The Catholic World Volume I Part 42

2. Let me next speak of the truths which the Church of England still retains. I have no pleasure in its present trials; and the anonymous writer who describes me as being "positively merry" over its disasters little knows me. If I am to speak plainly, he seems to me to be guilty of one of the greatest offences--a rash accusation against one whom he evidently does not know. I will further say that I lament with all my heart whensoever what remains of truth in the Anglican system gives way before unbelief.

I do not, indeed, regard the Church of England as a teacher of _truth_, for that would imply that it teaches the truth in all its circ.u.mference, and in all its divine certainty. Now this is precisely what the Church of England does not, and, as I will show presently, has destroyed in itself the power of doing. I am willing to call it a teacher of _truths_, because many fragmentary truths, shattered, disjointed from the perfect unity of the Christian revelation, still survive the Reformation, and, with much variation and in the midst of much contradiction, are still taught in it. I have been wont always to say, and to say with joy, that the Reformation, which has done its work with such a terrible completeness in Germany, was arrested in England; that here much of the Christian belief and Christian order has survived. Until lately I have been in the habit of saying that there are three things which missionaries may take for granted in England: first, the existence of a supernatural world; secondly, the revelation of Christianity; and thirdly, the inspiration of Scripture.

The Church of England has also preserved other doctrines with more or less of exactness, such as the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, the incarnation, baptism, and the like. I will not now enter into the question as to what other doctrines are retained by it, because a few more or a few less would make little difference in the final estimate a Catholic must make of it. A teacher of Christian truths I gladly admit it to be. A teacher of Christian truth--no, because it rejects much of that truth, and also the divine principle of its perpetuity in the world. Nevertheless, I rejoice in every fragment of doctrine which remains in it; and I should lament the enfeebling or diminution of any particle of that truth. I have ever regarded with regret the so-called Low-Church and Lat.i.tudinarian schools in the Anglican Church, because I believe their action and effect is to diminish what remains of truth in it. I have always regarded with joy, and I have never ceased to regard with sympathy, notwithstanding much which I cannot either like or respect, the labors of the High-Church or Anglo-Catholic party, because I believe that their action and effect are "to strengthen the things which remain, which were ready {297} to die." For myself, I am conscious how little I have ever done in my life; but as it is now drawing toward its end, I have at least this consolation, that I cannot remember at any time, by word or act, to have undermined a revealed truth; but that, according to my power, little enough as I know, I have endeavored to build up what truth I knew, truth upon truth, if only as one grain of sand upon another, and to bind it together by the only bond and principle of cohesion which holds in unity the perfect revelation of G.o.d. A very dear friend, whose friends.h.i.+p has been to me one of the most instructive, and the loss of which was to me one of the hardest sacrifices I had to make, has often objected to me, with the subtlety which marks his mind, that my act in leaving the Church of England has helped forward the unbelief which is now invading it. No doubt he meant to say that the tendency of such an act helped to shake the confidence of others in the Church of England as a teacher of truth. This objection was, like his mind, ingenious and refined. But a moment's thought unravelled it, and I answered it much in these words:

I do not believe that by submitting to the Catholic Church any one can weaken the witness of the Church of England for the truth which it retains. So far as it holds the truth, it is in conformity to the Catholic Church. In submitting to the Catholic Church, I all the more strongly give testimony to the same truths which the Church of England still retains. If I give testimony against the Church of England, it is in those points in which, being at variance with the truth, the Church of England is itself undermining the faith of Christianity.

It was for this reason I always lamented the legalizing of the sacramentarian errors of the Low-Church party by the Gorham Judgment; and that I lament now the legalizing of the heresies of the "Essays and Reviews," and the spreading unbelief of Dr. Colenso. I believe that anything which undermines the Christianity of England is drawing it further and further from us. In proportion as men believe more of Christianity, they are nearer to the perfect truth. The mission of the Church in the world is to fill up the truth. Our Divine Lord said, "I am not come to destroy, but to fulfil;" and St. Paul did not overthrow the altar of the Unknown G.o.d, but gave to it an object of divine wors.h.i.+p and a true adoration. For this cause I regard the present downward course of the Church of England and the Christianity of England with great sorrow and fear. And I am all the more alarmed because of those who are involved in it so many not only refuse to acknowledge the fact, but treat us who give warning of the danger as enemies and accusers.

