BY THE VERY REV. THE

URING the last few months an immense amount has been written on the question of Christian re-union. The interest in the subject has been stimulated partly by the Pope's letter to the English people, partly by the annual discussions in the Conference at Grindelwald; and it seems to me that many who have written at length about it have not given us any clear conception as to what they mean by re-union, or as to any method by which there can be the least chance of bringing it about.

The efforts of those who take part in the annual Grindelwald conference are mainly directed to effect some closer organic union between the Anglican Church and the various Nonconformist bodies. But corporate re-union, though in many respects desirable, is by no means necessary for essential unity. The separation between Christian bodies-the existence of many folds in the one flock-need not be a serious, still less an unmitigated, evil. If there be love, and the provoking of one another to good works, between the members of the various churches, then, if there be not identical organisation or identical opinions, there is something which is infinitely more precious ;there is that sort of spiritual union which Christ indicated when He prayed that "they all may be one, even as we are one 1 there is "the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace "2 there is one

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Christ, one Bible, one creed, one new man there is "access to God by one Spirit"; there is one hope of our calling"; one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God and Father of all, Who is above all, and through all, and in all." While this is so there is essentially, if not formally, "one body," and there may be some compensating gain, if there be some loss, in differences of hierarchy and external ordinances. The separateness of folds in the one flock may tend to widen the area and to stimulate the energy of Christian action. That there should be variety in minor matters, as well as unity in essentials, was a part, evidently, of Christ's own purpose for the Church; and the absence of rigid and stereotyped uniformity may help to save us from the creeping paralysis of apathetic torpor and functional religionism.

DEAN OF CANTERBURY.

make an unconditional submission to her baseless and exorbitant pretensions. This means that we should undo the work of our fathers; that we should re-embrace the deadly errors and (as we esteem them) the "blasphemous fables and dangerous deceits," which once, with all our hearts and souls, we repudiated; that we should give up the right to read for ourselves, in our own tongue, that open and unadulterated Bible which most of all we love-unless we first go humbly, cap in hand, to ask permission of some "priest," who may be a man as ignorant as tens of thousands of priests have been before him; that even if grudgingly permitted to read it, we should only be suffered to do so in perverted translations; that we should be forced to accept with it the fables of the Apocrypha; that we should not be allowed to interpret it at all, but compelled by force to accept any dictated absurdities of exegesis, adopted by Rome in accordance with an "unanimous consent of the fathers" which has not the smallest existence, and which even if it did exist would be the "unanimous consent" of men in no wise nearly so well qualified to interpret as we are ourselves— after centuries of that Light of God which "shows all things in the slow history of their ripening," and of Protestant learning to which Rome has scarcely added the most insignificant item. We are to bow our free hearts and free consciences to one Italian priest.2 We are to confess our sins to a miserable man like ourselves instead of to God; and we are to accept from him an absolution which, unless we be sincerely penitent, is not worth the breath which utters it; and which, if we be sincerely penitent, is already freely, fully, and finally accorded to us by God Himself.3 We are to send women-the silly, the ignorant, and the laden with sins, no less than the good and the pure-to confess to men, with the fatal and admitted possibilities of evil attested by centuries of miserable history.5 We are to accept a mass of doctrines to which neither Christ nor the Apostles once alluded, in spite of the crushing evidence by which they have again and again been proved to

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1 Rome's prohibition of the Bible is too notorious to need proof.

2 See Cardinal Baronius' "Ann. Eccl. ad. ann.," 912. Pope Adrian vI.'s letter to his legate, Francesco Chieregato: "In this holy see for some years there have been many abominations. Nor is it wonderful that the sickness should descend from the Head to the members, from the Chief Pontiff to other inferior prelates."

3 In all the boundless Scripture promises of free pardon to the penitent, mention is never once made of the need for or intervention of a priest.

4 2 Tim. iii. 6 : τὰ γυναικάρια, σεσωρευμένα ἁμαρτίαις, ἀγόμενα ἐπιθυμίαις ποικίλαις.

