The author is deceived in his assumption that these three churches are particular or local churches, subordinated to the universal church. St. Mary's church, which is my parish church, is a catholic church, if the see of Rome is the Catholic Apostolic See; for it depends on it, and through the bishop of the diocese communes with that see, and through that see with every other particular catholic church, thus establishing in the unity and catholicity of the See of Rome, or, as the fathers said, the See of Peter, the unity and catholicity of all particular or local churches in communion with it. By coming into communion with St. Mary's church, one comes into communion with the one universal church, is in the catholic communion, and is a Catholic; but nothing of the sort can be affirmed either of the Greek Church or of the Anglican. They acknowledge no subordination to any other organic body in existence; they depend respectively on no ecclesiastical authority or organic centre independent of themselves; they commune neither with each other nor with the Church of Rome, which holds them to be both in schism, and one of them in heresy. Certain Anglican ministers would willingly commune with the Greek Church, but it repels them, and declares that sect to be not even a church. The three churches named cannot, then, be particular churches holding from a common centre of unity, and Dr. Ewer must take one of them as the Catholic Church and exclude the other two, or have no Catholic Church at all.
The fact that there are certain points, if you will, essential points, of agreement between these three bodies, does by no means make them one body. Agreement is not identity. Great Britain and the United States speak the same language; adopt the same Common Law, which governs their respective courts; agree to a great extent in their usages, manners and customs, and civil institutions; and throughout they have a far closer resemblance to each other than has the Anglican Church to either the Greek Church or the Roman Church; and yet, are they not one nation, with one national authority, and having one and the same national life. Eliminate from New York and New Jersey the points in which they differ, and retain only the points in which they agree, and would they be one state under one and the same state government? Not at all, because they are separate organizations, and, as states, are each independent of the other. The Eastern churches were once in communion with Rome under the supremacy of the Apostolic See, and then were one with the Roman Church; but having separated from that see, they are churches in schism indeed, butde factoindependent. There was, down to the sixteenth century, a Catholic Church in England in communion with the Church of Rome or the Apostolic See; but the so-called Church of England is not its continuation, and, in the judgment of both the Roman Church and the Greek Church, is not a church at all, for it has no orders, no priesthood, no sacrifice; its so-called bishops and clergymen are only laymen, but for the most part educated, refined, and highly respectable laymen, devoted to the elegant pursuits of literature and science, the cultivation of private and public morals, and the interests and well-being of their families. But not to insist on this at present, we may affirm that, even supposing Anglicans have an episcopate, and that it resembles the Greek and Roman episcopates, it is no more identical with them than the government of Great Britain is identically that of Italy, Prussia, or Austria. These three states are all limited monarchies; they also all have parliamentary governments, and place the sovereignty in the nation, not in a particular family.But they are not one and the same monarchy, nor one and the same government, for they are politically separate and independent. It will not do to answer this by saying that each of these three episcopates hold equally from Jesus Christ, and are one in him; for that would either suppose the church to be in her unity and catholicity invisible, and without any visible organ or manifestation; or else that Christ has three churches, or three bodies, which the author can admit no more than we, for he professes to hold or believe ONE Holy Catholic Apostolic Visible Church.
In the beginning of the extract from Dr. Ewer's fourth discourse, the church is declared to be "an organism." An organism, we need not tell a man like him, is a living body, not a simple aggregation of parts, or an organization which, having no life in itself, depends on the mechanical, electric, or chemical arrangement of its several parts. In every living body or organism, there is and must be—as the older physiologists, and even the most recent and eminent, like M. Virchow, of Berlin, and M. Claude Bernard, of Paris, tell us, and by their researches and discoveries have proved—an original central cell, from which the whole organism proceeds, in which its vital principle inheres, and which is the type, creator, originator, and director of all its vital phenomena. The whole life, evolution, and course of the organism is originated and determined by this original central cell—this germ, or ovule, without which no organic life or living body is possible. This primitive cell or germ is never spontaneously generated, but is always generated by a living organism which precedes and deposits it, according to the old maxim,omne vivum ex ovo.[Footnote 161]
[Footnote 161: See a very learned and scientific essay inLe Correspondant, for October 25th, 1868,De l'Idée de Vie dans la Physiologie Contemporaine, by Dr. Chauffard, known to our readers by a very able essayOn the Present Disputes of Philosophy, translated and published in this magazine for November last, though the types made us call him Dr. Chaufaid instead of Dr. Chauffard.]
It is the origin and law of the unity, evolution, or growth of the organism, and is the type and generator of all the innumerable cells which form the whole cellular system of the entire organism, whether normal or abnormal.
