Anglican clergyman

“ While in many it is made God’s means for conferring incalculable blessings; so that through it the young are instructed, the careless awakened, inquirers directed to the Lord Jesus Christ, and the children of God confirmed in faith and aroused to holy energy for their Lord. The position of a clergyman is such that the influence of his ministry is sure to be felt throughout his parish. He has the sacred privilege of leading the worship of the religious portion of his people. ”

“ But it really does seem to me that the Church of England has gone so very wrong in this matter, that it is not right to keep things smooth any longer. The administration of the Communion is one of the very few religious duties now performed by the clergy for which Ordination has ever been considered necessary. Preaching, and reading the Scriptures, is what a layman can do as well as a clergyman. ”

“ The human title every man had who was a believer. To become a clergyman, it was necessary that the aspirant should be a Christian. No process of ordination (effective as that ceremony was considered) could have made a Jew or a Mahommedan an office-bearer in the Roman Catholic church. This, then, was the preliminary title to the ministry. But it was merely a human qualification. It required to be supplemented by a divine commission—by ordination from God, received at the hands of the successors of the apostles,—and then the clergyman's title was complete. ”

“ If reason were allowed to direct the affections, many would be preserved from rash steps that embitter their whole lives. It seems amusing to a Catholic to find the prospects of a clergyman's happiness so very commonplace; but it will be a relief to learn by-and-by how very different were his ideas when he became a clergyman, and built and dwelt in that identical parsonage that now existed only in his own and his mother's mind. He gets a commission in the Northamptonshire Yeomanry before returning to Cambridge for Hilary term this year. ”

“ All too often the clergy are supposed to have the sole responsibility of spiritually aiding the members of a parish, whereas, the laity, whether they recognize it or not, have almost an equal responsibility. The clergyman does spiritual [Pg 92] work, not because he is a clergyman, but because he is a Christian; though his special vocation determines the exact form his work should take. If there were more intelligent sympathy among the members of the congregation one with another, what strength would come to the penitent struggling to his feet, what added power to the faithful! ”

“ 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 institution, sustained as it was founded by a human authority, without priesthood, without sacraments, without absolution, without the real presence of Jesus upon its altars. ”

“ Whatever men’s opinions as to the policy of Establishment, no one can hesitate to admit that the clergy of the Church are men of pure life and conversation, zealous in the discharge of their duties; and, at present, apparently, more bent on prosecuting one another than on meddling with Dissenters. Theology itself has broadened so much, that Anglican divines put forward doctrines more liberal than those of Priestley ”

“ The Anglican clergy were not like the Irish priesthood, in close sympathy with the peasantry, or like the Scottish ministers, the organs of strong convictions spreading through the great mass of the middle and lower classes. A man of energy, who took his faith seriously, was, like the Evangelical clergy, out of the road to preferment, or, like Wesley, might find no room within the church at all. ”

“ Such I conceive to be a statement of the only view an Anglican can consistently take, unless he plants himself upon the common Protestant ground. According to this, it is ridiculous for him to abstain from going to Catholic services, reading Catholic books, and cultivating the acquaintance of Catholic clergymen and lay-people. The pretence of deposing or degrading clergymen, because they pass to the communion of Rome, is an absurd and impotent attempt at retaliation. ”

“ Because the clergyman is the one minister of Christ in the parish who did not invent himself, who cannot help existing. He is not asserting his ordinary self by being there; he is placed there on public duty. He is charged with teaching the lesson of Christianity, and the head and front of this lesson is to get rid of 'a spirit of watchful jealousy,' which, according to the Dissenter's own showing, is the very spirit which accompanies Dissent. How he is to get rid of it, how he is to win souls to the mildness and sweet reasonableness of Christ, it is for his own conscience to tell him. ”

“ From those various causes a High Church spirit is showing itself far beyond both sections of the clergy who have identified themselves with Anglican movements, and, in fact, is more or less affecting all parties. ”

“ The action of the university, both in what is taught, and in the spirit of the place, is directed more on producing an English gentleman, than a saint or a psychologist. It ripens a bishop, and extrudes a philosopher. I do not know that there is more cabalism in the Anglican, than in other churches, but the Anglican clergy are identified with the aristocracy. ”

“ Many persons have become seriously religious, who had been in the habit of considering that the service of God was only a fitting employment for Sunday. In fine, the spirit of God which breathed on the waters at the commencement is now passing over the British nation and impelling it towards Catholic truth.”
Not a few of those who were once distinguished ministers of the Anglican church are now officiating, with great [pg 122] acceptance, as Catholic priests. Of the 264 priests of the diocese of Westminster, there are 40 who were members of the official or law church. ”

“ There is some chance of success, therefore, in his efforts to convert; but the Protestant clergyman, if he were equally eager, has little or no probability of persuading so much larger a proportion of the population to come over to his Church. The Catholic clergyman belongs to a religion that has always been more desirous of gaining proselytes than the Protestant Church ”

“ Still, there they are, mindful, at least, of “Sabbath worship,” when the majority of their co-religionists see no necessity for remembering it.
Crowds of Anglican clergymen were also found travelling, on their own account, in the Protestant cantons. Five-and-twenty were together one day at Mürren, of all shades and hues, too; from my Lord Bishop, with his wife and daughters, to the young Ritualist curate, in his Roman collar and otherwise Catholic dress, the highest ambition of whose heart is to be taken—or rather mistaken—for a true Catholic priest. ”

