'^-"■ytl^l£^»^^'?' •Sa*?!£„a2' Protestant E-ois copal Churcli in the U. S. A. House of Bif^hoTDS Pastoral Letter of the Bishops to. the clergy Laity A.D. 1894 594 Ii!iil!lli!.!.; Pastoral Letter A. D. 1894 \^ '■• ' ( Pastoral Letter OF THE BISHOPS TO THE CLERGY AND LAITY A. D. 1894 ^i^ THE undersigned set forth this Pastoral Letter in accord- ance with authority committed to them by their Brethren of the Episcopate assembled in Council in the City of New York on the eighteenth day of October, being the festival of St. Luke the Evangelist, in the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety-four. J. Williams, Bishop of Connecticut and Presiding Bishop. Wm. Croswell Doane, Bishop of A Ibany. F. D. Huntington, Bishop of Central New York. Wm. E. McLaren, Bishop of Chicago. George F. Seymour, Bishop of Springfield. Henry C. Potter, Bishop of New York. THE CA8E, LOCKWOOD & BRAINARD CO., HARTFORD, CONN. PASTORAL LETTER. To our ivell-beloved Clergy and Laity : We, your Bishops, having been assembled to take order, under the guidance of the Holy Ghost, for the extension of the Kingdom of God, have availed ourselves of the opportunity to meet in Council to consider our duty in view of certain novel- ties of opmion and expression, which have seemed to us to be subversive of the fundamental verities of Christ's Religion. It has come to our knowledge that the minds of many of the faithful Clergy and Laity are disturbed and distressed by these things; and we desire to comfort them by a firm assurance that the Episcopate of the Church, to which, in a peculiar manner, the deposit of Faith has been entrusted, is not unfaithful to that sacred charge, but will guard and keep it with all diligence, as men who shall hereafter give account to God. In the discharge of that preeminently sacred obligation of our ofifice, we find our- selves constrained to address you on two cardinal truths of our holy Religion, not for the purpose of vindicating them, nor even to make an exhaustive exposition of them; but simply and plainly to set before you the truth of God which every minister of this Church has pledged himself to hold, teach, and defend, and to hand on unimpaired to those who shall come after us. It is a conviction of solemn duty which constrains us thus to address you at this time, and particularly to state what the Church requires all who minister in holy things to hold and teach, first, concerning the Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ, and secondly, concerning the Holy Scriptures, by sure and cer- tain warrant of which the Catholic faith is proved. 4 PASTORAL LE'JTER. I. The Incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ. And first, touching the Incarnation, and the Person and Natures of our Blessed Lord, this Church teaches and requires her ministers to teach, (i) in the words of the Creed commonly called the Apostles' Creed, that Jesus Christ is the "Only Son" of God ; in the words of the Creed commonly called the Nicene Creed, that Jesus Christ is the " Only-begotten Son of God, begotten of His Father before all worlds, God of God, Light of Light, Very God of Very God, begotten, not made, being of one substance with the Father"; m the words of the proper Preface for Trmity-Sunday, in the Order for the Holy Communion, that "that which we believe of the glory of the Father, the same we believe of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost, without any differ- ence or inequality"; and in the words of the second Article of P^eligion, that " the Son, which is the Word of the Father, begot- ten from everlasting of the Father," is " the very and eternal God, and of one substance with the Father"; (2) that this, the Second Person in the adorable Trinity, God from all eternity, was, in the words of the Creed commonly called the Apostles' Creed, " conceived by the Holy Ghost," and " born of the Virgin Mary " ; in the words of the Creed commonly called the Nicene Creed, that He "came down from heaven, and was incarnate by the Holy Ghost of the Virgin Mary, and was made man"; in the words of the Te Dcum, that He did " humble " Himself " to be born of a Virgin"; in the words of the Collect for Christmas- day, that He "was born of a pure Virgin"; in the words of the proper Preface for Christmas-day, in the Order for the Holy Communion, that He was, "by the operation of the Holy Ghost, made very man, of the substance of the Virgin Mary His mother, and that without spot of sin"; and, in the words of the second Article of Religion, affirming the decrees of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon, that He " took Man's nature in the PASTORAL LETTER. 