One of my critics has imagined, that I propose to myself and others the alternative of Catholicism or atheism. I have never attempted to bring any one to the perfect truth by destroying or by threatening the imperfect faith they might still possess. I do not believe that the alternative before us is Catholicism or atheism. There are lights of the natural order, divine witnesses of himself inscribed by the Creator on his works, characters engraven upon the conscience, and testimonies of mankind in all the ages of the world, which prove the existence and perfections of G.o.d, the moral nature and responsibility of man anterior to Catholicism, and independently of revelation. If a man, through any intellectual or moral aberration, should reject Christianity, that is Catholicism, the belief of G.o.d and of his perfections stands immutably upon the foundations of nature.

Catholicism, or deism, is indeed the only ultimately logical and consistent alternative, though, happily, few men in rejecting Catholicism are logically consistent enough to reject Christianity.

Atheism is an aberration which implies not only an intellectual blindness, but a moral insensibility. The theism {298} of the world has its foundation on the face of the natural world, and on the intellect and the heart of the human race. The old paganism and modern pantheism are reverent, filial, and elevating compared with the atheism of Comte and of our modern secularists. It would be both intellectually and morally impossible to propose to any one the alternative of Catholicism or atheism. Not only then do I lament to see any truth in the Church of England give way before unbelief, but I should regard with sorrow and impatience any attempt to promote the belief of the whole revelation of Christianity by a mode of logic which undermines even the truths of the natural order. The Holy See has authoritatively declared that the existence of G.o.d may be proved by reason and the light of nature, [Footnote 64] and Alexander VIII.

declared that men who do not know of the existence of G.o.d are without excuse. [Footnote 65] Atheism is not the condition of man without revelation. As Viva truly says in his comment on this declaration, atheists are anomalies and exceptions in the intellectual tradition of mankind.

[Footnote 64: "Ratiocinatio Dei existentiam, animae spiritualitatem, hominis libertatem, c.u.m cert.i.tudine probare potest." _Theses a SS.

D. N. Pio IX. approbatae_, 11 _Junii_ 1855. Denzinger's Enchiridion, p. MS. Ed. 1856. ]

[Footnote 65: Viva, _Propos. d.a.m.natae,_ p. 372. Ripalda, De _Ente Supernaturali_. disp. xx., s. 12, 59. ]

Nay, I will go further. I can conceive a person to reject Catholicism without logically rejecting Christianity. He would indeed reject the divine certainty which guarantees and proposes to us the whole revelation of the day of Pentecost. But, as Catholic theologians teach, the infallible authority of the Church does not of necessity enter into the essence of an act of faith. [Footnote 66] It is, indeed, the divine provision for the perfection and perpetuity of the faith, and _in hac providentia_, the ordinary means whereby men are illuminated in the revelation of G.o.d; but the known and historical evidence of Christianity is enough to convince any prudent man that Christianity is a divine revelation. It is quite true that by this process he cannot attain an explicit faith in all the doctrines of revelation, and that in rejecting Catholicism he reduces himself to human and historical evidence as the maximum of extrinsic certainty for his religion, and that this almost inevitably resolves itself in the long run into rationalism. It is an inclined plane on which, if individuals may stand, generations cannot. Nevertheless, though the alternative in the last a.n.a.lysis of speculation be Catholicism or deism, the practical alternative may be Catholicism and fragmentary Christianity.

[Footnote 66: De Lugo,--De Virtute Fidei Divinae, disp. i., sect.

xii. 250-53. Viva, _Cursus Theol._, p. iv., disp. i., quaest. iv., art. iii. Ripalda, _De Ente Supern._, disp. xx., seet. xxii. 117.]

I have said this to show how far I am from sympathizing with those, if any there be, and I can truly say I know none such, who regard the giving way of any lingering truth in the Church of England under the action of unbelief with any feeling but that of sorrow. The Psalmist lamented over the dying out of truths. "Diminutae sunt veritates a filiis hominum," and I believe that every one who loves G.o.d, and souls, and truth must lament when a single truth, speculative or moral, even of the natural order, is obscured; much more when any revealed truth of the elder or of the Christian revelation is rejected or even doubted. Allow me also to answer, not only for myself, which is of no great moment, but for an eminent personage to whom you have referred in your pamphlet. I can say, with a personal and perfect knowledge, that no other feeling has ever arisen in His Eminence's mind, in contemplating the troubles of the Anglican Church, than a sincere desire that G.o.d may use these things to open the eyes of men to see the untenableness of their positions; coupled with a very sincere sorrow at the havoc which the advance of unbelief is making among the truths which yet linger in the Church of England.

