Primitive church

“ When the novel worship that replaced the Holy Sacrifice built new tabernacles for its meagre and unmeaning rites, it invented the singing-gallery and the modern choir, all-sufficing, we acknowledge, for the Anglican "common prayer," and "worship" after the Presbyterian, Methodist, Baptist, and other such modes, but wholly out of place in a Catholic church, and totally inadequate for the holy offices of our religion.
Surely there is no one who will not heartily agree with us that we need a thorough reform, in this respect, in our church architecture. We build chapels, but not churches. ”

“ In Catholic countries (notably in Ireland) great churches are still built out of the savings of a poverty-stricken peasantry; and from this point of view the destruction of churches in the 16th century was probably a benefit to the world. This, however, is a consideration altogether alien to the Christian spirit, the aspiration of which is to lay up treasures not on earth but in heaven.
The Reformation was a fateful epoch in the history of church architecture. The substitution of the Bible for the Mass destroyed the raison d’être of churches as the middle ages had made them. ”

“ One may, for a moment, arouse interest by a new hypothesis, but it is only by the accumulation of facts that public opinion is perceptibly influenced in the end.
Viewed strictly, every Christian church was originally built on a pagan site, but we will limit the meaning of the adjective so that it shall apply to those churches which were erected, not on virgin soil, but on some spot once devoted to heathen worship, whether beneath a roof or under the open sky. ”

“ For the same reason offerings, alms, masses, prayers and other good works for the dead are useless and each will be judged on his own merits. Churches are unnecessary and should be destroyed, for holy places are not wanted for Christian prayer, since God listens to those who deserve it, whether invoked in church or tavern, in temple or market-place, before the altar or before the stable; and the Church of God does not consist of a multitude of stones piled together, but in the united congregation of the faithful. ”

“ A Protestant church is designed, no matter what the sect may be to which it belongs, not for poetical or aesthetic purposes, not for the admiration of architectural expenditures, not even for music, but for earnest people to hear from the preacher the words of life and death, that they may be aroused by his enthusiasm, or instructed by his wisdom ”

“ If the essence of the true Church is only to be found in the domain of the mind, or if it even remains a mere ideal, where is the guarantee that the mantle of the sacramental organization covers that silent, invisible congregation of spirits in which alone the Protestant looks for the essence of the true Church? ”

“ When the Reformation was completed, men sought to build churches where they could hear the voice of the preacher; for the mission of Protestantism is to teach, not to sing. Protestantism glories in its sermons as much as Catholicism in its chants. If the people wish to return again to ritualism, let them have the Gothic church. If they wish to be electrified by eloquence, let them have a basilica, for the voice of the preacher is lost in high and vaulted roofs. If they wish to join in the prayers and the ceremonies of the altar, let them have the clustering pillars and the purple windows. ”

“ If our faith had been a mere fad of the fading empire, fad would have followed fad in the twilight, and if the civilization ever re-emerged (and many such have never re-emerged) it would have been under some new barbaric flag. But the Christian Church was the last life of the old society and was also the first life of the new. She took the people who were forgetting how to make an arch, and she taught them to invent the Gothic arch. In a word, the most absurd thing that could be said of the Church is the thing we have all heard said of it. ”

“ No creed but the Scriptures, practically abolishes all Scriptures but those on the human heart; nothing between a man's conscience and his God, vacates the church; and with the church, the Holy Ghost, whose function is usurped by private reason: the church lapses into what are called religious institutions, these into Congregationalism, and Congregationalism into individualism—and the logical end is the abandonment of the church as an independent institution, the denial of Christianity as a supernatural revelation, and the extinction of worship as a separate interest. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Dogma can no more support the mythical element in one religion than in another. The time is coming when Christianity will abandon the effort altogether; but its last stronghold will be the Roman Catholic Church. ”

“ In a word, our symbol of the Incarnation reminds them of nothing with which they are familiar.
The secret is, they are not within the visible kingdom of the Incarnation; they are outside the visible church. Each sect will call itself a church, no doubt; and the Episcopalians have something to show for theirs, because, in its outward form, it is a fair imitation of a real hierarchy. But when they say in the Creed, with us, “I believe in the Holy Catholic Church,” they do not mean at all what we mean. ”

“ How, in spite of this deficiency, the Old-Catholic Church could be termed essentially episcopal we are at a loss to understand. That which is essential to a thing is that without which it cannot possibly exist for a single moment; but here we are asked to believe in a miracle which at once destroys all our physical and metaphysical notions of things. A new-born warrior fighting without a head, and a being existing without one of its essential constituents—such are the wonders which accompanied the genesis of the so-called regenerated church of the Old Catholics. ”

“ The theory of the ideal church is not yet effectively refuted, when we on the Catholic side content ourselves with proving that the true Church must become visible. This general proposition does not exclude the proposition of our opponents. For, according to the Protestant doctrine, also, the creative power of the spirit of Christianity exhibits itself in the construction of visible congregations, and the gradual actualization of the ideal Church is conditioned by a sensibly apprehensible mediation. ”