What we insist on here is that there is no organism without this original central cell or germ, and that this central cell, whence the unity of the organism is generated by a pre-existing organism, that is, by ancestors of the same species, and is neither self-generated nor made up by any possible mechanical or physico-chemical action or combination of parts, as Messrs. Virchow and Bernard have demonstrated. This principle or law of all organic life is universal, and applies to the church as an organism, notwithstanding her supernatural character, as to any of the organisms studied and experimented upon by physiologists in the natural order. The Creator does not work after one law in the natural order, and another and diverse or contradictory law in the supernatural order; and herein we discover the reason of the perfect accord of all the Creator's works, the perfect harmony of revelation and real science, and the aid revelation gives to science, and, in return, the aid that real science gives to the interpretation and clearer understanding of revelation. God is one, and works always after one and the same law in all orders, and is never in contradiction with himself.
The essential error of the non-catholic church theory is, that it denies the central cell or germ whence is evolved or produced the whole church organism, and assumes that the church derives her life from her members, and that she is constituted in her unity and catholicity as a living body by the combination of the several parts, or that the central cell is created by the organism, not the organism by the central or organic cell, which is as much as to say, multiplicity can exist without unity to produce it, or that dead or unliving parts can generate life and activity! No one need be surprised that men of clear heads and logical minds, trying to remove, on Protestant principles, the discrepancies between science and the Protestant religion, should rush into materialism and atheism. The principle the Protestant adopts in his non-catholic church theory is precisely the principle on which Mr. Herbert Spencer proceeds when he ascribes all the phenomena of life, or of the living organism, to the mechanical, electric, and chemical arrangement of material atoms. The same principle applied in theology leads inevitably to atheism; for, multiplicity given as prior to and independent of unity, no argument in favor of the divine existence can have any validity, nay, no argument to prove that there is a God can be conceived. Such is the terrible injury the non-catholic or Protestant church theory has done and is doing to both religion and science.
Dr. Ewer, no doubt, intends to reject, and honestly believes that he has rejected, this destructive theory, which, universally applied, results in nihilism; but we fear that he has not. He includes the one catholic church in what he calls the three particular churches—the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican. Each of these, he says, is a catholic church, but no one of them is the Catholic Church. Whence, then, do they or can they derive their character of catholic? The Catholic Church, according to him, is an organism. If an organism, it must have a central cell, anorganite, or organic centre, originated not by itself, from which all in the organism proceeds, or in which, in the language of St. Cyprian, all "takes its rise," and therefore on which all the parts depend. This central cell, which in the church we may call the central see or chair, and which the fathers, whether Greek or Latin, call the Chair of Peter, and since it is the origin of all the parts, is evidently prior to them and independent of them. They do not constitute it, but it produces, sustains, and governs them. On no other conditions is it possible to assert or conceive the unity and catholicity of the church as an organism. Particular churches are Catholic by holding from and communing with this central see or the organic centre, not otherwise.
But Dr. Ewer acknowledges no such central cell or central see. His organism has no organic centre, and consequently is no organism at all, but a simple union or confederacy of equal and independent sees. Rome, Constantinople, or Canterbury is no more a central see or organic centre of the church than any other see or diocese, as Caesarea, Milan, Paris, Toledo, Aberdeen, London, or Armagh, and to be in the unity of the church there is no particular see, mother and mistress of all the churches, with which it is necessary to commune. The several sees may agree in their constitution, doctrine, liturgy, and discipline, but they are not integrated in any church unity or living church organism. This is the theory of the schismatic Greeks, and of Anglicans and Protestant Episcopalians, and is simply the theory of independency, as much so as that of the New England Congregationalists, but it admits no organic unity.It is also the theory which Dr. Ewer himself appears to assert and defend. By what authority is he able to pronounce any one of the three churches named a catholic church, since no one of them holds from a catholic centre, or a central unity, for he recognizes no such centre or unity? The only unity of the church he can admit is that formed by the combination of the several parts, a unity formed from multiplicity. He holds that we need a great catholic reformation, a combination of the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches, which shall "evolve unity from multiplexity." Here, it seems to us, is an unmistakable recognition, as the basis of his catholicity, of the non-catholic church theory, and a virtual denial of the unity and catholicity of the church; for from multiplicity can be evolved only totality, which, so far from being unity, excludes it altogether.