“ I had noticed that, at various institutions, excellent clergymen, good preachers, thorough scholars, charming men, when settled as chaplains, had, as a rule, been unable to retain their hold upon the great body of the students. The reason was not far to seek. The average parish clergyman, even though he be not a strong preacher or profound scholar or brilliant talker, if he be at all fit for his position, gradually wins the hearts of his congregation. ”

“ The Puritans wanted to impose their form of discipline on the Church of England, and with this end in view they adopted the simple plan of turning churchwardens and sidesmen into Presbyterian elders, with the power of exercising discipline on the parishioners and of nominating to the patron the man whom he should appoint to a living. Their next move was a bold attempt to oust the Anglican clergy. ”

“ That was not what he required, He wanted nothing but his human title; and this he obtained by the election of the people and the approbation of the learned. Is the man now a clergyman as contradistinguished from a layman? We may call him so for convenience' sake; but it is a distinction without a difference. In the Romish church the clergy were separated from the laymen by the whole diameter which lies between the human and the divine. In their ordination the priests received a divine commission which the laity did not possess. ”

“ It is a curious fact, but one which has struck many even of those who have not yet found courage to knock and ask for admittance into the Catholic Church, that in proportion has a sect, or people, or nation, stray far from unity of the one true fold, so to their pastors and teachers neglect and despise that visiting and looking after their flocks, which forms with us such a prominent part of every parish priest's or missionary's duty. The High-Church Anglican Protestant clergymen—although still very far short of what is done by our clergy—come next to the Catholic priest in this work ”

“ Her mother was an invalid, her father a man of gloomy and almost fierce disposition, their means were so limited as to border upon poverty, and as if to complete the dreary picture, the scenery about the parsonage was "austere and lugubrious to contemplate, like the sea beneath an impending tempest."
In England the clerical profession is totally unlike the holy mission of a Catholic clergyman. The ecclesiastical life there is a career, not a vocation. ”

“ Nonconformist services are less plain; some go from their ranks because they dislike the “bald” worship in the chapel, and prefer the more elaborate forms of the Anglican Church, which in its turn is for the same reason left by others who find their tastes gratified by the complete thing, as it is to be enjoyed full blown in the Roman Catholic communion. ”

“ This is the land of sects. An Englishman is a free man, and goes to Heaven by any road he pleases.
But although anybody may serve God after his own fashion, their true religion, the one in which fortunes are made, is the Episcopal sect, called the Anglican Church, or, simply and pre-eminently, the Church. No office can be held in England or Ireland except by faithful Anglicans; a circumstance which has led to the conversion of many Noncomformists.
The Anglican clergy have retained many Catholic ceremonies, 278 above all that of receiving tithes with a most scrupulous attention. ”

“ If no one dreams now of any necessity of consulting the clergy, as such, with reference to the fashion in clothes or the economic and social policy of the nation, it is partly because those matters are no longer considered as religious, but purely temporal. The opinion of a clergyman, therefore, is of no more value than that of the well-informed layman, with his broader practical experience of life, if, indeed, of as much. ”

“ The bishops therefore, we infer, have just as much power as the people choose to give them, and we see no reason why the congregations should not enlarge and restrict that power at pleasure—make a new constitution, if they wish, every year, and treat their prelates as the savage treats his idol, which he sets upon an altar for worship in the morning, and if things go not well with him, kicks into the kennel at night. Indeed, since the foundation of the Anglican Church the episcopate has always been treated with scant ceremony. ”

“ There is nothing sacramental in Anglican orders, and there never was, since England broke away from the Church, and, consistently enough, orders were expunged from the Protestant catalogue of sacraments in the very infancy of the Reformation. They still keep up a semblance of orders: they have what they call the diaconate, the priesthood, and the consecration of bishops. A deacon is ordained much in the same way as our own deacons, and he can perform all the duties of the parish, with the exception of the Communion Service. ”

“ There were indeed among the clergy men of brighter genius and men of wider attainments: but during a long period there was none who more completely represented the order, none who, on all subjects, spoke more precisely the sense of the Anglican priesthood, without any taint of Latitudinarianism, of Puritanism, or of Popery. He had, in the days of the Exclusion Bill, when the power of the dissenters was very great in Parliament and in the country, written strongly against the sin of nonconformity. ”

“ There is nothing in the Anglican ordinal to show that the Holy Ghost is given for the consecration of a bishop in the Roman sense. In 1704 John Gordon, formerly Anglican bishop of Galloway, gave to the Holy Office an account of the manner in which he had been consecrated. The Sacred Congregation, with the pope’s approval, declared his orders to be null. The constant practice has been to reordain unconditionally Anglican priests and deacons. ”

“ Inheriting as he did all the religious affinities of his mother, these were compacted and made sensitive by years of silent protest against the proud worldly sufficiency of his father, the Major. Such qualities and experience found repose in the unyielding dogmas of the Westminster divines. At thirty the clergyman was as aged as most men of forty-five,—seared by the severity of his opinions, and the unshaken tenacity with which he held them. He was by nature a quiet, almost a timid man ”

“ For the clergyman, it is only necessary that he should be orthodox, humble, and pious; that he should on no occasion, right or wrong, set himself in opposition to his ecclesiastical superiors; that he should preach unpretending sermons; that he should never make jokes, nor understand the jokes of another: this is all that he wants to get on respectably. ”