The Relations of England to Christianity

If the constant and increasing press of active work, which, for the last ten years, has rendered it difficult, if not impossible, for me to find the quiet or time necessary for writing, will hereafter permit, it is my purpose to publish in succession three small volumes, of which the present is the first. In this will be found a number of Sermons on subjects of an Ecclesiastical and Historical kind. In the second I intend to treat of questions which relate to the foundations of the Faith; and in the third, of matters of a practical and devotional sort. I am only induced to publish by a conviction of the vital nature of the truths which may be contained in them. The sacredness and sovereignty of divine faith makes it a duty to use words as the sincere medium of thoughts, and to use the fewest and the sim plest that will convey our meaning. In such words I endeavoured for many years to say all that I knew of Truth to those who then would listen to me. I have had no other motive than a perpetual and ardent desire to give to others the truth as God had given it to me. I am fully conscious of the great imperfection of the books which I wrote, while as yet I knew the revelation of the day of Pentecost only in a broken and fragmentary way. As I saw the truth, so I spoke it; not without cost to myself. But I had no choice. I could not but declare that which was evidently to me " the truth as it is in Jesus." The works I then published, even without the private records I have by me, are enough to mark the progressive, but slow, and never receding advance of my convictions, from the first conception of a visible Church, its succession and witness for Christ, to the full perception and manifestation of its divine organization of Head and mem bers, of its supernatural prerogatives of indefectible life, indissoluble unity, infallible discernment, and enunciation of the Faith. Of those books I will say no thing, but that even in their great imperfections they have an unity, that is of progress, and a directness of movement, always affirming positively and definitely such truths of the perfect revelation of God as successively arose upon me. I was as one manu tentans, meridie ccecutiens, but a divine Guide, as yet unknown to me, always led me on. I can well remember how, at the outset of my life as a pastor, as I then already believed, the necessity of a divine commission forced itself upon me: next, how the necessity of a divine certainty for the message I had to deliver became, if possible, more evident. A divine, that is, an infallible message, by a human messenger is still the truth of God; but a human, or fallible message, by a messenger having a divine commission, would be the source of error, illusion, and all evil. I then perceived the principle of Christian tradition as an evidence of the Truth, and of the visible unity of the Church as the guarantee of that tradition. But it was many years before I perceived that such a Christian tradition was no more than human, and therefore fallible. I had reached the last point to which human history could guide me towards the Church of God. There remained one point more, to know that the Church is not only a human witness in the order of history, but a divine witness in the order of supernatural facts. It was not my intention when I began to enter into these details. I have never done so in public till now, and 1 hardly know whether to cancel what I have written, or to proceed in what I have to sav. I have never thought

*- / t^j it necessary to publish the reasons of my submission to the Church of God. I felt that those who knew me knew my reasons, for they had followed my words and acts: and that they who did not know me would not care to know. I felt, too, that the best expositor of

THE HEADSHIP OF CHRIST THE a man s conduct is his life; and that in a few years, and in the way of duty, I should naturally and un consciously make clear and intelligible to all who care to know, the motives of faith which governed me in that time of public and private trial. Eleven years have passed since then, and I may now gather together a few of the declarations of faith which the duties of my state have required of me. On reading them over for publication, I am struck by the unity, almost to sameness, which runs through them. I find in them also the natural and final result of the truths and principles which run through the works written in the preceding thirteen years. The reader will not, I hope, be weary of the frequent recurrence, I might more truly say of the perpetual presence, of three great truths, which pervade the following pages: I mean, first, the presence of our Divine Lord Jesus Christ in the Church, not only as its Head, but as the Fountain of life, intelligence, and action, both in the interior realm of its spiritual perfection, and in its exterior manifestation and jurisdiction over the nations of the world. Secondly, the divine organization and supernatural fruitfulness of the mystical body of the Visible Church on earth. Thirdly, the perpetual presence and office of the Holy Ghost as the personal and divine Teacher of mankind, from which flow two divine laws or endow-merits of the Visible Church, the one its infallible voice, the other its indivisible unity.

Now, of these three truths, the last is that which converted the convictions of my reason into the consciousness of faith, and cast upon the fragmentary truths of my past life the full illumination of the day of Pentecost, I can remember when it first began to rise upon me. As I have already ventured so far with personal narrative, for the first time, and perhaps for the last, I will go on. When a well known work on Development of Christian Doctrine came out, I felt compelled to examine into the nature of faith and the principles of divine certainty. The subject arose progressively and in order before me. I saw first that the matter to be ascertained and identified is the revelation of the day of Pentecost. Secondly, that the xprqpiov, by which it is to be ascertained and identified, is the tradition of the Church, including Holy Scripture as a part of that tradition. Thirdly, that the xgirqs whose discernment alone can apply this criterion, must be not the individual, but as< ixxXqofa, the Church in every age. And, fourthly, that the xgfais, or process of discernment by which the Church is to identify truth, if it be only the intellectual powers of its members taken collectively, would be no more than natural and fallible, and therefore could afford no basis of divine certainty for faith. And, lastly, that as the Church is a supernatural creation, supernatural in its origin, its attributes, its action, and its office, then certainly the discernment by which in all ages, from the first to the nineteenth, it identifies the Faith once delivered to the Saints, must likewise be supernatural, and therefore infallible. 1 remember how the words of Melchior Canus used to return upon me, "Consensus sanctorum omnium sensus Spiritus Sancti est."* And I saw that the "consent of the Fathers" was an inadequate and human conception of ahigherand di vine fact, namely, of the unity of illumination thatflows from the Presence of the Holy Ghost in the Universal Church and inundates it with the perpetual light of the day of Pentecost. I remember also how the words of Melchior Canus to Cajetan expressed my surrender to himself: a Vicimus utrique; uterque nostrum palmam refert; tumei; ego erroris."f This truth, which has governed all my later life, came upon me gradually, slowly, and at first dubiously, at the time when the tumults about the See of Hereford were giving place to the tumults about the Sacrament of Baptism. I had believed in, honoured, and served the Church of England, in the belief that it held and taught the whole revelation of the faith. When I came to * De Locis, Theol., lib. viii, c. 3. f Ibid.

see that the revelation of faith is preserved in the Church by the presence and assistance of a divine and infallible person, I was wont to say that the churches of Rome and England, though they be in popular opposition, and even in verbal contradiction, must be in substantial agreement. I had by that time a profuse and immutable conviction that the Holy Ghost perpetually and infallibly guides the Church, and speaks by its voice. I lingered still in hope that the Church of England was a part of that Church in which He dwells and through which He perpetually speaks. " Me lusit amabilis insania," which the facts before my eyes rudely dispelled. As a disciple of the Church of God, infallible in all ages, by virtue of the perpetual presence and assistance of the Spirit of Truth, I had no decision to make. The Church of England forsook me, not I it. Through it I had believed in the Church of my baptismal Creed, and to that Church I returned with as much sorrow of the natural order as falls to the lot of most men in the trials of a life, but with a light of reason, and consciousness of faith, and peace of conscience, which more than overpaidall sorrows and sacrifices; and over which no shadow of a momentary doubt has ever passed, in the eleven years from that time to this. I have been in these years filled with wonder that in the blaze of light which came upon me, i was so slow to perceive it. And I can only in it acknowledge the grace of our Heavenly Father, who opened my eyes at last. It is to me like the answer to an enigma, which, while unknown, baffles all our thought; wjien once known, is so self-evident that we can never forget it. All my life long I had been repeating my Baptismal Creed, "I believe in the Holy Ghost, in the Holy Catholic Church." I had learned to understand the first paragraph, respecting the Father and His work as Creator, and the second, respecting the Son and His work as Redeemer; but over the third para graph, respecting the Holy Ghost and His work as the Sanctifier and Guide of individuals and of the Church, there was a veil. The Protestant Reformation had obscured it by contradictions and by controversies; Anglicanism had refined upon its meaning with a subtilty and an incoherence which rendered any definite exposition impossible. I had studied and analysed every Anglican writer I could find, who treated of the subject of the Church, as especially Bilson, Field, Laud, Hammond, Pearson, and Thorndike, besides many lesser authors. I found that hardly two of them agreed together, except in rejecting the visible and indivisible unity of the Church, and the supreme and universal jurisdiction of its Visible Head. I found likewise that they all alike rejected the perpetual office of the Holy Ghost as the Divine Guide of the Church in every age. It then became manifest to me that, before I could understand the nature and office of the Church, I must first understand the mission and office of the Holy Ghost: and in the day in which I came to understand this third and last paragraph of my Baptismal Creed, the Church of God, one as God is one, numerically and indivisibly one: infallible in its knowledge, and in its enunciation of the Faith by reason of the perpetual in-dwelling and assistance of the Holy Ghost, arose in all its majesty before me. I saw then that, to understand the Creed of our Baptism, is to be a Catholic: and that in the day when we believe in the personality and office of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost, we submit to the Church, which alone is Catholic and Roman.

Now, inasmuch as this one truth pervades all that is contained in this volume, I think it well to state it as adequately and explicitly as I can, within the narrow limits of a preface: and I therefore do so in the following w^ords:

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I. It is evident from Holy Scripture, that the Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost, to be the Guide and Teacher of the Faithful until the second coming of the Son of God. It is hardly necessary.to offer proofs of this truth, but it may be well to define what is the nature of the dispensation of the Spirit under which we are placed.

II. The Holy Spirit came on the day of Pentecost and yet He was in the world from the beginning; as God He shared with the Father and Son in the creation of all things, and He " moved over the waters." Gen. i, 2.

III. Also the Holy Spirit wrought in the servants of God from the beginning, illuminating and sancti fying Patriarchs, Prophets, Psalmists, and Saints.

IV. How then can He be said to come on the day of Pentecost? If He was already in the world, how could He be said to come?

V. The true answer is to be found in asking the same question respecting the Son of God. He also came into the world, yet from the beginning He was in the world, u the world was made by Him, and without Him was made nothing that was made." St. John, i, 3, and Hebrews, i, 2.

He was also with the Church in the wilderness, yet after 4000 years, according to promise and prophecy, He came: that is in a new manner, and for a new pur pose. He came by Incarnation: that as a Man He might redeem the world, and become the "Beginning of the Creation of God." Apoc., iii, 14.

VI. In like manner the Holy Spirit came in a new

NOT FULFILLED TILL PENTECOST.

manner and for a new purpose, with a fulness and perpetuity of His Presence unknown before.

