The Anglican Episcopal Church.

Thames Star, Volume IX, Issue 3038, 9 November 1878, Page 1

The Anglican Episcopal Church.

Notwithstanding some difficulties which embarrass them, chiefly of their own creating, the Evangelical Church furnish, after all, but an insignificant number of converts to Romanism compared, ; to another reformed communion which aspires to a double character, and to be both Evangelical and Catholic.

It pleased Queen Elizabeth to arrest the spiritual revolution iu England when it had run but half its course. She would not, perhaps she could not, permit what we now mean by religious liberty. She instituted a system, and intended it to be co-extensive with the empire, which would comprehend as well Catholics as Protestants, those who believe in the magical efficacy of the sacraments and those who regarded the sacraments as forms which had a flavour of ttreidolatrbuß. ohel established a hierarchy, which yet should not be a heirarchy; bishops who might be called successors of the apostles, yet at the same time should be creations of her own, deriving their authority and their vely breath and being from the Crown. She instituted a liturgy and articles of- an analogous double composition—to Catholics assuming the complexion of the Ante.Nicene Church, to Protestants embracing the most vital doctrines of the Calvinistic theology.

Neither the Queen nor those who acted with her were themselves under any illusion as to the real nature of their Work. The Queen in her impatient moods refused her prelatei a higher name than Doctors; suspended, imprisoned, aud threatened to unfrock them. On the other hand she punished dissent as a crime. She insisted on conformity with an institution which she had made deliberately insincere. She fixed her eyes on the complications which lay immediately before her. She constructed her church for a present purpose, with a conscious understanding of its hbllowness. The next generation might solve its own difficulties. Elizabeth was contented if she could make her way undethroned through her own. With the artifice which was engrained in her disposition, she admitted , what she knew to be false into the organisation which was to control the education of the English race; and the deadly thing has remained where she placed it, bearing its poison-laden blossoms century after ceritury. Never has history pronounced a sterner condemnation on the experiment of tampering with truth. The bishops, as they settled into their places, assumed the airs and repeated the crimes of the prelates whom they succeeded. They constructed a theology to suit their position, and when the genuine part of the people saw through it and refused to accept it, they persecuted them till they provoked a revolt which cost a King and an Archbishop their lives, and for a time overthrew the whole constitution of their country. The Commonwealth was followed by a reaction in which the same chain was again imposed. Spiritual institutions can be remodelled only at a high temperature. When the metal is cold they can be broken, but they cannot be altered. Charles 11. believed in the Anglican bishops no more than Elizabeth believed in them; but he and his friends hated . the Puritans, and to be revenged on them they braced together again the dislocated pieces of Anglicanism. The reaction went so far as to encourage James to attempt the restoration of genuine Popery. The Kevolution followed. The Kirk established itself in Scotland; Popery was proscribed in England and Ireland; but the same shadowy Episcopal Church maintained its form, in these two countries, unimpaired and unmodified. It was supposed to have learned its lesson; to have been made to upderstand, at last, that spite of its Episcopal consecrations and its pretended priesthood, it was a Protestant institution and not a Catholic one. The body and appearance might bo , Catholic; the voice, when it opened its ' lips to teach, must be Protestant. The revolution had really produced some temporary effect of this kind. For a century and a half no more Romanising tendencies were heard in England; and such life as the Church possessed was Calvanist. But the free action of the spirit was paralysed by the dead body to which it was attached. The emotions of genuine piety were, choked in th» utteranoe. heligious paralysis still prevailed over England, and more fatally over Ireland. Nepotism, Erastianism, and self* indulgence became the characteristics of the Anglicau clergy; the best of them taking refuge in a stoical morality which was powerless except over the educated. It could not last. First Wesley and Whitefield arose, blowing into flame the ashes of the Reformers' theology, which " Paradise Lost " and the " Pilgrims' Progress" had prevented from growing entirely cold. Afterwards followed the great Evangelical revival, which spread into intellectual society, and, aid<d by the terrors of the French Involution, checked for a time the advancing tide of mate* rialism.