What can be the results of the Confessional, when influenced by such books as "The Priest in Absolution"?

be unscriptural, unprimitive, and uncatholic. We are to subject our rulers, and all our polity, to the self-interested and intriguing interference of Jesuits. We are to submit once more to the Pope's dictated kingship of Catholics, like King John, and King James II. We are to patter rosaries, and adore images, and go through mechanical services in unknown tongues, and to pray to dead men and women- "Saints "-of whom not a few like Cyril, and Becket, and Pius V. were excessively unexemplary characters. We are to shame our fathers by humbly prostrating ourselves in the dust before some Pope and confessing that we are excommunicated heretics. We are, in an absolute, unconditional, and complete submission, to set this Pope always before us. If history be precedent, where are we to stop? Who can tell? Are we to cancel Magna Charta, for his share in procuring which our great Stephen Langton was suspended by Pope Innocent III.? Are we to recant on our knees the truth that the earth moves round the sun as Galileo was forced to do? Or to abandon every hope of political liberty, seeing that, according to Pope Pius IX., all liberalism is accursed. Are we also to give up our old English love of truthfulness, and accept the detestable and demoralising casuistry of Alphonso de Liguori, and of Escobar? Let us be told how many more of God's best gifts we are to sacrifice before we can even tolerate to listen to the insidious blandishments of popes and cardinals. And what have the Pope and the Roman Church to offer us as a guerdon for our abandonment of liberty; for our submission to the tender mercies of sacerdotal despotism; for our humble acceptance of dogmas and claims which we regard as steeped in falsity and error?

As far as we can see, Rome can offer us absolutely nothing. Nothing but an accumulation of losses the most fatal can follow from our holocaust of advantages the most precious, and rights the most indefeasibly sacred. Are we, when we are not even hungry, to sell so divine a birthright, for so cold and unsavoury a mess of potage? Can the Church of Rome offer us salvation? It is infinitely less in her power to offer, than it is in our own to obtain through our Lord Jesus Christ, of whom alone cometh salvation. Which are we to accept what Christ says, who is the Truth; or what Rome says, who only represents the petrifaction of error? Christ said "If thou wilt enter into life keep the commandments;"1 Rome has said, that outside of her communion there is no salvation? The apostles said, speaking by the Holy Spirit," Believe in the Lord Jesus, and thou shalt be saved";3 St. John said, "He that doeth righteousness is righteous," and "every one that doeth righteousness is born of God"; St. Peter

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said, as a main lesson of his life, "Verily I perceive that God is no respecter of persons: bt in every nation he who feareth Him, and doeth righteousness, is accepted of Him." 5

No single Evangelist, Apostle, or New Testa

1 Matt. xix. 17. 2 Creed of Pope Pius IV., Art. xii. 3 Acts xvi. 31. + 1 John iii. 7; ii. 29. 5 Acts x. 34, 35.

ment writer-neither Christ, nor any one of His disciples, nor any one of their disciples for two centuries-said one word about the supremacy of Peter or union with Rome. This is only found in that creed-the creed of Pope Pius IV., teeming with errors, which Rome would palm on us in addition to the three creeds of Christendom. When Pius IX. said, "Every one who is baptised belongs to the Pope," he was guilty of "great swelling words of vanity"; which are utterly absurd. The dominance of Rome was founded partly on two or three texts grossly distorted and misinterpreted out of their proper meaning in defiance of all Scripture and all history; but chiefly on ignorance, superstition, arrogant claims, extraneous circumstances, and rhetorical exaggeration of third and fourth century fathers refuted by their own natural teaching and direct example.

