The Catholic movement in the Church of England 1923

Front matter

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Preface

I HAVE endeavoured in this book to put forward a general account of the position of those who are commonly called “* Anglo-Catholics.”” The word itself I have avoided: already there are signs that it is in danger of acquiring a misleading significance, as though “‘ Anglo-Catholicism ”’ ought in some way to aim at establishing a new variety of the Catholic religion, or could be content with securing certain changes in the general standard of teaching and external presentment of the Christian faith within the Church of England, while retaining the insularity of outlook which has since the sixteenth century been the curse of English religion. Consequently I have replaced the word by the term ‘“ English Catholics’’: the mere fact that it is somewhat awkward and inconvenient is of a certain value, since it serves as a continual reminder that the present state of affairs, in which those who hold the specifically Catholic conception of the Christian revelation are outwardly divided, is contrary to the will of God and calls urgently for remedy.

My object has been to describe the main features of the Catholic system of religion as it has developed from the teaching of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His Apostles, to trace the course of events by which the continuity of that system was just preserved in the English Church at the Reformation, and to describe the almost miraculous manner in which it was revived in the last century and the course which that revival has followed down to the present day. In conclusion I have endeavoured to estimate the

Vv attitude which the followers of the revival are tending to adopt towards certain of the problems of the present time, notably towards the urgent problem of Christian re-union.

The Christian religion is an eternal revelation of God to man, and is therefore necessarily in one sense incapable of change. None the less in another sense it is continually changing ; for it is continually adapting itself to new methods of human thought and new ways of looking upon life. Consequently it is in this sense a continual process of evolution, in which the element of permanent truth is continually being adapted to the needs of new generations. The present time is one in which the challenge of new methods of thought is being urged with the utmost vigour by one side, and resisted with equal vigour by those who find nothing wanting in the older traditions of Christian teaching. In certain points I have endeavoured to indicate the lines along which the reconciliation of the two claims may be looked for: but at the same time I am well aware that a final synthesis is not to be looked for in the immediate future. Those of my critics who do not condemn me as a “ Modernist ”’ will condemn me as an “‘ obscurantist’”’; probably both will be perfectly correct.

Unhappily in an age of controversy it is necessary to take for granted the greater part of those fields of Christian belief on which there is general agreement, and to spend an excessive amount of energy on ploughing the arid fields of polemical argument: this must be my defence for the lengthy treatment devoted to the question of authority in the Church. Here again I shall incur the displeasure of those who see nothing amiss in the traditional arguments of popular Anglo-Roman or Catholic and Protestant controversy. My apology for venturing on a new line of approach must be the proved

PREFACE Vil futility of a system of controversy which is foredoomed from the beginning to a perpetual deadlock.

In regard to the more recent developments of the Catholic movement in the English Church I have endeavoured rather to analyse the tendencies actually at work than to dictate a line of policy which the movement ought to follow. Those familiar with the course of the revival will be aware of the many attempts that have been made to limit its progress to some particular doctrinal and devotional point, beyond which it cannot go without being disloyal to the traditions of the Church of England. Those limits have each in their turn been submerged by the advancing tide of Catholic devotion, and are now only remembered as curiosities of the past. It is possible that I shall be accused of a lack of loyalty to the distinctive position of the Church of England. But if in being loyal to the teaching of the Church Catholic I am disloyal to the Church of England, I fear that I shall bear the reproach with equanimity.

In one respect I am conscious that this book is seriously deficient. Any attempt to trace the growth of the Catholic revival in the English Church ought to deal also with the parallel revival within the Roman communion in this country, a revival that has been so closely and curiously interwoven with the Anglican movement. I have not attempted to do so. The historical survey of the two revivals in M. Thureau-Dangin’s La Renaissance Catholique en Angleterre succeeds in surveying the whole course of the two revivals with an impartiality which is hardly to be achieved by any English writer who is inevitably engaged as an active partisan on one side or the other. I have therefore ignored the Roman revival, since any estimate of it that ventured beyond the limits of uncritical admiration would almost ° aia be resented as an impertinence.

viii 7 PREFACE

In conclusion I would ask that if in anything I have written I have-offended the feelings of my readers, the fault may be considered as due to inadvertence of expression, not to uncharitable intention. I have endeavoured to write in that spirit of charity which alone can lead to the reconciliation of the divisions of Christendom and bring into the way of truth those who are now in the darkness of unbelief and error. I would ask in advance for pardon in respect of the many failures of which I have no doubt been guilty.

