The Express.
London, England, 1851-10-28 00:00:00

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LONDIM TrESDA l', OCTOBER 28.

ISt far the most valuable contribution lately made
to the defeace of those great principles of the lie-
formation, the right and the duty of private judg-
ment for all men, and the right and duty of all com-
munities or societies to form and to organise religious
corporations or churches for themselves, is the essay
cm the Anyl eCotholie Theory in the present number
of the Eliatergh Reehor. For therein, that theory,
—viz., the existence of a visible church having alone
a duly constituted priesthood, which in its turn has
alone authority and power to duly and efficacionsly
administer the sacraments to the laity, is examined by
a writer who, to all the dialectic skill of the school
to which he is opposed, and to more than all their
felicity of illustration and power over language, adds
the severest habits of logical precision, of historical
accuracy, and of scriptural fidelity. From his pen
we have, therefore, what may be almostricalled a
mathematical demonstration of the unsoundness of
the apiritolate, as it has been audaciously termed, and
what, at all events, is a clenching argument against
the consistency of the Anglo.catholic theory with
the original design, or its adoption with the pro-
longed existence of the church of England.
The reviewer commences by pointin out that,
g
though the Ecclesiastical Titles Act of last session
has vindicated the exclusive power of the Sovereign
of this Halm to confer territorial titles as against the
Court of Rome, the statute has done nothing to
resist the fur more serious aggressions of the Church
of Rome in this kingdom—aggressions invited by its
internal condition. lie next remarks how the recon-
ciliation to Rome of the many eminent men who
have lately seceded from the Church of England IV as
•not primarily produced by dogmatic affinities, that
it was not the attractions of her peculiar and
strictly religious doctrines which drew them onward,
hut that it was their inability to find iii the church
of their own country the tests and qualifications of
that apostolic, traditional, and universal church,
which hail taken possession of their faculties and
their fcrlings. and produced in them a sort of sensu-
ous Christianity, requiring a warmer climate for its

full development than ours.
The party amongst the English clergy who some
ten yrars ago adapted this view of their own church,
who regarded her as a branch, and as the only pure
one, of the apostolic church, were not as a body re-
markable for the supremacy of logic in their writing*.
They generally were men of learning, of observation,
of gnat power over words ; but few of them had the
accuracy and precision of thought, the faculty of
throwing :taly the husk and retaining the kernel, and
the simplicity of well evolved principles which almost
always disting,niah the successful pursuers of truth.
Nut without any exception all the ribltst of this
party have at lust failed to find in the church, on
whose behalf they first advanced those pretensions,
those marks und signs, and assurances of their re-
ality, and-have gone over to Rome, where, as they
assure us, they have found them.
Still it is quite posorible that the see. ders may have
besot illogieul in taking their departure un such
grounds and in their secession ; tool the question,
therefore, to u bieli the reviewer mainly addiesaes
biome!' is the posstawion of any claims of the church
of England to the truth of this theory. The con-
clusion to which he comes is, of course, that unly to
which hie boreal fidelity could arrive—that the church
of England is only an example of the right estab-
lished at the Reformation, by men who had pre-
viously toted ,on what was purely dogmatic in the
then controversy on the duty of private judgment,
of a cation organising fur itself a religious corpora-
tion ; u right crery other nation has, or bodies of
Milli in a nation have as good and indefeasible a
right to exercise fur it and themselves, whenevrr and
however they please- -always keeping predominant,
when so acting, the gnat objects of a church or
religious organisation.
This was the theory of Lt-rifiric. IrAerstoxi.
has, in his I.ife of the great Reformer, quoted a
pa:wage, in which it is laid down in that bold and
burning language. which was so scornful and scorch-
ing of all pocerthaal fallacies:
It ha. Nei. saki that the Pope. the bishops, the priests,
sad MO.' • tin dwell in convents, form the spiritual or ve-
tlraisstical date; and that the primes, nobles, citizens, and
pewit& form the welsher state or laity. This is a fine story
may, 1... t no one, bum see, be alarmed nt it. .411 ehris-
tians belong to the spiritual state ; and there is no other
differcure between them that that of the fisactioas they dis-
charge. _ .

