Part 4

You may be curious to learn upon what basis I think myself able to sustain so direct a challenge to the whole principle and bearing of your second letter; and, strange to say, I know no one, whose words so aptly enunciate, and give expression to my argument as your own. You will think, I doubt not you have disarmed the quotation I am about to make, (which by this time you anticipate,) by having already brought it forward yourself, and stated you can no longer rely upon it. But you must excuse me for not so easily parting with it, and for endeavouring to prove you right in your earlier view, even against your own subsequent change of mind. “It is a miserable matter,” (you say, after having given various authorities among our ritualists to confirm your view of absolution,) “it is a miserable matter merely to be able to escape from condemnation. I am not content to think the interpretation which I insist upon is but one of many which _may_ or _may not_, according to individual caprice or individual ignorance be held without rebuke by our people, and taught by our clergy. If any one of the above theories is the true one, all the rest are false. And are we for ever to remain disputing? Is there no voice by which we may learn the truth? I believe that there is a voice, long neglected and long forgotten, the voice of the Church of England. Let us listen to her teaching, and we shall find that now, as of old, by the great grace of God, she does not speak with a doubting or hesitating tongue.” {50}

This was your opinion at the close of the year 1848, and this is what I still claim. I am prepared, even against yourself, to maintain, and I believe I can shew, its soundness. Do not suppose that I dream of quoting this or a further passage which I shall have occasion to extract presently, merely in order to show a discrepancy between what you asserted then, and what you hold now. I do not desire to cavil with your right to be inconsistent in search of truth, if that were all; and I must allow besides such things have “come to pass in these our days,” between then and now, as may much diminish our surprise at inconsistency or change of mind in any one. At any rate, it would be, I am well aware, a most idle task to endeavour to prove _my_ position in favour of the dogmatic teaching of the Church of England, merely by convicting you or any man of inconsistency, and showing that what you think and say now is different from what you thought and said a year and a half ago. In all truth this is not my object; but I cite these passages, because I know not how better, nay, not how so well to express my own meaning; that I may also comment a little upon the passages I cite, and your reasons for thinking the position they take up no longer tenable; and that in so doing I may add a few words beyond what you said even in 1848, for believing in their soundness. Let me turn to your words. You say, “Here though open to the charge of repetition, I must again lay down the principle upon which alone we can possibly decide what the judgment of the Church of England really is; and to which principle we are bound to bring for proof as to a test every doctrine which we assert or deny.”

Then this principle follows, most clearly enunciated:—

“We declare, therefore, that the Church of England now holds, teaches, and insists upon, all things whether of belief or practice, which she held, taught and insisted on before the year 1540, unless she has since that time, plainly, openly and dogmatically asserted the contrary. This we declare in general. And in particular, as regards that most important question, the right interpretation of the various services in our Common Prayer Book, we further add: that whatsoever we find handed down from the earlier rituals of the Church of England, and neither limited nor extended in its meaning by any subsequent canon or article, must be understood to signify (upon the one) hand fully and entirely all, and (on the other hand) no more than it signified before the revision of the ritual.” {51}

* * * * *

“Few persons will deny that the existence of a doctrine known, acknowledged, and taught in the Church of England at the beginning of the sixteenth century, coupled with the fact that no reformation or alteration of that doctrine has at any time since been made—and therefore that it was intended to be still known, acknowledged and taught, is strong evidence by itself that such a doctrine must be true. The obligation to enquire accurately into it, and if possible overthrow it, is in the first place, upon the shoulders of those who are inclined to doubt or to dispute. It will then be for us to see if it can be defended. One thing only I am bound to say before I pass on. And it is this: that, equally on this matter of absolution, as upon all other essential portions of the One Faith once delivered to the saints, I believe that the Church of England holds the true and complete doctrine of the holy gospel, and follows in her practice of it, the example of the primitive age. Our Church now claims, in right of her succession, all the ordinary powers and privileges which the Apostles received from their and her Almighty Lord; now offers to her children all the means whether in aid of, or as being necessary to, the salvation of each one which were offered from the beginning; and now, as of old and ever, either insists upon the reception, or entreatingly urges the acceptance, according to their various nature, of all and every of those means of grace.” {52}

I think I am justified in saying that you admit yourself, by inference, in your second letter, that if the principle of these passages can still be sustained, the case and position of the Church of England will be tenable against the charge of being without necessary dogmatic teaching. But you explain in your recent letter that you feel you must give up the soundness of these views; that you cannot now believe the same things concerning our Church’s rule of faith. Let me give this comment in your own words:—