Since the beginning of the Oxford Movement in 1833 its opponents have prophesied its speedy failure. Several times that failure has seemed imminent: yet it has never come to pass. “If this counsel or this work be of men, it will come to nought: but if it be of God, ye cannot overthrow it; lest haply ye be found even to fight against God.”

Ws Dae

Octave of SS. Peter and Paul, 1923.

12 17 31

THE APPLICATION OF THE CATHOLIC

I

it Til.

IV. vi

euM es VII.

VIII.

IX.

X.

XI.

RELIGION

SIN AND GRACE CoMMUNION WITH reat yee

ComMuNION witH Gop—THE SACRAMENTS 57

Baptism

"THE Rie é ‘Tue SACRAMENT OF Pak wee : CONFIRMATION

Hoty Unction

Hoty Matrimony

Hoty OrbDeER

Tue SACRAMENTAL Like

Part III

. Tue Necessiry oF THE CHURCH

. THe CuurcH AND THE SCRIPTURES

. Tue CurisTiAN Consciousness

. Tue Expression or AUTHORITY IN Hie

TORY ix

59 62

109 112 118 x CHAPTER

CONTENTS

V. Tue Test or AUTHORITY

VI.

Vit VIII.

IX.

. INTERNAL REUNION oF THE ENGLISH

Tue Unity or THE CHURCH Avutuority IN A Divipep CHURCH Tue Cuurcy IN Heaven

THe CuurcH IN PuRGATORY

PART sv THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND ~

. HisrortcaAL DEVELOPMENTS BEFORE THE

REFORMATION

. THe REFORMATION . Lue REFORMATION IN Evens

CATHOLICITY OF THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND Tue Cuurcu or EncLtanp BEFORE THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

TEENTH CENTURY .

REVIVAL

Part V Church

. REUNION WITH THE Hee Rowen Cuuner . Tue Eastern OrntTHopox CHuRCH

Tue Nonconrormist Bopigs .

PARTS VI PROSPECTS AND PROBLEMS

LIBERALISM

. SOCIAL PrRosBLeMs . CATHOLICISM AND PEACE . Misstons To THE HEATHEN

Epilogue

134 144 149 154 159

169 175 185 192 | 206

213 216

241 244 253 254

274 276

Part I The Catholic Conception of Christianity

I THE MEANING OF CATHOLICISM

The word Catholic means “ universal.’ In this sense it has been used since the second century A. D. to mean the whole body of Christian people as against particular individuals or groups who have sought to modify the teaching received by the whole body, either by the introduction of new doctrines or by the omission of certain doctrines already held by the whole. It implies the belief that there has been from the first preaching of Christianity one recognisable standard of belief, which is identical throughout the world, and that any deviation from it is an abandonment of the universal faith of the Christian community. This standard of belief may be developed by the bringing into explicit recognition of teachings which were already implied in the original deposit of faith, but not by the addition of anything new ; it may be modified by the omission of opinions widely held, but proved in course of time to be erroneous, but not by the abandonment of anything that has been formally and finally accepted as part of the Christian faith. It is important to bear in mind that the word ‘catholic ”’ does not denote universality in the sense of comprehensiveness, in other words that the Catholic Church does not include the whole body of those who in any sense call themselves Christians, and that the Catholic faith does not mean that irreducible minimum of common beliefs, if any such can be found, which is common to all Christian people. It is of course tenable that the Catholic Church ought to be made wide enough to include all such

t , people as are in general sympathy with the ideals of Christianity, and its doctrines reduced to a general statement of such ideals. But such a “‘ catholicism,’’ however desirable it might be, would in fact be something entirely different from Catholicism in the sense in which it has in fact been understood in Christian theology. The reasons for which those who hold the Catholic faith in its historic sense are unable to accept the view that the essentials of Christianity ought to be reduced to that minimum which could find universal acceptance among men of good will, or among all those who in some sense call themselves Christians will be made clear in the course of this book.