Recognizing no central see, centre and source of the unity and catholicity of the church, how can Dr. Ewer determine what churches are in schism or what are in union, what are catholic and what are not? What criterion of unity and catholicity has he or can he have? He says the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican are catholic, and he confines the Catholic Church to them. But how can he call them catholic, since they have no common organic centre, and have no intercommunion? We can find in his discourses no answer to this question but the fact that they have certain things in common. Why confine the Catholic Church, then, to these three alone? Why exclude Methodists, Presbyterians, Lutherans, and the Swiss, the Dutch, and the German Reformed communions? All these have something in common with the Roman, Greek, and Anglican communions, and even profess with them to believe the Apostles' and Nicene creeds. The Methodists have bishops, priests or elders, and deacons, as the Anglicans, and adopt the same articles of faith. The churches named have presbyters, and so have Presbyterians, the continental Reformed, and the Lutheran churches; some of the Lutheran churches even have bishops. There is something in common between these and the churches the author claims to be catholic. Why, then, does he exclude them from the list of communions of which the Catholic Church is composed? Or why, indeed, exclude any one who professes to hold the Christian church and the Apostles' and Nicene creeds? And why not reject as non-catholic everything which all these do not agree in holding? Does he not say thatcatholicmeans all, not a part, and why exclude from theallany who acknowledge Christ as their Lord and Master, and profess to be members of his church? The author has no criterion in the case but his own private judgment, prejudice, or caprice. He has no other rule, having rejected the apostolic or central see, for interpreting thequod semper, quod ubique, et ab omnibus crediturof St. Vincent of Lerins. Theallwith us means all those, and those only, who are, and always have been, in communion with the central or Apostolic See, and obedient to its supreme authority; but Dr. Ewer, who admits no such see, has, and can have, no authority for not including in theall, theomnibus, all who profess to follow Christ or to hold and practise the Christian religion. His catholicity is, then, the creature of his own private judgment, prejudice, or caprice; and his catholic church is founded on himself, and is his own arbitrary construction or creation. This is not the rejection of Protestantism, but is rather Protestantism gone to seed.
Throughout the whole of Dr. Ewer's reasoning, except where he is simply following Catholics in pronouncing and proving Protestantism a blunder and a failure, and answerable for the rationalism and unbelief in revealed religion now so prevalent among scientific, intelligent, clear-headed, and honest-minded men, there is the implied assumption that catholicity precedes the church, and that we are to determine not what is catholic by the church, but the Catholic Church by what we have, without her, determined to be catholic. This is not a Catholic but a Protestant method. We must first find the One Catholic Apostolic Church, and from her learn what is catholic, and who are catholics and who are not. This is the only scientific rule, if we acknowledge a Catholic Church at all.
If the Roman, Greek, and Anglican churches are no one of them the Catholic Church, they can be catholic, that is, be in the catholic organism, only by communing with the organic centre from which the life, activity, and authority of the organism proceeds, in which is the source and centre of the unity and catholicity of the church. But all particular churches in communion with the organic centre, and obtaining their life from it, existin solido, and commune with one another. The three churches named do not commune with one another; they are, as we have seen, three distinct, separate, and independent bodies, and foreigners to one another. Then only one of them, if any one of them, can be a catholic church. The other two must be excluded as non-catholic. What the author has to determine first of all, since he restricts the Catholic Church to the three, is, in which of these three is the original, organic, or central cell, or central see, whence all the others proceed, or from which they take their rise. But instead of doing this, he denies that any one of the three is the Catholic Church, and contends that it is all three in what they hold in common or agree in maintaining. The meaning of this is, that no one of them contains the organic cell, that there is no central organic see, as we hold the See of Peter to be, and therefore no church organism one and catholic. But this is to deny the Catholic Church, not to assert it. In attempting to include in the One Catholic Apostolic Church non-catholic and foreign elements, Dr. Ewer, therefore, manifestly loses the Catholic Church itself.
Dr. Ewer, notwithstanding his vigorous onslaught upon Protestantism, remains still under the influence of his Protestant training, and has not as yet attained to any real conception either of unity or of catholicity. Unity is indivisible; catholicity is illimitable, or all that is contained in the unity; and both are independent of space and time. The unity of the church is her original and central organic principle, or principle of life; the catholicity of the church is inseparable from her unity, and consists in the completeness of this organic principle, and in its being always and everywhere the complete and only principle of church life. The unity of the faith is in the fact that it, like the church, has its central principle out of which all in it grows or germinates, and on which all in it depends; the catholicity of the faith is in the fact that this faith is complete, the whole faith, and is always and everywhere believed and taught by the One Catholic Church, is always and everywhere one and the same faith, always and everywhere the truth of God. The catholicity of the church depends in no sense on diffusion in space or the number of her members.The church is catholic, not because she is universally diffused in space, but because she is the one only church, and includes in her organism all that is essential to the church as the church, or the mystic body of Christ, to the entire church life for all men and for all times.Catholicmeansall, rather thanuniversal, or universal only because it means all; and hence the church was as truly catholic on the day of Pentecost as she is now, or would be were all nations and all men included in her communion, as the human race, in the order of generation, was as complete and entire when there was no individual but Adam, as it will be when the last child is born. Time has no effect on either the unity or catholicity of the church; for she is always living in her unity and catholicity, an ever-present church, in herself the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever. She is in time and space, but not of them, nor, in her internal organism, affected by the accidents of either. The primitive church, the mediaeval church, and the church of to-day are identically the same, and the distinctions these terms imply are distinctions only in things externally related to her, not in herself. Such must be the church if one and catholic, holy and apostolic.