“Here, very probably, some one may object against me my own language, published rather more than a year ago. I allude to my book on the doctrine of absolution. Let me quote it.” Then follows the quotation I have already made as to our Church retaining the teaching she held previous to 1540, except where expressly repealed; upon which you add: “When that passage was written, it was written in entire assurance that every word might be established. I do not think so now. And with whatever pain I say this, it is not because my belief has altered from accepting the fixed principle that all essential Christian truth is one and eternal; and that every part of the Church-Catholic is bound of necessity to hold it whole and undefiled. Believing, as at that time I did, with the strongest confidence and trust that the Church of England was a living and a sound portion of the one holy Catholic Church, _I could not but assert_, as being capable of undeniable proof, her claims to teach authoritatively and undeniably every single doctrine of the Catholic faith. If I searched into her foundations it was with no shadow of fear lest they should be seen not to be resting on the rock, but much rather in the undoubting hope that the more she was tested and examined the more triumphantly she would declare herself to be divine.

“If the end of long enquiry and consideration has resulted in disappointed hope, and what seems to be evidence of the fallacy of former expectations; if I am compelled to own that the utmost we are justified in declaring seems to be—not that the Church of England now ‘holds and teaches’ &c., but—that the Church of England how _suffers_ and _permits_ to be held and taught; and again, as to the right interpretation of the prayer book, not ‘_must_ be understood,’ but ‘_may_ be understood:’ let none suppose that I have lightly yielded up that ground upon which alone a minister of the Church of England, as a minister of the Church Catholic, can stand securely.” {54}

Now, the first observation which hereupon occurs is this:—you state you can no longer think that ground tenable; but you do not sufficiently give a reason why you thus change your mind. I do not say you give _no_ reason, because I suppose we are to take the whole of your second letter, as in fact the reason; but I mean, you do not go into the particulars of the matter, nor in detail state the grounds why you should think the Church of England does not still appeal to her doctrine before the year 1540, wherever unrepealed, to supply the defect or short comings (if any) of her later teaching. You seem to have condemned her on her _practical_ or _external_ deficiencies, not as going into and proving her to have changed her internal rule. Indeed, it seems to me you have hardly weighed at all, either in asserting or denying the principle you formerly maintained and now yield up, the external evidence for its truth. This, perhaps, was originally not an unnatural omission, since you held the view co-ordinately with, and as an essential part of, your belief in the Catholicity of the English Church, not as a proof of it, nor as an answer to objections. You then so unhesitatingly believed the Church of England to be “a living and sound portion of the one holy Catholic Church,” (and were not engaged in _proving_ any thing about this at that time, your argument quite allowing you to assume it;) that, as you say, “_you could not but assert_ her claims to teach authoritatively and undeniably every single doctrine of the Catholic faith.” It followed directly as a natural and necessary consequence from the position you assigned her, that she _must_ be able so to teach; and, I repeat, you had no need to do more than assume it, because none of those with whom you were arguing, denied it; and your point was to show what followed from this unquestioned statement as to the particular doctrine you were then treating of, not to give the proofs of it in detail, if at all. That the Church of England was a true and living branch of the Church Catholic was therefore your premiss: that she taught necessarily the one essential Christian truth, all necessary dogmatic teaching, was your natural and just inference. And to show what this Christian truth was on absolution, you referred to the prior teaching of the Church of England, and of the Church Catholic as received by her before the reformation. But no wonder, when upon other grounds your premiss was shaken, the truth (as _I_ still believe it) of the inference was shaken also in your mind. It could not be its own proof. If you are no longer certain the Church of England _is_ a true and living branch, you lose _your_ evidence, I mean the evidence adduced by you in that treatise, and on which you were then resting, that she embraces all necessary dogmatic teaching. But if _I_ can shew by plain reasoning in the nature of things, or by external proof, without first assuming her Catholicity, that she _has_ this rule of faith; that she is linked up to, and holds on by, the whole of her teaching previous to the reformation, except where she has “plainly, openly, and dogmatically asserted the contrary,” I shall have just so much proof to give that she does not fail in point of dogmatic teaching, and therefore so far an answer to your difficulty and your enquiry, “What am I to teach as the faith and doctrines of the English Church?” If by this process I can make it reasonably clear that, “by the great grace of God,” the Church of England has had preserved to her a strict rule by which she does teach the whole Catholic faith, then shall I meet all the objection of your recent letter, so far as _principle_ is concerned, and sustain, as _my_ conclusion, what was _your_ premiss, that (in so far, at any rate, as her dogmatic teaching is concerned,) we have no right to doubt her claims; but that she is still what you so unhesitatingly believed her to be in 1848, a living portion (though it may be now a wounded one) of the one holy Catholic Church.