Il FOUNDATIONS

The Catholic faith begins with the belief that God, Who had for thousands of years prepared the world by partial revelations of Himself, vouchsafed in many times and places, but pre-eminently to the Jewish nation, made a final and complete revelation of Himself in the person of Jesus of Nazareth. This revelation differed not merely in degree, but in kind from all that had gone before it. For Jesus of Nazareth was not merely a human being, endowed to a greater extent than any other of the sons of men with insight into the nature of God; His birth was not as the birth of other men; He-was by a miracle born of a pure Virgin, Mary. None the less He was also perfect man, capable of being tempted and of suffering as we are. After a human life of perfect sinlessness, lived in the obscure Roman province of Judaea from about the year 5 B.C. to about the year 29 A. D., He was crucified. His death was due to the jealousy of the authorities of the Jewish nation, the accredited trustees of the fullest revelation of God hitherto granted to the world ; their jealousy was excited by His claim to revise, on His own personal authority, the beliefs and practices of the Jewish religion, abolishing its external forms, where these had become a hindrance rather than a help to the human soul in its attempt to approach to God; refusing to accept the tendency, then becoming dominant in the nation, to hold that the exact observance of such external forms was a necessary means of attaining to personal holiness ; and denying that the mere observance of such forms was in itself any part of personal holiness at all. In substituting for the old and incomplete conceptions of Judaism a new conception of the nature of God and His relations to man, He claimed to be acting in virtue of His own personal right, due to His unique relation to the one true God of Israel, Whom He claimed as His Father. The result of His teaching was the union of all the religious authorities of the Jewish nation, who were also, in virtue of the peculiar history of the people, its secular authorities as well, in a conspiracy to destroy Him; their united demand forced the Roman governor Pontius Pilate, whose consent was necessary for the infliction of the death-penalty, to agree to His crucifixion.

His ignominious death was not, however, as it seemed at the moment, the death blow to His teaching. He was crucified on a Friday; and on the Sunday morning He appeared to His broken and despondent followers, for He had risen from the dead. He had foretold to them both His death and His resurrection ; but it would seem that up to the last they had refused to credit even the possibility of His death, and were taken by surprise when it came; they were equally astounded at His resurrection. Their refusal to contemplate the possibility of His death was due to His claim to be the Messiah or Saviour of the nation, whose coming had been foretold by the prophets. The Messiah was expected to establish a kingdom in which He would reign as the king of the Chosen People and establish their supremacy over the whole world. Up to the last the followers of Jesus had expected the establishment of such a kingdom, and failed to grasp the death and resurrection which He foretold. His appearances to His disciples after the latter event extended over a period of forty days, at the end of which He definitely left them. His activities on earth were over. His followers, however, especially the twelve disciples who had been particularly closely associated with Him during the comparatively short period of public life which preceded His crucifixion, were no longer the little band of dispirited men who had stood by Him up to the moment of His arrest. They had now gained complete confidence in their Master.

For ten days after His departure they waited at Jerusalem; at the end of that time on the Jewish festival of Pentecost, the fiftieth day after the Passover, they came forward, filled with a new enthusiasm, ascribed to the direct outpouring of the divine Spirit which had inspired the prophets, and announced their claim that Jesus had risen, and that He had entrusted His followers with authority to proclaim that through belief in Him mankind could obtain forgiveness for their sins, and enter into a new order of life. That new life consisted in the power of attaining to holiness in this world and entering into\eternal glory after death. The last-named point was indeed at the moment regarded as being of comparatively minor importance ; for it was supposed that Jesus would shortly return in glory to judge the whole of mankind both living and dead and give to all their due reward of everlasting happiness or everlasting misery. .In any case however the vital element in their message was that the death of Jesus constituted an act of atonement for the sins of the world. In virtue of it all could obtain pardon for the sins of the past, (for Jesus had taught that by His death He was to bear the punishment that those sins deserved), and also the power to escape from the dominion of sin during the remainder of the time that might intervene between the acceptance of the new teaching and His second Coming, or the death of the believer. In order to enter into this new life it was necessary for the convert to be cleansed from his sins in the sacramental ordinance of baptism ; this ceremonial washing was the means by which the sins of the past were done away. The other distinctive ordinance of the new community or sect of Judaism, into which the followers of Jesus formed themselves, was the Eucharist, a ceremonial meal instituted by Jesus on the night before His crucifixion, in which the faithful, under the outward forms of bread and wine entered into a mysterious communion with the Master; for in eating the Bread and Wine of the Eucharist they were made partakers of His Body and Blood.

