on the 
 one hand an " Authority " which may be sent by 
 the hands of a nuncio half round the world in an 
 envelope stamped with the Pope's bulla ; or, on the 
 other, a " Code " which may be set on the shelves 
 of a library and doled out by a theological faculty. 
 
 There are just the three ways conceivable ; either 
 the Church must be perpetuated by an Infallible 
 Man ; or an Infallible Book ; or by a Living Body, 
 acting in an intelligent and regulated fashion. 
 
 This last is Episcopacy ; not the magical pas- 
 sage of the Holy Spirit through a succession of 
 men upon many of whom He has evidently not 
 found it pleasant to rest, but the transmission of 
 the life of a body through its proper organs. The 
 Divine forces, set in motion by our Lord, moved 
 along the line of least resistance. They did not 
 find the true line of development and propagation 
 at once ; they tried, experimented, rejected. This 
 is the natural history of every organism. But 
 having found it, and found it early, their Divine 
 
— 1 67 — 
 
 potency has reasserted itself at every stage of its 
 progress. 
 
 The present facts bear out the history. This 
 Church is the only one in America which is con- 
 tinually receiving accessions from the membership 
 of other Churches in the same field without at the 
 same time suffering a corresponding loss from its 
 own.* Is it not most natural to suppose that this 
 is because it possesses something which the others 
 do not ? The reasons often assigned for this phe- 
 nomenon, both by those within and those without, 
 are both shallow and false. Neither the posses- 
 sion of the Prayer Book, nor of social prestige^ will 
 account for the drift toward this Church. In 
 point of fact, I believe that for every one whom 
 the beauty of " our incomparable Liturgy " has 
 brought in, the strangeness of it has kept two 
 out; and as ior prestige, the prejudice in America 
 has always been against it. The fact is only to be 
 explained by the possession of that one thing 
 which is peculiar to it, and on account of which it 
 received its name of " Episcopal.'''' With that rough 
 accuracy which belongs to popular judgments, the 
 people have called it by its right name. They 
 call it what it is, and come to it because it is what 
 it is. 
 
 This conception of the Church as a Divinely 
 Developed Organism would seem to be the key to 
 the whole situation. Its being alive accounts for 
 
 * It is well to remember the fact that for every one who goes from 
 us to the Church of Rome five come from Rome to us. 
 
— 168— 
 
 botla its progress and its variety. It is not a 
 meclianical reproduction in each generation of a 
 pattern set in a previous age ; nor is it a voluntary 
 association whose fundamental constitution may 
 be recast at the pleasure of any age. It is a living 
 organism wliich has its own laws of development 
 and reproduction which cannot be violated or even 
 forgotten without peril to the life. It is not per- 
 fect either in doctrine or order, nor ever will be, 
 until the time comes for her to meet her coming 
 Lord " as a bride adorned to meet her husband." 
 This conception makes one easy in presence of the 
 fact of goodness which is Christian outside of this 
 Church, — outside of any Church. The Spirit of 
 Christ has been taken up into solution in human 
 society, and is continually being precipitated in 
 the form of a deposit of faith and order. So far 
 as it crystallizes it follows the forms in which 
 Divine affinities draw its atoms. We believe 
 therefore that whenever the scattered fragments of 
 the Church begin to move under the impulse of a 
 spirit of construction, they will take that form 
 which is approximately expressed by the phrase 
 " The Historic Episcopate," not because they are 
 pressed into it as into a mould, but because of a 
 spiritual tendency which inheres in the substance 
 of the Church itself. 
 
 Our contribution to the American Church must 
 be its organizing principle. Not its people ; nor 
 its Christianity ; nor its devotion ; nor its divine 
 spirit ; but its constructive idea. The gift may 
 
— 169 — 
 
 not be welcomed at our hands. It certainly will 
 not be if we profifer it with a patronizing air as 
 tbougb. it belonged to us. The truth is, we belong 
 to it. It went before us in point of time. My 
 predecessors in this lecture course Have traced the 
 way in which the Church Idea of the Master has 
 taken to itself a visible body throughout the ages. 
 It is my task to examine the situation in which we 
 now find ourselves. We have fallen upon a time 
 and country wherein the Body seems to be broken 
 in pieces. It presents the ghastly spectacle of dis- 
 membered limbs and joints, separated, but still 
 living ! This is the secret of the horror. If the 
 fragments were dead and buried or embalmed, 
 their sight would not cause the sense of distress 
 and perplexity which every Churchman must feel 
 at the situation. The question is not, — Can these 
 dry bones live ? but, — Can these living members 
 of Christ's flesh be brought together in one body ? 
 At present that sprawling aggregate of well-mean- 
 ing Christians which we call American Protestant- 
 ism is impotent. It is losing strength every year. 
 Romanism and " non-sectarian Philanthrophy " 
 are rapidly sharing between them the religious 
 impulse of the nation. Romanism must ultimately 
 fail here, as it has throughout the ages, for lack of 
 the Christian spirit. Churchless Charity must 
 fail for lack of the Christian method. What then 
 shall we do, — we who are both Catholic and Prot- 
 estant ? Our ecclesiastical life may not be more 
 alive than that of the other Protestant bodies, but 
 