The central life of the church, the source of all the vitality, force, and authority of the organism, of which—to use the figure we have already so many times used—the central cell is the organ, and which gives it all its generative force and governing power, is Jesus Christ himself, who is theformaof the church, as the soul is theformaof the body, or its organic principle; for the church is thebodyof Christ, and is nothing without him, and if separated from him would instantly die, as does the body when separated from the soul. But we are treating of the church, in which the unity of Christ is made manifest in her visible unity, and therefore of the visible, not of the invisible church. That the invisible unity might be manifested, St. Cyprian argues, in hisDe Unitate Ecclesiae, Christ established a central chair, the Chair of Peter, whence all might be seen to take its rise from one. This chair, the visible centre of unity, is to the church organism, as we have seen, what the central or organic cell is to every organism or living body in the natural order; but Jesus Christ, whom it manifests or represents in the visible order, is the living force and generative power of the central chair, as the soul is of the organic cell of the human organism. So much we must affirm of theChristianchurch, if we call it, as Dr. Ewer does, "an organism."
This organic central cell generates or produces not many organisms, but one only. So the Chair of Peter, the central cell of the church organism, can generate only one organism. Christ has one body and no more. That only can be the Catholic Church in which is, as its centre, the Chair of Peter, or, as we have before said, the organic central see, which may justly be called the Holy See, the Apostolic See, "the mother and mistress of all the churches," as in the living body the original central organic cell is the mother and mistress of all the secondary or inferior cells generated in the evolution of the organism. Here, again, theology and physiology coincide in principle.
We may now ask, Does the Greek schismatic church, as we call it, contain this central organic see? Certainly not; for she admits no such see, or, if she does, she confesses that she contains it not, and the Roman Church does.The Greek schismatic, as we call him, recognizes no church unity in the sense we have explained. He recognizes only diocesan, metropolitan, or patriarchal unity. Does the Greek Church, then, commune with this central see? No. For it communes with no see or church outside of itself. How is it with the Anglican Church? It does not any more than the Greek Church claim to possess it. It does not pretend to find it in the see of Canterbury, York, Dublin, or Armagh, and indeed denies both the necessity and existence of such see. She denounces the Roman see because she claims to be it; and Dr. Ewer tells us, in his reply to Mr. Adams, that the Protestant Reformation rendered noble service to the Anglican Church by delivering it from papal tyranny and oppression. Well, then, does the Anglican Church commune with the central or organic see, or Chair of Peter? No. For she communes with no see beyond herself. Then she is not the, or even a, catholic church. There remains, then, only the Roman Church, which is and must be the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church, if such church there is; for it can be no other. The reverend doctor's attempt, then, to find a catholic church which is not the Roman Church, or a catholicity which is "broader and deeper" than what he, as well as other Protestants, calls "Romanism," seems, like Protestantism itself, to have failed.
Dr. Ewer would evade the force of this conclusion, which the common sense of mankind unhesitatingly accepts, by resorting to what is known as "the branch theory." The Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches are not one or another of them exclusively the Catholic Church, but they are catholic churches, because branches of the One Catholic Church. But branches suppose a trunk. Where there is no trunk there are and can be no branches; for the trunk produces the branches, not the branches the trunk. Where, then, is the trunk of which the three churches named are branches, especially since the author says we are not to look beyond them for the Catholic Church? We let him answer in his own words:
"Permit me to close this part of my discourse by an illustration of the Catholic Church. We will take, for the sake of simplicity, a tree. For eight feet above the soil its trunk stands one and entire. Somewhere along the ninth foot the trunk branches into two main limbs. We will call the eastern the Greek limb, and the western we will call the Latin. Six feet further out on the Latin limb, that is to say, fifteen feet from ground, that western limb subdivides into two vast branches. The outmost of the two we will call the Anglican branch, the other we will call the Roman. These two branches and the Greek limb run up to a height of nineteen and a half feet from the ground. There they are, the three great boughs, each with its foliage, Anglican at the west, Roman in the centre, Greek at the east. If now you shield your vision from all but the top of the tree, there will appear to you to be three disconnected tufts of vegetation; but lo! the foliage and the flowers are the same. But remove now the shield from before your eyes, and behold in the whole tree a symbol of the Catholic Church—one organism from root to summit."