VII. We see in Holy Scripture that the dispensations of God are progressive, succeeding and perfecting one another. The Law was " a shadow of good things to come; 1 the Gospel is the substance.-

Heb.y x, 1.

Under the Law individuals were illuminated; under the Gospel it is promised they shall "all be taught of God." St. John, vi, 45. Before the day of Pentecost individuals here and there were gifted with Vision and Prophecy, afterwards as Joel foretold and St. Peter interprets, the Spirit shall be "poured upon all flesh." Acts, ii, 17. That is to say, the fulness of the Spirit shall be given in the Kingdom of Jesus Christ.

VIII. Our Lord reveals this progression in the dispensations of God when He says: " It is expedient to you that I go, for if I go not, the Paraclete will not come to you, but if I go, I will send Him to you." St. John, xvi, 7. As the Father had sent the Son, so the Father and the Son shall send the Holy Spirit.

St. John writes (chap, vii, 39): " As yet the Spirit was not given, because Jesus was not yet glorified." The coming of the Holy Ghost was purchased by the Incarnation, Passion, Resurrection, and Ascension of the Son of God.

IX. Our Lord also points out the difference be tween His own sojourn upon Earth and the abiding of the Holy Spirit. " I go unto the Father." " I will ask the Father, and He shall give you another Paraclete, that He may abide with you for ever." St. John, xiv, 13, 16.

The dispensation of the Son visible upon Earth was transient; the dispensation of the Holy Spirit invisibly dwelling in His stead is perpetual. The Second Per son in the Holy Trinity has reascended; the Third Person has descended to dwell in His place until the Son of God shall come to judge the world.

X. The office of the Holy Spirit is declared by our Lord to be "to lead into all truth;" " to bring all things to mind;" "to show things to come;" "to take of the things of Christ, and show them unto us." St. John, xiv, 26; xvi, 13, 15.

XL But on all this there can be no question. We are under the dispensation of the Spirit (II Cor., hi, 3, 6,) as St. Paul argues, contrasting it with the dispensation of the law. And, therefore, we are under the guidance of a Divine Teacher, as truly as the Apostles in Jerusalem. They were guided by the Son of God personally and visibly; we, by the Spirit of God as personally though invisibly present with us.

XII. And the office of the Holy Ghost, as the guide and teacher of the faithful, is as full and perfect in all its powers and prerogatives at this hour, as it was on the day of Pentecost. It is identically the same office, and has been perpetual to this day.

XIII. For in what does the office of the Holy Spirit consist, but in illuminating and sanctifying the elect servants of God? This is a perpetual work, and will continue until the last of the elect shall be gathered in at the coming; of Jesus Christ.

*. - fj

XIV. And what are the means and instruments of illumination and sanctification but the doctrines of Truth and the Sacraments of Grace? The Doctrines and Sacraments, therefore, are, and ever shall be, perpetually and divinely preserved, until the works of which they are the means and instruments shall be fully accomplished.

XV. These reasons, which, if need be, might be much expanded, prove that the Holy Spirit is at this hour, as he was in the beginning, the Guide and Teacher of the Faithful; and that they are under a Divine authority, and stand related to the invisible presence of a Divine Person, as truly present in the midst of them, as our Divine Lord was present among the Apostles and Disciples at Jerusalem.

It is also evident from Holy Scripture that the Church is the organ whereby the Holy Spirit teaches the faithful. There is no controversy between the Catholic Church and those who hold the doctrine of the Holy Trinity on the following points:

I. That the Holy Spirit is a Divine Person.

II. That He is now present in the world.

III. That He guides and teaches the faithful, one by one, if they seek His illumination as they ought.

But one point and a chief point of the office of the Holy Spirit yet remains to be stated. And this point is denied, so far as I know, by every Communion separated from the Catholic Church by, or since, the Protestant Reformation.

I mean that the office of the Holv Ghost is not only to guide and teach individuals one by one as He did before the Day of Pentecost, but also since that day, to guide the mystical Body of Christ, which is the Church.

It appears to me, that all who reject this truth fall back into the state of man under the Patriarchal or Mosaic Dispensations, before the Son was yet incarnate, or the Gift of Pentecost bestowed upon the Church.

IV. The effect of this retrogression in the dispensations of God, is that the Gospel is lowered to the Law; the substance to the shadow.

The Jewish Church is supposed to be a parallel to the Church of Christ; its declensions are assumed as proofs that the Universal Church may likewise err.

V. Now there is one impassable barrier of difference between the Jewish Church and the Church of Christ.

The Jewish Church was not the Mystical Body of the Incarnate Son: it had no divine head in Heaven: it was not inhabited by the Personal Descent and in dwelling of the Holy Ghost.

And that because the Son was not yet Incarnate, nor " the Spirit yet given."

VI. The Church, therefore, or Mystical Body of the Incarnate Son, is a new creation of omnipotence, of which there were of old types, shadows, and pro mises, but nothing like in kind.

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VII. St. Paul s Epistle to the Ephesians sets be fore us the formation and constitution of this Mystical Body, connecting it with-

1, The Ascension of the Incarnate Son into Heaven, and

2. The Descent of the Holy Ghost.

In chap, iv, he says, that by the Ascension God hath put all things under His feet (i.e. of Jesus Christ), and gave Him to be Head over all things " to the Church which is His Body, the fulness of Him that filleth all in all."

He carries out the same doctrine, saying

One body and one spirit, " wherefore He saith, ascended on high, He led captivity captive, and gave gifts to men. Now that He ascended, what is it because He also descended first into the lower parts of the Earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended above all the Heavens, that He might fill all things."

We have here the Ascension and the sift of the o

Holy Spirit, whereby the head fills the whole body.

Then immediately follows the constitution and formation of the body.

" And he gave to some Apostles, and some Pro phets, and other some Evangelists, and other some Pastors and doctors, for the perfecting of the Saints, for the work of the ministry, for the edifying of the Body of Christ until we all meet into the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God unto a perfect man unto the measure of the age of the fulness of Christ."

We have here a visible Ministry of Pastors guiding and uniting a visible body, ordained, consecrated, and illuminated by the descent of the Spirit.

Then follows the end for which this visible body was constituted, viz., the unity and certainty of faith* " That henceforth we be no more children tossed to and fro, and carried about with every wind of doctrine, by the wickedness of men, by cunning craftiness, by which they lie in wait to deceive; but doing the truth in charity we may in all things grow up in Him, who is the Head, even Christ. From whom the whole body being compacted and fitly joined together, by what every joint supplieth, according to the operation in the measure of every part, maketh increase of the body unto the edifying of itself in charity." ch. iv, 4, 16.

IX. Now in these passages we have revealed to us a new mystery, newly created by Divine Omnipotence, of which the former dispensation of God before the Incarnation of the Eternal Son, had no likeness or precedent.

The Apostle sets before us:

1. The Head, glorified at the right hand of God; being Himself both God and man.

2. The Body, made up of all the Saints of God in the world unseen, and the visible side of the Apostles, Pastors, and Faithful upon Earth.

3. The Mystical Person made up of both the Head and the Body, inhabited, illuminated, compacted, and perfected by the Descent and Presence of the Holy Spirit.

X. It is further evident:

1. That this mystical Person, which in the Epistle to the Corinthians he calls " Christ," is a Society not only morally one by perfect union, but numerically one by indivisible unity.

2. That it is organised and compacted part with part, and bound together as the limbs and members of a living man.

3. That it contains in itself a perpetuity and succession: a power of self-edification and self-production in virtue of the Divine Life, which from the Head descended to dwell in it.

4. That one great end of its constitution is the perpetuity of Truth and the Unity of Faith.

5. That its authority is divine and changeless, not human, " tossed to and fro."

6. That the members of this body are guided and preserved from being carried about by inherence as members in the body.

That they depend on the Body, not the Body on them.

7. That this body as a whole is the dwelling place of the Spirit, and the organ of His guidance and teaching.

XI. Now this is the point where, so far as I can understand them, all opponents of the Roman Catholic Church since the Protestant Reformation reject the office of the Holy Spirit.

They admit His teaching in individuals, but deny His perpetual guidance of the body.

The former is as old as Creation, the latter is part of the dispensation of which the beginning is to be found in the Incarnation of the Son of God.

XII. And the point is characteristically the mystery of the Holy Spirit, reserved for the latter times of grace; so that to reject it is to reject a vital part of the mystery of the Holy Trinity, as it is revealed in relation to the redemption of the world.

XIII. Between the office of the Son and the office of the Spirit of God, there is an analogy.

The Son was manifest in a Natural Body, that is the Manhood which He assumed to Himself.

The Holy Spirit is manifest in a Mystical Body, which He assumed as the Temple in which to dwell, and the Organ through which to teach and work in the world.

Again,

The Godhead and Manhood in Christ were united by an act of the Divine Will, never again to be parted.

In like manner,

The Holy Spirit is united to the Mystical Body by an act of the Divine Will, and though individuals may fall from the Body, the Body can never be parted from the Spirit of God, who dwells in it.

XIV. The difference, therefore, between the Union of the Holy Spirit with the Soul of each individual, and His union with the Body of Christ, is that the former union is conditional, and depends on the human will; the latter is absolute, and depends on the Divine Will alone.

XV. Individuals are on probation; if they believe, repent, obey, persevere, the union between them and the Spirit of God endures; if they will not persevere, it is dissolved.

But the Body is not on probation, it is not an individual, the union between it and the Spirit of God cannot be dissolved.

XVI. All individuals may fall away from grace, and are therefore defectible, but the line of the faithful is indefectible.

XVII. Our Divine Lord said:

" On this Rock I will build my Church, and the gates of Hell shall not prevail against it."

The perpetuity and indefectibility of the Church is thus divinely revealed; and this includes the perpetuity and indefectibility of the Faith on which the Church is built.

If the superstructure be indefectible, much more the foundation: and the union of the Faith with the Church is therefore perpetual and indefectible. They are divinely united, never to be divided.

This is only another form under which to express the indissoluble union between the Spirit of Truth and the Church, the organ of His teaching.

XVIII. The same is the meaning of St. Paul, when he calls the " Church of the Living God the Pillar and Ground (i.e. basis) of the Truth.

The Church is the divinely supported repository of the Truth, and the organ of its Publication to the world.

XIX. The same again is the meaning of our Divine Lord s words:

" A city seated on a mountain cannot be hid." He intends to describe the Church one, visible, and manifest to all the world, the witness and Herald of the Revelation of God.

