Idea of a Golden Age.—Allegorical Interpretations of the Old Testament.—Church Discipline.—Extrusion of Heretics.—Catholic Unity amidst National Peculiarities.
There is still another class of objectors to my statement, whose opinions are entitled to great consideration. They do not look upon the union of the Church with the civil power in different nations as a positive evil. It was God’s ordinance, to be submitted to like everything else which He appoints. ‘But to say that the Church is better for this state of things, that its circumstances in modern Europe are better than its circumstances were in the first five or six centuries, is false and dangerous. The age of the Fathers is the pattern on the Mount—the true model of a Catholic Church; in which there was fellowship in faith and worship, discipline for moral offenders, separation from wilful heretics. Since that time the Eastern Church has been separated from the Western, Protestants have divided themselves from Romanists; heresies have been tolerated, discipline made light of, the idea of national Churches substituted for the idea of a universal Church, in each particular nation the Church regarded as part of the civil establishment. This is a condition of things to be borne with humiliation and patience, not to be spoken of with triumph.’
1. The feeling that there has been a golden age of the Church to which we may look back, and for the restoration of which we may pray, has been so deeply rooted in the minds of men, in the most various circumstances, and holding the most various opinions, that he must be a very thoughtless Christian indeed who could treat it lightly. Nor can those who would restrict this age to the times before Constantine, or those who would confine it within the lives of the Apostles, fairly complain against the eulogists of the first six centuries. For it is clear that, in one sense, even the most limited period cannot be called a period of purity. As long as the Epistles to the Corinthians and the Galatians remain in the Canon, nay, till every epistle be weeded of some of its most striking warnings and exhortations, we must be content to admit (everybody has practically admitted), that there were spots even then in the feasts of charity; yea, that every form of corruption, every habit which threatens apostasy, might be found in the infant family of Christ. Do we, then, betake ourselves to the notion, that the glory of the apostolic period is to be sought in the ministers of the Church though not in its members? The epistles to the angels of the seven churches come in to perplex this conclusion. Some of these had lost their first love, some did not exercise discipline, some were guilty of tolerating a heresy, (which a moderately well supported ecclesiastical tradition would trace to one of the seven Deacons,) some had a name to live and were dead, some were neither hot nor cold. Are we, then, ready to give up altogether the feeling that the apostolic periods were different from other periods? If not, I think we must resort to some such hypothesis as this, which will perhaps really satisfy the minds of most men, who will give themselves leisure to consider it; That there was a more distinct and evident conflict in the age of the Apostles with different forms of evil, both without and within the Church, than there ever has been since. It was a critical period, one might say, the critical period in the history of mankind, and therefore was one which brought to light all dark images side by side with the perfect light to which they were opposed. And this, it may be, is the true idea of the golden age; at all events, the only one which the past history of the Church presents to us not an age of innocence, but an age of conflict; not one which was holding itself up as a model to the world, but which was bringing out the idea of the Church as a body belonging to no age; as the permanent witness against that secular spirit which would always make some period of time, and not the principles exhibited in that time, the object of its admiration.