But Evangelicanism was morally timid and intellectually weak. It did not grapple boldly with the vices of society, still less with the greed of money-making, which was saturating politics with ungodliness. The reviving earnestness of the nineteenth century demanded something which it described as deeper, truer than had satisfied tho preceding generation. The insincerity of Elizabeth and her advisers had yet to bear its last and dead* liest fruits.

Forty years ago a knot of Oxford students, looking into the Constitution of the Church of England, discovered principles which, as they imagined, had only to be acted upon to restore religion to the throne of the empire. With no historical insight into the causes which had left these peculiar forms in the stratification of the

Church like- fossils of an earlier age, they conceived that the secret of the Church's strength lay in the priesthood and the sacraments ; and that the neglect of them ■ was the explanation of its weakness. The Church of England so renovated would rise, they thought, like Achilles ' from ibis tent; clad in celestial armour it r'"would put to flight the armies of infidelity and bring back in tnodern*shape, adapted to modern needs, the era of Hildebrand , and Becket. They, and only they, as tracing their lineage through imposition of hands to the Apostles, could meet and vanquish the pretensions of Borne. Singular imagination ! The battle which ensued is not yet over, but the issue of it has long ceased to be uncertain. Of the conflict with Materialism, these gentlemen made less than the Evangelicals had made. Materialism is sweeping over the intellect of the age like a spring tide, continually on the rise. They did not conquer Rome. The ablest of them, after all their passionate denials, were the first to see that if their principles were sound, the Reformation had been a crime, and that they must sue for admission into the bosom of their true mother. They submitted; they were received; they, aud the many who followed them, have been the most energetic knights of the holy war ; they, have been the moat accomplished libellers of the institution in which they were born. The Anglican regiment, which pretended to be the most effective against the enemy in the whole Protestant army, is precisely the one which has furnished and still furnishes to that enemy the most venomous foes of the English Church, and the largest supply of deserters. What these gentlemen have really accomplished is the destruction of the Evangelical party in the Established Church. While the moat vigorous of the Anglo-Catholics have gone over to the Papacy, the rest have infected almost the entire body of the Episcopal clergy with principles which seem to add to their personal consequence. Ihe youngest curate affects the airs of a priest. He revives a counterfeit of the sacramental system in which he pretends to have a passionate belief. He decorates his altar after the Koman pattern; he invites the ladies of his congregation to confess to him, and whispers his absolutions ; and haying led them away from their old moorings, and filled them with aspirations which he is unable to gratify, he passes them on in ever-gathering numbers to the hands of the genuine Roman, who waits to receive them.

The Episcopal Church of England, with its collateral branches in this and other countries, no lounger lends strength to the cause of Protestantism. It is the enemy's chief depot and recruitingground. The ascendancy which it enjoys through its connection with the State, the exclusive possession of the old cathedrals and parish churches; the'tradition that hangs about it that dissent is vulgar, and that to be an Anglican, if not a Papist, is essential to being a gentleman, are weapons in its hands which it uses with fatal ingenuity. The Dissenter's themselves are not proof against the baneful influence which is extending even into their own borders. To those who have eyes to see thereJs no more instructive symptom of the age than the tendency of Presbyterian, Independent, and even Unitarian clergy to assume a sacerdotal dress and appearance. Their fathers insisted that between laymen and ministers there was no difference but in name, and they carried their protest into the outward costume. The modern ministers form themselves into a caste. They display their profession in the collars of their coats ; whether they are Soman or Geneva can be learned only on particulary inquiry. Their fathers ejected from their chapels the meretricious ornament so dear to sentimental devotionalisEa. The bare walls seemed to say in their stern simplicity, that no lies should be spoken or acted within them. Now each chapel must have its delicatelymoulded arches, its painted windows, its elaborate music. The exterior of an Independent Meeting-house is no longer a symbol of the doctrine which is still preached, from its pulpits. We enter,, and we are still uncertain where we are, till we study the construction of the East fnd —and even the still blank East End iggests in its form the idea of the not distant altar and sacrificing priest.;— Feotoe on the .Revival of Romanism.