And this great truth LUTHER went on to illustrate
by an example which rvduets the opposite position
to an absurdity, and a denial of religious ordinances:
If any pious laymen were banish." to a desert, and
having WI regularly consecrated priest among thesis, were
So nitric to choose for that (Mice one of their number,
tftwricil or unmarried, this man would by as truly a priest
•• it he had been consecrated by all the bishops in the
world. Augustine. Ambrose, and Cypriot' were chosen
in this manner. Ilene it follows that laity and priests,
priori' and bishops, or, as they say, the clergy aud the
laity. hale in reality nothing to distinguish them but their
functions. They all belong to the same (state; but all
hay,. not the same work to perform.
This reduction of clergy and laity into a mere
functional diflerencu gotta at once to the very root of '+
the pressatt contra versy. For if, as Lertts.ft con-
tends, the clergy do nut, by virtue of an unbroken
line of 0 LICCM. I from apostolic times, constitute
irrespectivelY, (as the Bishop of EXETER lately
argued) of their doctrinal purity or error, one great
universal church, to some diocesan brunch of which,
the bisl',op a. 'writ., all Christ ions oue obedience, but
arc or.ly, uv 1.1:11IEK lays down, in each separate
and distinct religious society or community, its
officers or functionaries, then the pretensions of a
visible church vanish from our sight, and the princi-
ples of the Reformation (which were also the prac-
tice of primitive times) become the only possible
rules of ('bristiun organisation. And thrit Is what
the reviewer so irresistibly establishes; therein fol-
lowing out, in perhaps a happier style, the noble
argument of Archbishop WIRTELY, whose larger
writings on ecclesiastical polity form text-books that
can be plated in the hands of all protestant students.
About ouch men as the reviewer and Dr.WIIATELY
there is illdVed a courage and a breadth of view
that might well shame the timid and safe episcopacy
of the church of Englaud—no matter whether evan-
gelical or not in its views. They arc not alarmed by
such springes to catch weak consciences, as imputa-
tions of 'whim, as charges of disloyalty to the church
of which they are members : fur t'ley know and feel,
and have reason for the faith in that their church
cannot exist, and has no existence', as a branch of as
universal catholic church ; that it rests solely and only
on national choice and will ; and that to deprive it of a
national character by attempting to place it on a larger
foundation, is to throw it on to the surface of a quick-
sand, where it must sink of its own weight, unless
rescued therefrom by reconciliation with Rome. They
do not, however, underrate the-privileges or advan-
tages of a C'hristian community ; they do not as-
sert that whatever nations or bodies of men in
a nation have an undoubted right to do, they would
be necessarily right in doing; they do not contend,
to use the archbishop's language, that what is lett
to their discretion is therefore left to their caprice, or
that they are to regard any point that is not ribs:).
lutaly essential as therefore absolutely indifferent."
But what they do claim is religious liherty fur men,
applied necoiding to the beet of their judgment, and
under a sense of responsibility, within those limits
which revelation has left at men.s disposal, anal what
they are 1/r. WILITELY has thus powerfully and
succinctly described.
'They (that is dissidents from any particular national
church), have an undoubted right, accenting to the prinal-
pbs I have been endeavouring to astahlish, to appoint such
orders of Christian ministers, and to allow to each such
functions as they judge most conducive to the great ends of
the society; they may assign to the sr/ioteor to a p .i1;01$ of
they, the otter of onlaining oftv.ir as their summon;
they tuay appoint one superintend, ~t sat the rt.% or sacra!,
wader the title of patriarch, archbishop, bishop, nod:ratr,
or any other that they may prefer ; they may mike the op-
poiNtincot of these fur lite, or for a limited period—by
el, scion or by rotatiou—with a greater or Ica extrusive
jurisilietion ; and they have a similar diserctiomai7 power
with respect to Liturgies, festivals, ceicmunies and what-
ever else is left at large in the scriptures.
And why have nations and men in nations this