Free Church

“ The Church is not a true and perfect Society, entirely free; nor is she endowed with proper and perpetual rights of her own, conferred upon her by her Divine Founder; but it appertains to the civil power to define what are the rights of the Church, and the limits within which she may exercise those rights. ”

“ True freedom can only live with true loyalty and obedience, such as our Prayer-book, our Catechism, our Church of England preaches to us. It is a Church meant for free men, who stand each face to face with their Heavenly Father: but it is a Church meant also for loyal men, who look on the law as the ordinance of God, and on their rulers as the ministers of God ”

“ If the bishops are in disrepute and the inferior clergy are falling away, it can hardly be necessary to tell us that the church has no real hold upon the people; that follows as a matter of course. Accordingly, the most interesting of the debates were on the best methods of giving vitality to the work of the church—on ministrations to the laboring classes, on free churches and free preaching, on the abuses of the new system, and on the need of something equivalent to the preaching Orders and Congregations of our own church. ”

“ My church, the Catholic Church, is, by virtue of my citizenship and my right of conscience, the law of the state so far as her own freedom is concerned, and as is necessary to protect and defend her in the free and full enjoyment of her rights. ”

“ Again, it is intolerable that in the canon law so much importance is attached to the freedom, life and property of the clergy, as though the laity were not also as spiritual and as good Christians as they, or did not belong to the Church. Why are your life and limb, your property and honor so free, and mine not? We are all alike Christians, and have baptism, faith, Spirit and all things alike. If a priest is killed, the land is laid under interdict, [26] —why not when a peasant is killed? ”

“ The Free Churchmen, on the other hand, while maintaining as their cardinal principle that the Church must be free from all State interference, and while therefore protesting against the existing Establishment, held that the Church, if its freedom were adequately guaranteed, might lawfully accept establishment and endowment from the State. ”

“ Add to this the anticipated enjoyment of the liberty in wait for him on the eastern lands of Catholic faith. Yet the prospective and future return to the land of bondage must from time to time have thrown shadows of sadness over the gushing and joyful youth at school. But now comes a truce to religious dissensions and family [Pg 543] quarrels; a victory is gained: the church is free, her shackles broken. Catholic and non-Catholic worship at the altar of their choice freely and publicly. They are all children of the same political family, members of the same moral body! ”

“ To the Church much more than justice is to be done; it is to be ‘made free’, which, I fear, means that the Kings are not to appoint its bishops. But later Kings always found a way of avoiding this restriction. ”

“ I wish to state here that my personal experience in this Church for half of the time which I have spent in this life, informs my judgment that such is not the case, that the Latter-day Saints are a free people, and the system which they have adopted—which they understand to be of divine origin—is calculated in its character to make them free. ”

“ It is a doctrine which the Church cannot afford to give up, and it is a doctrine to which every denomination holds in some form. We differ only as to the principle upon which the election is based. We Presbyterians, adhere rigidly to the Bible, and say that God’s choice grows out of His own will and pleasure, while our opposers affirm that it is founded upon the good works of the creature, and thus make salvation a matter of debt, and not of pure, free grace. ”

“ But yet, though upon such consideration, a free use of your own judgment, as to providing for your own Salvation is granted you; yet, methinks in this matter you have some greater cause to suspect it, since several Churches, having of late taken liberty to examine by Gods Word more strictly the corrupt doctrins of former ages, yet these reformed, as well as the other unreformed, stand opposite to you; and neither those professing to follow the Scriptures, nor those professing to follow Tradition, and Church-Authority ”

“ Submission to the disciples of a Christian church must be voluntary, and not by the constraint of force or hypocrisy. In Christ's church ALL must be free, and not a mixture of free-men and the slaves of sin.—Ed. ”

“ Hardly anywhere was the Church free from them. Let us ask only one question here: by what power were they resisted? The human mind had then the fullest liberty of action in Christians. It was by a free choice—a choice accompanied with danger, and persisted in through suffering—that men became Christians. The liberty which men exercised in becoming Christians they could use further against Christian doctrine, by innovating ”

“ We will, that each particular church as a body, actuated by the same spirit, choose her own preacher and support him by a free-will offering, without a written call or subscription, admit members, remove offenses; and never henceforth delegate her right of government to any man or set of men whatever. ”

“ The first is the desire that the living Church should be as free as possible; hence the Catholic Church and its ministers everywhere welcome the growth of local as against centralized power. They do so unconsciously but none the less strongly. ”

“ XVII. Religious Liberty God alone is Lord of the conscience, and He has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men which are contrary to His Word or not contained in it. Church and state should be separate. The state owes to every church protection and full freedom in the pursuit of its spiritual ends. ”

“ A further cause which has operated to prevent theology from obtaining the benefit of free discussion is the interpretation popularly placed upon the constitution of the Church Establishment. For fifteen centuries of its existence, the Christian Church was supposed to be under the immediate guidance of the Holy Spirit, which miraculously controlled its decisions, and precluded the possibility of error. ”

“ When you so kindly consented to assist me in giving to the world the views of Free Churchmen, I think there was a distinct understanding that our chief consideration was to be the Free Churches themselves, looked upon as a great body of closely allied Christians who are prepared to offer their system to the world as an alternative to the ecclesiasticism which has in the past usurped the name of Christianity. ”

“ Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between Man & his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only, & not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should "make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof," thus building a wall of separation between Church & State. ”