You have touched upon, though without entering into proofs to sustain it, (which as I have said before, your argument did not there require,) the principle by which the said dogmatic rule is to be established; viz. “the Church of England now holds and insists upon all things, whether of belief or practice, which she held, taught, and insisted upon before the year 1540, unless she has since that time plainly, openly, and dogmatically asserted the contrary.” . . . Again:—“Whatsoever we find handed down from the earlier rituals of the Church of England, and neither limited nor extended in its meaning by any subsequent canon or article, must be understood to signify (on the one hand) fully and entirely all, and (on the other hand) no more than it signified before the revision of the ritual.”

You do not say precisely _why it must_ be so received, unless we are to understand (a position with which I make no quarrel) that common sense and the nature of things declare it to be a self-evident truth, immediately the proposition is announced. But I venture to think, beyond this strong support it has other and more particular evidence, and so rests altogether upon a much wider basis than is overthrown by the general and sweeping rejection of it in your assertion, that you do not now think it tenable. It appears to me in the first place, as I have said, to rest on principles of reason and common sense, and next to admit of particular proof, that the Church of England does retain such teaching.

Let me ask you to examine with attention the evidence I am about to adduce. I would arrange it under the following heads:—

I. Common sense, and the nature of things.

II. Appeals of our Church to antiquity, and the teaching of the Church universal, as well as to her own previous constitutions and canons.

III. Recognition of such previous teaching by the civil power; if not proving the same point positively, yet at least shewing negatively that it is not contradicted.

IV. Some confirmation of the above view from considerations of what the Church of England would deprive herself of, (which no one has ever supposed her to have done) if the principle were to be carried out that her existence is to be dated from the sixteenth century only; and nothing to belong to her rule of faith but what was then determined, and in words set down.

I. Surely it is most certain on grounds of abstract reason and common sense, that things will stand as they are, if they neither fall to decay of themselves, nor are altered by any external power. No one pretends that the dogmatic teaching of a Church will fall to decay of itself. The other alternative, therefore, is all we have here to consider. I say then that, of any building, what you do not destroy, remains. You find such or such a fabric standing. It is, in your opinion, out of repair, or deformed with unnatural or unsightly excrescences, which in process of time have overgrown, or been engrafted upon it. Additions you may conceive them to be to the original structure, and now, injurious or inconvenient. You resolve that these, whether accidental or evilly contrived, shall be removed, and you address yourself to the task. Surely, your own principle in 1848, that what is not removed, remains, is most sound: I know not how to consider it less than axiomatically true. If a tower be taken down here, or a turret there, a window blocked up on this side, or a door opened in that, still the foundations remain the same as ever, unless you absolutely root them up. The basis of the building, except in such case, cannot be imagined to be moved, and just so much of the superstructure as you do not throw down, must stand as heretofore. It may be obscured by something else; it may be much less noticed, or noticeable, than it has been; it may be disregarded in the public eye; one whole side of the building may be clothed in shadow, but yet, if not destroyed, there it will remain, and remain as an integral part of the building to sustain its uses, and to be claimed for them when need is by the owner of the whole, and by his servants at his bidding. And so in that “city set on a hill,” her foundations are the same for ever; and, unless the Church of England at the reformation destroyed the foundations;—save where she may have “plainly and openly” pulled down any thing which had before-time been built up;—that which was laid, and that which was built remains, and is our heritage at this very day. So great is the absolute and essential difference between FORMATION and REFORMATION, and such the argument in favour of your principle in 1848, from abstract reason and the nature of things! {59a}

But further, we are not without an abundance of external proof, if I may so call it, besides this common sense reasoning, shewing that the Church of England at the reformation, if we gather her intentions not from opinions of individual reformers, but from her own authoritative acts, did not mean to adopt a wide and indiscriminate destruction of her previous teaching, and _did_ mean to keep all that she did not mark to be destroyed. This point was the foundation of a large part of the most learned and able argument of Mr. Badeley before the Committee of Privy Council, by which he asserted, and as it seems to me, proved (although the Court appears to have taken absolutely no notice at all of this part of his speech) the certain and positive connection of the Church of England with the previous Church in this country, and with the Church universal, and this, not only by the links of the same apostolical succession, but in the maintenance of a connected doctrine. And the general principle as to antiquity, and the sense of the Church precedent to the reformation, which Mr. Badeley laid down expressly with a view to the matter of the suit in which he was engaged, and in order to apply it immediately to baptism; that same principle, be it observed, is applicable in exactly the same way, and the same fulness to every other article of the faith, unless any where it can be shown that the Church of England at the reformation did “plainly, openly, and dogmatically contradict it.” It would therefore be very much to my present purpose to cite here nearly the whole of this part of Mr. Badeley’s speech, but as you know it well, and can easily refer to it, I shall but extract a few of the more important passages, where the proofs of this principle being the rule of the English Church are given.