XX. The same again is the meaning of His words to His disciples, " Ye are the light of the world."

The instrument and organ of His Truth to the World is the visible society of the Faithful, that is the Church. He likens it to a light, self -manifesting and self-evident, revealed by its own nature. And He adds, as explaining His own design, and the end for which He would constitute His Church visible in the world, " Neither do men light a candle and put it under a bushel, but on a candlestick, and it giveth light unto all that are in the House."

BUT THE INSTRUMENT OF PROBATION.

If the Church be not the Organ of Truth, the candle is put under a bushel.

XXI. To pass from illustrations to the thing illus trated, we find,

1. That our Lord constituted a visible body of Apostles.

2. That on the day of Pentecost the Holy Spirit descended on them, and, as St. Paul teaches in the Ephesians, filled and united the Mystical Body with a new, divine, inextinguishable Life, so that it be came " One Body and One Spirit."

3. That this Body, whether united at Jerusalem, or spread throughout the Earth, was absolutely one, both morally by perfect union, and numerically by absolute and Indivisible Unity; having One Lord, One Faith, One Baptism, One God and Father.

4. That its universality consists not only in mere extension, but in absolute sameness, continuity, and identity throughout the world.

That when this one Body spoke with authority, its claim to teach for God was, a It seemed good to the Holy Ghost and to us." Acts, xv, 28.

XXII. And, therefore, St. John writes to the faithful in unity with the Church: " Little children, it is the last hour, and as ye have heard that Antichrist cometh, even now there are become many Antichrists, whereby we know that it is the last hour. They went out from us, but they were not of us; for if they had been of us, they would no doubt have re mained with us, but" they went out, " that they may be made manifest that they are not all of us."

u But you have the unction from the Holy One, and know all things."

" Let the unction which you have received from

Him abide in you, and you have no need that any man teach you." I. St. John, ii, 18, 19, 20, 27.

That is to say:

Ye who are united to the one Mystical Body, which is the Organ of the Holy One, the Spirit of Truth, are anointed and guided by a Divine Authority, and have no need of human teachers, " That any man teach you, being taught of God."

XXIII. From all these testimonies of Holy Scripture it is evident

1. That the Holy Spirit teaches in the world at this hour, and exercises in all its fulness of powers and prerogatives, the office of Illuminator, Guide, and Teacher, which He assumed on the Day of Pentecost.

2. That as the Organ of His Voice and guidance at that time was the one visible Society of the Apostles and Faithful, so now at this it is the one visible Society, descended from them and spread abroad in undivided unity and perfect identity throughout the world. To this I must add as a general conclusion: That it is impossible to reject the indissoluble Union of the Spirit of Truth with the Universal Church, and His perpetual guidance of the same, without rejecting a main and vital part of the office of the Holy Spirit, and therefore of the Economy of the Holy Trinity in relation to the redemption through Jesus Christ.

Such then, is the formal object of faith, the veracity of God revealing His Truth to us, and not only by an act of revelation eighteen hundred years ago, but also by sustaining His revelation, whole and inviolate, in all its fulness and integrity, through all times, and by proposing it to us by His Divine voice in every age. On this I do not purpose now to dwell, because I hope to do so more fully hereafter. But, inasmuch as in the following sermons I have frequently spoken of the relation of England since the Reformation., to the Church and to the Faith, and inasmuch as the limits of a sermon did not permit me to speak as fully as I desired, and in addressing Catholics it would have been out of season and place to say much, nevertheless, in publishing these sermons to take their fate among objectors and antagonists, it is necessary to speak more at large. I will, therefore, set down, at least in outline, the basis on which the assertions in these sermons rest.

The more I have studied the religious and political history of England since the Anglican Reformation, and the more I have observed the currents of thought, the dominant tendencies in English society at this day, the more I have become convinced that the English people are upon an inclined plane. Men may strive to retard their descent, but it is inevitable. The laws of nature are not more irresistible and unerring than the law which generates unbelief from the first principle of private judgment. Even in our own lifetime, the advance of indifference, rationalism, infidelity, secularism, and atheism, both objective and subjective, is vast and perceptible. The last ten years have developed these evils as with a tropical growth: and the relation of England to the Catholic Church and to Christianity, and even to the Christian society of the world, are no longer what they were, when the men of our day first entered upon life. I can conceive the pity with which some will regard me, when I say that I trace this development of intellectual, social, and spiritual anarchy to one cause, separation from the Holy See, because separation from the Holy See is separation from the Universal Church, and to be se parated from the Church is to be deprived of its divine guidance and support. This I will endeavour briefly to verify by undeniable facts in the history of our country.

The prerogative of St. Peter in confirming the faith of his brethren is luminously manifested by contrast ing the immutability of Rome with the vicissitudes of the nations of the Christian world. Of the Roman people alone can be said what St. Cyprian wrote, that among them a defection in faith had never been. Arianism and Nestorianism overcast the eastern nations, Donatism the southern, modern heresies the northern: but in Rome the divine tradition of the faith has descended in full and steadfast vigour through every age. Christian and Catholic by the very law of its life, it is the centre and the fountain of Christianity and of Catholicism to the nations of the world. Their relations to Christianity and to the Catholic Church may be measured by their relations to Rome. These given, the others are ascertained.

No nation, except perhaps Spain, has ever undergone such vicissitudes in its faith as England. Ireland, by its side, received the faith from its first apostles, and has continued immutable and constant to this hour. England, in everything of this world mightier and more imperial, has been twice disin herited of its faith, and has twice in great part received the gift of eternal life from Ireland.

My object is not so much to trace out the variations of England, but to exhibit its present relations to the Faith and Church of Jesus Christ. I shall, therefore, attempt no more than to indicate the phases of Christian life through which it has passed: from its first union with Rome to its present rebellion against the Vicar of our Lord; that is, in its British, Saxon, Norman, and Protestant periods.

England of the British, without doubt, received its regeneration from Rome, the source of its civil life and order; and its fidelity to the Christian Faith and Church is attested by the presence of its Bishops in the Council of Aries and of Sardica. When infected by Pelagianism of its own growth, it was cleansed by the Roman Pontiffs: and throughout its early Christianity we hardly trace it but in its relations to the Holy See.

When the vials which were poured out upon the Rome of the Pagans forced its legions to withdraw from Britain, and the whole island was submerged by an inundation of heathenism, the vigilant charity of the Roman Pontiffs drew once more the outlines of the Heavenly city upon its w r asted soil, and the Catholic Church again arose as a fabric of light in the night-season, uniting, assimilating, and sanctifying the conflicting and discordant kingdoms of the Heptarchy. Then began the most beautiful epoch of English history. At no time was England so purely Christian and Catholic as then: so child-like in faith, so docile to the Holy See. The wonderful influence of ecclesiastical legislation penetrated and possessed the whole land. Jesus, His Immaculate Mother, and His Saints, took Saxon England as their special inheritance. The whole civil life of the people and the whole subdivision of the country was governed by Faith. The prerogatives of the Prince and the decrees of legislatures were directed by the Church. The Bishops and Barons sat and legislated side by side, so that historians were wont to say that Parliament had the aspect of Councils. In the Courts of the Counties the Mass-Thane and the World-Thane sat in one tribunal, and administered thelaw with concurrent jurisdiction. Christianity was, as the English jurists used to say, a part and parcel of the law of England: and the Catholic Church was the form and mould of civil government. It was a time fruitful in saints from every rank and class. but, above all from the highest. A special grace was upon the royal houses. Some thirty Saxon Princes made pilgrimage to Rome: and some fourteen of both sexes took the habit of religion: many are upon the altars of the Church. It was Saxon England which first laid at the feet of the Successor of the Apostle the tribute of Saint Peter s Pence; and the Catholic world at this day in renewing this oblation of filial piety render a tribute of Christian honour to the Island of Saints. It was during this period, that is, between A.D. 800 and 1000, the most eminently Catholic time in English history, that the foundation and the outline of the civil order of England which endure to this day were laid. The permanent principles and stable elements of its greatness descend to us from the ages in which England was the Island of Saints. We may take as the type and recapitulation of Catholic Eng land the Saint and King with whom its purest Catholic greatness expired, St. Edward the Confessor, whose memory was long invoked by the English people under their iron masters. " The laws of good King Edward" became after the Conquest the burden of their lament and appeal, and the golden age to which they stretched out their hands in vain.

Then came a third period, in which the relations of England to the Holy See were extensively changed. It is not to be denied that in Norman England we see the first rise of the monarchy to its full stature and greatness. But it is in that same period that the first seeds of its modern evils, including even the so-called Reformation, were cast. With the Norman entered into England the jealousy and insubordination of its Princes towards the Holy See, the proud spirit of national independence, and a secular or anti-ecclesiastical spirit. The five centuries from the Conquest to Henry the Eighth were fruitful and majestic in every thing which glorified worldly pride, but they were centuries of decline in the Kingdom of God. As England grew greater in secular grandeur, it grew less in spiritual fertility. The saints of the centuries before the Conquest are many, those of the centuries after it are few. The kings of England, with few exceptions, from William the First to Henry the Eighth, were often in conflict with the Roman Pon tiffs; and the saints of those times won their crowns as martyrs and confessors, in resisting the anti-Catholic violence of their sovereigns, as Saint Edmund and Saint Thomas of Canterbury, Saint Richard of Chi-chester, and the like. As the Saxon period closed significantly and typically in Saint Edward, King and Confessor, the Norman period closed fittingly and prophetically in Henry the Eighth. He did but give final expression and effect to the secular and schismatical nationalism which the whole line of Norman kings had laid down in their legislation, and vindi cated in their acts. The blood which was shed in the transept of Canterbury was only the first great drop of the storm by which Henry the Eighth and Eliza beth stained and steeped the soil of England.

In estimating the condition of England since the Reformation, it is necessary to keep the Norman period before our eyes. No people can ever break so abruptly with its antecedents as that its past will not live on, and actively work upon its present. A distinguished French writer, De Tocqueville, has lately shown how vast a body of social and political traditions and principles ran on unchanged from the France before to the France after the first great revolution. And yet we have been wont to believe that the continuity of the civil society of France was so absolutely cut asunder, that the " ancien regime" is gone, and a new creation set up in its place. So it is with England before and after the Reformation. The jealous claims of royal supremacy in princes, the selfish nationalism and antipathy to foreigners, a remnant of barbarism as the gs^Xacj/a among the Greeks, and a wilful and obstinate independence of individual character, all these things are traceable before the great outbreak of the Reformation, and they run on in the same channels to this day.