“ Already in the age of the Reformation the human intellect was sapping the foundations of the structure. But the religious imagination was still intensely susceptible, and when the moral sense was sharply awakened by the reformers both within and without the Catholic church, it fell back on the imagination as its familiar ally, and clothed with new life the ancient forms. The Catholic turned with fresh ardor to mass and miracle and holy church. ”

“ As for Catholicity necessitating a ritual, all religions must more or less. Do men object to the old law because of its glorious ritual? Is not the very Baptist-act of immersion a ritual, and their singing in common? So much so that, for neglect of this observance, Baptists cut off the whole Christian body from community [pg 394] with them. Which is harder to believe—the Catholic doctrine which teaches that we must obey the church which we believe to be the only church of Christ, and in support of which teaching we bring forward some very substantial proofs, or this? ”

“ Yet even these shadows on the image of the Church are evidences of her vitality. How superhuman must be an organization which outlasts all enemies in spite of many deficiencies! It is error, therefore, to infer from the undeniable, practical incongruity between the essence of the Church and her outward form that there cannot be an exclusive, concrete realization of the true Church in history.
To make the growth of Catholicism intelligible to his hearers, Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven with a grain of mustard, which unfolds the least of all seeds to a stately tree. ”

“ First, the invisible Church is tacitly put and mistaken for the visible, the truly spiritual for the nominal, it being assumed that we can know the hearts of others. Then, secondly, this invisible Church is supposed to become visible, and to be alone visible, in the persons of those who maintain the doctrines of grace; while the really external Church, consisting of the entire body of professing Christians throughout the world, vanishes out of sight, and is declared to have no ecclesiastical existence! ”

“ At that time there were incorporated in the Christian church heathen rites, which with the innovations added, down through the ages to the present time, stamps that church today as one entirely separate and apart from the original apostolic church. Without Apostles and Prophets through whom they might obtain the word of God, the church has steadily drifted from its moorings into the broad sea of men's opinions, until it is split and divided into hundreds of different sects and creeds, no one of which can today present an organization that even resembles the form of the Church of Christ. ”

“ The monasteries and universities, that had supplied priests for the English mission, were either destroyed or passed into other hands, so that it became clear to both friends and foes that unless something could be done to keep up the supply of clergy the Catholic religion was doomed ultimately to extinction. ”

“ Biblical inspiration being attenuated to almost vanishing point, there is nothing left but to appeal to the Church—not, indeed, to the Church of to-day, lost amid the mazes and intricacies of sects and schisms, but to that venerable fiction, "the undivided Church" of the first few centuries of our era, and thus brand religion with the stigma of retrogression by proclaiming it the only thing which is incapable of progress. ”

“ And nevertheless, its image is still so dimly comprehended, both by the visible and the invisible church of Christ!
The Catholic church says that it comprehends this goal; but then it separates it from the actual, from the general life, and ever more and more incloses it within the symbolic institution, which it calls the church. She forgets more and more—at least in Rome—that symbols, dead works and ceremonies, are not the chief thing. She takes the shell for the kernel. She builds beautiful churches and permits humanity to decline. ”

“ Protestant Christianity, probably the most intensely masculine of all religious schemes which have claimed the attention of man, has not wittingly retained any of the detested female emblems, yet so deeply has the older symbolism taken root, that even in the architecture of the modern Protestant church with its ark-shaped nave and its window toward the rising sun, may be detected the remnants of that early worship which the devotees of this more recently developed form of religious faith so piously ignore. ”

“ The Catholic Church, as churches go to-day, is certainly the most spectacular; but it must feel that it has a great fund of impressiveness to draw upon when it opens such sordid little shops of sanctity as this. It is impossible not to be struck with the grotesqueness of such an establishment as the last link in the chain of a great ecclesiastical tradition. ”

“ My thesis is, not that the church as now held historically was corrupted, but that the church so held was itself the total departure in principle from scripture, from what Christ set up by the Holy Ghost. The doctrine of full justification by faith, founded on accomplished redemption, and the recognition of the Holy Ghost as present and a directing power, were lost, and the clergy and sacraments substituted for them. The reformation removed many corruptions which had grown intolerable, and many false principles, but the notion of the church was still based on the clergy and the sacraments. ”

“ But the author would avoid this conclusion by making the tradition he concedes mean nothing, or at least nothing tangible. When Protestants speak of the common consent of Christians, he says (p. 115) , “they understand by Christians the true people of God,” that is, “the truly regenerate, holy men, the temples of the Holy Ghost.” They understand not a public external organic body, but an invisible and inorganic body of believers, confined to no one external communion, that is, men who belong to what Catholic theologians call “the soul of the church.” ”

“ The true church of Jesus Christ was lost sight of. It was spoken of as the invisible church, while the denominations were the visible churches. Men joined churches because they thought that it was the right thing to do.
"About the year 1880, or 350 years after the Augsburg Confession, A.D. 1530, a deep conviction seized a number of earnest, sanctified people that the denominational system was wrong, utterly unscriptural. They began to preach a pure Bible church of which salvation alone makes men members." ”

“ If we look back into history for the character of the present sects in Christianity, we shall find few that have [453] not, in their turns, been persecutors and complainers of persecution. The primitive christians thought persecution extremely wrong in the pagans, but practised it on one another. The first protestants of the church of England blamed persecution in the Romish church, but practised it against the puritans: ”