5 womb of the Blessed Virgin, of her substance; so that two whole and perfect Natures, that is to say, the Godhead and Manhood, were joined together in one Person, never to be divided, whereof is one Christ, very God and very Man." This doctrine, held by the Church from the earliest ages as revealed and taught in Holy Scripture, witnessed to and defined against all attacks of error by the four great general Councils of the undivided Church, is held by this Church as the funda- mental doctrine of Christianity. It has been well said that " this was the real contribution of the General Councils to human his- tory: the more and more explicit reassertion of the Incarna- tion as a mystery indeed, but as a fact. The various heresies which attempted to make the Incarnation more intelligible, in reality explained it away ; while Council after Council, though freely adopting new phraseology, never claimed to do more than give explicit expression to that which the Church from the be- ginning had implicitly believed. Their undoubted purpose, as viewed by themselves, was to define and guard, and to defi'ne only in order to guard, what they conceived to be the essence of Christianity." It is never to be forgotten that the doctrinal state^ients of the undivided Church are in no sense an enlarge- ment of, or addition to, the domain of the Faith, but only a defence and definition of the same. This is in strict accordance with the teaching of Holy Scrip- ture. When the Apostle, writing to the Ephesians, would desig- nate the final authority in matters of the Faith, he said, " Ye have not so learned Christ"; and when St. John wrote to the elect lady his burning appeal for stedfastness in the faith, he summed it up in these words: " He that abideth in the doctrine of Christ, he hath the Father and the Son." It is not enough to learn about Christ; it is not enough to know what Christ taught or what is taught about Him; it is Christ that is to be learned; it is the Christ in whom we are to abide; Christ as revealed in Holy 6 PASTORAL LETTER. Scripture; Christ as the fact of experience; Christ as the hinge of human history; Christ as the central and cardinal point of the Creed, which must be read backward and forward from Him: backward to reveal " God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth," and forward to teach us and to give us " the Holy Ghost, the Holy Catholic Church, the Communion of Saints, the Forgiveness of Sins, the Resurrection of the Body, and the Life everlasting." Unless our Lord Jesus Christ is firmly held to be God's own true and proper Son, equal to the Father as touching His God- head, and to be also the true Son of the Blessed Virgin, by miraculous conception and birth, taking our very manhood of her substance, we sinners have no true and adequate Mediator ; our nature has no restored union with God; we have no sacrifice for our sins in full atonement and propitiation, holy and accept- able to God; for our moral weakness and incapacity there is no fountain of cleansing, renewal, and re-creation after the measure ai"rd pattern of a perfect manhood. The assertion of the Catholic doctrine of the Incarnation — the one indivisible Personality of the Son of God Incarnate, the Word made flesh and dwelling among us — is the antidote of the false teaching of ou^ day, which is simply the revival of the old heresy of the self- perfectibility of man. For the miraculous Virgin-birth, while it is alone befitting to God, in assuming our nature into personal union with Himself, marks off and separates the whole of our humanity as tainted by that very corruption of original sin, which had no place in human nature as that nature was assumed by our Blessed Lord in His Incarnation. We are moved to impress upon the minds of the people com- mitted to our charge, and of the teachers commissioned by our authority to teach them, that these plain statements of Holy Scripture and of the authoritative Formularies of the Church re- PASTORAL LETTER, 7 quire a plain and full acceptance of the facts that the human conception and birth of our Lord Jesus Christ was accomplished by the miraculous operation of the Holy Ghost, and that the Humanity in His one Person is wholly derived from the sub- stance of the Blessed Virgin Mary, His mother. Only so could He be the "Seed of the woman" that was to bruise the ser- pent's head; only so could He fulfil the prophecies, "A woman shall compass a man," and "Behold, a virgin shall conceive, and bear a son"; only so can the angelic annunciation be under- stood, " The Holy Ghost shall come upon thee, and the power of the Highest shall overshadow thee; therefore also that holy thing which shall be born of thee shall be called the Son of God"; only thus can we accept the statement of St. Matthew, " She was found with child of the Holy Ghost," and the angel's assertion, recorded by the Evangelist, "That which is conceived in her is of the Holy Ghost"; only