Anglicans

“ CHAPTER I. HOW I FOUND MYSELF IN THE CATACOMBS.
I am an Anglican of the Anglicans, I mean that I am τετράγωνος a Perfect Man, with four angles impinging upon my neighbours and producing among them many a sore. Whithersoever I go, into whatsoever society, I take my angles with me. They do much damage, but they establish the principle of Anglicanism. ”

“ We should, perhaps, except the Anglicans, who are less a sect of Christendom than a clique or set of recipients of government pap, with no fixed doctrinal or moral principles save an overweening idea of their own eminent respectability, a thorough knowledge of the buttered side of their own bread, and a keen appreciation of number one. They have become hereditarily accustomed to consider Anglicanism less as a scheme of doctrine and morals than as an institution for distributing government patronage among their ministers, and for securing in these a somewhat superior police in aid of the state. ”

“ Anglicans having destroyed, as far as their influence extends, the whole authority of the living church, they affect, since they must obey something, to reserve all their obedience for what they call the primitive church. ”

“ Those Anglicans who know the true Church, but do not become Roman Catholics, thinking that they approach very near the Catholic Church, because their prayers and ceremonies are like many prayers and ceremonies of the Catholic Church, and because their creed is the Apostles' Creed. ”

“ Weak in their reasoning, and selfish in their objects, the Anglicans were of importance only from the support of the conservative English instinct, which then as ever preferred the authority of precedent to any other guide, and defended established opinions and established institutions because they had received them from their fathers, and because their understandings were slow in entertaining new convictions. ”

“ Several high-church periodicals, widely circulated, such as the Union Review and the Church News, lay down, with extraordinary boldness and precision, doctrines which the so-called reformers labored to explode. Rumors are ever afloat of important conversions about to take place, and thus Catholics in England are constantly encouraged, while Anglicans are proportionally unsettled and alarmed. The Establishment is dying by the hands of its own pastors. ”

“ The Calvinists recognized only two sacraments—baptism and the Lord's Supper. Lutherans and Anglicans retained, in addition to the two sacraments, the rite of confirmation, and Anglicans also the rite of ordination. The official statement of Anglicanism that there are "two major sacraments" has made it possible for some Anglicans—the so- called High Church party—to hold the Catholic doctrine of seven sacraments. ”

“ I cannot help hoping that your own reading of the fathers will on the whole bear me out in the above account of their teaching concerning the Blessed Virgin. Anglicans seem to me to overlook the strength of the argument adducible from their works in our favor, and they open the attack upon our mediaeval and modern writers, careless of leaving a host of primitive opponents in their rear. I do not include you among such Anglicans; you know what the fathers assert ”

“ The other method of defending the reformation of the Church of England, is by admitting, that the Church of Rome, as the Anglicans call it, has been, and is, a true church, teaching with authority all doctrines necessary to salvation; that the Church of England, having purified itself from errors and abuses, is also a true church, an integral portion of the catholic or universal church, with all the authority to such a body ecclesiastical, of due right, appertaining. ”

“ First, in the historyof the Arians I found the same phenomena which I had found in the Monophysites: the pure Arians were the Protestants, the semi-Arians were the Anglicans, and Rome now was what it was then. Secondly, the bishops, one after another, began to charge against me in a formal, determinate movement. Third, it was proposed by Anglican authorities to establish an Anglican bishopric in Jerusalem--a step which amounted to a formal denial that the Anglican Church was a branch of the Catholic Church, and to a formal assertion that the Anglican was a Protestant Church. ”

“ Moreover, High-Church Anglicans are avowedly bent on improving their church; their church is not their guide or their mother, but rather an institution which has so far fulfilled its purpose but imperfectly, and which, by a judicious process of reformation, they hope to assimilate to an ideal existing in their own minds. ”

“ The spirit of inquiry which led men to question the claims of an infallible priesthood, and culminated in the breakdown of the power of the Roman Catholic Church in England, had its birth among the middle classes. The modern scientific movement, to which the Anglican Church has been so bitterly opposed, started from the same source. The battle for freedom of worship, whether fought by Anglicans against Romanists, or by Dissenters against Anglicans, has been mainly carried on by members of the middle classes. ”

“ All these have something in common with the Roman, Greek, and Anglican communions, and even profess with them to believe the Apostles' and Nicene creeds. The Methodists have bishops, priests or elders, and deacons, as the Anglicans, and adopt the same articles of faith. The churches named have presbyters, and so have Presbyterians, the continental Reformed, and the Lutheran churches; some of the Lutheran churches even have bishops. There is something in common between these and the churches the author claims to be catholic. ”