Now surely the history of the Church for the first five or six centuries does present the Church in the same kind of struggle as this which we have discovered in the apostolic time. The battle is somewhat changed in its character after the accession of Constantine, but who will say that it was less severe? Or who will venture to affirm that the Divine image was less brought out through these strifes in such men as Athanasius and Chrysostom, than it had been in Ignatius or Justin? The whole history of this century is a book of the wars of the Lord; most precious, surely, because it shews how the principle of strength made perfect in weakness was working itself out in individual men and in the whole of society; because it shews how the shouts of the soldiers of the Cross were laying low the highest Babel tower that was ever raised in this world; because it shews that the scheme of God was to prevail, and that nothing was to withstand it. But surely this is the picture which that time presents; not a picture of still, beautiful, pastoral life, but of great crimes and great virtues—oftentimes appearing in the same men, yet always illustrating each other; always enabling us, if we look, to see what man is with God and without Him. He has been pleased to exhibit to us this age, not in particular specimens of virtue and excellence, but as a whole; as a whole it is precious to us. We lose the blessing of it, we lose the idea of the Church which it represents, if we omit any of its darker features. Let us consider, then, what we do when we desire that this age, so invaluable as a portion of history, should be restored to us in fact. If we ask that the age in which St. Paul preached may come again, we ask that Nero may come again; if we ask that we may be transported back to the glorious period of Athanasius, we ask to live under the tyrant Constantius, to have the world almost wholly pagan, to have the Church almost wholly Arian. If we long to sit at the feet of Chrysostom, we long for the infamous corruptions of Antioch and Constantinople, for the government of Eutropius, for the horrible villanies of the eunuchs of the palace. If we reckon that it would have been a blessing to live under the teaching of Augustine, we must be content to see Rome sacked by one set of barbarians, and the Church in Africa threatened by another; we must get our learning from a race of effete rhetoricians; we must dwell amidst all the seductions and abominations of Manicheism. These are very commonplace considerations; but as they are true, it is very advisable for the honour of the Church and of its Head, as well as for the removal of a certain fantastic habit of mind which is most alien from the temper of the early ages, that we should occasionally dwell upon them. The effect of doing so cannot be to make us fall into any contempt of the Fathers, or to adopt those notions respecting them which have been propagated of late in this country with so much more of self-conceit than learning, and which could only have gained currency through some weakness in the theory to which they were opposed. Unquestionably, if we are reasonable men, the more we look at the mass of evil in society, which the Church was sent to decompose, the more we shall admire the power which decomposed it, and be thankful for the instruments by whom He worked.
2. But, then, can we do this, and not see something more than a permission of those national societies which the Church called into being, and with which, in the Western world, she became identified; must we not believe that this was a mighty step in the development of the Divine scheme, in the establishment of the Divine kingdom upon earth? The Church had been brought out as one body existing in different places, to try its strength against the Roman world, and it had prevailed. It had made good the principle upon which it stood against the most terrible odds. What so reasonable as to believe that it was to carry on its work of creation, in the very line in which the world’s work of destruction had been carried on; that as the Roman empire had swallowed up all nations into itself, its mighty antagonist was to make them breathe again, to shew each what its proper place and function was in God’s kingdom and commonwealth? Are we told that this doctrine savours of those modern theories respecting progression, which are so godless and intolerable? I care not what ill name may be given it, provided it justifies the ways of God to man, and shews that the Church has not existed for nothing. But if by this charge it be meant that we are supporting a notion of progress, which is inconsistent with the permanency of God’s order and truth, there never was one so ill supported or so unfortunate. They are the innovators, they are the deniers of the permanence of God’s order, they would make the Church merely a growth out of foregone and exhausted states of society, who maintain that national life, upon which so much honour was put in the old world, has been discarded as worthless in the new. We say that there was no such alteration in the counsels of the Divine mind, that the history of modern Europe proves there was not. We say that the constitution of the Church, as it was exhibited during the conflicts with the Roman empire, was simply a universal constitution; we rejoice that it was so; hereby such a constitution was shewn to exist, hereby the meaning of past history, which had all been leading to the discovery of it, was made evident. But we say that this constitution was necessarily imperfect, for it left all the relations of men, as held together by the bonds of neighbourhood, as distinguished by race and language, unaccounted for; it did not bring these relations under Church influence. And we say that, seeing these relations are especially developed in the Old Testament, it was the necessary consequence of this imperfection, that one aspect of that Testament should be lost to the first age of the Church. I know that I am using language which will shock some good persons, and therefore I will endeavour to explain myself.
3. It is commonly said that the Fathers must be looked to as the interpreters of Scripture, in consequence of their proximity to the Apostles, the opportunities they might have had of hearing the very words which they uttered. &c. I confess I have never been able to understand this doctrine of proximity. It would seem to me to prove that Athanasius, or Ambrose, or Augustine, must be of far less value to us, as an elucidator of truth, than Hermas or Ignatius; and I do not think that this has been the practical feeling of the Church in any age. It would have seemed to me rather that the great worth of the Fathers arose from their being placed by God in circumstances which especially enabled them to apprehend certain great truths, especially those foundation truths which concern His Being and the order of the Universal Society. Adopting that view, I can believe that each had his own special merits; that the Alexandrian might see that which the Latin could not see; that one principle would be brought out in mighty power by him who struggled with Arians, another by him who, in his own heart and in the world, had done battle with Manicheism. Adopting the other, I think that I shall not only be in danger of making an age into a Church, but of exalting particular individuals of that age above others, to whom perhaps a more important work was committed.