so can we grasp as it should be grasped the revelation in the Gospel according to St. John, " The Word was God; and the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, full of grace and truth." This true doctrine of the Incarnation is not only the cardi- nal and fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith, but it in- cludes and involves all of our Lord's redemptive work: His one Sacrifice for all the sins of the whole world, both original and actual; His resurrection from the dead ; His Ascension into Heaven; His Intercession; and the glory of His eternal King- dom. When the grace of God is poured into our hearts to know the Incarnation of His Son Jesus Christ, it leads us, by His Cross and Passion, to the glory of His resurrection. Of the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Church teaches, in the Creeds commonly called the Apostles' and Nicene Creeds, that " the third day He rose again from the dead ac- cording to the Scriptures "; and in the fourth Article of Religion 8 PASTORAL LETTER. that He "did truly rise again from death, and took again His body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the per- fection of man's nature." The teaching of the New Testament gathers the whole fact and force of the apostolic evidence about this truth. The Apostles were ordained to be " witnesses of the Resurrection." By every test of enmity overcome, of unbelief converted, and of love and longing satisfied and convinced, Christ moves through the New Testament Scriptures, "the first- begotten of the dead," His voice. His wounds, His words, and His familiar ways all testifying to His identity: "Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself; handle Me and see; for a spirit hath not flesh and bones, as ye see Me have "; " I deliv- ered unto you first of all that which I also received, how that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures; and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures; and that He was seen of Cephas, then of the twelve; after that, He was seen of above five hundred brethren at once, of whom the greater part remain unto this present, but some are fallen asleep; after that. He was seen of James, then of all the Apostles; and last of all He was seen of me also, as of one born out of due time." This Church nowhere teaches, and does not tolerate the teaching, that the Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ was a so-called spiritual resurrection, which took place when the vital union of His mortal body and His human soul was dissolved by death, and that the fleshly tabernacle saw cor- ruption in the grave and was turned to dust. This would be to make the Resurrection take place from the Cross and not from the sepulchre. This would make void the purport and the power of the great argument of the Apostle in the Epistle to the Hebrews, as to the eternal Priesthood of the risen and ascended Lord, Who " ever liveth to make intercession for us," PASTORAL LETTER. 9 Who "by His own blood entered in once into the holy place, having obtained eternal redemption for us," and by the power of His prevailing intercession has given us " boldness to enter into the holiest by the blood of Jesus, by a new and living way, which He hath consecrated for us, through the veil, that is to say, His flesh"; it would mar the Human Nature of Christ, and tend to the dividing of His one Person, or to the commingling of His two Natures; it would blot out the vision vouchsafed to the Apostle and Evangelist St. John, of the " Lamb as it had been slain," and it would silence the unceasing song of the re- deemed: "Thou wast slain, and hast redeemed us to God by Thy blood out of every kindred, and tongue, and people, and nation." We have not undertaken to discuss these great doctrinal questions in detail; nor are we delivering our private and per- sonal opinion on these vital subjects. We are speaking, not as truth-seekers, but as truth-receivers, "ambassadors in bonds"; even'as St. Paul says, " That which we also received deliver we unto you." Our sole inquiry is: What does this Church teach? What is the declaration of God's Holy W^ord ? And here we rest; for the Priest's vow is to minister the Doctrine, as well as the Sacraments and the Discipline of Christ, " as this Church hath received the same," and because she hath received it " according to the commandments of God." And the true lover of God, the Theophilus, who would " know the cer- tainty of those things" wherein he is instructed, who would have "a declaration of those things which are most surely be- lieved among us," must receive them as they " delivered them unto us which were eyewitnesses and ministers of the Word." It should be borne in mind by all — Bishops, Priests, Dea- cons, and Laymen — that the facts and