This assumes that the trunk is the primitive undivided church, or the church prior to the separation of the Eastern churches from the jurisdiction of the Roman see. But does that undivided church, the trunk church, still exist in its integrity? No. For if it did, there would be no difficulty. It ceased to exist in the ninth century, and now there is no undivided church. Then that has fallen into the past. Then there is no present living trunk, but branches only. Branches of a trunk that has ceased to live can be only dead branches. The alleged branches communicate with no living root, and have no intercommunion; they therefore are not and cannot be one living organism. The author himself half concedes it, for he continues:
"A church that is one like the trunk of that tree for the first nine centuries—that the Western subdividing at the fifteenth century into Anglican and Roman. As a fact, the unity of the organism is not broken; intercommunion between its three parts is simply suspended for a time—suspended until that differentiation shall take place in God's one church which, as Herbert Spencer so admirably shows, is the law of all growth; a differentiation which means, in its last issue, not a complete sundering, but the eventual unity of multiplexity, the harmony of co-ordinate parts. Did it not mix the metaphor somewhat, I would go on and complete the illustration by supposing sundry branches of this tree to be cut off from time to time and inserted into vases of water standing round about the great tree. Being without root, those cut longest ago are all dead; while only the most recently cut are green with a deceptive life, themselves soon to wither and die. These cut branches, standing trunkless and rootless about the living tree, would be apt symbols of the Protestant sects.
"We have found, then, what the Catholic Church is."
There can be no suspension of intercommunion of the branches so long as their communion with the root, or organic cell, through the trunk, is not suspended; for through communion with that they intercommune. But any interruption of that communion is not only the suspension, but the extinction of intercommunion. The restoration of intercommunion once extinct cannot be affected except by a living reunion of each with the root or organic cell of the organism. Probably, then, the author has been too hasty in exclaiming, "We have found what the Catholic Church is." He seems to us to have found neither unity nor catholicity.
Dr. Ewer seems to forget that the church never has been and never can be divided. Has not he himself said that she is one, and does he need to be told that one is indivisible, or that its division would be its death? The tree with successive branches which he adduces in illustration is, no doubt, a living organism; but it can illustrate only the unity and catholicity of the central and ruling see, and the particular churches holding from it. Branch churches are admissible only as particular churches produced by and dependent on the organic centre, or apostolic see, mother and mistress of all the churches of the organism. But we have already shown that the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches are not particular churches, for they are independent bodies, subordinate to or dependent on no organic centre which each has not in itself. As the Catholic Church is one, not three, and as we have shown that it is neither the separated Greek Church nor the Anglican, it must be the Roman See and its dependent churches, in which is the primitive, original, productive, and creative life of the church, since, as we have seen, it can be no other. We have refuted the "branch theory" in refuting the author's assumption that the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican churches hold from and are subordinate to the one universal church, which, as independent of them, has no existence.
The failure of the author to find the Catholic Church is due to the fact that, from first to last, though he calls the church one, he really recognizes no church unity, since he recognizes no visible centre of unity whence emanates all her life, activity, and authority. Till the ninth century the East and West were united, and the church was one; but it had no centre of unity at Rome any more than at Antioch, at Alexandria, or Constantinople, in the successor of St. Peter in the See of Rome any more than in any other patriarch or bishop.Hence no church could be convicted of schism, unless its bishop refused to commune with another, or another refused to commune with him; but which was the schismatic was indeterminable, unless the whole church should come together in General Council and settle the question by vote. This is the author's theory of unity, a unity which has no visible centre. It is the common Anglican theory, and appears to some extent to be that of the schismatical Greeks. But this theory makes the unity of the church a mere collective federative unity, or an aggregation of parts, which is simply no unity at all, and at best only a union. The unity of the church implies that all in the church proceeds from unity, and is generated, upheld, and controlled by it. The unity is the origin of the whole organism, and what does not proceed from it or grow out of it is abnormal—a tumor, or an excrescence to be exscinded. Hence the impossibility of arriving at the unity of the church by aggregating the parts which have lost it or have it not. It is impossible to assert the unity of the church without asserting a central see, and its bishop as its visible manifestation. There is, we repeat, no organism without the central cell, and no visible organism without a visible centre of unity. The author would do well to study anew the treatiseDe Unitate Ecclesiaeof St. Cyprian, to which we have already referred.
There is and can be no visible unity of the church without a central see, the centre and origin of unity, life, and authority; and when you have found that see, you have found the Catholic Church, but not till then. Every see, or particular or local church in communion with that see; and dependent on it, is in the unity of the church and catholic; and every one not in communion with it is out of unity and not catholic, nor any part of the Catholic body. Admitting that there is the Catholic Church, the only question to be settled is, Which is that See? Reduced to this point, the controversy is virtually ended. There is and never has been but one claimant. Rome has always claimed it, and nobody in the world has ever pretended or pretends that it is any other. Constantinople and Canterbury have disputed the supremacy over the whole church of its pontiff; but neither claims nor ever has claimed to be itself the central organic see, the visible centre of the church organism, and organ of its life and authority.