By the Christian society of Europe, I do not mean the Christian Church, but the social and spiritual order which under the action of the Church has compacted the races and peoples of Europe by a domestic organization into Christian nations, and by international law into a confederacy of Christian powers; that is, in a word, Christendom, which contains not only the spiritual order of the Church, but the natural order of human society, with all its elements, and re lations of government, and material civilization.

Now the history of Christendom has three marked periods: the first, in which it was nascent and slowly arising towards its maturity; the second, in which it was mature; the third, in which it gives tokens of decay. In the first period society was not Christian, and only yielded itself partially to the action of the Church; in the second, it had become thoroughly penetrated by the Church, and, though distinct and without confusion, identical and coextensive with it; so that Christian society may be said to be the Church viewed in the natural order, and the Church to be the Christian society viewed in the supernatural order; in the third period, society has been gradually withdrawing itself from the Church, and relapsing into its original separation and independence of the Faith and Christian law.

Now it is not my present purpose to treat of these periods, nor to dwell upon the powers and laws by which the Church regenerated and Christianized the natural society of the world. It will be enough for me to indicate the four chief agencies by which this work was accomplished. First, by the law and Sacrament of Christian Matrimony, its unity and indissolubility, the fountain of all the sanctity and order of domesticlife, and the root of political society; secondly, the unity of the Faith, which alone can generate unity of private or public action; thirdly, the unity of the Church, which by its laws and its legislation unites races into nations and nations into empires; and, fourthly, the supreme authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, the fountain and source of all unity, the last and absolute arbiter of all debates: these four are, both de jure and de facto, the four corner-stones of the Christian society of the world. I must leave to others, with more of leisure and of ability than myself, to trace out what I have roughly suggested in the order of history, of philosophy, and of faith; and also to examine and to measure the bearings and defections of this modern political order from these bases of its Christian perfection. All I can do is to touch the out line of this subject in the example of England alone. In order to do this more surely, I will first examine the relations of England to Christianity and to the Catholic Church, by which we shall be able to measure its relations to the Christian society of Europe, which is, as I have said, the offspring of Christianity and of the Church.

1. Now, the relation of any body or people to the Church or to the Faith may be measured by their relations to its head. Their attitude towards Rome will give the exact appreciation of their attitude towards the Revelation of Jesus Christ.

They who devised and decreed the celebrated statute of the twenty-fourth Henry the Eighth, by which they claimed for the realm of England an imperial character, an independence of all temporal authority, and a self-sufficiency in all spiritual things, little thought, we may well believe, of the legitimate and inevitable consequences of their principles.

It is an inadequate and superficial conception of the Anglican Reformation, to suppose that its chief labour was to controvert certain particulars of Catholic Faith, such as transubstantiation, invocation of Saints, and purgatory. It consists formally in the rejection of the Divine voice of the Church in effacing from the minds of the English people the whole idea of a visible and divinely endowedChurch, with supernatural offices. From this one master-error all the rest inevitably flow.

What a great English political writer said of France during its first revolution, that it had "torn itself from the family of nations and become the antagonist of all," may be with greater truth said of England under the action of the Protestant Reformation. It rent itself violently from the common wealth of Christendom, and constituted itself upon a basis of temporal and spiritual independence, at variance with the true interests of Catholic and Christian nations. Three centuries have been required to unfold all that lay hid in this act of separation. The antagonism of England to the religious and political condition of Catholic nations has become more and more formal and declared. In the seventeenth century England and France represented and led the two great arrays of the Protestant and Catholic policy of Europe. But a Protestant policy, properly so called, no longer exists. The progress of indifferentism, incredulity, and revolution has swept before it the narrow forms of Protestant policy. The two only ultimate forms of thought and action are the Catholic and the anti-Catholic of which, if it can hardly be said that France is the head of the former, it may with truth be affirmed that England is the head of the latter. The policy of uncatholic Russia is Catholic by the side of the anti-Catholic policy of England, which represents at this day not the partially Christian political society of the original Protestant Reformation, but the politics of the natural order, divested not only of the Catholic, but also of the Christian or supernatural character. But this I shall hope to explain more fully hereafter.

2. The first effect of the act by which England separated itself from the Catholic unity was to set in motion a principle of perpetual separation which has never ceased to bear its fruit. The population of England, in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was some where between three and four millions. Excepting the remnant of Catholics still faithful to the Holy See, the whole population was at least nominally and externally contained within the one dominant Church, established by Act of Parliament. At this day, with a population of 20,000,000, not one half of the people, by the latest statistical returns, is contained by the Anglican Church. The principle of separation has never ceased to work; and the great schism from the Catholic unity has been followed and punished by a perpetual separation of individuals and of masses. It is not necessary to narrate in detail the long line of separations which have detached one half of the English people from the Protestant Church of England.

It will be enough to notice the chief sects which have parted from its communion. The earliest, in the time of Elizabeth, was a form of Calvinistic Presbyterianism. The Presbyterians of England received great support and augmentation of numbers and of force from their contact with the Presbvterians of Scotland.

And this union it was which finally, in the reign of

Charles the First, overthrew the Episcopal Hierarchy of the Church of England. Next in order, both of ideas and of time, came the separation of the Inde pendents, who, retaining a belief in a Christian ministry, rejected altogether the union of ministers in a common government, and taught that each several minister and each several congregation constituted a whole and perfect church in itself. After these fol lowed a crowd of sects which rejected the idea of a Christian ministry, except as a human means of pre serving order. This is no more than the logical development of the original rejection of the divine unity and authority of the Church. The whole idea of a Church, divinely founded asakingdom or government, with laws of unity and of authority binding the conscience of men, was gradually effaced. Successively and part by part, the whole system of the divine order faded away, and new separations founded themselves upon denials of the need of a Christian ministry, of visible communion, of a Christian Hierarchy, as before the Anglican Church had founded itself upon a denial of the divine laws of Catholic unity and of the jurisdiction of the Holy See. It is not necessary to my present purpose to mark the epochs of these separations. It is enough to state upon the authority of a Protestant and a separatist, that by the time of Charles the First, not more than eighty years after the final establishment of the Reformation, the sects of England amounted to two hundred. The last two centuries have added almost without number to the minor sects of England of every form of fanatical pietism and extravagance, until, as I have already said, eight or ten millions, or one-half of the population, are lost to the Anglican Church. On this statement I do not dwell, as the purpose I have in view is rather the logical and moral than the material development of English Protestantism. My intention is chiefly to show that in one half of the English people the idea of a Church with divine endowments of unity and authority is so perfectly effaced, that Christianity is regarded only as a system of theism and of ethics, and not as a supernatural order by which men are united to God, and thereby aggregated into a divine society. And more than this, there has been gene rated among English sectarians a strong spirit of jealous opposition to the idea of a Church standing, as they say, between God and the soul, and assuming to direct the conscience and the will.

But, perhaps, it may be thought that the idea of a Church with divine endowments to teach and govern, if lost among the sectaries, is still preserved in the Anglican Church; that, if one half of the population have ceased to believe, or even to apprehend it, at least the other half, which retains a Hierarchy and fills the place of the Catholic Church in England, must have retained it.

But this is not the fact. Of the half population still adhering to the Anglican Church, the great mass are only passively and nominally of its communion. They have been born in it, or they are dependent upon it, or those who have power over them, as the aristocracy and richer families of the commons who possess estates in land, require fidelity to the established religion as a part of the duty of their dependents.

It is, perhaps, not easy to appreciate the state of opinion in a body so fluctuating as the Anglican Establishment. But it is certain that from its first foundation episcopacy was accepted by it as a form of government rather to be desired than as vital to the Church. The lawfulness of episcopacy, rather than its necessity; its convenience, rather than its divine institution, was the position maintained even by those who most strenuously contended for it. Such was the state of opinion in the reign of Edward the Sixth, and until the latter end of the reign of Elizabeth. While the power of Catholic Spain was feared in England, the English Protestants made common cause with the Protestants of Germany and Switzerland. This period ended with the destruction of the Spanish Armada; and immediately a new tendency developed itself, and a new school was founded. From that time the union with the foreign Protestants was relaxed, and a hierarchical school began to teach the divine institution and necessity of Episcopacy. The founders of this school were Hooker and Whito-ift. It was con-o tinned by Andrews and Hall, and raised still higher by Laud and Hammond. But if this form of opinion grew up, another was also developed at its side, and a long line of laxer divines, of whom some were Anglican Bishops, laid more widely than ever the foundations of the anti-hierarchical school which endures to this day. Between these has sprung up, since the year 1688, a school of latitudinarian opinions, which teach that all external forms of Church government are mutable and non-essential. Now, these three schools are the chief which exist in the Anglican Church on the subject of the nature, order, unity, and authority of the Church. The great mass of its people and the majority of its clergy, are either ignorant or indifferent upon this point; passively living on under the traditions in which they were born, without so much as a formal or conscious intellectual perception of the nature of a Church.

And of these three schools, two are definitely and decidedly opposed to the true divine idea of the Visible Church invested with the endowments of unity and authority in teaching and government: so that the opinion which teaches Apostolical Succession, Episcopacy, and a certain idea of Priesthood, without any true or adequate idea of a Sacrifice, is that of a mere school, respectable for the learning and piety of many of its founders, but representing a very narrow section of the Anglican Church.

Judging from the popular public opinion of the English people, as manifested habitually and turbulently in its daily flood of newspapers, in its innumerable publications, in its tide of public clamour, and its perpetual private talk, it is within limits to say, that the true and divine idea of the Church of God, as the presence of Jesus teaching and reigning upon Earth, not only has no existence in the mind of the English people, but is known only to be rejected as a human superstition or a spiritual tyranny. It is this which has always given such a peculiar sharpness to all the controversies and collisions between the English Pro testants and statesmen, and the Catholic and Roman Church. There does not exist perhaps in the world a population in which the spirit of hostility against the unity of the Church has taken so deep and so wide spread a root. I do not except the United States of

America, partly because the spirit of separation which exists there is purely English in its origin, and partly because in America the spirit of social and personal tolerance is far more genuine and, I may say, more generous than in England, where the traditions of royal, national, aristocratical, family, and personal pride and resentment against the Catholic Church still sustain an active and high- wrought hostility to its authority.