But whichever of these views be adopted, it will be difficult to prove that the Fathers had any better means than other men of understanding the circumstances of the Jewish nation. They had no proximity with the Fathers of that nation. The Jews with whom they could converse were either those in whom the national feelings had been merged in more general Catholic sympathies, or those who were trying to set up their old national distinctions against the Church, or those who regarded their whole past history as little more than a collection of allegories, or the development of a Mosaic philosophy. Again, their circumstances could give them no sort of sympathy with the old national life of the Jews; the temple was gone, the city was laid waste; these events had been necessary to the establishment of the universal Church, and that Church stood in the midst of a great empire, in which there was no nation “that moved the wing, or opened the mouth, or peeped.” Would it not have been most reasonable to expect, under such circumstances, that so far as they were polemical, they might be able to prove clearly that the Jewish Commonwealth was meant to be the seed of a great tree; so far as they were experimental, that the Jewish saints had struggled with the same internal enemies, which were assailing themselves; so far as they were mystical, that there had been an invisible guide and teacher, training man to know Him through all past ages of history: but that whatever belonged to the common, daily, human life of the Jews would be utterly puzzling to them, would seem quite out of place in a Divine book, and would therefore of necessity be translated into cabalistic lore? I say, would not anyone expect this from the position in which the Fathers were placed? And if the facts should be found exactly to accord with these expectations, if every Christian of the present day who looks into them should be puzzled and perplexed by curious and subtle spiritualisations of facts, which simply as facts have been his delight as a child, and which, as he grew to be a man, have seemed to connect themselves with what is passing in the world around him; if there be a use of this spiritualising method, which the Church even of that age has itself condemned, if yet this extravagant use of it was justified in the practice of the most learned and laborious of all the Fathers, and if it be most difficult to find where the point is at which he transgressed the legitimate rule, is it more wise and pious, and more respectful to these holy men, to say that they could not take in the literal meaning of the old Scriptures, so as to give that literal meaning any life, and that it was not intended they should do so; or to determine that we will make out a case for them by renouncing all our own advantages, by resolutely praising a system of interpretation which our consciences and hearts are continually repudiating; and then, after all, to give up the defence of it when it is clearly and consistently worked out?
I will not stop to remark, what must be obvious to every person who considers the foregoing statements, that the ideas of the Fathers respecting marriage, property, every institution which belongs in the first place to our earthly condition, must have been exceedingly affected by their views of the Old Testament generally. In all cases they will have sought for the highest, most transcendental ground upon which such ordinances were to be defended; since they must exist, they will readily have looked upon them as types of something higher; but how to connect the type with the actual fact, how to avoid the conclusion that that which is not directly of heaven belongs in some sense to human depravity, it was impossible for them to see. It will be impossible, I believe, for us, if we do not feel something more than a grumbling acquiescence in the scheme of God for the education of our race, if we do not acknowledge, that by restoring national life through the means of the Church, He was carrying out the law of redemption, and shewing how everything that belongs to man and his position here, everything that does not involve the violation of that position, is comprehended under it.
4. But it is affirmed that the discipline of moral offenders was recognized by the early Church as essential to its existence, and is almost lost sight of since the Church entered into fellowship with the nations. I admit at once that the principle of spiritual discipline, of a discipline for the rectification of habits and principles, a discipline far more deep and subtle than any which lawgivers can exercise, is implied in the constitution of the spiritual body, and that it was first manifested to the world, like all the other principles of the Church’s polity, in its first ages. I admit, further, that in connexion with this highest power, there is one implied in the very existence of every society, (but especially necessary to such a society as the Church,) of noticing the more outward and flagrant transgressions committed by its members, and of determining how far they exclude the offender from its privileges. This power, I conceive, was not only exercised by the early Church, but was almost the only witness to the degraded and sensualized slaves of a military despotism, that there is any authority in heaven or earth competent to punish the offences of the high as well as of the low. One such example as that which St. Ambrose gave, in his sentence upon Theodosius, was for its practical effect worth all the tomes of the Roman jurisconsults. But yet the history of that transaction, and of all the other transactions of that period, proves that the Church was utterly unable to deal with the accumulated mass of profligacy which was to be found among those who had been admitted to its fellowship. Councils might determine that such and such crimes excluded the offender for five, or six, or twenty years from the Eucharist, yet we know that crimes of the blackest character were perpetrated by clergymen as well as laymen. And it must occur to everyone sometimes to ask himself whether the Church, while she was claiming such lofty and heavenly powers, was not frequently compelled by the circumstances in which she was placed, to degrade these powers, and to assume far too much the character of a mere spiritual police.
