In a former article we endeavoured to point out, and expose, the fundamental error respecting the nature of the Church on which the whole of Mr. Northcote's reasoning is based. We found it to be, the supposition that the Church is, in its essence, a visibly organized corporation, to which, as to His vicar upon earth, Christ has delegated his authority; and which, in consequence of such delegation, claims the obedience of the world. With this supposition Mr. N.'s argument, as we have seen, stands or falls. He professes to inquire to which communion, the English or the Roman, the "notes" of unity, sanctity, &c., most evidently belong; but it will be found that he confines his view throughout to the outward manifestations of these four attributes; and this too necessarily, inmuch as in his view the Church to which they belong is a visible body. With the Protestant, who maintains an entirely different doctrine, all that Mr. N. alleges against the Church of England, has no weight whatever ; the visible disunion said to prevail within her pale only proves that she is not the " one body" of Christwhich none of her members, we should think, ever maintained. might, therefore, dismiss the rest of the pamphlet as simply irrelevant to the subject in hand, had we not pledged ourselves to a more extended examination of it. We purpose at present, firstly, to examine whether or not Mr. N.'s statements as to the respective claims of the Churches of England and Rome to the mark of unity are founded on truth; and, secondly, to make some remarks on what the real unity of the Church consists in.

We

1. And, firstly, it is said that the Church of England stands alone in the world, having no communion with any other national Church. “In considering the point of unity, as it concerns the Established Church of England, it cannot but be fair to look on that Church in the character which you yourself assign to it— that, namely, of a national Church, forming a part of the one Church Catholic. Looking upon her, then, in this point of view, we are naturally led to inquire how she stands in relation to the other national churches which, with her, according to this theory, make up the Catholic Church, and with which we should therefore expect her to be one in origination,' in hope,' in 'charity,' in 'discipline,' in sacraments,' and in faith;' in which six points, according to Bishop Pearson, the unity of the Church consists. Now of these, the unity of 'origination,' and of hope,' may be claimed alike by all Christians of whatever denomination; but can it be said that the English Church, as a body, is one with other churches even in the unity of charity?' and is it not a fact almost too obvious to mention, that in point of discipline and sacraments, in point of faith and doctrine, there is no one Christian society in the world, excepting her own off-shoots and dependencies, with whom she is in communion."(Pp. 8, 9.) We are defective, then, in the characteristic of unity, because there is no other national Church, except our own off-shoots or dependencies, with whom we are in perfect communion. Did it never occur to the writer that precisely the same thing, and with far greater emphasis, may be said of the Church to which

·

he has attached himself, the Church of Rome? Is there a single national Church in the world with which the Church of Rome is in communion? By the term " Church of Rome" we mean that aggregate of national Churches which constitutes the Roman obedience, acknowledging the pope as its spiritual head. This body stands absolutely alone in Christendom; it anathematizes every other Christian community, the Greek Church, the Church of England, the foreign Protestant churches, all in fact who, though "calling themselves Christians," refuse to bow to the authority of the pope. It refuses to recognize the validity of any orders but its own, and, in a word, confines Christianity to its own pale. Of all existing visible Churches, the Church of Rome is the furthest removed from communion with any other. The answer to this of course will be, "It cannot be otherwise; the Romish Church is the one true Church, and no other exists; we cannot have any communion with bodies which we hold to be mere heretical sects." But what have we, or what has the Greek Church to do with Rome's assertions concerning herself? What if, in her arrogance, she denies to us the name of Christians? That cannot alter the fact. We know, and profess, that we are Christians; Rome does the same; so does the Greek Church, and so do the foreign Protestants; if one member of Christendom chooses to say of itself that it only is the Church, what is that to the rest? That arrogant member cannot sweep the other Christian communities from the face of the earth, as easily as she anathematizes them; there they still are, witnesses against her intolerance and exclusiveness. She cannot be allowed to clear herself of the charge of exclusiveness by assertions which none but herself admit. It would be just as easy for us, or for the Greek Church, as it is for the Church of Rome, to assert that every other community of professing Christians is an heretical sect: that we do not do so is simply because in our opinion it would be a grievous sin to do so. So then the simple fact remains, that

whereas Christendom is divided into various national Churches, none of which are in full communion with each other, the Romish Church is just that very member of the whole which isolates herself most from the rest, and by anathematizing all who will not admit her claims in every point, places an insuperable barrier between herself and them. We presume not to say of ourselves what the Church of Rome says of herself; we anathematize no other body; nay, we hold out, as far as we conscientiously can, the right hand of fellowship to every other community of professing Christians.

