OLD-CATHOLIC CONGRESS AT FREIBURG.

Globe, Volume II, Issue 156, 3 December 1874, Page 3

OLD-CATHOLIC CONGRESS AT FREIBURG.

[From the Spectator .]

The Old-Catholic Congress at Freiburg does not appear to have been a success this year, but the Conference which followed it at Bonn, presided over by Dr Bollinger, was a step of real interest. Dr Bollinger invited a few representatives of all the Communions with which he anticipated agreement —especially the Greek Church, and the Anglican Church in England and America —to discuss their chief differences, and agree on some formula, if not exactly of union, yet of communion. The discussion seems to have been rather strange. The three Churches—the chief Anglican representatives were Canon Liddon, Bean Howson, and the Bishop of Winchester (Br Harold Browne) managed to come to a sort of concordat about the peculiar doctrine of the Greek Church, which refers the Procession of the Holy Ghost to the Father only, and this we have described elsewhere ; but they made the repudiation of the Virgin Mary’s Immaculate Conception a sine qua non of the peace. Canon Liddon objected to insisting on this repudiation, remarking that though he quite disbelieved it himself, he thought it was sufficient to say that such a doctrine was not an essential part of an orthodox creed. But the Old Catholics insisted that there should be a definite repudiation of it, as a mode of rebuking Papal falsehood. It would surely rebuke Papal falsehood as well, and much more consistently, to say that the doctrine has no authority. Why should you demand that a mere dream is to be repudiated 1 Moreover, is it not somewhat strange for high theologians to leave a definition as to the Third Person of the Godhead open, while they insist on an implicit denial of an imaginative fancy about a human being ? The Bonn Conference has clearly no idea on what lines to lay down its new appeal to authority, and is indulging in the merest caprice.