For a few years the new community continued to be a sect of Judaism; but before long, under the influence of Saul of Tarsus, originally a Jew of the most scrupulous orthodoxy, and a persecutor of the Christians, it broke away from, or was cut off by, the followers of the old religion. Saul was converted by a vision of the risen Jesus, and became the most ardent Apostle of the new revelation. It was his insistence on the necessity of preaching it not only to the Jewish nation, but also to the Geiitiles, and his clear perception of the logical necessity of abandoning, so far as the latter were concerned, the observance of the old system of the Law, that led to the

B |

6 THE CATHOLIC MOVEMENT breach between the new movement and the traditional system of Judaism. In spite however of the fact that in respect of education and general personal ability he was by far the greatest figure in the new movement, the leadership of it remained with the obscure fisherman of Galilee, Peter, who had been one of the original disciples of Jesus, and had by Him been given a general, though not clearly defined, position of leadership among His followers. From its outset the new movement was violently unpopular. In the eyes of orthodox Jews, not only in Palestine, but throughout the whole Roman Empire and beyond its borders, the Christian Jew was an apostate from the national faith. It must be remembered that then as now there was a Jewish colony in every important town of the Graeco-Roman world. It must also be remem, bered that Judaism was then a vigorous and progressive religion, making converts wherever it went. It rightly saw in Christianity, with its offer of the same advantages that Judaism had to give and its abolition of the necessity of complying with the somewhat grotesque and repulsive requirements of the Mosaic Law, a rival which must be .- destroyed, if Judaism was to continue to exist as a Serious religious force outside the limits of the Jewish nation.

_ At the same time Christianity was bitterly persecuted by the heathen. To them it seemed only a new form of the old Jewish “ superstition.”” Judaism had indeed in spite of great unpopularity‘obtained a general toleration in the Roman Empire ; for in spite of its considerable successes its proselytising had been on too small a scale to attract the general attention of the heathen world. It was not so with Christianity. The new teaching abolished the ~ observance of the Law, which had hampered the propagation of Judaism: but it retained and emphasized the refusal of Judaism to admit of any compromise with religions of the Gentile world; the Christian must renounce all connection with the religious life of his neighbours. It was this absolute exclusiveness which separated Christianity from the numerous Oriental cults which were its contemporaries and rivals. The same feature provoked in the incredulous and easy-going world of the first century A. D. the most embittered hostility ; the profession of Christianity by itself was a capita] offence. None the less the new religion grew and prospered, until within three hundred years from the death of Jesus of Nazareth on the cross outside Jerusalem it had become the recognised religion of the Roman Empire. In the struggle between the world and the Galilean the Galilean had conquered.

Ill THE PERSONALITY OF CHRIST

The teaching of Jesus of Nazareth had not primarily concerned itself with the laying-down of any system of dogmatic belief. He had summoned men to repent and enter a new kingdom of God which He had come to establish on earth. This kingdom was not indeed to be fully realised in the present order of the world, but only after His second coming in glory to judge all mankind. Until that time however it was possible for men to enter into it in that preliminary or provisional form in which it was to be set up at once. The first condition of entering into it was repentance; and this must be followed by a life of complete surrender of all worldly interests, and, if necessary, of all worldly possessions. The motive for such a surrender was personal faith in His own claim to be the Messiah, and His power. to reward His faithful servants. This faith involved a constant struggle to attain to personal holiness, the conception of holiness — being that which He laid down by His teaching and by His personal example. To those who followed Him He promised forgiveness of sins, a forgiveness which He claimed to give in virtue of His own personal authority. In His sweeping revisions of the conception of holiness current among the Jews of His own time He claimed a similar authority, based only on His peculiar personal relation to God, a relation described as Sonship, but without any theological definition of the meaning of the term. To those who disputed His authority He replied by pointing to the miracles which He worked. This teaching was partly given to the general public which flocked to hear Him, partly to a small inner circle of chosen companions. To this circle He promised after His Resurrection a special gift of the Spirit of God, which would enable them to carry on His work of calling men to repentance and holiness. To those who repented they could grant forgiveness of sins in His name. It has been seen above that this power to obtain forgiveness was based on the fact that His death was a ransom for the sins of the world. |

It must always be borne in mind that these claims were made by Jesus of Nazareth before a nation which claimed to possess the only true revelation of God to man in the form of the Jewish Scriptures, and that Jesus Himself fully admitted that claim. The divine origin of the Law and the prophets He fully admitted; His authority however was such that He had the right to interpret and to fulfil them by introducing a new dispensation by which the old was superseded. The theology of the Catholic Church as to His personality rests not on any particular verbal utterance of Jesus, but on the impossibility of explaining in any other way the facts of His life and the history of the Church. That theology holds that He is both God and man. His humanity was indeed doubted by certain very early sects of heretics, who, believing in His Godhead, could not understand how it was possible for God to die upon the Cross. It is not a matter which the present generation is likely to dispute. Clearly His death could not be an atonement for the sins of mankind, unless He Himself shared the nature of those who had sinned; nor could His example of perfection be of any value, unless He were open to the same temptations which beset the children of men.