For, by a singular fatality, Mr. N. has selected to contrast with the Church of his adoption, that very member of the general Christian body which, in the present disjointed state of Christendom, whereby perfect communion between the various members is rendered impossible, maintains a greater degree of communion with the other divisions than any one of those divisions does with the rest. He could not have pitched upon a more unlucky instance than the Church of England. For, though not perfectly, we are yet partially in communion both with the Romish and Greek churches, and with the foreign reformed churches. With the former we agree (essentially) in ecclesiastical polity; with the latter we agree (essentially) in doctrine. With the Greek and Romish Churches we have retained the episcopal regimen, and consequently we admit the validity of their orders; while the Thirty-nine Articles are almost in exact accordance with, and indeed evidently framed after, the Confession of Augsburg. "Blessed be God," says Bishop Hall, (quoted by Mr. N., p. 9.) "there is no difference in any especial matter betwixt the Church of England and her sister churches of the Reformation; we accord in every point of Christian doctrine without the least variation; their public confessions and ours are sufficient convictions to the world of our full and absolute agreement.' Thus, if

* Peace-maker.

a Romish or a Greek priest passes over to our Church, we do not reordain him, and so far we maintain communion with those churches; while if a foreign Protestant wishes to minister in our communion, we re-ordain him, indeed, but we require him, in signing our Articles, to sign nothing contrary to his own confession, nothing essentially contrary— and so far we are in communion with the churches of the Reformation. The real fact then is this :-none of the Churches of Christendom are in full communion with each other; but of all those churches the Romish is the farthest removed from, while the English most nearly approximates to, that desirable object. And, with this remark we may dismiss Mr. N.'s first charge against our Church.

2. The next topic urged against us is, our internal disagreements respecting important points of doctrine. "What is the condition," Mr. N. asks, (p. 13,) "in this respect of the Church of England? Is it not confessed on all hands, and bewailed the most loudly by the most devoted of her children, that, on some of the most fundamental questions of the Christian religion, there exists in her 'notorious contradictions ; that she allows one set of men to preach one doctrine, and another to preach its logical and consequential contradictory?"" Nor is this evil merely a separable accident, depending upon the state of parties in particular periods; it is interwoven with the very constitution of the English Church, and therefore inevitable." In truth, that the real cause of the mischief lies deep in her very essence is too manifest, whether we survey the history of her origin and the formation of her various symbols and offices, or her theory as stated in her own Articles. There has been within her, from the very first, a contest between two irreconcileable principles, the Catholic and the Protestant; each of these has wrung from her what sanction it could; and utter inconsistency has, of course, been the result." (p. 20.) The instances alleged of this contradiction in doctrinal statements are, the assertion of the Catechism that

"the body and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper," compared with the declaration at the end of the Communion service that, by kneeling at the Sacrament, no adoration is intended, for that "the natural body and blood of our Saviour are in heaven, and not here;" the twenty-first Article, which teaches that "General Councils may err, and sometimes have erred," contrasted with the "laws of the English Church, by which that is adjudged to be heresy, which has been so adjudged by the authority of the first four general councils" (p. 22); the ordination services wherein we are told that "from the Apostles' times there have been three orders of ministers in Christ's Church compared with the nineteenth Article, (on the Church,) which seems to have been purposely framed so generally as to include all the Reformed churches;" (p. 22.) and the difference between the language of the Articles and that of the Liturgy on the subject of baptism.

Previously to examining Mr. N.'s allegations, we cannot help expressing our surprise that any one, at all acquainted with theology, should have confounded, as he has done, the unity of the Church Catholic with the internal harmony of particular churches. He inquires which of the two churches, the Anglican or the Roman, exhibits the greater harmony among its members on points of doctrine and discipline; what connexion, we ask, is there between such an inquiry and the great fact of the unity of the whole body of Christ? It seems evident that the unanimity, be it more or less, of the members of a particular church is something generically different from the unity of the whole Church. The human body is one, but its unity, the unity of the whole body as composed of many members, is surely not analogous to the unanimity with which the component parts of one member, the eye for instance, perform their functions; or to take a more appropriate illustration, the unity of the whole body politic is, not merely of a higher nature than, but different in kind from, the harmony

that may exist among the members of one of the many corporations comprised in the body. Family peace has no essential connexion with national unity; nor the latter with that unity which belongs to the whole human race.

But let this pass; we proceed to inquire whether Mr. N.'s accusations are well-founded.

Is it, then, the truth that, taken as a whole, the formularies of the English Church are ambiguous and inconsistent? Let it be granted as an undoubted fact, which we are not concerned to deny, that they were so framed as, if possible, to conciliate men of opposite views and parties, that, with this view, extreme statements were purposely avoided, and so much of the ancient structure retained in the new building as was not absolutely incompatible with the character of the latter. The Reformation took place in England under very different circumstances from those which witnessed its rise and progress abroad. In Germany, not only were the kingdoms of which the Germanic confederation was composed, ranged on different sides of the great controversy of the day, but, without a single exception, the existing prelates of the Church were strenuously opposed to the Lutheran doctrines. Hence a unanimous national movement, or a combination of the ancient ecclesiastical polity with the new (new to that age) doctrines of Protestantism_became alike impossible; and Lutheranism from being a school of doctrine embodied itself into a separate and rival community. Anathematized by the Church in which they had been nurtured, the foreign Reformers had no alternative but to frame for themselves a new polity and a new ritual, very different, of course, from that of the community which had expelled them from its bosom. The breach between the old and the new order of things was complete and palpable. With us the case was quite otherwise. The great mass of the nation, the king and nobles, the episcopate and the clergy, with few exceptions, heartily concurred in the work of Reformation; the Church reformed

