HISTORY'S TESTIMONY TO THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND.

BY E. P. LARKEN.

THE present position of the Church of England is one of peculiar difficulty. We hear it frequently asserted now, and we acknowledge the truth and force of the assertion, that the Church of England is on her trial before the nation, and before the world; that is to say, that people are now, more seriously, more earnestly, more anxiously, than they have ever done before, examining into and testing her claims to be the great Protestant exponent of Christian truths. On each side, and on every variety of ground, do the counsel for the prosecution attack her with merciless severity. In the light of history they view her, and in that light they say she shows merely as a creature of the State; nay, worse still, as the creation and puppet of a sensual man and a self-willed woman, who thought far more of securing and extending their own influence and power than of securing and extending the influence and power of Christ. They attack her on moral grounds, proclaim her a living lie, inconsistent alike in her constitution and in her formularies. Her claims, too, to represent the nation, are disputed, and her offer to embrace minds widely varying in tenets is scorned or disregarded. Romanist, dissenter, freethinker, alas! that we must add certain of her own children as well, join hand in hand in a fierce onslaught on the Church of their common nation; they attack her as an establishment, they attack her as a Christian institution, and declare that they will not rest satisfied till as one or as the other, or as both, she trails her banner in the dust and owns herself vanquished, and forsaken alike by God and men.

It is my purpose to examine shortly, on historical and ethical grounds, the claims set up by the Established Church to be the Church of the nation. By the Church of the nation" we mean a Church co-extensive with the nation, a Church whose history in time coincides with the history of the nation, a Church in which the nation's manners, customs and laws are found to have their root, and in whose bosom the fossil remains of such

manners, customs and laws that have passed away from the face of the earth in the struggle for existence, are to be discovered embedded. Such a Church does the Church of England profess herself to be.

Now, we may admit that, for all practical purposes, Christianity was introduced into England by St. Augustine. Augustine was the emissary and tool of Rome. He came to England not merely to preach the Gospel to a benighted people, but also to bring to bear on that people, whether they were heathens or Christians, the authority of the Roman see. In other words, the work of St. Augustine was this-to plant the Church in those parts of the land where it was not known, and to bring this newly planted Church, together with Christianity in any other form in which he might find it, into communion with, and subordination to, the Church of Rome. And he did both these well. The latter portion of his work was at first and for a long time only partially effected. The Pope was, and continued for many centuries to be, no more than primus inter pares. The English Church recognised in him no transcendent qualities, no infallible head; he was to her but a great bishop, great in virtue of his rank, as Peter's successor, great in virtue of his alliance with the powers of the world, great in virtue of his victories over kings and emperors. There it ceased. In the person of the Pope, however, the whole Roman system is embodied, and that system, from the days of Gregory until now, pretends to nothing short of the complete sovereignty, temporal and spiritual, of the wide world. Thus is happened that Augustine, in bringing over with him from Rome the life seeds of the gospel, had, unawares to himself perhaps, mingled with them the tare seeds of error and falsehood. And now began the great struggle. Side by side the seeds were planted in the ground, side by side they sprang up; but side by side they could not live for ever. Which would in the end prevail? The struggle was long and obstinate, but the odds on one side were very heavy. That most marvellous organization which the world has ever seen, the Roman Church, had seized her prey in one of her constrictor-like folds, and slowly but very surely she was tightening her hold on the victim's body, and crushing out the life which she had been the means of giving. The Norman conquest meant one great victory for the claims of Rome, for William came in the Pope's name, and fought under the Pope's banner. But the Norman kings were still too wise and too politic to submit to the supremacy, even

in matters spiritual, of a foreign power, however willing they might be to appeal to the influence of that power in their difficulties. The English Church, independent of all foreign control, was too bright a jewel in their crown, and too valuable an instrument in their hands, for them to allow its possession to pass passively from them. And so the struggle recommenced with tenfold violence. King and pope, pope and bishop, bishop and king were, in turns, engaged continually in the combat. But a temporary end was soon to come. The vacillating policy of a traitorous coward sacrificed the liberty so long and so bravely fought for. John for a crown sold the birthright of the English Church.

Now followed centuries of shame and degradation, centuries in which the Church, with her ministers and her children, with her sacraments and her mysteries, showed little to prove her claim to being the temple of the living God.