3. Thus far I have spoken only of the prolific fertility of the Anglican Reformation in producing endless separations from its own unity, if I may so call it, and in thereby effacing the very notion of the Church, as it forms an article of our Baptismal Creed, and as it reigns by the authority of Jesus Christ over the nations of the world. But there is another more intimate and more vital development of error to be noted, which for three hundred years has never stayed its onward progress I mean the genesis and production of heresy in respect of the dogmas of faith, and of unbelief, as the parasite of heresy.

It would be impossible at this time to do more than to indicate broadly and in outline the successive and accumulating phases of error which have manifested themselves in the Anglican Church alone: for of the sects in separation from it I shall not attempt to speak.

Now, I would mention only those manifestations of error which have been important and permanent; for to trace out or to define the lesser developments would be impossible. I would notice, then, a series of distinct schools of erroneous opinion progressively gene rated within the pale of the Anglican Church during the last three centuries.

First, in the reign of Edward the Sixth the Anglican Church was essentially Protestant. It was in close

\j alliance with the Reformers of German} 1 - and Geneva. If it had Bishops, it nevertheless admitted Presbyterian ordinations. If it retained fragments of the Missal, it pulled down all Tabernacles and Altars. If it retained the administration of Sacraments, it did so under protest, promulgating in its articles the Sacramentarian doctrines of Calvin and Zuinglius.

In the reign of Elizabeth, as I have already said, a hierarchical school sprung up, and with it a partial re-action towards a sounder doctrine on the subject of the grace of Sacraments. Sometimes, indeed, the highest hierarchical pretensions and practices were held in union with a Calvinistic doctrine on all other points, as in Whitgift and Hall.

In the reign of Charles the First, the hierarchical spirit led many into the study and admiration of the Catholic Theology; and in the midst of penal laws the

Church, by its secret and supernatural action, began powerfully to affect many minds. There can be no doubt that a reaction towards the Church partially de veloped itself. And while the Protestants of England and Scotland called Rome Babylon, they called the Anglican Church her eldest daughter. Popery and Prelacy were identified. The Primacy of the Holy See and the Episcopacy of the Anglican Church were regarded as differing not in kind, but only in degree. There can be no doubt that at that moment an extensive change in favour of the Catholic Church spread itself among the members of the Anglican body. This is to be found in the works and lives of Laud, Ham mond, Forbes, Montague, Pearson, Thorndike, and others, and extends itself through the commonwealth and the reign of Charles the Second, until the Revolution of 1688 under William the Third.

In the reign of William the Third, the Protestant re action from the Catholic influence of James the Second, together with the Calvinism of Holland, laid the foundations of the latitudinarian school, which in every generation has become more numerous and powerful. The essence of latitudinarianism is simple indifference in matters of religion. The Episcopalians of England and the Presbyterians of Scotland united under the form of Established Churches to support the new dynasty and each other. An extensive school of able but worldly divines sprung up, whose religion con sisted in controversy against Catholicism and comprehension of all Protestant sects. Tillotson and Hoadley both accused of secret Socinianism may be taken as the two corner-stones of the system which has become the prevalent religion of English laymen from the Revolution of 1688 to this day. There can be no doubt that if the majority of the Anglican clergy hold a hierarchical and sacramental theology, the vast majority of the laity reject both Hierarchy and Sacraments, except as things tolerable and indifferent. It is remarkable that the greatest blow dealt to this pernicious system came from the hands of a Catholic Bishop that is from Dr. Milner, Vicar- Apostolic of the Midland District in England in a work called Letters to a Prebendary, that is to a certain Balguy, a disciple of Hoadley.

During the whole of the foregoing period, from the Reformation downwards, two great tendencies were at work in the Anglican Church the one a tendency to exaggerate the importance of the external forms of worship and discipline; the other, to concentrate itself in an internal Pietism. There can be no doubt that the so-called High Church or Hierarchical School has hardly ever produced a writer of an interior spirit. If we except Jeremy Taylor, who was hierarchical only by accident, and really mutable, rhetorical, and latitudinarian, there is hardly to be found among them a devotional, ascetical, or mystical writer. On the other hand, such writers abound among the so-called Low Church or Puritan school: as, for instance, Hall, Baxter, Owen, Leighton, Scrougall, and the like, within the Anglican System, and a far greater number among the dissenting sects. This seems to explain the fact that the Hierarchical school has always been dry and punctilious, and the Puritans or Pietist school always disorderly and unconforming.

This opposition produced two schools the one formalistic, Arminian, semi-Pelagian, and verging on Socinianism: the other Sacramentarian, Zuinglian, and fanatical, issuing often in Antinomianism. The end of the last century and the first thirty years of this were spent in a conflict between these two schools, in which the Pietistic or Puritan school, under the name of Evangelical, gradually prevailed more and more in imparting its character to the popular religion of the Anglican Church.

Such was the state of the Reformed Church of England down to the emancipation of the Catholics, or until about the year 1880. From that time two new and energetic intellectual movements developed themselves; and two schools, which must extensively affect the future relations of England to Christianity and to the Catholic Church, were formed.-

After three hundred years of penal laws, and fifty years of unsuccessful conflict, the Catholics entered into the political and social life of England, as the early Christians emerged from the catacombs into the light of the sun and the public streets of Rome. The true and adequate cause of this emancipation is not to be found in the will or power of any Government, nor in the agitation or influence of any individual. It is to be sought further off, and to be found in the far wider movement which had swayed the continent by a reaction from the impieties of the first French Revolution towards the Catholic faith and the Catholic Church. Another of the great reactions which have affected the social order of Europe, as a law of its progress since the schism of the sixteenth century, had set in, and its influence powerfully supported and urged forward the Catholic movement in Ireland and the larger spirit of political justice in England.

The same cause produced in the Anglican Church, and chiefly at Oxford, an intellectual movement so well known that I should fear to enter into a description of it. Nevertheless, I may say that this intellectual movement was in no way begun by the direct action of the Church, nor by Catholic preachers, or theologians, or writers of any kind. It was not the work of Catholic Priests in England, nor of Catholics at all. It sprung up from causes remote from all these agencies causes hardly perceived at the time. The effect, however, was most extensive. This school created for itself a whole literature, secular and, so to say, theological. It multiplied every form of secular writings History, Biography, Poetry, Romance, artistic and assthetical works. In theology, it translated a Bibliotheca Patrum, wrote dogmatic treatises, controversial arguments, commentaries on Scripture, Ritualistic essays, and the like. It pushed its frontier to the verge of the Catholic Church, and rested its extreme position upon the Council of Trent. Such was the Oxford movement, of which many reasons warn me to refrain from saying more than that it was a sincere, manly, and resolute endeavour to find truth at all hazards, and to follow it at all costs.

The progress and development of this school immediately began to throw out a reaction on the other side. So early as the year 1835, at the outset of the Oxford, or so-called Catholic movement in the Anglican Church, an opposition arose on the part of certain men of high intellectual cultivation who had imbibed the spirit and system of the German Rationalism.

This school was headed by Arnold, the intimate friend of Bunsen. Gradually it has multiplied: chiefly among his scholars in the two Universities of Oxford and Cambridge, until finally it has expressed itself in a volume of much notoriety, entitled a Essays and Reviews." Of the tenets of this school I will give a summary in the words of a document prepared with much exactness by a committee appointed for the purpose by the Anglican Convocation or Synod of the so-called province of Canterbury.

" We have carefully examined the work, and we consider the following to be its leading principles:

" I. That the present advanced knowledge possessed by the world in its manhood, is the standard whereby the educated intellect of the individual man, guided and governed by conscience, is to measure and determine the truth of the Bible.

" II. That when the Bible is assumed to be at variance with the conclusions of such educated intellect, the Bible must be taken in such cases to have no divine authority, but to be only a human utterance.

" III. That the principles of interpretation of the Bible hitherto universally received in the Christian Church are untenable, and that new principles of interpretation must now be substituted, if the credit and authority of the Holy Scriptures are to be maintained.

" We find that in many parts of the volume state ments and doctrines of the Holy Scriptures are denied, called into question, or disparaged, for example

" 1. The verity of miracles, including the idea of creation as presented to us by the Bible.

" 2, Predictive prophecy, especially predictions concerning the Incarnation, person, and offices of our Lord.

" 3. The descent of all mankind from Adam.

" 4. The fall of man and original sin.

(t 5. The divine command to sacrifice Isaac.

" 6. The Incarnation of our Lord.

" 7. Salvation through the Blood of Christ.

61 8. The Personality of the Holy Spirit.

" 9. Special and supernatural inspiration."

Again: a friendly reviewer gives this account of the " Essays and Reviews:"

u No fair mind can close this volume without feeling it to be at bottom in direct antagonism to the whole system of popular belief.... The men and women of our congregations are told that the whole scheme of salvation has to be entirely rearranged and altered. Divine reward and punishments, the fall, original sin, vicarious penalty, and salvation by faith, are all, in the rational sense of the terms, repudiated as immoral delusions. All the bases of the Believer s

Creed are undermined, the whole external authority on which it rests is swept away.

a In their ordinary, if not plain sense, these have been discarded the Word of God, the Creation, Redemption, Justification, Regeneration, Salvation, Mira cles, Inspiration, Prophecy, Heaven and Hell, Eternal Punishment, a day of Judgment, Creeds, Liturgies, Articles, the truth of Jewish History and Gospel Narrative. A sense of doubt is thrown over even the Incarnation, Resurrection, and Ascension, the Divinity of the Second Person, the personality of the Third."

It is to be observed that these Essays, though pub lished in one volume, were not written in concert. They therefore present a form of thought extensively prevailing not only in the two Universities, but also in England at large. Of the seven writers, all are members of the Anglican Church: six are ministers holding office as professors, or other ecclesiastical and academical trusts. In truth, the Rationalistic school may be said to be thoroughly established in England. Such then, " confi tentibus ipsis," is the Rationalistic school in the Church of England. But it is not a mere school of thought, vague and floating, which may be absorbed or dissipated. An authoritative preliminary judgment has been pronounced upon it by the highest Ecclesiastical tribunal, excepting only the

Queen in Council. And that judgment, though in some degree adverse to the liberty claimed by the Rationalists, nevertheless gives to that school a substantive existence, and incorporates its principles by public law in the system and rights of the Church of England. Fifteen articles, containing highly heretical matter, were exhibited by a certain Anglican Bishop against Dr. Williams, one of the chief writers in the " Essays and Reviews," before the Court of Arches: twelve of those articles were dismissed, thereby either directly or indirectly declaring that the matter of them might with impunity be taught by the clergy of the Church of England; three were declared to be at variance with the formularies of the Establishment. In the course of the judgment, certain first principles were laid down which are more to our purpose than the articles in question.