truths which lie at the basis of the relicfion of Christ are eternal facts and eternal lO PASTORAL LETTER. truths, Stamped with the assurance which Divine infallibility ogives. A Revelation, the conditions of which should be pliable to the caprices of speculative thought, would be thereby voided of all that makes revelation final and sure. A Creed whose statements could be changed to accord with the shifting cur- rents of opinion or sentiment, or with the trend of thought in each succeeding generation, would cease to command and guide the loyalty of the people, and would not be worthy of the respect of mankind. The Creeds of the Catholic Church do not repre- sent the contemporaneous thought of any age; they declare eternal truths, telling what God has taught man and done for man, rather than what man has thought out for himself about God. They are voices from above, from Him " with Whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning," and, as such, are entitled to our implicit faith. Grave peril to souls lies in the acceptance of the letter of the Creeds in any other than the plain and definitely historical sense in which they have been mterpreted by the consentient voice of the Church in all ages. Fixedness of interpretation is of the essence of the Creeds, whether we view them as statements of facts, or as dogmatic truths founded upon and deduced from these facts and once for all determined by the operation of the Holy Ghost upon the mind of the Church. It were derogatory to the same Blessed Spirit to suggest that any other than the original sense of the Creeds may be lawfully held and taught. It becomes us, more- over, to consider that Christianity reconstructed as to its Faith must logically admit a reconstruction of the ethics, the spiritual life, the worship, the ministerial and sacramental agencies, and the good works which have ever been the benign products of rhe ancient truths. Such results we see in unhappy abundance all around us; and they do not encourage us to think that it is possible to improve the Christianity of our Lord and Saviour. PASTORAL LETTER. II There is no Christ save the Christ of the CathoHc Faith; and it is the blessing of this Christ, " the same yesterday, and to-day, and for ever," upon this Faith " once for all delivered to the Saints," which assures to the Church and the world all that ennobles, beautifies, and saves man. II. The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures. There is a manifest analogy between the embodiment of the revealed Word of God in the terms of human thought and the tabernacling of the Personal Word of God in our flesh. Yet, at the threshold of our consideration of the Holy Scrip- tures, we are constrained to observe this plain and evident dis- tinction: that while the Church, in her Creeds and Standards, has clearly and precisely defined not only the fact, but the method, of the Incarnation of Christ, she has confined herself to a positive assertion of the fact of the inspiration of Holy Scrip- ture, without any definition of its 7node, or the exposition of any theory concerning it. Nevertheless, the declaration of the fact of Inspiration is unequivocal. The. Creed expressly declares that "the Holy Ghost spake by the Prophets"; the sixth x\rticle of Religion teaches that " Holy Scripture containeth all things necessary to salvation"; the Declaration for Orders signed by every authorized teacher of the Church commands him to teach that "the Holy Scriptures are the Word of God"; and the ordi- nation vows solemnly taken, in the presence of God and of His Church, by every Priest and Bishop, bind them to the state- ment that the same Scriptures " contain all Doctrine required as necessary for eternal salvation through faith in Jesus Christ." Certain points must be first fixed in the consciousness of all reverent students of God's Holy Word. Concerning the Scrip- tures of the elder Covenant, our Lord authenticated the teach- ing of the ancient Church, to which " were committed the ora- 12 PASTORAL LETTER. cles of God," by His public and official use of the Canon of the Old Testament Scriptures, as we know it to have been read in the Synagogue worship of the Jews of His time. Nor may we forget that He Himself, after His Resurrection^ declared that these Scriptures testified of Him, specifying them in detail to the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, when, "beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded unto them in all the Scrip- tures the things concerning Himself," and more fully still, when standing with the assembled Apostles He said, " These are the words which I spake unto you while 1 was yet with you, that all things must be fulfilled which are written in the Law of Moses, and in the Prophets, and in the Psalms, concerning