With no recognized central and ruling see with which all, in order to be in unity, must commune, and with only particular, or rather independent and isolated, churches in existence, without any intercommunion one with another, and all of which, as separate and independent churches, have failed, how can those several branches, which are only trunkless, be restored, "unity evolved from multiplexity," and intercommunion re-established? If there is an organic see, the centre of unity, mother and mistress of all the churches, particular churches that have failed can easily be restored if they wish. They have only to abjure their schism or heresy, be reconciled with that see, submit to its authority, and receive its teaching. They are thus reincorporated by the mercy of God into the church organism, and participate in its unity and the life that flows from it. But on the author's church theory, we can see no possible way in which the separate bodies can be restored to the unity of the church.Unity cannot be constructed or reconstructed from multiplicity; for there can be no multiplicity where there is no unity. Multiplicity depends on unity, which creates or generates and sustains it. Suppose we grant for the moment the Catholic Church is no one of the three churches, yet is not separable from or independent of them, and, in fact, underlies them, but inorganic, or having only these for its organs. How shall they be brought into organic unity? By a General Council? Where is the authority to convoke it, to determine who may or who may not sit in it, and to confirm its acts? You say, Summon all the bishops of the Roman, the Greek, and the Anglican bodies. But who has authority to summon them, and why summon these and no others? Who shall say? It is the same question we have had up before. Why extend or why confine the Catholic Church to the three churches named? Where there is no recognized centre of authority, that is to say, no recognized authority, there is authority to admit or to exclude. It is necessary that authority define which is the Catholic Church, before you can say what organizations it includes or excludes, or what prelates or ministers have the right to be summoned as Catholic prelates or ministers, and what not.
A nation disorganized, as the author assumes the church now is, though he trusts only temporarily, can reorganize itself; for the political sovereignty resides always in the nation, or, as we say, in modern times, in the people. The people, as the nation, possess, under God, or rather from him, the sovereign power to govern themselves, which they can neither alienate nor be deprived of so long as they exist as an independent nation or sovereign political community. When the old government which, as legal, held from them, is broken up or dissolved, they have the inherent right to come together in such way as they choose or can, and reconstitute government or power in such manner and vest it in such hands as they judge best. But the church disorganized cannot reorganize itself; for the organic power does not vest in the church as the faithful or the Christian people. Authority in the church is not created, constituted, or delegated by the Christian people, nor does it in any sense hold from them. Church power or authority comes immediately from God to the central see, and from that see radiates through the whole body; for the author agrees with us that the church is an organism. Hence we recognize the Council of Constance as a General Council only after it was convoked by Gregory XII., who was, in our judgment, the true Bishop of the Apostolic See, and hold legal only the acts confirmed by Martin V. The disorganization of the church is, then, its dissolution or death. It has no power to raise itself from the dead. If the central see could really fail, the whole organism would fail. The church is indefectible through the indefectibility of the Holy See, and that is indefectible because it is Peter's See, and our Lord promised Peter that, however Satan might try him, his faith should not fail: "Satan has desired to sift thee as wheat; but I have prayed the Father that thy faith fail not." The prayer of Christ cannot be unanswered, and is a promise. The attacks on the Holy See have been violent and continual, but they have never been successful. Our Lord's prayer has been effective, and Peter's faith has never failed. No doubt there is the full authority to teach and to govern in the church; but this authority is not derived from the faithful nor distributed equally among them, but resides primarily and in its plenitude in the Holy See, and therefore in the bishop of that see, or the pope, Peter's successor, in whom Peter lives and continues to teach and govern the whole church.All Catholic bishops depend on him, and receive from him their jurisdiction, and by authority from God through him govern their respective dioceses. The church is papal in its essential constitution, not simply episcopal; for we have seen that it is an organism, and can be an organism only as proceeding from an organic centre, or central see, on which its unity and catholicity depend. The Apostolic See cannot be separated from theSedens; for without him it is empty, incapable of thinking, speaking, or acting. It is, then, it seems to us, as utterly impossible to assert the church as really one and catholic, without asserting the pope, or supreme pastor, as it would be to assert an organism without asserting a central organic cell. The failure of the pope would be the failure of the whole church organism, with no power of reorganization or reconstruction left—an important point in which the church and the nation differ. The overlooking of this point of difference is the reason why our catholicizing Anglicans suppose that the church, though disorganized, is able to reorganize herself. The reorganized church, if effected, would be a human organization, not a divine organism as created by our Lord himself. But the church, as we have seen, has never been disorganized, and could not be without ceasing to exist, and cease to exist it cannot, if catholic. The organic centre from which the whole organism is evolved and directed has remained at Rome ever since Peter transferred thither his chair from Antioch, and the particular churches holding from it and continuing subject to it are integral elements of the catholic organism, which is as perfect, as complete, and as entire as it was when the Oriental churches acknowledged and submitted to the supremacy of the successor of Peter, or when the church in England was in full communion with the Apostolic See of Rome. The separation of these from the Roman communion, though it destroyed their unity and catholicity, did not break the unity and catholicity of the organism; it only placed them outside of that organism, and cut them off from the central see, the source of all organic church life. The revolt of the Anglo-American Colonies from Great Britain, in 1776, and the Declaration of their Independence of the mother-country, did not break her unity or authority as a nation, and indeed did not even deprive her of any of her rights over them, though it enfeebled her power to govern them, till she herself acknowledged them to be independent states.