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Cardinal Vaughan is never tired of quoting the mere phrase of St. Ambrose-Ubi Petrus, ibi Ecclesia a phrase which has no such meaning as he gives it; which comes in a passage full of the most fanciful and valueless exegesis; and which, taken in the sense he assigns to it, is not only unauthorised, but false. The meaning which Cardinal Vaughan assigns to it is quite inconsistent with that of other passages of St. Ambrose. 2 Had occasion arisen, St. Ambrose would have been the first to show by his actions, as St. Cyprian did,3 that he cared nothing whatever for Rome or her supposed connexion with St. Peter, when Rome took a line which he regarded as heretical or mistaken. But what St. Ambrose said or meant is of very little consequence. was no theologian, and had no independent authority. St. Jerome treats his exegetic claims with utter scorn. What Christ said was something immensely different, namely, " Where two or three are gathered together in My name, there am I, in the midst of them." 4 Christ scarcely ever spoke of "the Church.” His all but invariable phrase was "the Kingdom of Heaven," or "the Kingdom of God." Every member of that kingdom, therefore, is a member of the Church.

He

I will give Cardinal Vaughan a much truer and more valuable quotation, from Tertullian, founded on the words of Christ Himself: Sed ubi tres, ecc'esia est, licet laici”—“Where there are three (Christians), it is a church, even if they be laymen." And another from St. Augustine : "Si Christum attendas ubique est Christus. You

1 This quotation comes from St. Ambrose's Commentary on the Forty-sixth Psalm, in a confused passage which is a fanciful mystical application of John xviii. 16. 2 For instance, St. Ambrose says of St. Peter: "Primatum egit confessionis, utique, non honoris ; primatum fidei non ordinis" (De Incarn. Dom., ii. 4). He gives to St. Paul a perfect equality with him: "Com. in Eph. ad Gal.," ii. So, too, the remarks of St. Jerome in his letter to Evangelus, are directly inimical to any supremacy of Rome. St. Gregory I. was one of the best and greatest of the Popes, and he said that "whoever desires to be called the Universal Priest is the forerunner of Anti-Christ in his pride."

3 See Cyprian, Ep. lxxii., and Bishop Firmilian's remark on Pope Stephen's audacity and insolence (Cf. 75).

Matt. xviii. 20. See, too, Eph. ii. 19, 22.

say Lo, here is Christ.' I say He pervades the whole. You divide unity." The dominance of Rome exercised in past centuries with such boundless arrogance and such unutterable cruelty is based on misquotations, and on late, untrustworthy interested traditions, false donations, forged decretals, and interpolacions foisted into patristic literature to make up for evidence which was felt to be so utterly weak that it could not stand at all without the ready aid of forgery and fraud.

Nor is it in the power of Rome to give us union with "the Church." She always speaks of herself as "the Church," and as the only Church, and treats the 140,000,000 of Protestants who reject her corrupt communion as heretics, who, according to the decree of many popes, are only fit for the dungeon, the thumbscrew, and the rack. Such a claim is exactly as if some rotted and barren vine-branch claimed to lop away all the other branches of the true Vine; or as if some fallen tree, covered with clammy fungi, claimed to be the sole representative of the Tree of Life in the Paradise of God. The way in which the Church of Rome-a Church the farthest removed of all the Churches from the truth of the Gospel, parades her usurped pretension to be "the Church" is mere jugglery and aλacóveia, which can only impress the ignorant and the unwary, unless they have been rocked and dandled in the delusive glamour of a false system.

The word Church" in the abstract has but one meaning, a meaning which reduces to bathos the pretence of Romanism, which scarcely even nominally represents more than half the number of living Christians, to be "the Church." The Church means, in particular, "a congregation of faithful men, in which the pure word of God is preached, and the Sacraments be duly administered," a definition to which the Church of Rome very imperfectly corresponds; and "the Church" in general has no other meaning than that invariably given to it in Scripture, and in every formulary of the Church of England, namely, "the mystical body of Christ, which is the blessed company of all faithful people," 2 "all who in every place call on the name of the Lord Jesus Christ, both theirs and ours; "3"all who love our Lord Jesus Christ in sincerity;" "all Christian people throughout the world." 5

If

But if Rome can not offer us salvation or union with "the Church," can she offer us an improved morality? Judging both by the state of things in the present day, and also by a thousand years of history, we should say very much the reverse. the acceptance of Romanism tended to righteousness, then the City of Rome-the very seat of the Pope, and crowded with more ecclesiastics than any city of the world, ought to have been a very centre of moral light; yet in point of fact, we know from Dante, from Petrarc, from Savonarola, from Machiavelli, from Guicciardini, from Cardinal