Me." The Scriptures of the New Covenant contain equally strong and clear statements of the Inspiration of the whole Canon; as when St. Paul says, "Whatsoever things were written aforetime were written for our learning"; and St. Peter, "Holy men of God spake as they were moved [borne on] by the Holy Ghost "; and again St. Paul, with direct reference to the Scriptures of the New Covenant, declares in the first Epistle to the Corin- thians, " Which things we speak, not in the words which man's wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth, comparing [combining] spiritual things with spiritual." This is but the realization of our Lord's promise, from which all examination of the meaning of the peculiar and unique Inspiration of the writers of the New Testament Scriptures ought to begin. It is the men who are inspired, and not primarily the book; and it was to the men that our Lord gave the promise and assurance of Inspiration, when He said: "The Comforter, which is the Holy Ghost, Whom the Father will send in My Name, He shall teach you all things, and bring all things to your remembrance, whatsoever I have said unto you"; "When He, the Spirit of truth, is come. He will guide you into all truth"; "He shall PASTORAL LETTER. I3 glorify Me, for He shall receive of Mine, and shall show it unto you." Thus we may have full assurance that the Faith which was taught by the preaching, has been preserved in the writ- ings, of men to whom, "through the Holy Ghost," Christ gave commandment that they should " teach all nations to observe all things whatsoever " He had commanded, and to whom the authority committed on the day of the Ascension was confirmed and quickened into active exercise by the power given on the day of Pentecost, when "they were all filled with the Holy Ghost." Meanwhile, it has not been left to modern criticism to dis- cover that God's revelation of Himself to man was a progres- sive revelation, until " in these last days He hath spoken unto us by His Son," Who is " the brightness of His glory and the express image of His Person "; so that the Revelation thus made is the final revelation of God to Man. The writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews teaches us that " God spake unto the fathers in many portions," never at any one time communicating to them the whole truth, but revealing it in parts, as they were able to bear it. The same authority declares that " God spake to the fathers in many fashions," sometimes in dreams and visions of the night, while at other times the Word of God came to the Prophet with such distinctness that he could preface his mes- sage with the sacramental words, "Thus saith the Lord"; and while the Catholic symbol of the faith declares that the Holy Ghost " spake through the Prophets," the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews says that " God spake unto the fathers in the Prophets." Hence, the minute and reverent study of the Divine Word must always be necessary, and will always be profitable. The time will never come when men will not be obliged to combine the separate portions of (lod's Word, to study the fashions \\\ 14 PASTt)RAL LETTER. which they were given, and to consider the operation of the Holy Ghost both in and through the sacred writers. And the time will never come when the honest student of God's Word will not require and will not welcome every critical appliance which the Providence of God may furnish, to cast a new light upon the sacred page. It would be faithless to think that the Christian religion has anything to fear from the critical study of the Holy Scriptures. "The Church of the present ^nd of the coming day is bringing her sheaves home with her from the once faithlessly dreaded harvests of criticism." We devoutly thank Ciod for the light and truth which have come to us, through the earnest labors of devout critics of the sacred text. What we deprecate and re- buke is the irreverent rashness and unscientific method of many professed critics, and the presumptuous superciliousness with which they vaunt erroneous theories of the day as established results of criticism. From this fault professedly Christian critics are unfortunately not always exempt; and by Christian critics we mean those who, both by theory and practice, recognize the In- spiration of God as the controlling element of Holy Scripture. The same Spirit Who " in time past spake to the fathers by the Prophets " still speaks to us in the sacred page. He whO' heeds what God has thus revealed will be made " wise unto sal- vation." To him who heeds it not, though he be the greatest of all critics, the Scripture is a sealed book. The true correct- ive of the unrest of our day will be found in the devout use of the Holy Scriptures. If any man will search them as our Lord commanded, they will testify of Him. If any man will study them " for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction m righteousness," he will not be disappointed; whatever may be the value of critical study, and however thankful we may be for the fact that no discovery of modern research, positively ascer- PASTORAL LETTER. 