Now I readily allow, that the effect of the restoration of fixed, positive national law, and of outward formal tribunals for the punishment of crime, has been to make men less sensible of the meaning and of the need of spiritual discipline. And the more strict and definite this law has become, and the more men in general have been brought to acknowledge it as a fixed necessary element in their lives, so much the less has the sense of another kind of government, one reaching to the feelings and character, prevailed; nay, there has been a desire to get rid of it altogether. But none of these facts convince me, that the establishment of outward law, the formation of national societies, were not parts of God’s great scheme for developing more fully the nature and character of Christ’s kingdom. Looking at the question in the most obvious way, if I compare the state of any nation in modern Europe, I would include even Russia, with that which we know to have been the state of the Roman and Byzantine empires during the first seven centuries, I should really tremble for my own ingratitude, if I did not wonder at the change which God has wrought. And this change, I affirm to be not merely one in outward and material happiness, but one connected with the very ends for which the Church exists. It does seem to me, in the first place, a positive good that the Church should not be looked upon at all in the light of a police, that there should be another body performing that function, and leaving it to find out its own. And next, I believe that every circumstance in the later history of Europeans has been enabling the Church in each nation to discover if she will what her powers are, how much greater than those of the statesman—how indispensable to the statesman. In the first age, spiritual discipline tried to be everything. Since that time outward law has tried to be everything; the existence of spiritual discipline has been forgotten. I shewed, in my first part, how clearly and awfully it has been demonstrated that law cannot do what it wishes to do and pretends to do. Thus, then, I think we are coming to a time, when the spiritual side of Christ’s kingdom must come forth into a prominence which it has not yet assumed; when the education and discipline which the Church exercises will be demanded by each nation for the preservation of its own existence. But the Church, I believe, can only profit by this great crisis in the history of mankind, if she be ready to acknowledge that according to the will of her Author and her Lord she is not meant to have an independent existence; that she is not meant to be extranational; that she has no commission or powers which dispense with the necessity of positive, formal law, and with outward government; that her highest honour is to be the life-giving energy to every body in the midst of which she dwells.
5. ‘But the Church in old times was able to cast heretics out of her bosom. When she becomes connected with the nation, it either undertakes the punishment of them by its own vulgar methods, or else entertains them and tolerates them, without paying the least heed to the Church’s sentence.’ Here, again, I believe the same observations apply. The character and constitution of the Church in the early ages were, I think, manifested in its contests with heretics. One or another partial theory was broached, one or another article of the Creeds was set aside or pared away. The Church, often against terrible odds, asserted the integrity of her constitution; asserted that spiritual unity which is the ground of her existence. That there might not be divisions, she was driven to draw subtle distinctions, submitting oftentimes to the charge of logomachy, that she might maintain the realities which logomachists were making void; often seeming to puzzle the wayfarer that she might preserve to him his inheritance. This was her conflict at that time; for this end it was necessary she should have her individual champions and her general councils. I have no doubt this was the work of the early Church, and that amidst all the sins of even her best and bravest members, she fulfilled it as it was meant to be fulfilled.