itself. This circumstance enabled those who presided over that great work to consider calmly, and without violent prejudice, what was to be retained and what rejected of the mixed mass of truth and error which lay before them. It was their leading principle to change nothing but what was manifestly contrary to the Word of God. What they had in view was not to found a new Church, but to restore the existing one to its pristine state. Their work may be compared to what one often sees in these days of ecclesiastical architecture, when some ancient church, which had been disfigured by the bad taste of former ages, is restored to its original condition; the unsightly plaster which had enveloped its graceful pillars is removed, the windows reappear in their proper form and symmetry, inconsistencies and improprieties are done away with, and we see, not a new building, but the building itself as it came from the hands of the architect. Now it may doubtless be a question whether, in some instances, our Reformers did not stretch their compliance with existing prejudices to the utmost possible limit; especially whether their veneration for the early Church, as exhibited in the writings of the Fathers of the 4th and 5th centuries, was not excessive, and led them to permit the retention of some things which are not quite in harmony with Protestantism. But whether this be so or not, their avowed principle was to preserve whatever they could; and unless we bear this in mind, we shall neither understand, nor make due allowance for, the peculiar structure of our formularies. The ecclesiastical polity which our Reformers found existing they left almost untouched, with the exception, of course, of the one point of the supremacy of the pope, which not they, but Henry VIII. had long before shaken off. With the liturgical services then in use, the case was somewhat different; possessing many excellencies inherited from ancient times they had become mixed up with Romish errors; these it was the Reformers' care to discriminate and separate from the sound body on

which they had been grafted. What if, in some instances, they erred in judgment, and left what they ought to have removed, shall we, on this account, accuse them of unfaithfulness to their convictions? None will do so who place themselves in their position, and consider by what strong motives they were impelled to be as sparing as possible in the work of excision. These ancient services had, by long usage, become identified with the religious convictions of the nation; to have substituted new ones in their place, or even to have altered them so materially as to destroy their identity, would have given a shock to the feelings of a people always fond of ancient forms, and seriously impeded the progress of the Reformation.* The consequence of this tenderness and forbearance on the part of our Reformers is that our Liturgy is, not indeed Roman Catholic, but certainly Catholic, in its general tone; that is, it represents not the peculiar religious feeling of the 16th century which was called forth in opposition to Romanism, but that type or version of Christianity which was prevalent in the 3rd and 4th centuries, and which, whenever it did not manifestly touch upon Romish territory, our Reformers proposed to themselves as a model. So much, then, and no more, is to be conceded as regards our liturgical formularies.

But in those authorized documents which were expressly framed in opposition to Rome, does the Church of England speak with "stammering lips," and in ambiguous language? Nothing can be further from the truth. In the Thirty-nine Articles the Protestantism of our Church exhibits itself in the most decided manner. Here the Reformers were unshackled by those considerations which influenced them in remodelling our services. They had not to amend ancient forms, and to do so as circumspectly as possible, but to frame a new confession, embodying the sentiments of a Protestant Church. In

*Of this the failure of the attempt made, in the great rebellion, to establish new services, after the Presbyterian model, is a remarkable proof.

such a task as this they felt themselves comparatively free; and gave expression to their convictions in those short, but distinct, statements on the great points in debate between them and their opponents, which no ingenuity of ancient or modern times has been able to reconcile with the doctrines of Rome.

Let it be admitted, then, that there is in our formularies, a religious element which bears a stronger affinity to the Christianity of the ancient Church than to that of the Reformation-that in the Liturgy Catholicism, (not that of Rome but of the 4th century,) while in the Articles Protestantism preponderates; what, after all, will this prove? The question still remains, what on the whole is the spirit of our authorized documents? And we maintain, against Mr. N., that it is decidedly Protestant even in most of the instances of alleged inconsistency which he has brought forward. "The body and blood of Christ are verily and indeed taken and received by the faithful in the Lord's Supper." (Cat.) Mr. N. finds it difficult to reconcile these words with the declaration at the end of the Communion Service, that by the act of kneeling no adoration is intended to the sacramental bread and wine, and has known "some young persons, who have been taught to understand the Catechism in its obvious meaning, greatly perplexed by this declaration, not knowing which of the two to receive, but feeling it quite impossible to receive both." (P. 21.) Who the teachers of these young persons may have been we know not; we hope not Mr. N. himself; for, whoever he be, he must have been signally wanting in common honesty. He had to instruct his young persons in the true meaning of the Catechism; with the view of ascertaining what that meaning is, he would of course, if he had been really desirous to discover the mind of the Church, have looked into her other authorized formularies, (the Articles, for example,) and by comparing them with each other, have elicited what on the whole she means to teach, explaining deficient and ambiguous statements in one formulary