15. tained, is of a character to unsettle a Christian's faith in any particular, we must remember that the chief duty of every student, and especially of every teacher, is to learn what the Scripture says and what it means, so that he may be able faith- fully to open the same Scripture to the help and healing of sinful man. Any instruction or any study which makes any part of the Bible less authoritative than it really is, which weakens faith in its Inspiration, which tends to eliminate Christ from the utterances of the Prophets, or which leads a man to think of miracles with a half-suppressed skepticism, is a pernicious instruction and a pernicious study. A great danger may beset the flock of Christ, not merely from false teaching, but through injudicious and ill- timed teaching, the effect of which is not to settle and confirm, but to undermine and weaken faith. This danger exists, and, unless it shall be conscientiously avoided by every teacher of the Church, the coming generations may live to see " a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord." The Inspiration of the Holy Scriptures is a postulate of faith, not a corollary of criticism. It cannot lawfully be questioned by any Christian man, and least of all by men who have sealed their conviction of the certainty of the faith with the solemn vows of Ordination. Outside of the domain of faith, there may be undetermined questions touching matters which, to some minds, may seem to be almost essential to the integrity of the Christian scheme, but which cannot be necessary to salvation. In this border-land, thinking minds will appreciate and rever- ently and conscientiously use the freedom which is accorded to them; but they will not carry their liberty over into the realm of adjudicated truth. Their obligations to God, as men and as priests, bind them in a holy and blessed servitude to the truth; and a consciousness of their own honest loyalty is essential tO' their self-respect. 1 6 PASTORAL LETTER. Under the instruction of their Divine Master, the first am- bassadors of Christ knew how fruitless even a high degree of evangeUc activity must be without unflinching loyalty to a body of Doctrine once for all delivered and received. In the ages all along, since the first Council was held in Jerusalem, the safety and honor of the Church have been endangered as much by the inroads of disbelief in revelation, and by lax constructions of creeds and oaths of allegiance, as by the idolatry of the East, or the barbarism of the West. Not less plain is this condition, and not less sharp is the test of obedience, in this land and at this time, in the matter of the Church's formularies of worship. Seductions to lawless- ness abounding in a civilization showy rather than strong, in communities of eager enterprise, intellectual pride, social agita- tion, and vast material opportunities, lay upon the Church a solemn obligation to abide stedfastly in the unchanging prin- ciples of her commission and her confessions, and in the dignity and simplicity of her acknowledged offices and standards; not forgetting that spiritual life must decay, not only when pledges are emptied of their meaning, but when formularies are maimed of their integrity. No specious plea of progress, liberty, independence, or comprehension can weaken in the least the constraining obligation of a covenant of conformity. A heresy which would seek at the Altar protection from the penalty of a violated vow forfeits the respect and tenderness due to honest doubt. We therefore earnestly entreat you, dear Brethren of the Clergy, that you " stand fast in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made you free," that you " declare the whole counsel of God," as this Church hath received the same, that you exercise discipline without fear, " not handling the Word of God deceitfully," "holding the mystery of the faith in a pure conscience," and " by manifestation of the truth commend- ing yourselves to every man's conscience in the sight of God." PASTORAL LETTER. 17 So exhorting you, dearly beloved in the Lord, and beseech- ing the Father of mercies to " stablish, strengthen, and settle " you and the flocks intrusted to our care, we " commend you to God, and to the Word of His grace, which is able to build you up, and to give you an inheritance among all them which are sanctified." PHOTOMOUNT PAMPHLET BINDER Manu/aclurtd bu SAYLORD BROS. In*. Syracuse, N. Y. Stockton, Calif. ..«