“I shall next appeal” Mr. Badeley says, “to antiquity in order to shew more fully that this doctrine for which I contend,” (of course the immediate doctrine which Mr. Badeley had in view, was baptismal regeneration: but his argument reaches, as I have just said, to the full purpose for which I cite it;) “has always been, and must necessarily still be, the doctrine of the Church of England. * * * If there can be any doubt at all about the sense and meaning of our Church, if it can be supposed by any criticism or minute construction, that these Articles and Formularies do leave any question open—do omit in any degree to declare with certainty the doctrine of the Church, resort must be had not to the writings of the reformers, not to the opinions of any individuals, however respectable they may have been; the only appeal can be to the early Church, and the doctrines which that Church professed. That is indisputably the standard to which we are referred, not only by our Prayer Book and our Homilies, but by those who took the most prominent part in the reformation in this country, and it is natural that this should be so, because what was in fact the reformation, and what its object? My friend, Mr. Turner, the other day, spoke of the Church of England in 1552, as being then in its infancy: but according to my understanding, it was then at least more than 1200 years old, for we have evidence of British bishops having attended some of the earliest councils. Some are supposed to have been present at the Council of Nicea, and it is positively stated that three attended the Council of Arles, which was prior to that of Nicea. The Church of England, therefore, is an ancient and an apostolic Church, deriving its succession from the primitive Church, and one and the same through all ages. The Reformation was no _new formation_, not a creation of a _new_ Church, but the correction and restoration of an old one; it professed only to repair and reform, not to found or create—and it assumed to do this, according to the doctrines and usages of the primitive Church. The reformers well knew, that if they did not stand upon that ground, they had no resting place for the soles of their feet; they were fully conscious that if they attempted to alter the Church any otherwise than according to its ancient model, it would crumble to pieces altogether, and probably bury them in its ruins. All they professed, was to strengthen it where it was decayed, and to strip off those additions, which have encrusted or grown upon it in the lapse of time, without the authority of the Scripture, or of primitive tradition; but to this they declared that they adhered; they bound themselves down by this rule, and appealed to antiquity for all they did.” {63}

Then having quoted a passage from Bishop Jewell’s Apology, appealing to antiquity as our Church’s guide, and shewing (to use Mr. Badeley’s words) “that the intention of our reformers in departing from the Church of Rome, was not at all to depart from the doctrine of the Catholic Church,” he goes on to cite confirmatory authority to the same point in even more weighty documents.

“In the preface to the Prayer-book, as well as in the Articles, we have frequent references to the Fathers and the Primitive Church. We have the same in the Homilies; in almost every page they teem with quotations from the Fathers, and support themselves upon the ancient doctrine and the Catholic tradition; and therefore, in inquiring into what was the doctrine of the early Church upon the question now in issue, we are following precisely that course of inquiry, and appealing to that tribunal, which was marked out for us by the reformers themselves. They referred to the primitive doctrine as an indication of their meaning; and of course, if they had departed from that, they would have departed from the Church itself, because the Church, and the faith of the Church, can be but one.”

* * * * *

“I can show, that at the time of the Reformation there certainly was no intention to depart; and was no real departure in any respect from the doctrine of the early Church, on this or any other matter, certainly not on the Sacrament of Baptism, or upon the Sacraments generally; AND WHATEVER WAS NOT ALTERED AT THE PERIOD OF THE REFORMATION, REMAINS, AND CONTINUES TO BE THE DOCTRINE AND LAW OF THE CHURCH TO THIS DAY.” {64}

Again, Mr. Badeley says, “we have authority for looking to antiquity in one or two public documents which are of importance; for in the canons which were made in the year 1571, in that very Convocation which ratified the Thirty-nine Articles, we have this in the directions to preachers:—

“Imprimis vero videbunt, ne quid unquam doceant pro concione quod a populo religiose teneri et credi velint, nisi quod consentaneum sit doctrinæ veteris aut Novi Testamenti, _quodque ex illâ ipsâ doctrinâ_, _Catholici Patres et veteres episcopi collegerint_.”—Pp. 100, 101.