“ Catholic writers were impelled by a wish to smooth the way for the return of Anglicans to holy unity. Both, indeed, thought that in view of studies brought up to the level of ^ecent research, and of new documents rescued from oblivion, it was not inopportune to re-examine the question by Our authority. And We, not disregarding such desires and opinions, and, above all, obeying the dictates of apostohc charity, have considered that nothing should be left untried that might in any way tend to preserve souls from injury or procure their advantage. ”

“ But as there is one and the same sun shining over the whole world, so the preaching of the truth shines everywhere, and enlightens all men who desire its knowledge." [58]
What, then, was the motive of Anglicans, in maintaining the unity of particular churches, and the institution of bishops cohering with it, to be necessary, while they denied the necessity of unity in the Church universal, or of a Primate's institution, to effect universal unity? ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Anglicans insisted upon those parts of Scripture which relate to the Holy Trinity, the Incarnation, and the Atonement, and to the ordinances of baptism and the Lord’s Supper. They used the priesthood and rites of Judaism for the support of their own views regarding sacerdotal ministrations. Diocesan episcopacy and Apostolical succession they endeavoured to deduce from the New Testament ”

“ The odium theologicum is ever hotter between sections of the same party which are divided by trifling differences, than between the open representatives of antagonist principles; and Anglicans and Lutherans, instead of joining hands across the Channel, endeavoured only to secure each a recognition of themselves at the expense of the other. ”

“ He is a brave warrior, and wields a heavy weapon; he studies his foe well before he strikes, but, when he strikes, he strikes in a vital part.
We do not mean to say that he has finished the much-discussed question of Anglican ordinations, or that Anglicans will hereafter have nothing to say. They will always have something to say so long as the Establishment lasts. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ As to the inference you draw from what I call the fundamental principles of our government, prove that the Anglican church holds them, and I will allow her to be an ally of despotism; but you shall bring your proofs from her canons, articles, and liturgy, not from the servants of court-chaplains, or the flatteries of those who forget the priest in the sycophant. Wolves and worldlings creep into every church. The apostolic age had its Demas, and ours has its Williams. ”

“ This doctrine has been made of faith in the Roman communion, but has not yet ecumenical acceptance, and therefore may be doubted without sin by members of the Greek or Anglican Churches. What we need to avoid, as the Lambeth Conference has reminded us, is a purely insular and provincial attitude in relation to doctrines which have not been formally set forth by Anglican authority. The Anglican Church has tried its best to impress upon us that there is no such thing as an Anglican Religion; there is but one Religion--the Religion of God's Catholic Church. ”

“ The Anglican church is marked by the grace and good sense of its forms, by the manly grace of its clergy. The gospel it preaches, is, `By taste are ye saved.' It keeps the old structures in repair, spends a world of money in music and building ”

“ An Anglican church,—nationally independent, without giving up its connexion with the reformed churches of the continent, and reformed, without however letting fall the ancient forms of episcopacy,—in accordance with the ideal, as it was originally understood, was at length, after a hard schooling of trials, struggles, and disasters, really set on foot. ”

“ If we examine [21] Anthony Gilby's 'One Hundred Points of Poperie yet remaining which deform the English Reformation' (he enumerates in fact 151) , omitting those concerning the administration of justice in the Bishop's Courts, which were only indirectly a religious question, we shall find that no one of the real doctrines of the Anglican Church is in question, but trifling matters of vestments or ceremonies, to which, as we have seen, the Anglican divines of that age attached no importance, and many of which they would willingly and even gladly have given up. ”

“ But, as We stated at the beginning, there is nothing We so deeply and ardently desire as to be of help to men of good-will by showing them the greatest consideration and charity. Wherefore We ordered that the Anglican Ordinal, which is the essential point of the whole matter, should be once more most carefully examined.
In the examination of any rite for the effecting and administering of a sacrament, distinction is rightly made between the part which is ceremonial and that which is essential, usually called the matter and form. ”

“ Contrast, for instance, the Calvinists with the Greeks, or France with the north of Germany, or the Protestant and Catholic communions in Ireland. As to England, it is scarcely doubtful what would be the state of its Established Church if the Liturgy and Articles were not an integral part of its establishment; and when men bring so grave a charge against us as is implied in your volume, they cannot be surprised if we in turn say hard things of Anglicanism. [Footnote 20] In the Catholic Church Mary has shown herself, not the rival, but the minister of her Son. ”

“ With regard to the Anglican clergy, it may be observed that the state church of England is almost entirely for the benefit of the aristocracy, which sees its younger sons enter her “orders” all the more gladly because their subsistence is thus provided for without the patrimony of the head of the family being much diminished—the children of the aristocracy thus aiding to maintain an institution to which in a great measure its influence is owing. As to the German Protestant clergy, they are neither so influential nor so respected as the Anglican. ”

“ 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 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. ”