THE

CHRISTIAN REMEMBRANCER.

OCTOBER, 1843.

Speculum Ecclesiæ Anglicana; or, Some Account of the Principles and Results of the Reformation of the Church of England. By JOHN HARTLAND WORGAN, M. A. Curate of Calthorpe, &c. London: Parker. Leicester: Crossley. 1843.

THIS is an admirable work, obviously the result of much study and reflection, vindicating, as we think, successfully, that which ought to require no vindication among us-the main character and essential principles of our English Reformation; taking a cheerful view of our prospects, and marked throughout by that hearty loyalty to the Reformed Church of England which we believe to be a necessary condition, as well of success in removing her defects as of all other healthy exertion within her pale. This last point is so important that we propose pausing on it, and devoting a couple of articles to the consideration of our ecclesiastical condition and character.

Is the Church of England Catholic or not? This is a question that is asked alike by friend or foe. If any understand it as an inquiry whether or not the Church of England be the Catholic Church, we must inform them at once, that we have no intention of either vindicating or impugning a thesis, the very proposal of which is an extreme absurdity. We should not, indeed, have alluded to this preposterous inquiry, had it not really been raised both by Romanist and Anglican writers, the former of whom are too glad to see made, and some of the latter of whom have been too willing virtually to make, such a ridiculous claim. When we ask whether or not the Church of England be Catholic, our inquiry can rationally and fitly take but two

directions. We may ask if she be a legitimate branch of the Catholic Church, so as alone to have rightful authority over those placed within her geographical boundaries: or secondly, we may ask if she be Catholic in tone, temper, and character, manifesting the reality of her profession to this effect, by her words and by her deeds.

Of these inquiries we have no intention, at present, of entering on the former. It is a question of facts, and of facts easily ascertained. It has been already abundantly discussed, and if there be any one of our readers who feels unsettled on the subject, we must refer him to the works of our standard divines, as containing all that can be said on it.

The latter, however, is ground that still remains in great measure to be worked; for, when our Romish assailants are tired of impeaching the validity of our orders, the sufficiency of our liturgy, and the orthodoxy of our doctrine, they not unfrequently, at present, shift the discussion from those points to our actual temper and practice, and impugn our Catholicity, by denying that we bear the fruits of Catholicity. They argue, "it is very well to say that you are Catholic, that you have never quitted the unity of the Church, that you hold the doctrine, and join in the sacraments, of the whole body of the faithful; that you have never broken the sacred line of the priesthood, that you propose no terms of communion but such as are entirely Catholic, and refuse none such as it is Catholic to demand of you. Granting all these things, for argument's sake, how come you to be so uncatholic in all you think, and say, and do? Try as you like, you cannot act the part which you claim for yourselves your own habitual conduct condemns you. From the date of that event which you call the Reformation, your Church has been nothing but a national institution, and all your talk about Christ's universal kingdom and holy Catholic Church, has not opened to you one glimmering of communion with any christian souls born out of your own geographical limits." Nor is this estimate of the Church of England confined to Romanists. There are those among her own children who form a very similar one; who consider her to be indeed the branch of the Catholic Church to which they owe allegiance, but nevertheless to have forfeited every claim to their affection, except that essential one, to be, in short, as uncatholic as it is possible for a Catholic Church to be.

Now, it is notionally possible that the case should be so. There might be a Church, having rightful authority over her children, and yet acting a cruel part by them, even as there are parents who must be reverenced and obeyed as such, though they have no personal claims on the respect or affection of their offspring. The Church of England may be the representative of the Church Catholic to Englishmen; and yet may be the

worst branch of that Church,-the coldest and the most neglectful,-may do less than any other for the spiritual advancement of her children, and may be the most willing of any to remain in a state of isolation, and consequent languor and decay. It is very distressing if the case be so; but it is, as we have said, supposable that it should, and many seem to think it certain that it is. Let us ask how far the facts justify such an impression.

We need hardly say, at the outset, that the interruption of communion between ourselves and the Latin Church, however great a calamity, does necessarily involve no loss of Catholicity. If our position can be justified in this respect, (as we have taken for granted,) then, though we must bear meanwhile with the partial loss of one of the most beautiful fruits of Catholicity, we may ourselves be altogether Catholic. The intercommunion of churches must not be confounded with the unity of the Church. The one is an unchangeable reality, "eternal in the heavens," of which each integral portion of the visible Church on earth is the sacrament, and to which each such portion conducts her faithful members: the other is a manifestation that men and churches perceive and enter into that reality, one of the fruits of Catholicity, but not Catholicity itself. For every faithful branch, nay, every faithful member, of the Church is so far Catholic; and only as being so, can either the one or the other be within the promises. Catholicity consists in having such an apprehension of the faith, and following such a line of conduct, as shall produce a capacity of, and readiness for, christian sympathy and communion with any church or any man willing, on true principles, to grant and return them; and if they be withheld, the offerer is not one whit the less Catholic. The question, then, comes to this, whether, the Catholicity of her formal position being granted, the Church of England does exhibit such capacity and readiness,whether she be not herself too well pleased with her insular independence-whether she may not have discouraged Catholic communion when it might have taken place-whether she has not stinted her children of that largeness of sympathy and fellowship to which it was her part, as a Church, to have invited and raised them. This is some of the complaint which certain of them are now making against her. Let us see if they have any good reason for making it.