The author seems to suppose that the Greeks and Anglicans, in separating from Rome, broke the unity of the church, and carried away with them each a portion of her catholicity, so that there now can be no One Catholic Church existing in organic unity and catholicity, save in reminiscence andin potentia, unless these two bodies are reunited with Rome in one and the same communion. But the Greeks and Anglicans had both for centuries recognized the authority of the Apostolic See, as the centre of unity and source of jurisdiction. When the Greeks separated from that see and refused to obey it, they took from it neither its organic unity nor its catholicity; they only cut themselves off and deprived themselves of both. The same may be said of Anglicans in separating from Rome and declaring themselves independent.They deprived themselves of unity and catholicity, but left the original church organism in all its integrity, and only placed themselves outside of it. The separation in both cases deprived the church of a portion of her population, and diminished her external power and grandeur, but took away none of her rights and prerogatives, and in no respect impaired, as we have already said, the unity or catholicity of her internal organism. All that can be said is that the separated Oriental churches and Anglicans, not the church, have lost unity and catholicity, and have ceased to be Catholics, even when agreeing with the church in her dogmas and her external rites and ceremonies.
There is, then, on the side of the church, no broken unity to be healed, or lost catholicity to be restored. If the Oriental churches wish to regain unity and catholicity, all they have to do is to submit to the jurisdiction of the Apostolic See, and renew their communion with the mother and mistress of all the churches. Not having lost their church organization, and having retained valid orders or the priesthood and the august sacrifice, they can return in their corporate capacity. There is in their case only a schism to be healed. The Anglicans and Episcopalians stand on a different footing; for they have not even so much as a schismatic church, since the Episcopalians hold from the Anglicans, and the Anglicans from the state. They have no orders, no priesthood, no sacrifice, no sacraments—except baptism, and even pagans can administer that—no church character at all, if we look at the facts in the case, and therefore, like all Protestants, can be admitted to the unity of the church only on individual profession and submission. There is much for those out of unity to do to recover it and to effect the union in the Catholic communion of all who profess to be Christians, but nothing to render the church herself one and catholic. Her unity and catholicity are already established and unalterable, and so are the terms of communion and the conditions of church life. No grand combination, then, is needed to restore a divided and disorganized church.
But if the church were disorganized and a restoration needed, no possible combination of the several disorganized parts would or could effect it. The disorganization could not take place without the loss by the whole organism of the organic centre, and that, once lost, can be recovered only by an original creation, by our Lord, of a new church organism, which, even if it were done, would not restore us the Catholic Church; for it would not be a church existing uninterruptedly from the beginning, and there would be a time since the Incarnation when it did not subsist, and when there was no church. The author assumes that unity may be evolved from "multiplexity," which is Protestant, not Catholic philosophy; without unity there can be, as we have said, no multiplicity, as without the universal there can be no particulars. The universal precedes the particulars and generates them, and when it goes they go with it. Unity precedes multiplicity, and produces, sustains, and directs it. This is implied in every argument used, or that can be used, by philosophers and theologians, to prove the existence of God and his providence. Atheism results from the assumption that multiplicity may exist by itself, independently of unity; pantheism, from the assumption that unity is a dead, abstract unity, like that of the old Eleatics, not a concrete, living, and effective unity, and the denial that unity creates multiplicity.Physiology is refuting both by its discoveries, confirming what has always been affirmed in principle by traditional science, the fact that there is no organism or living body, in either the animal or vegetable world, without the original central cell, born of ancestors, which creates or generates and directs all the vital phenomena, normal or abnormal, of the organism, as has already been stated, thus placing science and the teaching of the church in harmony.