3. It is, however, but reason that I {299} should rejoice when whatsoever remains in it of imperfect truth is unfolded into a more perfect faith: and that therefore I desire to see not only the conversion of England, but the conversion of every soul to whom the more perfect truth can be made known. You would not respect me if I did not. Your own zeal for truth and for souls here speaks in my behalf. There are two kinds of proselytism. There are the Jews whom our Lord condemned. There are also the Apostles whom he sent into all the world. If by proselytizing be meant the employing of unlawful and unworthy means, motives, or influences to change a person's religion, I should consider the man who used such means to commit _lese-majeste_ against truth, and against our Lord who is the truth. But if by proselytizing be meant the using all the means of conviction and persuasion which our divine Master has committed to us to bring any soul who will listen to us into the only faith and fold, then of this I plead guilty with all my heart. I do heartily desire to see the Church of England dissolve and pa.s.s away, as the glow of lingering embers in the rise and steady light of a reviving flame. If the Church of England were to perish to-morrow under the action of a higher and more perfect truth, there would be no void left in England. All the truths. .h.i.therto taught in fragments and piecemeal would be still more vividly and firmly impressed upon the minds of the English people. All of Christianity which survives in Anglicanism would be perfected by the restoration of the truths which have been lost, and the whole would be fixed and perpetuated by the evidence of divine certainty and the voice of a divine Teacher. No Catholic desires to see the Church of England swept away by an infidel revolution, such as that of 1789 in France. But every Catholic must wish to see it give way year by year, and day by day, under the intellectual and spiritual action of the Catholic Church: and must watch with satisfaction every change, social and political, which weakens its hold on the country, and would faithfully use all his power and influence for its complete removal as speedily as possible.

4. But lastly, I am afraid we have reached a point of divergence.

Hitherto I hope we may have been able to agree together; but now I fear every step of advance will carry us more wide of each other. I am unable to consider the Church of England to be "in G.o.d's hands the great bulwark against infidelity in this land." And my reasons are these:

1.) First, I must regard the Anglican Reformation, and therefore the Anglican Church, as the true and original source of the present spiritual anarchy of England. Three centuries ago the English people were in faith _unius labii:_ they were in perfect unity. Now they are divided and subdivided by a numberless multiplication of errors. What has generated them? From what source do they descend? Is it not self-evident that the Reformation is responsible for the production of every sect and every error which has sprung up in England in these three hundred years, and of all which cover the face of the land at this day? It is usual to hear Anglicans lament the multiplication of religious error. But what is the productive cause of all? Is it not Anglicanism itself which, by appealing from the voice of the Church throughout the world, has set the example to its own people of appealing from the voice of a local and provincial authority?

I am afraid, then, that the Church of England, so far from, a barrier against infidelity, must be recognized as the mother of all the intellectual and spiritual aberrations which now cover the face of England.

2.) It is true, indeed, that the Church of England retains many truths in it. But it has in two ways weakened the evidence of these very truths which it retains. It has detached them from {300} other truths which by contact gave solidity to all by rendering them coherent and intelligible. It has detached them from the divine voice of the Church, which guarantees to us the truth incorruptible and changeless.

The Anglican Reformation destroyed the principle of cohesion, by which all truths are bound together into one. The whole idea of theology, as the science of G.o.d and of his revelation, has been broken up.

Thirty-nine Articles, heterogeneous, disjointed, and mixed with error, is all that remains instead of the unity and harmony of Catholic truth. Surely this has been among the most prolific causes of error, doubt, and unbelief. So far from the bulwark against it, Anglicanism appears to me to be the cause and spring of its existence. As I have already said, the Reformation placed the English people upon an inclined plane, and they have steadily obeyed the law of their position, by descending gradually from age to age, sometimes with a more rapid, sometimes with a slower motion, but always tending downward. Surely it would be unreasonable to say of a body always descending, that it is the great barrier against reaching the bottom.

I do not, indeed, forget that the Church of England has produced writers who have vindicated many Christian truths. I am not unmindful of the service rendered by Anglican writers to Christianity in general, nor, in particular, of the works of Bull and Waterland in behalf of the Holy Trinity; of Hammond and Pearson in behalf of Episcopacy; of Butler and Warburton in behalf of Revelation, and the like. But whence came the errors and unbeliefs against which they wrote? Were they not generated by the Reformation abroad and in England? This is like the spear which healed the wounds it had made.

