The Union of Christendom
[This suggestive article must appeal to all who hope for a united Christendom one day, and who are determined to work for that great ideal.—En. Spectator.]
LOOKING at it from one aspect, the Church of England is a preliminary experiment in Christian unity. It embraces within one organic body Catholic, Liberal and Evangelical. These " colleges of religion," if we may call them so, make up the " university " of the English Church ; and though the disintegrating forces are strong, the sense of corporate life is stronger, and the larger unity is maintained.
What the Church of England is thus attempting with difficulty but with success to do, the whole Catholic Church will some day have to attempt on a world-wide scale. The great Communions, Greek, Roman, Anglican and Evangelical, will be " colleges " within the greater " university " of the Catholic Church. Though enjoying a measure of independence, these Communions will share in the organic life of the whole, and when the whole is realized as greater and more vital than the parts, the unity of the Body of Christ on earth will be within sight.
This may seem mere paper-theorizing ; but if we visualize Reunion in this way one practical result should follow. By the Papal claims the Roman Church excludes Evangelical Christianity, and thus achieves an easy but narrow unity. The Church of England, by reconciling within one spiritual house Catholic and Evangelical, is achieving a unity more difficult to maintain but very much more worth while. To assent to this, Catholics (in the narrower sense), whether Roman or Anglican, must recognize that Evangelical Christianity has become a permanent type of Christian life within the whole Church. It has now a tradition of 400 years, and those four centuries since Luther can no more be ignored than the 400 years culminating in the Council of Chalcedon.
As the " Church of sound learning," to use Creighton's phrase, the Church of England tries to recognize the significance of all the centuries of Christian history. Though she attaches special importance to the early centuries as the period of the Councils and the Fathers, she believes that the Post-Reformation centuries have also their lessons to convey. If the patristic age was the formative period, the Lutheran age was reformative. And one of the lessons of the modern period is that Evangelical Christianity has become a permanent force within the whole Church. To try to exclude the Evangelical type from the Church of England would be to impoverish her, as the Roman Church has been im- poverished by the loss of the Evangelical bodies. There are probably not a few Roman Catholic laymen who wish that their Church possessed the simplicity, the elasticity and the Scripturalness of the Church of England at its best ; indeed, the present writer has met more than one Roman Catholic layman who has admitted as much.
• The practical result of visualizing Reunion in the way suggested is that it enables us to conceive of Evangelical Christianity as a valuable and permanent constituent in the Christian whole. But Evangelicals will also have to realize the value and permanence of Catholicism.
Evangelicals appeal to the Bible as interpreted by the individual conscience ; Catholics appeal to it as illum- inated by the history of mankind and the Church. To the one the Bible is a thing apart ; to the'other it is the Church's classic. Both views are helpful, but • the Catholic view contains the greater truth. • Further, if Evangelicals use the weapon of history in their appeal to the tradition of the four centuries since Luther, th, must recognize how much stronger is that weapon the hands of those who can appeal to. the older and longer tradition of the .thousand years before Luther It has long been recognized that there is such a thio as Scriptural, or non-Papal, Catholicism. That is not the discovery of the Anglo-Catholics of to-day, nor was it the invention of the great men of the Oxford Movement Non-Papal Catholicism lay behind the famous " King's Book " of 1543. Dr. Muller, in his work, Stephen Gtr diner and the Tudor Reaction, says of the " King's Book that " it represents the most successful attempt in th Reformation age—perhaps in any age—to set forth doctrinal exposition of anti-Papal Catholicism." Perim) if Bishop Gardiner, who may have been personal! responsible for some of the views in that Book, had becon Primate on the death of Warham, instead of Cramer the Church of England under his guidance might hay sooner embodied this Scriptural Catholicism and has ante-dated the Oxford Movement by three centuries.
Undoubtedly there has been since the Reformation view of Christianity which we may contrast both witl Eastern and Western Catholicism and with' Eva ngelica Christianity ; we might call it Northern Catholicism It is represented by great names in English Chum history, Hooker, Andrewes, Laud, Cosin. John I attempted, though without success, to make it preva in Sweden. Old Catholics in Holland and Genus, have continued the tradition. But its great and indis putable success has been the gradual but sure revival o Catholic belief and practice in the Church of Engin' since the Oxford Movement. Such a Northern Catholi cism, Scriptural in belief, austere in ceremonial, unitil liberty with discipline and authority with learning, is n longer a theory but a fact. " Northern " may be a fins nomer, since the great Christian Communions have no no geographical limits. Eastern Orthodox are found i the West ; and Westerns are found in the Far East But the term may serve to point its distinction from th Catholicism of Rome and Constantinople, and to mom. Evangelicals to a Catholicism which • finds its premix seat in Canterbury.
The words which Canon Lacey uses in his book, null and Schism (p. 158), probably express what more an more people are feeling to be true " The Christia Church is one family, and Christians are brothers. It i a fact, not an aspiration. All Christians are brother4 Orthodox and heretic, Catholic and schismatic, all a brothers." The Church of England is endeavouring embody this family spirit. Though comprising with' it people differing as widely as the Anglo-Catholic an the Protestant Evangelical, it yet maintains its organ' unity, as is shown by the vitality of the Church Assembly And in thus keeping under one roof children of differcn character but of one blood, the English Church is scttin forth an example to the Church Catholic of the way which it, too, will some day set its house in order.
E. H. DITNI:I.EV.
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