The learned judge declared in substance as follows:

1. That the Church of England holds the Books of the Old and New Testament to be inspired and Canonical.

2. That no one is at liberty to deny the inspiration or canonicity of those books.

3. That the Church of England does not declare what inspiration is, except that it signifies an interposition of God.

4. That it does not affirm all parts of the said books to be so inspired.

5. That any clergyman may deny the inspiration of any part of those books as long as he does not deny the inspiration of any entire book. He may, therefore, deny the inspiration of all of every book except some residuum of each, so that the name of the book be still retained in the Canon.

6. That what remains he may interpret as he judges best, save only that he may not, by his inter pretations, contradict the articles and formularies of the Church of England.

7. That these articles and formularies were in many points left ambiguous, in order to permit liberty and largeness of interpretation, of which every one may avail himself as his conscience an.d critical faculty may require.

Such is the judicial and authoritative interpretation of the sixth article of the Church of England, the first and productive principle of all protestant ism, namely, that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation; and that those books are to be accounted Canonical of which there was never any doubt in the Church.

I need not stay to point out that this is pure and essential Rationalism. The members of the Church of England may reject or retain what they will, some more and some less, of the Scriptures; but all that is hereby rejected is rejected on the principle of Rationalism, i.e. of the critical reason: all that is retained is retained upon the principle of Rationalism, that is, of human testimony tried by the same criterion. The individual is by necessity rationalistic in the use of the liberty permitted to him; and the Church of England is equally rationalistic both in the principle on which it permits that liberty, and in the. position it has assumed in the sixth article towards the Scrip tures and the Church. This judgment, therefore, hasan importance far beyond any that has yet been given. It is far more rationalistic than the Essays and Reviews; and it is more final and fatal in its operations, inasmuch as it is not the wandering of private individuals, but the authoritative promulgation of Rationalism as the basis of the Established Religion by its highest ordinary tribunal in ecclesiastical matters. And not a voice, so far as I can find, has been raised by any one of all the schools of Anglican Protestantism against it.

Since the delivery of this judgment, a remarkable illustration of its principles has been given by a work on the Pentateuch, by Dr. Colenso, Anglican Bishop of Natal, who in a laboured argument denies that the

Books of Moses were written by Moses; and that the Books themselves are of a historical character, that is, are credible as a history. Dr. Colenso professes nevertheless a heartfelt belief in the revelations of the Old and New Testaments, but rests his belief upon the subjective convictions of his own spiritual consciousness. I need not point out the essential rationalism of this procedure; and in noticing it, I desire to do so with a sincere compassion towards those who, having been tortured by the Protestant fiction of the sufficiency of Scripture, have fallen by recoil into a rationalistic illuminism. God grant that he, and others like him, may see that the perfect rationalism and the perfect illumination are to be found not in the private reason or in the private spirit, but in the intelligence of the universal Church, illuminated by the perpetual indwelling and the light of the Holy Ghost.

I have thus summarily sketched out the chief forms of religious opinions which have sprung up in the Anglican Church in the three last centuries. Others there are, as St. Augustine said of the lesser heresies, "paene innumerabiles;" but these are formal, per manent, and substantive schools of error: namely, the Protestant, Hierarchical, Romanizing, Latitudinarian, Formalistic, Puritan, Oxford, and Rationalistic Schools. These forms of religious opinion have been gradually evolved from the darkness and chaos created by the Anglican Reformation. Since that period the Anglican Church has been in a state of perpetual flux. Fixedness it has had none from the moment of its separation, when it lost its inherence in the universal Church by schism, and the influx of its supernatural mind and divine guidance by formal heresy. For, as I have said before, the master heresy of the English race is to deny the presence of any infallible authority upon earth.

During the eighteen centuries of its existence the o o

Catholic Church has been tried by the rise of a succession of heresies within its unity. Every century has had its characteristic heresy. From Gnosticism to Jansenism there is a line of almost unbroken succession in error which has sprung up parasitically by the side of the Divine Truth. But the Church has re mained steadfast and resplendent, without change or shadow of vicissitude, ever the same, and perfect in its light as in the beginning. The errors of the human intellect have never fastened upon the supernatural intelligence of the mystical Body; but every successive error has been expelled by the vital and vigorous action of the infallible mind and voice of the Church of God. All its dogma of faith remains to this hour incorrupt, because incorruptible, and therefore primitive and immutable.

The errors of men have been cast forth as humours, which are developed in the human system, but can not coexist with the principle of life and health. A living body easts off whatever assails its perfection. " They went out from us, but they were not of us, for if they had been of us, they would have continued with us, but that they might be manifest that they were not all of us."

But in the Anglican Church all is the reverse. Every error which has sprung up in it adheres to it still. Its doctrines vanish, its heresies abide. All its morbid humours are absorbed into its blood. The Lutheranism of Edward the Sixth; the Hierarchical Calvinism of Elizabeth; the Ceremonial Arminianism of James; the Episcopalian Antiquarianism of the two Charleses; the Latitudinarianism of William the Third; the Formalism and the Fanaticism of the Georges; the Anglo-Catholicism and the Rationalism of the last thirty years, all coexist at this hour, side by side, congested together, in open contradiction, and almost perpetual controversy. It would be untrue to represent any one of these schools of error as the legitimate voice or exponent of the Anglican Church. They are all equally so, and all equally not so. They each claim so to be, and deny the legitimacy of all the rest. But the Anglican Church pronounces no judg-¹ ment among them. It sits mute and confounded. It puts none of them out of its pale. None of them will go out. All alike refuse to be put out. For all are equally of it, and all, therefore, by the inspired rule, alike remain with it. And this for the obvious reason already given, which to any Catholic is intuitively clear: forasmuch as the Anglican Reformation has entirely cancelled from the intelligence of the English people the whole idea of the Church divinely founded, endowed with supernatural attributes, and teaching with divine, and, therefore, infallible certainty, there is neither any principle of authority, or test of certainty by which to discern truth from error, nor any frontier or circle of unity from which error should be expelled. I believe the universal experience of all those who have exercised the evangelical ministry in England would be this, that the last article of the Creed, which enters, and that slowly, and for a long time painfully, into the English intelligence, is the nature and office of the Church: or to speak theologically, the formal object of Faith, and the divinely ordained conditions of its manifestations to the world. I will make but one further reflection, and then draw a general conclusion as to the present relations of England to Christianity and to the Catholic Church, and therefore to the Christian Society of the world.

The reflection is this: The direct occasion of the departure of England from the doctrines of Faith was collision with the Catholic Church and with the Holy See. Three times England has contended with the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and three times it has suffered loss, each greater than the last. The schism of Henry the Eighth was on no point of doctrine. The dogma of faith remained unchanged till after his death, and he was buried amidst the solemnities of the Catholic Dirge and Requiem. It was the spirit of rationalism, and the jealousy of the Crown, which begun the conflict. After this came the result: and the peculiar aberrations of the Anglican Protestantism were the immediate consequences.

Again, in the time of Elizabeth, by cruel persecution and by shedding the blood of the Saints, Eng land sinned against the Church of God, and the first germs of its own internal schisms began immediately to spring up.

A third time, in the reign of James the Second, the English people and their Rulers contended with the Holy See, and by recoil fell into Latitudinarian Protestantism.

We live in the period of another collision, and of another recoil; but as yet perhaps neither the collision nor the recoil have reached their limits.

A few years ago the Sovereign Pontiff restored to England the Catholic Hierarchy, and the Rulers stirred up many classes of the people to a momentary madness of fear and of resentment. The time is too recent and the event too well known that I should need to dwell upon them now. But it is remarkable that at this moment a recoil the most pronounced, formidable, and reasoned, as well as the most extensive, and extending towards rationalistic unbelief, which has ever been known in England since the reformation has developed itself. It must not be indeed supposed that rationalism did not already exist in the Anglican Church. The germs of it were deep in its original foundation, and had widely, but informally spread themselves. All that is new at this time is its systematic expression, and its logical relation to the state of religious belief in England. There can be no doubt that the controversies of the last thirty years have resolved the question of religious belief for all intelligent minds in this country into its ultimate analysis. It is a simple question between Rome and rationalism, be tween the divine certainty of faith, and the instability of human opinion: between the presence of a Divine Teacher and the solitude and darkness of the human soul. They who have watched the development of the religious intellect, so to speak, of the English peopie, in the last years, can fix with certainty upon the period when this alternative became a public and practical question: and they have noted the immediate reaction which threw itself back in the direction of German criticism, as the only assignable reason for not submitting to the Catholic Church. Many who are now prominent in the anti-catholic movement in England, especially in public life, were once on its frontier, and, parted from their former colleagues and convictions, actually on the threshold of its unity, I may say ad limini apostolorum. We are always tempted to think the time in which we live to be eventful and pregnant beyond other ages. But I think we shall not be far wrong in considering as exceptionally great the thirty years which began with Catholic Emancipation in England, including the restoration of the Catholic Episcopate and terminating in the an ti- Christian movement of the nations against the Temporal Sovereignty of the Holy See. In this period there has been a pronounced and explicit development of the two intellectual movements indicated above. There was a time when those who now stand opposed as Catholics and Rationalists were apparently in close and perfect identity of convictions. But even then, under the form of a common opinion, there lay concealed the essential antagonism of two principles, the divergence of which is as wide as Divine Faith and human opinion can interpose between the minds of men. While every year has confirmed to some the reasons which, with luminous evidence, convert the convictions of the intellect into the consciousness of faith, and has revealed more and more the divine unity and endowments of the only Church of God, others once by their side have been carried back, as by a ground swell, into Anglican ism, Protestantism, Latitudinarianism, and Rationalistic Deism. Such has been their recoil from collision with the Church of the living God, and such have been already the oscillations, and the descending reactions of England in its three hundred years of contention with the Holy See. "Durum est contra stimulum calcitrare." " It is hard to kick against the goad."