— 170 — 
 
 its life has been continuous : and it is not severed 
 from tlie body Catholic. This is our peculiar 
 inheritance. To throw it away or to abandon it 
 would be for us to commit suicide, and, beside 
 that, it would be to do an incurable wrong to Prot- 
 estantism. So far as can be seen, there is no other 
 possible ground upon which its disjointed forces 
 could rally if they wished. That they are not yet 
 ready to rally upon this one is painfully evident. 
 Nor will they probably accept our position until 
 all other schemes shall have been tried and failed. 
 
 Our role is a delicate and difficult one. It is so 
 difficult that it is not strange that some among us 
 seek relief in simpler conceptions of the Church 
 Idea. The ecclesiastic among us thanks God that 
 we are not as other men are, and bids us sit still 
 with our inheritance hugged to our bosom, and 
 wait for God's own time when American Chris- 
 tianity will be willing to accept our system upon 
 any terms which we may dictate. The impatient 
 latitudinarian amongst us bids us make terms 
 with Protestantism as it is, regardless of our bonds 
 to the Catholic world. Hither of these courses 
 would be simple to comprehend and easy to carry 
 out. But they would both alike defeat our pur- 
 pose. The one would leave us isolated and de- 
 spised : the other would find us absorbed and 
 despised. What can we do ? 
 
 Union with Rome is out of the question. The 
 Pope does not want us, and we will not have the 
 Pope. We can neither join in with Protestantism 
 
—171— 
 
 nor hold ourselves aloof from it. We are in every- 
 one's watch and no one's mess. And all this 
 why ? Simply because we believe that the Church 
 of Christ is a living, highly organized body whose 
 life must be continuous. Our Christianity and 
 our Churchmanship, like our souls and our bodies, 
 can only exist united. We believe that our 
 spiritual life would die if detached from " the body 
 of the Church." 
 
 We stand for the Church Idea, which is the 
 principle of Christian unity. We cannot turn our 
 backs upon that idea even long enough to " ex- 
 change " into another man's pulpit. There is no 
 question of " recognizing " either the other man's 
 ministry or his church. What we cannot do is to 
 recognize even for an hour the principle upon 
 which such " exchange of pulpits " is proposed. 
 That principle is that denominationalism is per- 
 missible, or that at worst it is a necessary evil. 
 We hold it to be a crime. We cannot condone 
 the crime for a moment. It may be that the 
 fault is ours as much as another's. It may be so. 
 But we have said, — and we are the only church 
 which has said — " let us find out in all humility 
 where does lie the fault, and let us make an end of 
 it." We are ready, at least our Bishops have 
 said that we are ready, to look the evil in the face 
 and to abide any consequences which may flow 
 out of its cure. 
 
 The Bishop of Western New York has said well 
 that if any one of the larger denominations of this 
 
— 172 — 
 
 country were to take us at our word our churcli as 
 a churcli would disappear. So it would. So we 
 must believe tlie Bisliops meant by tbe Lambetb 
 Declaration. But "he that losetb bis life sball 
 find it," " whosoever bumbletb himself shall be 
 exalted," is as much the law for a Christian 
 Church as it is for a Christian man. If in the 
 United Church of the United States our old organ- 
 ization disappear, it will disappear as the architect's 
 plan disappears in the finished cathedral. The 
 principle, for which we have stood for more than a 
 century of our national life, is in no peril of being 
 lost save by our own self-seeking or timidity. But 
 *' except a grain of wheat fall into the ground and 
 die it abideth alone : but if it die it bringeth forth 
 much fruit." In this dying the grain is forced to 
 throw off its husky integuments one after another 
 until the germ finds its multiplied life in the new 
 and greater organism. When this Church is 
 really taken into the soil of American Christian 
 life it too will lose integuments of prejudice, cus- 
 tom, practise, of use and wont and ritual. These, 
 diry and unattractive as some of them have been, 
 have been and are yet needful to preserve the germ. 
 But when the seed becomes really buried in the 
 soil these must give way in the interest of the 
 greater life. 
 
 To leave tropes and similes, the Protestant Epis- 
 copal Church stands for something without which 
 the Church of the United States cannot be consti- 
 tuted. The people of this country are already 
 
—173— 
 
 Cliristians. But there is among tliem a steadily- 
 rising discontent with their Church life. This 
 discontent is our opportunity, — our opportunity 
 not to grow at their expense in the futile dream of 
 absorbing them all, but to do that specific work 
 for them and with them up to which God has led 
 us by so strange a path.