During this, the darkest period of the Church's history, at times indeed the desire for liberty reasserted itself in a fluctuating way. At times a wavering light shot up which told that Englishmen were still Englishmen at heart, and that freedom was to them in this, as in all other points, the greatest possible blessing. At times the body heaved uneasily in its death sleep, striving to shake off its nightmare load of lust and falsehood. But their spasmodic efforts were unavailing, and the Church of England lay bound and helpless beneath the yoke of Rome. The Reformation, when it came, came as the outburst of the wrath, so long pent up, against these centuries of lies. Men learnt that God was to them not the far away King, who spoke to and dealt with His subjects only through the ministers of His Church on earth, ministers who too often mocked in their lives the commandments they were sent to preach, but that He was a very personal Father, filling each soul with the brightness of His glory, and knowing and to be known of them individually and directly. Men learnt this, and learning it they protested with voice and action, they protested in thought and life, against that system whose devotion to its own aggrandisement had blinded it to the true purpose of its mission, and had caused it so grossly to mislead them and their fathers.

It is impossible within these limits to discuss the Reformation, its causes and its effects, at any length. It will be sufficient for us to turn to the English Church, and to see

what was generally the outcome of events here. Shortly then the Reformed Church of England differed from each of the other reformed churches, either in its mode of government, or in the breadth of its constitution, or in both. The Reformation received its first impetus in England, to all appearance, from the hand of one man, Henry VIII. Now, our 26th Article assures us that "the unworthiness of the minister hinders not the effect of the Sacrament." So here, Henry, unworthy as he was in his manner of life, unworthy as he was in the motives which actuated him, was still the instrument used for effecting this great work. It is said sometimes that Henry usurped the place of the Pope. He did nothing of the kind. He claimed for himself that position in relation to the Church that in old days his predecessors had claimed, that position which was allotted to the kings of Israel and Judah. That is to say, Henry claimed, as the nation's king, to be the nation's representative, the temporal visible head of the nation's Church.

Elizabeth, when she came to the throne, carried out the same idea. The spiritual government of the nation was left, nominally at least, in the hands of the spirituality; but the Church, so far as she was a national body, was subjected to the national laws, and her temporalities were controlled by a temporal head. The spiritual affairs of the Church were, as we have said, left in the hands of the spiritual rulers. These spiritual rulers were the bishops. When the Reformers' knives had lopped off the excrescences which had grown on the body of Christ's Church, much was cut away that had in truth become a part of that body in the natural course of its development. Thus it was with the Episcopacy. But in England, and in England alone, was the Episcopacy, properly speaking, spared. Many causes combined to effect this. The patriotism of the English race, shut out from the world around them in their island home, extended even to the clergy, and made many of them less unwilling than they would otherwise have been to break their connection with Rome. They were "Catholics, if you please, but Englishmen first;" and finding that the Roman idea of Catholicity required of them renunciation of their country, they accepted a Reformation, which, while it loosened the bands which held the visible Church together, left them in England their original constitution, for all practical purposes, intact. But this cause of the retaining of the Episcopacy was one among many. A Church, whose head officers possessed more than ordinary privilege and power, who

traced their spiritual ancestry back to the Apostles, through whose hands the Apostolic gift of ordination might be transmitted, and who would thus act as a formidable bulwark against the encroachments of Rome, was judged to be most in accordance with history and tradition, most likely to tend to the doing of all things decently and in order, and to prove a safe guardian of Gospel truths. For we must remember that the average Englishmen of the day, whilst he hated the deceptions and excesses practised by the Romish priests, yet was, and remained for some time to come, in the early days of the Reformation, more than half a papist. Swift has told us how, when Jack and Martin consulted their father's will after their final rupture with Peter, Jack destroyed his coat in trying to destroy the lace and ornaments with which it had been covered; whilst Martin showed greater discretion in removing only what could be removed without injury to the fabric itself. Both Jack and Martin repented bitterly for having disobeyed the set terms of their father's will; but while the repentance of the one showed itself in an injudicious zeal, which after a time grew into a blind fanaticism, the repentance of the other, while no less true, was controlled by a wise and moderate estimate of the relation of the coat to the body which it clothed.

The Reformed Church in England, then, takes up this position with reference to Christianity, of which it claims to be the great exponent, and of the truths of which it claims to be the guardian. It divides the doctrines which are brought before it into three classes, which may be termed the essential, the nonessential, and the detrimental. The Church recognizes those doctrines which it judges to be essentials as "saving doctrines," doctrines generally necessary to salvation; and on this recognition it rests its claims to Catholicity. For as each doctrine is in its turn brought before the Church, it is put to the test of "Quod semper, quod ubique, quod ab omnibus creditum est." If the doctrine can stand this test, well and good; it finds its place among the list of essentials, and is embodied in the Church's formularies, to be taught as a thing generally necessary to salvation. If, however, the doctrine fails, when the test is applied to it, to satisfy the Church that it is essentially a Catholic doctrine, then a second examination is necessary, that it may be judged whether the doctrine may be preserved in a subordinate position in the Church's formularies, as useful and expedient, but not as indispensable, to spiritual life (as the books of the