But it is not the divine office of the Church to make wounds in the faith that it may use its skill in healing. They were quelling the mutiny which Protestantism had raised, and arresting the progress of the Reformation which, like Saturn, devours its own children.

Moreover, to be just I must say that if the Church of England be a barrier against infidelity, the Dissenters must also be admitted to a share in this office and commendation. And in truth I do not know among the Dissenters any works like the Essays and Reviews, or any Biblical criticism like that of Dr. Colenso. They may not be very dogmatic in their teaching, but they bear their witness for Christianity as a divine revelation, for the Scriptures as an inspired book, and, I must add further, for the personal Christianity of conversion and repentance, with an explicitness and consistency which is not less effectual against infidelity than the testimony of the Church of England. I do not think the Wesleyan Conference or the authorities of the three denominations would accept readily this a.s.sumed superiority of the Anglican Church as a witness against unbelief. They would not unjustly point to the doctrinal confusions of the Church of England as causes of scepticism, from which they are comparatively free. And I am bound to say that I think they would have an advantage. I well remember that while I was in the Church of England I used to regard Dissenters from it with a certain, I will not say aversion, but distance and recoil. I never remember to have borne animosity against them, or to have attacked or pursued them with unkindness. I always believed many of them to be very earnest and devoted men. I did not like their theology, and I believed them to be in disobedience to the Church of England; but I respected them, and lived at peace with them. Indeed, I may say that some of the best people I have ever known out of the Church were Dissenters or children of Dissenters. Nevertheless, I had a dislike of their system, and of their meeting-houses. They seemed to me to be rivals of the Church of England, and my loyalty to it made me look somewhat impatiently upon them. But I remember, from {301} the hour I submitted to the Catholic Church, all this underwent a sensible change. I saw that the whole revelation was perpetuated in the Church alone, and that all forms of Christianity lying round about it were but fragments more or less mutilated. But with this a sensible increase of kindly feeling grew upon me. The Church of England and the dissenting communions all alike appeared to me to be upon the same level. I rejoiced in all the truth that remains in them, in all the good I could see or hope in them, and all the workings of the Holy Spirit in them. I had no temptation to animosity toward them; for neither they nor the Church of England could be rivals of the imperishable and immutable Church of G.o.d. The only sense, then, in which I could regard the Church of England as a barrier against infidelity, I must extend also to the dissenting bodies; and I cannot put this high, for reasons I will give.

3.) If the Church of England be a barrier to infidelity by the truths which yet remain in it, I must submit that it is a source of unbelief by all the denials of other truths which it has rejected. If it sustains a belief in two sacraments, it formally propagates unbelief in five; if it recognizes an undefined presence of Christ in the sacrament, it formally imposes on its people a disbelief in transubstantiation and the sacrifice of the altar; if it teaches that there is a church upon earth, it formally denies its indissoluble unity, its visible head, and its perpetual divine voice.

It is not easy to see how a system can be a barrier against unbelief when by its Thirty-nine Articles it rejects, and binds its teachers to propagate the rejection, of so many revealed truths.

4.) But this is not all. It is not only by the rejection of particular doctrines that the Church of England propagates unbelief. It does so by principle, and in the essence of its whole system. What is the ultimate guarantee of the divine revelation but the divine authority of the Church? Deny this, and we descend at once to human teachers.

But it is this that the Church of England formally and expressly denies. The perpetual and ever-present a.s.sistance of the Holy Spirit, whereby the Church in every age is not only preserved from error, but enabled at all times to declare the truth, that is the infallibility of the living Church at this hour--this it is that the Anglican Church in terms denies. But this is the formal antagonist of infidelity, because it is the evidence on which G.o.d wills that we should believe that which his veracity reveals. Do not be displeased with me. It appears to me that the Anglican system, by this one fact alone, perpetually undoes what it strives to do in behalf of particular doctrines. What are they, one by one, when the divine certainty of all is destroyed? Now, for three hundred years the Anglican clergy have been trained, ordained, and bound by subscriptions to deny not only many Christian truths, but the divine authority of the [Greek text], the living Church of every age. The barrier against infidelity is the divine voice which generates faith. But this the Anglican clergy are bound to deny. And this denial opens a flood-gate in the bulwark, through which the whole stream of unbelief at once finds way.