Paronius, from Luther while he was still a Romanist, no less than from numberless other testimonies of contemporary Romanist witnesses, in days when priests, monks, and nuns formed perhaps one third of her population, that Rome was through age after age a sink of iniquity; and it is the unanimous testimony of men who have lived in Rome all their lives, that, alike among priests and people, there has been an immense advance in morality since the days when Garibaldi took Rome, and the Pope became "the prisoner of the Vatican." Moreover it was exactly at the period when the popes and their cardinals migrated to Avignon that Petrarc, and St. Catherine of Siena, and many others drew the very blackest pictures of the morality of Avignon. If such were the results of Romanism at Rome and at Avignon under the very eyes of the priest who speaks of himself as "the Vicar of Christ," and of his "sacred college of cardinals," and priests" and religious," what possible reason have we to expect that England would improve in character under the Papal sway? I speak of the system as historically illustrated, and its natural fruits, not forgetting the admirable men who at various periods have risen above it, and not questioning the noble personal qualities which inspire many a life of self-denial to-day. Again some of the cruellest and worst of kings and potentates-a Phocas, a John, a Mary Tudor, a Charles V., a Philip 11., a Duke of Alva, a Charles IX., a Louis XIV., and James 11., have been among those who were most ultramontane. Judged by its consequences, judged à posteriori, judged by centuries of history, the rule of Rome in England was down to the days of the Reformation a rule of greed and self-interest against which our best kings and our people and even our greatest Churchmen constantly and indignantly protested; and if re-established it could not but result in national feebleness, degeneracy, and retrogression. All the greatest literary, political, social, imperial advance of England dates from the days when she flung off the oppression of Rome; and even before that day her truest and most eminent sons, alike in Church and State, were those who most energetically refused her exactions and repudiated her claims.

Two things no doubt Rome could and would give us Jesuitism and the Inquisition. What Jesuitism has done for the nations; how deadly has been its curse; how dark and evil the name it has often earned; how even popes have striven to suppress it, and striven in vain, let history tell! As for the Inquisition it is, in our judgment, the most horrible and the most anti-Christian institu

1 See Janus, "The Pope and the Council," pp. 365, 366; and what Bishop Martorano said at the opening of the Council of Trent. And see Liverarni, "Il Papato, l'Impero, e il Regno d'Italia." 1861.

2 "Roman Catholicism," says the late Justice Sir FitzJames Stephen, has been "to the last degree dishonest, unjust, and cruel, to all real knowledge. It has been the enemy of Government on rational principles, of physical science, of progress in morals, of all knowledge which tends to expose its fundamental fallacies." "Life,"

p. 372.

tion ever devised by the perversion of man's heart.1 Its garments are incarnadined with the blood of the saints of God.2 Its more than devilish inventiveness of torture-used in pretended defence of the Gospel of Him who rebuked the Sons of Thunder, and of the Church which once held that "Violence is hateful to God "--if it were not anti-Christian would be enough to make Christianity stink in the nostrils of mankind. Yet so far from repudiating the Inquisition, even in these days Rome, when, as in Romish countries, she shows herself in her true guise, blesses it altogether. Pius V. was always goading on the butcher Alva, and all whom he could influence to the extirpation of the Protestants. Gregory XIII. sang public Te Deums, fired cannons, illuminated Rome, and struck medals in honour of the execrable massacre of St. Bartholomew. Innocent XI. promised to Louis XIV. the eternal blessing of the Church for the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in spite of the nameless horrors which it involved. As an issue of the great struggle of other generations there are, it is said, barriers throughout Europe against the return of such days; but they remain part of the historical outcome of Romanism.