Dr. Ewer probably does not in his own mind absolutely deny the present unity on which depends the catholicity of the church; but he supposes it is in some way involved in multiplicity, so that it needs not to be created, but to be evoked from the existing "multiplexity" which now obscures it and prevents its effectiveness. But this we have shown is not and cannot be the case, because the unity not only produces, butdirectsorgovernsthe manifold phenomena of the church, and must therefore be always distinct from and independent of them. Also, because so long as unity and catholicity remain, no disorganization or confusion requiring their evolution can take place, except in the parts exuded or thrown off by the organism, severed or exscinded from it, that is, only in what is outside of the One Catholic Church, and forming no part of the catholic body. That schismatics and heretics lack unity and catholicity, is, of course, true; but they cannot obtain either by an evolution from such organization as they may have retained when the separation took place, or may have subsequently formed for themselves, but must do it, if at all, by a return to the organic centre, where both are and have never ceased to be, on the terms and conditions the Holy See prescribes.
Dr. Ewer maintains that the Catholic Church is restricted to the Roman, Greek, and Anglican Churches, and consists in what these have in common or agree in holding. These, he maintains, have all failed, have taught and still teach grievous errors, set up false claims, and one or more of them at least have fallen into superstitious practices; yet he contends that the universal church has not failed. But as the universal church has no organic existence independent of these, has no organs of speech or action, no personality but in them, how, if he is right in his theory, can he maintain that the whole church has not failed? If he held that the unity and catholicity of the church were in the central or organic see, he might hold that particular churches have failed, and that the One Catholic Church has not failed. Then he could assert, as we do, that the organism remains, acts, teaches, and governs through its own infallible organs, in its own individuality, or the supreme pontiff who is its personality or person. But on his theory, the failure of each of the three parts which comprise the whole church, it seems to us, must carry with it the failure of the whole.
Dr. Ewer's difficulty would seem to grow out of his wish to be a Catholic and remain in the Anglican or Episcopalian communion in which he is a minister, or to return from Protestantism to Catholicity without any change of position. This would be possible, if holding, on private judgment, Catholic dogmas, and observing, on no authority, Catholic forms of worship, constituted one a member of the Catholic Church. But he should understand that what he wishes is impracticable, and that all his efforts are labor lost.So long as a man is in a communion separated from the present actual living unity of the church, he can become a Catholic only by leaving it, or by its corporate return to the Holy See and submission to the supreme pontiff.
A corporate return is practicable in the case of the Eastern churches; but even in them the individual who is personally aware of the schismatic character of his church should abandon it for unity at once without waiting for its corporate return; but in the case of Anglicans and Episcopalians, as in the case of all Protestant communions, the return must be individual and personal.
We are surprised at Dr. Ewer's statement that the Greek Church has no cultus of St. Mary ever-Virgin, as we are that many Anglicans, like Dr. Pusey, who object to the Roman Church on account of that cultus, should seek communion with the schismatic Greeks, with whom that cultus is pushed to an extreme far beyond anything in the Latin Church. The truth is, that all that offends Protestants in the Church of Rome, except the papacy, exists in even a more offensive form in the Greek schismatic Church. The schismatic Greek bishops exercise over their flocks a tyranny which is impracticable in the Roman Church, where the papal authority restricts that of bishops and tempers their administration of their dioceses.
But it is time to bring our remarks to a close. We are unable to recognize the Catholicity we profess in that proposed by Dr. Ewer. The one holy catholic apostolic church he sets forth does not appear to us to be the church of the fathers, nor the one of which we are an affectionate if an unworthy son. In our judgment, Dr. Ewer is still in the Protestant family, and following private judgment as his rule, though denouncing it. He has not grasped the central, or, as Dr. Channing would say, the "seminal" principle of the Catholic Church. Yet he seems to be well disposed, and to be seeking it, and has made large strides toward it. We think his discourses are not only brilliant, bold, and energetic, but fitted to have great influence in turning the public mind toward the Catholic Church. We have given our reasons why we do not admit that he has as yet found that church; but still we think his discourses will help many to find it, though he himself may not find it. He has, as yet, strong prejudices against the Church of Rome, and is undeniably anti-papal. But still there can be no doubt that he would like to feel himself a Catholic, and have done once for all with Protestantism. Dr. Ewer stands not alone. There are large numbers in his communion, and other Protestant communions, who think and feel as he does, who, from the top of Mount Pisgah, have obtained—if not the clear vision Moses had—at least some glimpses, more or less confused, of the promised land, and are attracted and charmed by what they see of it. We have a feeling of respectful tenderness toward these men, and of great sympathy with their trials and struggles. While we must tell them the truth in firm and manly tones, treat them as men, not as children, we would, on no account, say or do anything to wound their susceptibilities, or to create an impression that we do not take a deep and lively interest in their efforts to arrive at Catholicity. The spirit is working in them to bring them to light and life. They are not against us, and to some extent are with us. We would, for their sakes, they were wholly with us, and we never cease to pray God that they may find the haven of security and rest it has pleased him that we should find for ourselves.We once were one of their number, thought and felt with them, struggled with them, and we can have for them only words of encouragement and hope. In what we have said we have had only the desire to assist them to find and understand the One Holy Catholic Apostolic Church.