The Bishop of Winchester (Dr. Wilberforce) closed the Church Congress
at Leeds last week with a sermon on the first great Council of the Church at Jerusalem, the leading idea being that the Church had then absolute dogmatic certainty, because it had unity, but that in losing unity at the Greek schism and the Reformation the Church had lost certainty, and that in regaining unity it would regain cer- tainty. This is surely a very odd view. Had, then, the Churches which separated themselves from Rome in the sixteenth century no certainty of the truth of the very views on the strength of which they separated themselves? If not, how could they have justified a schism by which they were to lose certainty ? Surely to throw away certainty certainly for the future for the sake of a truth of which they could not be certain, because they had not for it the authority of the portion of the Church they left behind them, would have been mad. No view could be more unintelligible or illogical. Nor do we think Dr. Wilberforce the least warranted in saying that the present longing for unity is in any sense a longing for certainty. Most of those who long for unity don't really believe that any (Ecumenical Council, however
absolutely universal, could give certainty ; nay, a good many of them think it a great advantage of disunion that there is no authority to which even in theory they could be asked to submit. Our ecclesiastics have not yet realised that human authority in matters of faith is just what modern Churches cannot brook. Why the "Old Catholics" are the proof. They did not object to the Church so long as the only final authority was in abeyance, and not used against them. Directly it was, they took refuge in a theory of Church infallibility which made the infallible authority un-get-at-able, and renders it simply impossible that any authorita- tive declaration should ever be pronounced against them again. It would be truer to say that the yearning for unity is a substitute for the yearning for a certainty no longer deemed attainable.
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