CHARACTER OF THE REFORMED CHURCH 3

This is a very fair representation of academic opinion on the subject of the National Church, and it has the defects of academic opinion. It is supercilious, confident, and partial. None the less, however, it expresses with force and effect so much of the facts as it takes account of. Mr. Brewer, approaching the subject from the side of history, took another view. To his thinking the Reformed Church was a dull, prosaic, useful institution, destitute equally of the romantic charm and the immense abuses of its mediæval predecessor.

"The Reformed Church of England has always found its strongest hold in the middle classes of this country."

Accordingly the explanation of the distinctive features of the English Church must be sought in the habits and ideals of the middle classes.

"The Englishman of the middle class estimates a Church, established or otherwise, by its utility: he measures its importance by its usefulness to his family, to his village, or to his parish, and lastly, perhaps least of all, to himself."*

Mr. Brewer's view was certainly true of the sixteenth century; in some sense it is true to say that this prosaic, utilitarian conception of the Church found expression in Hooker's immortal work, but another spirit revealed its presence in the Reformed Church as the seventeenth century advanced. The Anglo-Catholicism of Laud and his contemporaries was neither the creature of middleclass habits, nor the exposition of middle-class ideals. The Puritanism of Elizabeth's reign, which was specifically the middle-class element in the National Church, became increasingly restive within its pale, and finally, exchanging Nonconformity for Dissent, rose in revolt and levelled to the ground the whole ecclesiastical fabric. Certainly it is in the Dissenting denominations rather Henry VIII., pp. 470-1.

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than in the Established Church that the mind of the middle classes has found fullest expression, and the motive forces of Protestantism, which in the sixteenth century effected the breach with the mediaval tradition of faith and worship, have their most natural and unimpeded course outside the English Church. It was inevitable that in the first stages of the Reformation, when all the forces of change were barely adequate to overcome the conservative power of the existing system, the Reformers should have thought, spoken, and acted with an unbalanced and one-sided vehemence. Their avowed intentions, their personal beliefs, their precedents of ecclesiastical practice must be discounted by the conditions of their time. The essential principles of the English Reformation must be sought elsewhere. In what they destroyed the men of the sixteenth century were often the blind agents of contemporary passions. They wrecked the painted windows, and broke down the carved work of the sanctuary, and ground the "idols" to powder after the Mosaic precedent, and no reasonable man dreams of elevating their iconoclasm into a law of practice.* They poured out their indignation against superstitions, which were gross, and pontiffs, who were scandalous, in language of vehement and brutal scorn, which no just man would rehearse as honourable to their memories or illustrative of their piety. In what they preserved and revised the men of the sixteenth century acted deliberately, for the most part, against the prevailing tendencies of the time, often perhaps against their own preferences. Therefore the essential principles of Anglicanism stand out to view most conspicuously in the Book of Common Prayer.

Cf. MARK PATTISON's dictum: "The only key to a revolutionary epoch is the results which actually establish themselves. Posterity which witnesses these, may by their aid interpret the quarrel out of which they arose."-Essays, vol. ii. p. 3.

ANGLICANISM ESSENTIALLY CATHOLIC 5

The Homilies and even, though in a less degree, the Articles * have a temporary purpose, a transitory validity, a contingent worth. They are, by general consent, already relegated to the category of "historical memorials": but the Prayer-book, representing the purged and ordered current of traditional religion, exhibits the permanent effects of Reformation, and forms the true and abiding standard of Anglican orthodoxy. It embodies the Anglican version of the Catholic system. Anglican history confirms this account of Anglican principles. In times of national unrest, when passions are stirred and men regard with hostile eyes the institutions of society, the Church of England attracts to itself a disproportionate share of unpopularity. It is reviled as an impossible and dishonest compromise, answering clearly to no popular conviction, and serving apparently no popular interest. But in quiet times it is otherwise. The Prayer-book has its effect a distinctive Churchmanship shows itself, and finds expression in art, literature, and theology. That distinctive Churchmanship is not Protestant, but Catholic -if, without offence, we may employ a term so contentious and so inevitable. We submit that the distinctive colour of Nonconformist Christianity is Protestant, and the distinctive colour of Anglican Christianity is Catholic.