Quite recently a Spanish professor publicly toasted the Inquisition at a banquet in Madrid; a French Dominican preached in its honour at Notre Dame; and the Revue Romaine, blessed by the Pope, had an article in 1895 by Père Pie de Langogne in which he talks of the "blessed flames" of the Inquisition, and calls those who oppose intolerance" sons of darkness," and says,

"Absit ut cæcitate obfuscati liberalismi... imbelles inquiramus ratiunculas ad defendendam S. Inquisitionem . . et benedictas rogorum flammas!" And this under the eyes of the very mild and benevolent Leo XIII. We know therefore what we have to expect from this sweet and blessed dominance of soft-speaking priests!

Rome then has nothing, absolutely nothing, to offer us. The gifts of which she would rob us are the richest of our blessings; those which she promises us are like the boons of the evil genii which are curses in disguise. She offers us the specious sham of external unity in error, purchased at the cost of liberty and progress; she offers us the most demoralising of all tyrannies-the tyranny of priests; she offers us Jesuits, the Inquisition, and casuistry; she offers us rosaries, and prayers to saints, and heaps of sham miracles, monkish impostures, and spurious relics; she offers us the demoralisation of auricular confession; and images, and Eucharistic materialism, in that sacrament which she has mutilated and which only a handful of her votaries ever take, and, even then, only on rarest occasions; she offers us that purely functional religionism, disburdened

1 Cardinal Manning said that, "Neither the Church nor the State, when united on the true basis of Divine right" (ie., when priests can trample on the necks of kings), "have any cognisance of tolerance."

2 See Innocent Iv.'s Bull "De extirpandâ," 1252, and the hideous book called "Sacro Arsenale," Bologna, 1665. But on this subject one cannot mention a tithe of the horrible evidence in this space.

of personal responsibilities, which with widespread secret atheism prevails on the continent; she tries to palm off upon us a claim to infallibility which is the greatest outrage on the understanding, and more preposterously at variance with all Scriptures and all Christian history than any conceivable claim can be. These things she offers us-and what does she take away?

I. She takes away that absolutely unimpeded and ever-open access to God, which God Himself has given us, without the smallest need for any other Mediator than Christ. For as there is but one God, so there is but one Mediator between God and man, the Man Christ Jesus.1

II. She takes away our open Bible 2 and all right to interpret it, whereas Christ and the Apostles send us "to the word and to the testimony," and praise the Bereans as noble because they "searched the Scriptures daily to see whether those things

IV. She puts us under the velvet hand and iron claw of a smooth but most direly oppressive priesthood, whereas St. Peter called all Christians "a royal priesthood," and "a holy priesthood; and St. John wrote that "God has made us a kingdom and priests."

V. She takes away, chokes, curses our right of private judgment, whereas the Apostle said, "Prove all things, hold fast that which is good ;"" and so far from dictating to his converts, wrote, "I speak as unto wise men; judge ye what I say"; and Christ said, "Why judge ye not of your own selves what is right?" We ask with St. Bernard, "Shall I listen to man, and be deaf to God?"9

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VI. She tells us to submit our reason to herself, though she has no better or more instructed reason at her disposal, and though, without the use of our own reason we cannot form any possible estimate, except an unreasoning and unreasonable one, even of her own claims; whereas God tells us that there is "a light which lighteth every man that is born into the world." 10

VII. When our conscience deliberates, and as

1 1 Tim. ii. 5.

2 See, among scores of proofs, the fourth rule of the Index, Cardinal Wiseman "On the Use of the Bible," 1853, and the condemnation of Lasserre by Leo XIII. 3 John v. 39; Isa. viii. 20; Acts xvii. 11.

Gal. v. 1. Pius IX., in his Encyclical and Syllabus of 1864, denounced liberty of conscience and freedom of speech; and Cardinal Manning, speaking in the Pope's name (Tablet, vol. ix. 1864), said, "I acknowledge no civil superior." See, too, Leo XIII.'s Encyclical Immortale Dei, and his letter to the Archbishop of Toledo.

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1 Peter ii. 5, 9; Rev. i. 6; xx. 6. See Tertullian, De exhort. castitatis: "Nonne et laici sacerdotes sumus et offers, et tinguis, et sacerdos es tibi solus."