If, as I have said, the four bases of Christian society be the Christian law of matrimony, the unity of faith, the unity of the Church, and the supreme authority of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, then enough has been said to show that England has removed its civil polity from the foundations of the Christian law to the basis of mere natural society. By its original sin of royal and national pride, it threw off its obedience to the Vicar of Christ, and, by inevitable consequence, violated the unity of the Church and of the faith. And

Acts, ix, 5.

now, in these last days, it has violated the unity and indissolubility of Christian marriage by legalising divorce, thereby dissolving the primary foundation-stone of the Christian society, laid by the Church of God in England. It has needed many generations to unfold what lay hid in the original separation of Henry the Eighth. It may take generations to un fold all that lies hid in the existence of the Divorce Court. But time, though slowly, works surely.

" Fecunda culpse secula nuptias Primum inquinavere et genus et domus; Hoc fonte derivata clades, In patriam populumque fluxit."

Horat., Od. Lib. iii, 6.

Lastly, of the relation of England to the Christian Society of Europe, that is, of the Foreign Policy of the English Government towards Christianity and the Catholic Church, what can I say? Out of traditional hatred of the Holy See, the hatred which springs from wrong, " odisse quern laaseris," the English Government has placed itself at this time at the head, not of the Protestant policy of Europe as in other days, but of the anti-catholic revolution of the world. It does not lead on the formal errors of Lutheranism or of Anglicanism, but the principles of heresy and of anarchy. It has headed the unbelief and the sedition of Europe. It is the intrinsic enmity of the congeries of heresies within the Anglican Church which chiefly directs the political power of England against the Catholic Church, and above all against the Holy See. But the Government of England represents not the Anglican Church alone: it represents also the whole mass and waste of fanaticism, indifference, and un belief which reigns over one-half of the English people. This great power of the national will drives every government in the same path. No man can withstand or direct it. All must obey it, as if all were carried onward by an irresistible tide. And, as I have already pointed out, the very idea of the Church divinely organised and endowed with a supernatural office being effaced from the intelligence of the English people, the policy of the Government is, by its own nature and instinct, hostile to the Catholic Church, and therefore to the Christian Society of Europe. At this moment it stands alone in the world, isolated from all Catholic nations, because it is anti-Catholic, and from all con stituted governments, because it is the stimulus and the head of revolutionary movements in every people.

The principle of non-intervention is nothing more than the enunciation of the principle of national independence, which, as I have shown, was the first step of Henry the Eighth in the way of schism. Let me suppose this principle to be admissable in the sphere of pure politics. Its application to the question of the unity of the faith and of the Church, or of the Sovereignty or the Temporal Power of the Vicar of Jesus Christ which now agitates the world, is essentially a denial of the divine institution of the Church. To such a government as that of England, which represents a population not only in schism and in heresy, but traditionally hostile to the spiritual authority of the Church and of the Pontiffs, it is frank and logical to let loose every agency, and to stimulate every agitation which can undermine the Temporal Power of the Holy See. Having no perception of the nature of the Church, even as a spiritual kingdom, and hating its supreme authority, nothing can be more consequent, or congruous for the English Government than to endeavour to make Rome the capital of an united Italy. It is a pure and consistent anti-catholic policy. Any government which proclaims the principle of non-intervention in the Roman question, thereby denies the divine authority of the Church and of the Holy See, and its divine mission to the nations of the world. All this the English Government denies by the original hypothesis of the so-called Reformation. It is Lutheranism in politics and the Reformation in diplomacy. As the Government of England represents merely natural society, that is, civil power divested of the character of religion, and without the guidance of the divine authority of the Church, it is inevitable that it should be in diametrical opposition to all governments which, being Christian and Catholic, recognise their duty to sustain, by active power, the Catholic Faith, the Catholic Church, and the prerogatives of the Holy See. To this simple issue all the foreign policy of the day is resolving itself. In its last analysis it is the conflict of the Christian and the Natural Societies. Neither France nor any Catholic people can accept the principle of non-intervention, when the Faith, or the Church, or the Patrimony or the Sovereignty of the Church, are at stake; they would fall from their Catholic and Christian character in the act of adopting such a policy. To invite them so to do is an offence against their deepest and highest sense of duty. England proclaims such a policy be cause it is not Catholic, and because its Government acts as if it had no relations to Christianity; and, in proclaiming this principle, it assumes an attitude towards Christianity and the Church, and towards the Christian Society of Europe, which gives to it at this moment the melancholy preeminence of being the most anti-catholic, and therefore, if not in its intentions, certainly in its influences and in its results, the most an ti- Christian power of the world.

Of the relations of the Anglican Church to Christianity and to the Catholic Church, enough has been already said. It is evident that the perpetual flux and change which has developed in these three centuries so many heresies, is perpetually resolving the Anglican Church into the two only tenable forms of religious opinion and belief, rationalism and faith. The departure of the Anglican body further and further from all primitive doctrines, and from the very idea of divine certainty in matters of belief, has be come greater in every successive century, and, as we have seen, with every successive collision with the Church of God. Whatsoever be the partial re action of opinion in individuals or fragments of the Anglican body towards a more positive faith, I can not note in the body as such, any tendency but one of further departure from unity, and of a lower descent in unbelief.

As to the several classes of the people, the same must be said. In the higher class there has been in every century and every generation a great and continual loss to the Catholic Church. In the beginning of the last century nearly a fifth of the Peers of England were Catholics; now they are hardly more than a dozen among three or four hundred. In the counties of England a large proportion of the landed proprietors were Catholics, now but few remain.

In the middle class, which represents especially the commercial, parliamentary, and protestant spirit of England, Catholics are hardly to be found.

Among the learned classes the proportion is hardly greater, and, if greater, only because the numbers of those classes are so much less.

I may then be asked: If this be so, what remains for England? Are all the hopes with which Catho lics have consoled and cheered themselves of a work of grace in England without foundation?

By no means. There are many and great en couragements to the largest and most sanguine hopes; such hopes as Christians and Catholics alone know how to cherish, because they alone know the power and the love of God.

First, it must be said, that the work of conversion which, down to the beginning of this century, was rare, and sporadic, and at most in the smallest number, has now, in these last thirty years, become very frequent, numerous, and svstematic. It is not now the work of j an individual here and there, but of the Church, as a body, working by its action upon the English people.

Next, conversions to the faith have been from everv class. There is no grade, or condition of public, or private life, no profession, no art, no science, no de gree of intellectual cultivation, which has not made its contribution to the Church. The gift of faith has fallen upon men of every kind, but chiefly upon the learned professions: upon Anglican ministers, lawyers, physicians, and students of the two Universities, and upon those who fill many offices of public trust and importance. And these again become centres of influence to the classes or professions to which they belong, and in almost every instance their example, or their instructions bring others to the faith.

Again, a great change has passed upon the public opinion of England on the subject of Protestanism. It has, by a series of internal conflicts and self-contra dictions, extensively lost the confidence and respect of educated men. The defiant and self-lauding tone of the last generation is now seldom heard. The rationalistic excesses of Germany have very deeply dis credited the Protestant Reformation, and the glaringinconsistencies of the Anglican system have reduced its members to a tone of apology unknown before.

Moreover, later writers, impartial, though Protestant, both in England and abroad, have exposed the true history of the Reformers and the Reformation, to such an extent as to make many of a better and higher mind unwilling to call themselves Protestants.

Also, the Protestant controversy lias undergone a great modification. Instead of the contemptuous and confident tone of other days, it is timid and full of concessions, excepting in the fanatical Protestants, to whom few educated people pay attention or show any respect. The anti-catholic argument is, in Theology at least, sensibly weaker, and narrowed to fewer points, and now so seldom heard, compared with other times, that it is, as a public voice, almost silent.

The so-called Anglo- Catholic movement has for years defended many points of Catholic truth, not fully, indeed, but approximately, so that a great part of the Protestant controversy is turned aside from the Church, and spends itself upon its own adherents.

And further, the Catholic literature and the Catholic argument is in the hands of multitudes who before never could, or never would, listen to the truth. In society it has become a common topic, so wide spread and so habitual, that it may be said to pervade the conversation of the educated classes. Much of this is, of course, hostile to the Church; nevertheless, it is discussed as a common and even prominent subject in the upper classes of England.

Another point in which society in England is greatly modified towards the Church is this: The race of men who maintained the penal laws, and breathed their spirit, is nearly passed away. Their sons, who were either born, or brought up after the repeal of the penal laws, are now the fathers and heads of this generation. They are, as a rule, men of a larger, juster, calmer, and more equitable mind. They will themselves both listen to the truth, and t/ more readily allow their children to do so. By the same cause, their children will probably be even more just and large than themselves; and the next generation may be indefinitely emancipated from the anti-catholic prejudices and falsehoods of their fathers.

Also, Catholics are to be found in so many fami lies, that it is no longer possible to keep up the absurd estrangement and affected separation between Protestants and Catholics as in other times. They are obliged to receive their Catholic kinsmen, and, at least, to eat and drink with them.

All these particulars might be more fully developed, but what I have said will suffice.

There remains, however, one other, and that the greatest cause of hope.

I have hitherto spoken of the organised social and political life of England. I am afraid that it is further removed from Christianity and from the Church than at any previous time in its history. The whole weight of England in the world is secular and anti-catholic. It represents mere natural society, with its indocility and insubordination to revelation and to divine authority, and its proud vindication of liberty of thought, of speech, and of action, both in individuals and in nations. Individualism in religion, and nationalism in politics, are the two cardinal points of its existence.

There remains, however, one more element in our subject, the English people; the unorganised life, so to speak, of its millions, " Israel scattered upon the mountains, as sheep having no shepherd. " I trust I shall find pardon if I manifest too great a love for the people of my own race, u my brethren according to the flesh."f The Anglican Reformation was the sin of the Rulers, not of the people; of the Pastors, not of the flock. It was not until after long years of force, and fraud, and unrelenting cruelty, of persecution unto death, with frequent but fruitless armed risings in defence of their faith, that the poor of England fell under the power of their masters. They were robbed of their faith, and separated from the Church of God by conquest; and their children have been born into the ruin of their inheritance, and are in schism by no conscious, much less by any perverse election of their will. The qualities of the²

Anglo-Saxon race are in them still; the same docile, childlike, perhaps slow, intelligence; the same firm, tenacious, and fearless will; the same love of truth, and of justice, of fair dealing, and of uprightness in word and deed. If our great St. Gregory could once more walk through the place of their captivity, he would recognize the countenances of his children s children. The fluctuations, recoils, reactions, heresies, controversies, and fanaticisms which have desolated other Protestant countries, such as Germany and Switzerland, and also, to no small degree, the educated classes of England, have passed almost unfelt over the millions of the English people. It is said that the greatest tempest does not stir the waters of the sea below the level of certain feet from its sur face. All above is in violent agitation, while all benea this still and tranquil, as from the beginning of the creation. So it is with the great living, breathing, beating, and, I may say, noble human heart of the English, the Anglo-Saxon people. The life of the northern races is in them: a profound sense of an unseen world: of God as their Creator, the witness of all their actions, and their just Judge at last. Upon this also the Catholic Church has built what three hundred years of schism and heresy had never overthrown, a belief in Christianity as a divine revelation, and in the inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. There is in the mouths of the English poor a saying, the origin of which I could never trace. But it seems " volitare per ora virorum," like a sybilline oracle, or, more truly, like the proverbial instinct of a race once Catholic. It is " like the sound of one going in the tops of the pear trees,"³ the sign of the Lord s advent, presence, and future manifestation. They habitually say, t(The Catholic religion was the first religion, and it will be the last." There floats among them the traditionary expectation, that the faith of their fathers will one day rise again; and, though they have been taught to hate it and to fear it, nevertheless they look for it, with no alarm at least for the bearing of the prophecy upon the destinies of the Anglican Establishment, which they neither believe in, nor love.