In any case it is rather His Godhead which the modern world accepts less readily. The difficulty of believing that the Creator of all things intervened in person in the history of one particular planet to reverse the order of human history is obviously stupendous. Yet Catholic theology states that it actually occurred, and that no smaller assumption will account for the facts. The belief was not reached in a moment. In general the writers of the New Testament, which record the teaching of Jesus and His immediate followers, represent Him as a being of a supernatural order, higher than even the created Spirits, or angels, whom Jewish tradition believed to be the ministers of God. The belief in the existence of such an order of spirits was confirmed by Jesus Himself, and has passed into the traditional theology of the Church ; but it was never supposed that Jesus was a created being of this class. In general the writers of the New Testament are content to describe Him in language borrowed from the conceptions of that mixture of Jewish and Greek thought which was current at the time both in Palestine and among the Jews of the Dispersion, i.e., the Jews resident in the cities of the civilised world outside the territory of Judaea. In the terminology of this world of thought He is described either as the Incarnation of the divine Word, the Reason or thought of God, by which He made the world, (for this Reason was regarded as an emanation from God possessed almost of an independent personal existence), or as the divine pattern or prototype of humanity conceived by God at the creation, (for the original divine pattern of man must have been perfect, and actual men being sinful could only be regarded as an inferior class of beings, resulting from the union of a copy of the divine origina with the material creation). The inadequacy of these conceptions is manifest, but they were employed, the former by the author of the Fourth Gospel, the latter by St. Paul, as a means of expressing the belief that Jesus was a being of a distinct order, existing independently of the world, and the divine agent employed for its creation and redemption rather than a created being. Such a belief harmonised with the Jewish conception that the Messiah was not merely a human being called by God to save the nation, (for this had been the oldest Jewish conception), but a pre-existent representative of humanity, who was to be revealed by God at His appointed time.

These conceptions might develop in one of two ways. Either they might lead to the belief that Jesus had been the revelation on earth of a subordinate being in a divine hierarchy, divine in His nature, yet inferior to the supreme Godhead, or they might lead to a belief in His personal identity with God.

It was the latter course that after long and embittered controversies was followed by Catholic theology. Into the history of those controversies we cannot enter. It is sufficient to point out that it was the only possible explanation of the belief that Jesus was of a higher order than any created being, whether human or angelic. In the ages when Christianity was first preached there was a general willingness to accept religions which offered salvation from the difficulties and miseries of the material world by the personal union of the individual believer with a redeemer of an intermediate order between God and man ; and numerous attempts were made to explain the personality of Jesus in this way. None the less they were rejected by the instinct of Christianity. They could be made to harmonize with a great deal of the language used about Him by His first followers, for those followers had often borrowed terms to express His nature from the circle of religious ideas which were occupied in proclaiming the salvation of man through the agency of such intermediate redeemers. Yet it was rightly felt by the Church that such conceptions of the personality of Jesus would be fatal to the Christian faith. For they would immediately have reduced Him to the position of being one among many redeemers. It was characteristic of the age to suppose that all the various cults which offered salvation in this way were in their varying degrees approximations to the truth, and none of them exclusively the truth ; it was from the outset the central doctrine of Christianity, as it had been of Judaism, that it alone was true and all other religions false, But this claim could only hold good if Jesus were Himself the full and final revelation of God to man ; and this belief could only be maintained if in fact He was personally identical with God.

Any lower claim would have reduced Him to the position of being one among many more or less divine redeemers. By contenting itself with such a claim and tolerating its rivals the Church could have escaped from persecution ; but it would have disappeared, as its competitors disappeared, by a process of gradual amalgamation with one another which robbed them of their character as religious cults and reduced them all to a rather nebulous mysticism. It was the claim that Jesus was God, which guaranteed to the Church i2 THE CATHOLIC MOVEMENT the permanence of its system of salvation, its external forms of worship, (for these in their essence were derived from Jesus Himself), and of its standard of moral perfection. It is of importance to bear in mind that this insistence on the divinity of Jesus in the fullest possible sense was entirely contrary to the natural tendencies of the time and the immediate interests of the Church, although it seems to us necessary and inevitable. For it is plain that modern thought could never tolerate the conception that Jesus was, so to speak, a semi-divine being. It is possible to accept Him as God, or to regard Him simply as a man of peculiarly lofty spiritual insight, but not as a supernatural being intermediate between God and man. Hence it is natural for us to suppose that the Church took the simple and obvious course: in point of fact its course was entirely contrary to the general tendencies of the age. ,