“ In fact, the Church never admitted free will, or used the word when it could be avoided. In Latin, the term used was "liberum arbitrium,"—free choice,—and in French to this day it remains in strictness "libre arbitre" still. From Saint Augustine downwards the Church was never so unscientific as to admit of liberty beyond the faculty of choosing between paths, some leading through the Church and some not, but all leading to the next world; ”

“ The preachers and lecturers deal with men of straw, as they are men of straw themselves. Why, a free-spoken man, of sound lungs, cannot draw a long breath, without causing your rotten institutions to come toppling down, by the vacuum he makes. Your church is a baby-house made of blocks, and so of the state. ”

“ Never was the Church blessed with a stranger ally than this freest of free thinkers, who looked at churches very much as he would have looked at a layer of extinct oysters in a buried mud-bank. Strong's notion was that since the Church continued to exist, it probably served some necessary purpose in human economy, though he could himself no more understand the good of it than he could comprehend the use of human existence in any shape. ”

“ Civil liberty is impossible without religious liberty. But here the founders of our constitution were confronted with a great difficulty. To follow out the old Catholic tradition, and grant freedom to the “church of God,” was impossible. There were so many “churches of God,” antagonistic to one another, that to pronounce for one was to pronounce against all others, and so establish a state religion. ”

“ For the civil government can give no new right to the church, nor the church to the civil government. So that, whether the magistrate join himself to any church, or separate from it, the church remains always as it was before — a free and voluntary society. It neither requires the power of the sword by the magistrate's coming to it, nor does it lose the right of instruction and excommunication by his going from it. This is the fundamental and immutable right of a spontaneous society — that it has power to remove any of its members who transgress the rules of its institution; ”

“ No matter what we claim for the Catholic Church in the theological order—we claim for her in the civil order in this country only equality with the sects, and for Catholics only equal rights with citizens who are not Catholics. We demand the freedom of conscience and the liberty of our church, which is our conscience, enjoyed by Evangelicals. This much the country in its constitution and laws has promised us, and this much it cannot deny us without breaking its faith pledged before the world. ”

“ Above all it is indisputable that the Catholic Church, in order to emphasise her opposition to the so-called Evangelical freedom, devoted herself ever more assiduously to promoting a true inward life of religion among the people, the lower clergy and the bishops. ”

“ As churchmen we contemplate with reverence, our protestant, episcopal, and apostolical communion. We believe that it rests on “the foundation of Apostles and prophets, Jesus Christ himself the chief corner-stone.” And we contend for the right of the Church to demand from her own ministers faith in her doctrines, and to model her own worship, and adjust her own ceremonies according to her own holy discretion. But we compel no man to come in. We love and cherish the chartered and constitutional liberties of our country ”

“ Let us see how she applies this rule to education in non-Christian communities.
We find first the communities wherein the constitution proclaims the liberty of all worships, and their equality before the law. Here, the Catholic Church has ceased to be the religion of the state, which no longer lives in her spirit, no longer accepts her direction in matters of religion and morality, but prefers independence to all the advantages of a union with which it thinks it can dispense. How will the church act in this novel position? ”

“ Yes, Holy Father, and Cardinal-Bishops, I am justified in criticizing the Holy Catholic Church! And I am likewise justified in condemning the Protestant Church! All have fallen woefully short of the glory of God, and none obeys the simple commands of the Christ. The Church throughout the world has become secularized, and worship is but hollow consistency in the strict performance of outward acts of devotion. ”

“ But always and everywhere does the church assert, and, as far as she can, maintain the full and perfect liberty of religion, the entire freedom and independence of the spiritual order, to be itself and to act according to its own laws—that is, religious liberty in her sense, and, if the words mean any thing, religious liberty in its only true and legitimate sense. ”

“ In fact, I greatly doubt whether any form of religion ought to be 'established' in a free country. While I am resolved to uphold Protestantism, I think I best do so, by seeking to remove all restrictions from the Catholics, who, I am persuaded, will sacredly abstain from endeavoring to promote their own interests at the expense of ours. ”

“ By Liberal Catholics may be understood those who desiderate freedom not only for but in the Church, and would subject all arbitrary power of Church as well as State in matters of religion to law and tradition ”

“ Hence, not only do we exclude from our range all that concerns the ascetic life and the more intimate relations of religion, but we most willingly devote ourselves to the treatment of subjects quite remote from all religious bearing. Secondly, we have to remember that the internal government of the Church belongs to a sphere exclusively ecclesiastical, from the discussion of which we are shut out, not only by motives of propriety and reverence, but also by the necessary absence of any means for forming a judgment. ”

“ In like manner it is to be understood that the Church no less than the State itself is a society perfect in its own nature and its own right, and that those who exercise sovereignty ought not so to act as to compel the Church to become subservient or subject to them, or to hamper her liberty in the management of her own affairs, or to despoil her in any way of the other privileges conferred upon her by Jesus Christ. ”

“ Your Lordship must have read this Act of Parliament, passed in the first year of the first Protestant reign, and coming forth in company with the Common Prayer-book. This was tolerant work, to be sure; and fine proof we have here of this Church being "favourable to civil and religious liberty." Not content with stripping these faithful Catholic priests of their livings; not content with turning them out upon the wide world, this tolerant Church must cause them to perish with hunger, or to be branded slaves. ”