It may be that, as the Norman Conquest imposed for centuries upon Saxon England the Norman language and the Norman laws, which all have been swallowed up and overwhelmed, as a stone in the sands, by the rising and return of the Saxon spirit, the Saxon language, and the Saxon race, so, in like manner, the oligarchical religion of the English Crown and Aristocracy may be absorbed and buried in the rising again of the popular faith of the Saxon people of England. Be this as it may, certain it is that in no class of the English population are the Catholic faithful or the Catholic Priest more truly respected and loved. The poor of England have much ignorance and many strange errors as to the Catholic faith, sedulously pro-

CD pagated in the last three centuries by those who live by contending with the Church and dividing its spoils. But they have no class prejudices, no fanatical controversy, no pharisaical religion, no worldly respects or fears to blind their eyes, or to pervert their will. They are both willing and resolute in seeing with their own eyes and hearing with their own ears, and in judging of men as they find them, and of listening calmly to what they teach, and in accepting it if they believe it, and in defending it if it be persecuted, from a mere love of fair play and of a generous sympathy with those who are weak and with those who suffer. The progress of the Church among them is vast and limited only by the narrowness of our means, "messis quidem multa operarii autem pauci,"* may be said indeed of England; and of its poor, " regiones albas sunt ad messem."t There is no more beautiful vision in the natural order than the woodlands, and the cornlands, and the downs, and the hamlets, and the villages of England, with their simple poor, and the homes and the * St. Matt., ix, 37. t St. John, iv, 35.

works of men. And surely the Lord of the Prophet, who had pity upon Ninive for the sake of its poor and its innocent and its oxen, will have pity upon them. And He who had compassion on the multitude because they had been with Him three days and had nothing to eat, will one day let fall the Bread of Life in abundance round about their dwellings in the o wilderness. It is upon this broad base that the Catholic Church in England must hereafter repose. The Reformation, with all its traditions, ecclesiastical, religious, political, and social, its class interests, and its class prejudices, as a religion, is dying out, and must die out; and in its death will give birth to the indifferentism and incredulity which has been already gene rated by the great revolt of the sixteenth century in every Protestant country. But the masses of the English people are still the " apta materia" for the action of the Catholic Church, of its divine voice in teaching, and of its seven Sacraments of life, order, and of sanctity. And for this reason it is that the restoration of the Hierarchy was cheaply purchased at the cost of all the Papal Aggression tumult. It would have been cheaply purchased at the cost of seven such confusions. It was the restoration to the Saxon race of the supernatural form of the Kingdom of God, which once before, through the Hierarchy of St. Gregory the Great, had created Saxon England from the rudiments of its disorder to be a Christian Church and a Catholic monarchy. It is not wonderful that the anti-catholic spirit should have rent and tormented Eng land, when the shadow of the Divine presence fell upon it. The clamour and uproar did no more than publish to every soul of man within the realm that the Church of God summoned them to submission. Instead, then, of wishing that so great a Pontifical act had been carried through in silence, or by a carnal and stealthy prudence, we may rejoice that it was not " done in a corner," or brought in privily and unawares. Its magnitude demanded a proportionate promulgation, and its claim upon the consciences of men required a publication which should render the plea of ignorance impossible. In the last twelve years the Catholic Church in England has closed with the population, and entered into every rank, class, and degree of its social life; and, though the number of the souls gathered into its unity be great every year, the true growth and progress of the Church is not in the number of its conversions. Many as they are, what are they upon a population of twenty millions? The true growth and development of the Church is to be found in its own restored and expanding organization; in the multiplication of its priesthood andreligious orders; in the increase of every form of religious charity and activity; in the rising culture of its education in every class; above all, in the influx of the mind, order, power, and energy of the Catholic Church, and chiefly of the Holy See, throughout the whole structure and extent of its ecclesiastical life and system. For it may be said with truth, that the Catholic Church in England, at this moment, is rather a new creation from the Holy See, as in the time of St. Gregory the Great, than the continuity and development of an ancient body. The ancient Church in England withered up and perished by nationalism, and the destroyer cut it down, and cast it into the fire. The Catholic Church of this hour springs anew from the side of the Vicar of Jesus Christ, and gives to the Sovereign Pontiff, in Eng land, what the Count de Maistre expressed in one of his true and brilliant analogies, a Real Presence throughout its unity. Catholic England fell by ceasing to be Roman, and has risen again by the return and expansion of the life, mind, power, instincts, and action of the Holy See.

One thing is certain. The action of the Holy See upon England is more powerful at this day than it has been at any time since the Reformation, not only by the development of the Catholic Church, which, in these thirty years, is beyond all expectation great, nor only by the restoration of the Catholic Hierarchy and Order, but by the closer union of the life of the Catholic Church in England with the Holy See, and by its wide-spread influence upon the whole population of the land, by reason of the conflict which is now waging, in pretext against the Temporal Power, but in reality against the Spiritual Power of Rome. All the nations of Europe are constrained to take part in this contest. Some of contention, and some of good will. The English people are compelled to hear the subject daily discussed. Many go further and further into the anti-catholic policy; but many are staggered, and shaken, and many are revising their former opinions and retracting their former words. There is no doubt that the authority of Rome, like that of our Lord, who was " crucified in weakness, but raised in power," is every year greater upon the intelligence, conscience, and heart of the na tions of Europe. The providential institution, design, and preservation of the Temporal Power is manifested and believed in now as it was not even in 1848; and the nations which now for a time seem fluctuating and passive, may resume their former fidelity and courage. " Sanabiles fecit nationes super terrain," and after a period of disease they may return to their pristine health. The anti-catholic policy of the moment may, at any day, disappear in the nations which retain their union with the Catholic Church; and England may find itself in the religious and political isolation, which its greatest man in these days, the late Duke of Wellington, foretold would be its last and gravest danger. Probably its conduct towards the Holy See may be the cause of a reaction against it, which will be all the more complete as it will be the more visibly deserved. When the Catholic nations of Europe return to the traditional policy of Christendom, England will stand alone, ostracised by its own anti-catholic spirit and character.

Such, then, appear to be the relations of England to Christianitv and to the Catholic Church.

i/

The relations of the Crown, the Government, the Legislature, the organized political life, the dominant public opinion, is anti-catholic and anarchical: to a great extent it is anti-christian, and destructive of the Christian and Catholic Society of Europe. This evil tendency, increasing steadily and perpetually from the so-called Reformation, is, we may fear, stronger at this day than ever. Except by a miracle of Providence, it must certainly run to lengths, of which all we now see is no more than the beginning. Nothing, I fear, but greater excesses can be looked for from it.

The same must be said, with modifications, of the Anglican Church, and of all classes of the English people as such.

I see no appreciable reaction towards either Christianity or the Catholic Church sufficient to counter balance the visible and vast development of the spirit of rationalism and of religious anarchy. But as these antagonists dissolve themselves, the Church advances, always expanding its majestic unity, and these two operations never cease in their activity. The true and living relations seem to exist chiefly between indivi duals, "homines bonae voluntatis" of every class, and the great mass of the simple people. In preparation of heart they believe in Christianity and in the Catholic Church. Explicitly they know little, but implicitly they submit to the whole revelation of God. Over such it is that the restored Catholic Church of Eng land is now extending its renewing influences, and it may be that the Hierarchy of Pius the Ninth may have a future in England as the Catholic Church in Arian Spain and Arian Lombardy, which, after cen turies of eclipse, came forth again in a renewed and a mightier splendour, and has filled the Catholic world with its greater light even to this day.

Hitherto I have spoken only as the signs of the sky and of the times betoken. I have treated, as far as I could, in the order of history, and in the in dications which mark the tides and the currents of human action, the evidences of what may be in store for England hereafter. But there is a power and a will above all these which renders to us no account of its intentions, and alone disposes all. We must adore it in silence, and yet we may not in silence pass over its presence and its part in such a theme as this. There was a time when the conversion of Rome was humanly as hopeless as the conversion of England, Yet it was done; and it was done, not by the slow accretion of individuals, as men build palaces or pyramids, but by an instantaneous act of power, as God laid the foundation of the Earth and rears the height of mountains. What more unlooked for than the decree which, all in one day, hung upon the columns of the Forurn " Christianam religionem profited liberum." And how wonderful and almost instantaneous, like a beautiful vision, was the rise and the world-wide expansion of the peace and glory of Pontifical Rome, the mother and mistress of all churches. So, in its proportion, there may also be a grace in store for Eng land. For the blood of martyrs is not shed in vain, nor are the tears and prayers of widows and orphans, virgins and confessors, forgotten before the Throne. A great and mighty intercession has been for centuries ascending for England. The times of its desolation will not last for ever, nor has God forgotten to show mercy. The loss of its worldly splendour, by which it is now inflated and intoxicated, may, perhaps, be required as the price of its restoration. For, as it lost its true Christian glories by the growth of its worldly greatness, so, perhaps, a worldly humiliation may be the just divine condition to its rising again to the grace of the Kingdom of God. But this may come as in one day when we least look for it, and in one day it may turn to the Lord " when the veil shall be taken away"⁴ from its heart.

Footnotes

1. I St. John, ii, 19. ↩

2. II Chron., xviii, 16. t Rom., ix, 3. ↩

3. II Kings, v, 24. ↩

4. II Cor., iii, 16. ↩