But does not everyone feel in reading ecclesiastical history, that this position, though in some respects a glorious one, was in many an unfortunate one? In these struggles with those who would have divided her, the Church was maintaining her character as a kingdom, cohering by its relation to an awful name, which it was bound to assert and defend. And yet the impression of her having this character was in no slight degree impaired by the strifes into which she entered for the sake of it. These led men more and more to fancy that the battle was for a set of dogmas or opinions, which the particular set of doctors called Catholics had agreed to maintain against the world, but which, unfortunately, they could not settle among themselves. Supposing Pagans or Jews had taken up this notion, it might be a matter of regret; but if Christians and Christian teachers fell into it themselves, the very existence of the Church was put in peril. And it is evident that this was the case. The Greeks especially, priding themselves upon that gift of subtlety which has in all ages been committed to them, seem to have lost unawares the entire substance, every part of which they were able with such accuracy to distinguish; to have called forth new heresies by the very zeal and decrees which suppressed the old; to have felt less and less that the Church was anything but a school, even while they were resorting most unscrupulously to measures which could only be justified to their consciences by the belief that it was the one human fellowship. I think we must all feel it a relief to escape from this Greek world of controversy into the Latin world of business and enterprise. There may be much evil there, too, but there is a practical work going on; societies are growing; the Church is felt to be herself a society, governed by certain laws, informed by a certain principle. Who can help feeling, that amidst all the contradictions of the Middle Ages, the sense of a common bond, the feeling of a one spirit and a one object, were far more realised than they had been except by a very few of the highest minds in the age of the Œcumenical Councils? And this is surely what one would expect, if one really believed that the Church was under God’s government, and that He was making its meaning and power manifest, amidst all the perplexities and distractions of men’s self-will. Now, however strange it may appear, the connexion of Church polity with national polity was certainly the means of keeping this feeling alive. The Greeks could not look upon the Church as a kingdom, because they had nothing to teach them what a kingdom was; they were living under a despot with whose government they had no sympathy, who ruled by creatures and tools, not as the centre of a social order. And this assertion is confirmed by a fact which seems at first to interfere with it, and to supply a better reason for the character which I have attributed to the Western Church. The Pope, it will be said, made the Middle Ages conscious of their Church unity, and yet the Pope was the great antagonist of national societies. I answer, it was the feeling of national life that grew up in the countries of the West, which made it possible that there should be a Bishop assuming the position which the Pope assumed. When once the national feeling had been strongly developed, it was impossible to view the Church in the light of a mere learned school; men were obliged to look upon it as a kingdom, for it was exercising the powers of one, and in no other character could they have paid it homage. Hence it was possible for the Bishop of Rome to give an outward formal character to this kingdom, to put himself at the head of it, and though amidst continual reluctations and manifestations of independence to act as the feudal superior of the different societies into which Christendom was divided. But mark under what conditions this was possible. The Pope himself becomes the sovereign of a state; he does honour to the very principle he is setting at naught. I feel of course all the anomaly of this position; but it explains, I think, clearly, how truly it was the will of God that the Nations should come into being, and how necessary this was, not for the chastisement of the Church, but for its development. And to return to the point immediately under our consideration, it is in this way that the new position of those who differed from the doctrine or order of the Church is explained. In the first age they are pronounced guilty of violating the tradition and creed of the universal society; in the second age, they are treated as invaders of the order and unity of the particular state in which they are found, or of the states generally, so far as they feel themselves united for a common object; in the third age, the state feels that it consults its own peace better by leaving them alone, by allowing them a settled position, by treating them as the rest of its subjects. I have already said why I believe that each state will continue to do this only just so long as it maintains its relation with a spiritual society; why, the moment it becomes a mere civil body, it will of necessity resort to force again for the putting down of opinion. But now I am looking at the question in another light, and I would ask whether this is not a most important step in the plans of God. First, the spiritual society in her general councils took cognizance of the schisms and heresies, but in doing so she ran the risk of seeming to be herself only the maintainer of a certain system of opinions, not the pillar and ground of truth. She inadvertently cultivated the very spirit of disputation which she wished to check. Next, the particular states shew that they are interested in the repression of these schisms and heresies, hereby testifying that they are of a practical character, that they do really interfere with government and order. But in bearing this testimony, the states were also doing a great injury to the Church; they were putting themselves into its place; they were using vulgar visible arms, for the accomplishment of an invisible and spiritual end.