We have several times taken for granted the Catholicity of our formal position; i. e. we have taken for granted that our Church, as a Church, did nothing material at the Reformation, or subsequently, which she had not a right to do; nothing, therefore, which justified other churches in interrupting their communion with her. Our own convictions go further; for, since we believe the integral character, and consequent occasional independence, of churches to be as vital a truth as is the duty and privilege of intercommunion, we cannot but think that it

was right to bear a witness for it; and that, under the circumstances, the work of reformation could not have been accomplished without such a witness. But this is beside our present question. Has our Church ever exulted, or ever contentedly acquiesced in a state of separation from other churches? It costs us little to admit that her rulers, at the time of the Reformation, may not have always carried about with them a due sorrow for the schism in which they were taking a part. Such an admission in no way commits the Church, which has entered into the benefit of their labours; for she, simply as being a Church, must ever have a largeness and perfection beyond that of any of her individual members; they serve her each in his place and degree, each seeing his own especial side of that truth which she retains as a whole. While, therefore, it is no disparagement to the Anglican reformers, that they did not escape that one-sidedness which is more or less the necessary condition of each individual's thought and action; that, occupied with one great and holy work to which the Head of the Church had called them, they were not mentally and morally fitted for every other;* such considerations can still less be made an imputation against that Church which is committed to nothing about those men but their public and formal proceedings; and to whom in every other respect they are but two or three individuals among her children of one particular time. In this imperfect state of affairs, no truth, especially no long-forgotten truth, is ever very sedulously pursued, except at the temporary and partial expense of some other; it is our duty, for our own parts, to see that this be as little the case as possible; but as we can hardly hope altogether to avoid its occurrence in ourselves, so are we bound to look most leniently on it in others. As far, then, as we have yet gone, no worse case is made out against the Church of England than that, during the bustle and crisis of her Reformation, those who were engaged in that work may not, perhaps, have always kept their minds awake to considerations not directly connected with it.

Passing, then, the period of Reformation, what have been the subsequent tone and temper of our Church in this matter of communion with the rest of Christendom? That the seventeenth century saw no greater signs of christian intercourse between the English and other churches than had taken place during the sixteenth, we frankly admit; but we think that the same kind of considerations which we have pleaded on behalf of the

It ought, moreover, to be mentioned, that the reformers generally cannot be considered to have known how vast and how long-enduring was to be the suspension of communion in Western Christendom; and that, the moment that fact became too apparent to be mistaken, English churchmen felt themselves called to a new line of thought and action, and the foundations were laid of that theology which has ever since been the characteristic of genuine English divines, and by means of which only can a more extensive development of Catholicism than we have yet seen be looked for.

one, may be abundantly extended to the other also. There was enough and more than enough to do at home; and, consequently, there was little or no leisure to look abroad. As, during the sixteenth century, the English Church had to work hard to get herself reformed, so, during the seventeenth, she had to toil first for her Catholicity, and next for her very existence. There was surely ample excuse for a communion leaving her foreign relations unattended to, which had to defend the necessary organization of the Church, and nearly every point of Catholic practice against puritan objections; then to struggle under persecution for her very existence; then, when restored to her worldly prosperity, to look about her and learn what was altered in her situation; then to guard herself against latitudinarianism and liberalism during a political crisis but too connected with those evils, under new rulers but too much disposed to favour them, and amid a literature inspired by their influence. Throughout all this period she was, in one form or other, fighting for her very life; so that we are brought down to the eighteenth century, without having yet seen the Reformed Church at any tolerable leisure to look beyond the enemies who were continually environing her.

But the eighteenth century, it will be said, was one of peace and repose, during which a Church, in the smallest degree Catholic, would have striven after a more extended fellowship than that embraced within the Anglican communion-would, although the doors of Western Christendom were shut against her, have turned to the East, and to her Colonies, cultivating the friendship of the one and enlarging her own borders throughout the other. Those who do not prefer this as an accusation against our Church, will for the most part meet it by disclaiming all sympathy with the spirit of the eighteenth century, and, as we may say, altogether washing their hands of it; for that unfortunate period stands alone among the ages in having no good word said for it. Nothing has ever received such universal abuse in the nineteenth century as its immediate predecessor. No laudator temporis acti ever extends to it the benefit of his disposition. No man wishes to revive its fashions; no man who deems that he has "fallen on evil days," turns a wistful eye to it, or anything belonging to it; no dreamy person is spoken of as living in it; no affected writer imitates its authors; its architecture is shuddered at; its literature despised; its canons of criticism listened to with a shrug; its great names mentioned with uplifted eye-brow; its decisions reversed; and its religion denounced alike by churchman and by sectary.

*We suspect we are right in keeping to the male sex; for certainly the other seems smit with some part at least of their great grandmothers' gear.