Seventeen or eighteen thousand men, educated with all the advantages of the English schools and universities, endowed with large corporate revenues, and distributed all over England, maintain a perpetual protest, not only against the Catholic Church, but against the belief that there is any divine voice immutably and infallibly guiding the Church at this hour in its declaration of the Christian revelation to mankind. How can this be regarded as "the great bulwark in G.o.d's hand against infidelity?"

It seems to me that the Church of England, so far from being a bulwark against the flood, has floated before it. Every age has exhibited an advance to a more indefinite and heterogeneous state of religious opinion within its {302} pale. I will not go again over ground I have already traversed. Even in our memory the onward progress of the Church of England is manifest. That I may not seem to draw an unfavorable picture from my own view, I will quote a very unsuspected witness. Dr. Irons, in a recent pamphlet, says: "The religion of the Church has sunk far deeper into conscience now than the surviving men of 1833-1843 are aware of. _And all that Churchmen want_ of their separated brethren is that they accept nothing, and profess nothing, and submit to nothing which has 'no root' in their conscience."

[Footnote 67] If this means anything, it means that objective truth has given place to subjective sincerity as the Anglican rule of faith.

You will know better than I whether this be the state of men's minds among you. To me it is as strange as it is incoherent, and a sign how far men have drifted. This certainly was not the faith or religion that we held together in the years when I had the happiness of being united in friends.h.i.+p with you. Lat.i.tudinarian sincerity was not our basis, and if the men of 1833 and 1843 have arrived at this, it is very unlike the definite, earnest, consistent belief which animated us at that time. You say in your note (page 21) kindly, but a little upbraidingly, that my comment on your letter to the _"Record"_ was not like me in those days: forasmuch as I used then to join with those with whom even then you could not. It was this that made me note your doing so now. It was this which seemed to me to be a drifting backward from old moorings. For myself, it is true, indeed, that I have moved likewise. I have been carried onward to what you then were, and beyond it. What I might have done then, I could not do now. What you do now seems to me what you would not have done then. I did not note this unkindly, but with regret, because, as I rejoice in every truth, and in every true principle retained in the Church of England, it would have given me great joy to see you maintaining with all firmness, not only all the particular truths you held, but also the impossibility of uniting with those who deny both those truths and the principles on which you have rested through your laborious life of the last thirty years.

[Footnote 67: "Apologia pro vita Ecclesias Anglicanae," p. 22.]

And now I will add only a few more words of a personal sort, and then make an end. It was not my fate in the Church of England to be regarded as a contentious or controversial spirit, nor as a man of extreme opinions, or of a bitter temper. I remember indeed that I was regarded, and even censured, as slow to advance, somewhat tame, cautious to excess, morbidly moderate, as some one said. I remember that the Catholics [Greek text] used to hold me somewhat cheap, and to think me behindhand, uncatholic, over-English, and the like. But now, is there anything in the extreme opposite of all this which I am not?

Ultramontane, violent, unreasoning, bitter, rejoicing in the miseries of my neighbors, destructive, a very Apollyon, and the like. Some who so describe me now are the same who were wont then to describe me as the reverse of all this. They are yet catholicizing the Church of England, without doubt more catholic still than I am. Well, what shall I say? If I should say that I am not conscious of these changes, you would only think me self-deceived. I will therefore only tell you where I believe I am unchanged, and then where I am conscious of a change, which, perhaps, will account for all you have to say of me.

I am unconscious, then, of any change in my love to England in all that relates to the natural order. I am no politician, and I do not set up for a patriot; but I believe, as St. Thomas teaches, that love of country is a part of charity, and a.s.suredly I have ever loved England with a very filial love. My love for England {303} begins with the England of St. Bede. Saxon England, with all its tumults, seems to me saintly and beautiful. Norman England I have always loved less, because, though more majestic, it became continually less Catholic, until the evil spirit of the world broke off the light yoke of faith at the so-called Reformation. Still, I loved the Christian England which survived, and all the lingering outlines of dioceses and parishes, cathedrals and churches, with the names of saints upon them.