The successful assertion of their civil and political rights by the Dissenters has tended to de- Protestantise the Church of England, for, by no conscious effort either

The Clerical Subscription Act of 1865, passed in consequence of an earnest movement for increased intellectual liberty within the Church, abolished the old, strict form of subscription, and substituted a vague and elastic "assent." And at no time have the 39 Articles bound the laity.

+ We have stated below the reasons why we avoid applying this term to the Church of England. In its historic and controversial senses it is not applicable to that church. Broadly we may observe that Protestantism emphasises the individual, and Catholicism the society: thus in the latter the Divine-right Ministry and the Sacraments are of cardinal importance; in the former they are perhaps desirable, but certainly optional

within or without the Church, but solely by the normal working out of a natural law, the Protestant will bestow his spiritual allegiance where his principles have fullest exposition. Of course if Catholicism were rightly identified with the system of the Roman Church, then the consequence, which so many people seem to dread, would properly follow. The gradual elimination of the dis

tinctive Protestant element from the National Church would advance pari passu with the gradual approximation of the National Church to the model of Rome. If, however, Catholicism be truly distinct from that modern system which arrogates to itself a monopoly of the Catholic name, if the notion of a Via Media be something more respectable than that of political compromise, if the National Church be something more legitimate than a theological half-way house where doubt is christened inquiry, and unbelief screened by evasion, then the deProtestantising of the Church of England may be ministerial to the widest influence for good which that Church possesses. Coleridge, in his Table Talk, is related to have spoken with characteristic energy against the common use of the word "Catholic as synonymous with "Roman ":

"The present adherents of the Church of Rome," he said, "are not, in my judgment, Catholics. We are the Catholics. We can prove that we hold the doctrines of the primitive Church for the first three hundred years. The Council of Trent made the Papists what they are.

"A person said to me lately, 'But you will, for civility's sake, call them Catholics, will you not?' I answered that I would not, for I would not tell a lie upon any, much less upon so solemn an occasion. The adherents of the Church of Rome, I repeat, are not Catholic Christians. If they are, then it follows that we Protestants are heretics and schismatics, as indeed, the Papists very logically, from their own premisses, call us. 'Roman Catholics' makes no difference. Catholicism is not capable of degrees or local apportionments. There can be but

one body of Catholics ex vi termini. To talk strictly of Irish or Scotch Roman Catholics is a mere absurdity." "> *

Of course the large-minded philosopher was not excluding Roman Catholics from the pale of salvation; he was only more suo urging a more careful use of religious terms. The English Church was properly Catholic because it had, in his judgment, loyally adhered to the Catholic tradition, without subtracting from or adding to it. We are not here concerned with the Roman Catholic Apologia; but it is vital to the argument of this essay, and, indeed, to the understanding of this volume of essays, to grasp the meaning which is attached to this word “Anglicanism," which appears so frequently in our pages, and figures on the title-page. If the term "Catholicism" had not been so depraved by controversial usage as to prohibit the hope that it could, in the general mind, be severed from its Roman associations, we should certainly have preferred it on many grounds, for nothing is farther from the thought of the writers of these essays than to suggest that the Christian revelation can in any measure be tampered with in deference. to local and political conditions. "Anglicanism" does not essentially mean a revised Christianity-the creature of the English temperament, the product of the English soil but rather the original and changeless Catholic faith and discipline, as both have filtered through the medium of a national history, and found practical expression in the organisation, traditions, and formularies. of a National Church. Anglicanism is properly historic Christianity within the sphere of English influence. Its

Table Talk, pp. 19, 20, 3rd edition. [London, 1851.] See the very sensible remarks on the question of ecclesiastical nomenclature by Provost Salmon in his admirable "Infallibility of the Church," Preface, p. viii. fol. "To speak honestly, of all the sects into which Christendom is divided, none appears to me less entitled to the name Catholic than the Roman."