other Jurisdiction, so far as may be consistent with the Civil Rights of Society.

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2nd. That ever since the Reformation, it hath been the received Doctrine of the Church whereof we are members (and which by the Constitution of this State is entitled to the perpetual enjoyment of certain Property and Rights under the denomination of the Church of England), that there be these three orders of Ministers in Christ's Church: Bishops, Priests and Deacons, and that an Episcopal Ordination and Commission are necessary to the valid Administration of the Sacraments, and the due Exercise of the Ministerial Functions in the said Church.

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3rd. That, without calling in Question, or wishing the least Contest with any other Christian Churches or Societies, concerning their Rights, Modes and Forms, we consider and declare it to be an Essential Right of the Protestant Episcopal Church to have & enjoy the Continuance of the said three orders of Ministers forever, so far as concerns matters purely Spiritual, & that no persons in the character of Ministers, except such as are in the Communion of the said Church and duly called to the ministry by regular Episcopal Ordination can or ought to be admitted into or enjoy any of "the Churches, Chapels, Glebes or other Property" formerly belonging to the Church of England, in this State, & which by the Constitution and Form of Government is secured to the

said Church, or her Superior Order of Ministers, may in future be denominated.

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4th. That as it is the Right, so it will be the Duty, of the said Church, when duly organized, constituted and represented in a Synod or Convention of the different Orders of her ministry and People, to revise her Liturgy, Forms of Prayer & public worship, in order to adapt the same to the late Revolution, & other local circumstances of America, which it is humbly conceived may and will be done, without any other or farther Departure from the Venerable Order and beautiful Forms of worship of the Church from which we are sprung, than may be found expedient in the Change of our situation from a Daughter to a Sister Church."

I think that this document makes it quite evident that whatever else Protestant might mean to its authors, it did not mean a break with the past, the establishment of a new Church on the basis of a new understanding of Scripture. To those who signed this declaration, and we may be sure that their position was that of the vast majority of American Churchmen of the time, the Church to which they belonged was a body having a vital connection with the past, the maintenance of which depended on the continuance of Holy Orders. They gave no sign of thinking orders unimportant. The great trouble they put them

selves to to get the Episcopate is of itself a measure of the value they placed upon them. They valued them as ensuring at once the continuity of the Church with the past, and as a means of securing the valid administration of the sacraments. It would be difficult to find a document with less of the spirit of Protestantism in it, whether one means by Protestantism the three fundamental principles of the Reformation, or the popular go-as-you-please-ism of the present day. I think we are safe in concluding that to the fathers of the American Church the Protestant which they placed in its legal title was indicative not of a theological position, but of an historical tradition.

II

PAPALISM

HE assertion of the Roman Catholic con

troversialist is that the Church of England is the brand new product of the Reformation. The reply of the Anglican Catholic is that there is much better ground for regarding the Roman Church as a modern product than there is for so regarding the Anglican. The modern Roman Church dates from the council of Trent, that is from the Reformation, in much the same sense as the Anglican does: that is, in both Anglican and Roman Churches there was, at that epoch, an overhauling of the accumulations of the past, a sorting out of the inheritance of the Middle Ages, a rejection of some teaching and practices and a retention of others. In the Anglican Reformation the attempt was to go back of the Middle Ages to what was conceived to be the belief and practice of the Primitive Church; in the Tridentine Reformation the attempt was to clarify and codify Medieval teaching and to reduce its heterogeneity to a uniformity under the Papal

Supremacy. The result has been that in the Anglican Communion there is variety of use and practice which resembles nothing so much as the variety of the Middle Ages, while in Rome there has been a growing rigidity of doctrine and discipline as the power of the Papacy has extended. Then in 1870 came the climax when the claims which had been persistently pressed were imposed by authority as of faith. There has been in the history of the Anglican Communion no such revolutionary action as that whereby the Vatican Council superseded the original constitution of the Church by the proclamation of an infallible Papacy. From the beginning the Church was governed by bishops deriving their power from their orders, and assembling from time to time to witness to the faith that they had received from their predecessors, and to give utterance to the mind of the Church on such new questions as confronted them. For this primitive constitution there has been substituted, in the Latin Church, a central power issuing infallible decrees on faith and morals, and appointing and giving jurisdiction to bishops who hold their office and exercise their powers at its will. There has been no change in the constitution of the Anglican Church at any time even approximating this. The crowning insolence is found in the assertion that