It is this vision of the past which still hovers over England and makes, it beautiful, and full of memories of the kingdom of G.o.d. Nay, I loved the parish church of my childhood, and the college chapel of my youth, and the little church under a green hillside, where the morning and evening prayers, and the music of the English Bible, for seventeen years, became a part of my soul. Nothing is more beautiful in the natural order, and if there were no eternal world I could have made it my home. But these things are not England, they are only its features, and I may say that my love was and is to the England which lives and breathes about me, to my countrymen whether in or out of the Church of England. With all our faults as a race, I recognize in them n.o.ble Christian virtues, exalted characters, beautiful examples of domestic life, and of every personal excellence which can be found, where the fulness of grace and truth is not, and much, too, which puts to shame those who are where the fulness of grace and truth abounds.

So long as I believed the Church of England to be a part of the Church of G.o.d I loved it, how well you know, and honored it with a filial reverence, and labored to serve it, with what fidelity I can affirm, with what, or if with any utility, it is not for me to say. And I love still those who are in it, and I would rather suffer anything than wrong them in word or deed, or pain them without a cause. To all this I must add, lastly, and in a way above all, the love I bear to many personal friends, so dear to me, whose letters I kept by me till two years ago, though more than fifty of them are gone into the world unseen, all these things are sweet to me still beyond all words that I can find to express it.

You will ask me then, perhaps, why I have never manifested this before? It is because when I left you, in the full, calm, deliberate, and undoubting belief that the light of the only truth led me from a fragmentary Christianity into the perfect revelation of the day of Pentecost, I believed it to be my duty to walk alone in the path in which it led me, leaving you all unmolested by any advance on my part.

If any old friend has ever written to me, or signified to me his wish to renew our friends.h.i.+p, I believe he will bear witness to the happiness with which I have accepted the kindness offered to me. But I felt that it was my act which had changed our relations, and that I had no warrant to a.s.sume that a friends.h.i.+p, founded upon agreement in our old convictions, would be continued when that foundation had been destroyed by myself, or restored upon a foundation altogether new. And I felt, too, a jealousy for truth. It was no human pride which made me feel that I ought not to expose the Catholic Church to be rejected in my person. Therefore I held on my own course, seeking no one, but welcoming every old friend--and they have been many--who came to me.

This has caused a suspension of nearly fourteen years in which I have never so much as met or exchanged a line with many who till then were among my nearest friends. This, too, has given room for many misapprehensions. It would hardly surprise me if I heard that my old friends believed me to have become a cannibal.

But perhaps you will say, This does not account for your hard words against us and the Church of England. When I read your late pamphlet I said to myself, Have I ever written such hard words as these? I will not quote them, but truly I do not think {304} that, in anything I have ever written, I have handled at least any person as you, my dear friend, in your zeal, which I respect and honor, have treated certain very exalted personages who are opposed to you. But let this pa.s.s. It would not excuse me even if I were to find you in the same condemnation.

One of my anonymous censors writes that "as in times past I had written violently against the Church of Rome, so now I must do the same against the Church of England." Now I wish he would find, in the books I published when out of the Church, the hard sayings he speaks of. It has been my happiness to know that such do not exist. I feel sure that my accuser had nothing before his mind when he risked this controversial trick. I argued, indeed, against the Catholic and Roman Church, but I do not know of any railing accusations. How I was preserved from it I cannot tell, except by the same divine goodness which afterward led me into the perfect light of faith.

But I have written, some say, hard things of the Church of England.

Are they hard truths or hard epithets? If they are hard epithets, show them to me, and I will erase them with a prompt and public expression of regret; but if they be hard facts, I cannot change them. It is true, indeed, that I have for the last fourteen years incessantly and unchangingly, by word and by writing, borne my witness to the truths by which G.o.d has delivered me from the bondage of a human authority in matters of faith. I have borne my witness to the presence and voice of a divine, and therefore infallible, teacher, guiding the Church with his perpetual a.s.sistance, and speaking through it as his organ. I have also borne witness that the Church through which he teaches is that which St. Augustine describes by the two incommunicable notes--that it is "spread throughout the word" and "united to the Chair of Peter."