Lastly, the states have forborne, or are inclined to forbear, from these experiments, having found them to be ineffectual. But in turn they are inclined to look upon all spiritual matters as transacted between quarrelling schools and sects, with whom the national government has little to do,—except, when they become very violent, to keep peace between them; at other times leaving them to carry on the work of mutual destruction. Now, I say, if there be a Church in the world, these are circumstances in which she can produce an evidence of her reality which she could not produce in either of the previous periods. She cannot cut off heretics from her communion, for they have cut themselves off—they do not care for her communion. But she can shew that she has that secret power within her which may unite them; that those nice distinctions of Fathers and of councils were not really distinctions meant to cause separation, but to prevent it; meant to preserve truth in its fulness and completeness against a time when men, having tried their different plans and methods of thought, should begin to desire that which would reconcile them, and when they should acknowledge no higher evidence of a Divine mission in any body than this, that it satisfies that aspiration. The Church, again, cannot make civil rulers perceive that she has a power of the same kind which they possess, for when they have fought her with her own weapons, they have prevailed and she has been foiled; but she may prove to them that she has another power, entirely distinct from theirs, far higher than theirs, to which they must resort, or perish in their feebleness.
6. I will conclude this head with one or two remarks upon the alleged impossibility of recognizing a one Catholic Church under the distinctions and limitations of national bodies. ‘How,’ it is asked, ‘can a Church be one if it have no visible tokens of unity? Those who dream with the Quakers that the Church is a purely spiritual unseen body, may perchance think that all ceremonial uniformity is of no worth. But the defenders of National Churches are very far from any such notion as this. They require that the ecclesiastical organisation should be strict and formal. Yet, according to them, it must have a different organisation in every country, for there can be no general councils, seeing that everything is subject to the will of particular princes, and seeing that even provincial synods and national convocations are regarded with great jealousy by the civil power. What can happen, then, but that the Church should lose all the features by which its identity is ascertained in different parts of the earth, that it should gradually become more and more accommodated to the habits of particular districts; till at last it becomes more proud of that which separates it from other communities in other parts of the world, than of that which it has in common with them.’
My answer to these arguments is this: I have maintained against the Quaker that there are certain permanent ordinances in which the character and universality of the Church are expressed; she does not, therefore, depend for her unity upon the faith and feeling of her particular members, but bears a constant and abiding testimony against the want of faith or feeling in any or all of them. If this be a true doctrine, if it be the will of God that these ordinances should denote the universal and spiritual society, we should naturally expect that He would manifest the distinction between them and everything which is but accidentally connected with them. Evidently there are some accidents with which they must of necessity be connected. Baptism and the Eucharist must be administered in some mode: there must be rules about the jurisdiction of Bishops. If there are forms of prayer there must be given forms. There may also, of course, be a number of accidents which are not necessary, but which, from particular reasons, have obtained sacredness in different parts of the Church, or through the whole of it. Now the effect of the general legislation which the Church possessed in the early ages was unquestionably to connect together a particular mode of treating these ordinances with the ordinance itself. I do not say that this was the wish of the early Church: on the contrary, I believe that the study of the proceedings and decrees of councils would lead us to trace a very cautious and often subtle wisdom in discriminating between that which was merely of needful ecclesiastical institution, and that which was of the nature of the thing itself. And there was a higher wisdom than this, directing the practice of the early Church, and actually hindering different portions, even of such an empire as the Roman, from adhering to one ritual or one set of observances, with that fidelity which they observed in preserving the Creed and the ordinances. Still the result of œcumenical government in some degree to those who lived then—in a much greater degree to us who merely read their history,—is to efface this distinction, and to prevent us from contemplating the Divine sign in its own simplicity and integrity, as separate even from the most desirable and indispensable arrangements respecting it.