[Footnote 68] I know that the corollaries of these truths are severe, peremptory, and inevitable. If the Catholic faith be the perfect revelation of Christianity, the Anglican Reformation is a cloud of heresies; if the Catholic Church be the organ of the Holy Ghost, the Anglican Church is not only no part of the Church, but no church of divine foundation. It is a human inst.i.tution, sustained as it was founded by a human authority, without priesthood, without sacraments, without absolution, without the real presence of Jesus upon its altars. I know these truths are hard. It seems heartless, cruel, unfilial, unbrotherly, ungrateful so to speak of all the beautiful fragments of Christianity which mark the face of England, from its thousand towns to its green villages, so dear even to us who believe it to be both in heresy and in schism. You must feel it so. You must turn from me and turn against me for saying it; but if I believe it, must I not say it? And if I say it, can I find words more weighed, measured, and deliberate than those I have used? If you can, show them to me, and so that they are adequate, I will use them always hereafter. G.o.d knows I have never written a syllable with the intent to leave a wound. I have erased, I have refrained from writing and speaking, many, lest I should give more pain than duty commanded me to give. I cannot hope that you will allow of all I say. But it is the truth. I have refrained from it, not only because it is a duty, but because I wish to disarm those who divert men from the real point at issue by accusations of bitterness and the like. It has been my lot, more than of most, to be in these late years on the frontier which divides us. And--why I know not--people have come to me with their anxieties and their doubts. What would you have done in my place? That which you have done in your own; which, _mutato nomine_, has been my duty and my burden.

[Footnote 68: _S. Aug. Op._, tom, ii., pp. 119, 120; torn, x., p. 93]

And now I have done. I have a hope that the day is coming when all {305} in England who believe in the supernatural order, in the revelation of Christianity, in the inspiration of Holy Scripture, in the divine certainty of dogmatic tradition, in the divine obligation of holding no communion with heresy and with schism, will be driven in upon the lines of the only stronghold which G.o.d has const.i.tuted as "the pillar and ground of the truth." This may not be, perhaps, as yet; but already it is time for those who love the faith of Christianity, and look with sorrow and fear on the havoc which is laying it waste among us, to draw together in mutual kindness and mutual equity of judgment. That I have so ever treated you I can truly say; that I may claim it at your hands I am calmly conscious; but whether you and others accord it to me or not, I must leave it to the Disposer of hearts alone to determine. Though we are parted now, it may not be for ever; and morning by morning, in the holy Sacrifice, I pray that the same light of faith which so profusely fell upon myself, notwithstanding all I am, may in like manner abundantly descend upon you who are in all things so far above me, save only in that one gift which is not mine, but his alone who is the Sovereign Giver of all grace.

Believe me, my dear friend, Always affectionately yours, HENRY EDWARD MANNING.

ST. MARY'S, BAYSWATER, Sept. 27, 1864.

P.S.--My attention has just been called to the concluding pages of the last number of the _Quarterly Review_, in which I am again described by a writer who evidently has abilities to know better, to be in "ecstasies." The writer represents, as the sum or chief argument of my "Second Letter to an Anglican Friend," the pa.s.sing reference I there made to the Lord Chancellor's speech. I quoted this to prove that the late judgment is a part of the law, both of the land and of the Church of England. But the whole of the letter, excepting this single point, is an argument to show that the vote of the Convocation carries with it no divine certainty, and resolves itself into the private judgment of the majority who pa.s.sed it. For all this argument the writer has not a word. I cannot be surprised that he fills out his periods with my "ecstasies," "shouts of joy," "wild paeans," a quotation from "Shylock," and other things less fitting. This is not to reason, but to rail. Is it worthy? Is it love of truth? Is it good faith? Is it not simply the fallacy of evasion? I can a.s.sure him that this kind of controversy is work that will not stand. We are in days when personalities and flimsy rhetoric will not last long. Neither will it bear to be tried by "the fire," nor will it satisfy, I was about to say, nor will it mislead, men who are in earnest for truth or for salvation. I had hoped that this style of controversy had been cured or suppressed by a greater sincerity and reality of religious thought in these days of anxiety and unbelief. There either is, or is not, a divine Person teaching perpetually through the Church in every age, and therefore now as always, generating faith with divine certainty in the minds of men. This question must be answered; and, as men answer it, we know where to cla.s.s them, and how to deal with them. All the evasions and half-arguments of such writers are becoming daily more and more intolerable to those of the English people--and they are a mult.i.tude--who would give all that they count dear, and life itself, to know and to die in the full and certain light of the revelation of G.o.d in Jesus Christ.

H. E. M.

{306}

Translated from Le Correspondant.

A RUSSIAN RELIGIOUS.

BY PRINCE AUGUSTIN GALITZIN.