When the Bishop of Rome tried to perpetuate in his own person this oecumenical legislation, the peril became infinitely greater. The most fearful confusion arose between the signs of the Church and the ecclesiastical appointments which had been devised to make these signs effectual. Nothing could so obscure the Divine origin and constitution of the Church as this confusion. The eagerness of the Church to claim the power of legislating in emergencies hid from view the fact that she was resting upon any principles, or that God had legislated for her. At the same time she could not practically maintain a strictly universal legislation; the habits, maxims, and precedents of different localities interfered with it:—only to make the confusion of authorities and obligations more complete. Then came the Reformation, asserting the law of God as something paramount to the law of the Church, and, when its maxims were perverted, suggesting to men that their wills or their notions were superior to either. Meantime, however, the Church within each nation had begun practically to claim for itself the power of decreeing rites and ceremonies. That claim, properly considered and used, was the greatest witness which could be borne against the notion that ordinances and ceremonies are the same. It did homage to the former as the gifts to the Church universal; it treated the latter as needful provisions to be taken cognizance of by the spiritual body, this body having at once the strongest obligation to teach men by outward evidences that they were members of one family, and not to permit its own theories or notions of what was suitable to this end to mix themselves with the great principles of God’s government. Various causes, however, interfered to mar the effect of this proclamation. As the ecclesiastical body in any particular nation found itself checked by the self-will of individuals unwilling to submit to the regulations which are necessary to the existence of every society, and which acquire an especial sacredness in one which is meant to be the pattern of a human fellowship, it was inclined to put forth its pretensions more strongly, and to identify that which it decreed with the very being of the Church. This temper was especially likely to prevail in nations which had acquired a strict civil organisation, and which were continually exercising their powers of legislation. The ecclesiastical body would naturally catch the habit of looking upon itself as merely existing to legislate, and would be more proud of the rules which it was laying down for its own government, than of all the influence it was exerting upon the heart of society. Supposing such a tone of mind to become prevalent, I can conceive no greater mercy than that the civil power should step in to put a stop to clerical convocations, or to discourage provincial synods. But for such violence, I cannot conceive how any national Church could have learnt what its own peculiar powers were. I think it must have been crushed under the weight of its own decrees; and, above all, that it must have lost sight of the only grounds of unity which it can have with the members of other nations. On the other hand, it seems to me that by this discipline it has been manifested wherein the substance and essence of a national Church consist; that its substance is given it by those ordinances which belong to it in common with Christians elsewhere; that its essence consists in those powers which belong to it in common with the different parts of the body, and which are to be exerted in the first place for the benefit of its own country. When this lesson has been well learnt, I have no doubt but that each national Church will recover its synods and its convocations; for then she will know how to use them. Not with the lust of legislation, not in the hope of accomplishing her chief objects by decrees, but for the purpose of satisfying scruples, of leading men away from the restless study of what is external by not compelling them to arrange and deliberate about it for themselves, of determining those ceremonies which to a people of a particular climate, character, and constitution best express the great ideas of the Church, of more effectually establishing and directing discipline and education, of promoting fellowship with national Churches which are willing to acknowledge themselves as parts of a great Catholic body.
Whether when national Churches begin to understand their own position they may not once more send their representatives to a general council, and whether the princes of the different nations may not feel such a measure helpful instead of injurious to their objects, I will not inquire. I see no reason why, if we follow God’s method, we may not arrive at such a result, though I can see the strongest why, if we violate that method and seek to have an independent existence, no councils, no compacts, no projects of union, can ever be otherwise than evil in themselves and pregnant with mischief.
Ought we to say then, that Church unity belongs to the first six centuries, and that since national distinctions began, there have been no traces of it? We have, I think, been able to perceive, that the separation of the Greek from the Latin Churches, which is so frequently lamented over, and which ought to be a great cause of shame and humiliation to both, has, nevertheless, led to very blessed results, by separating the Church from a cruel and mischievous tyranny, and enabling it to develop its powers under freer and happier conditions. In like manner, if we consider the subject calmly and solemnly, not omitting repentance for our sins nor thankfulness for our mercies, we shall, I believe, perceive, that but for the Reformation in the sixteenth century, European society must have sunk into the condition of an infidel world, nominally ruled by the intriguing head of a little Italian principality; really divided into a number of warring states, each aiming at the most selfish objects, each only looking to religion as the means of accomplishing them. From that time it has been evident to thinking persons that there are two principles struggling in Christendom for supremacy: the one, that which is embodied in Protestantism, resisting the claim of the spiritual power to any extra-national domination, and always tending to set at naught spiritual authority altogether; the other, that which is embodied in Romanism, resisting the attempts of the particular states to divide their own subjects from the rest of Christendom, continually striving to uphold the Church as a separate power, and to set at naught the existence of each particular nation. These principles have fought together in Europe for centuries. If it be really the purpose of God in our age to reconcile them, and to cast out the element in each which is contrary to His will, and which has been introduced to it by the perverseness of men, shall we whine about the loss we have sustained by not being born at a time when the Church was making its first struggling efforts to assert its own unity? Shall we not rejoice and give thanks that we are born in these latter days of the world, when all things are hastening to their consummation, and when the unity of the Church shall be demonstrated to be that ground upon which all unity in nations and in the heart of man is resting?