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Vi 
 
The Church's Creed, or the Crown's Creed ? 
 
 A. LETTER 
 
 The Most Rev. Archbishop Manning, 
 
 ranj. 
 
 EDMUND S. FFOULKES, B.D., 
 
 AUTHOH OF "CHRISTENDOM'S DIVISIONS." 
 
 " First cast out the beam out of thine own eye, and then shalt thou see 
 clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother's eye."— /S. Matt. yii. 5. 
 
 NEW YORK : 
 
 POTT & AMERY, COOPER UNION. 
 
 1869. 
 

 HAETFORD : CHUECH PBESS COMPANY. 
 
A LE 
 
 ^^'^'^'^r 
 
 i_ Library. 
 
 My Lord Archbishop : — I take the^^fi^^ef^iof:- 
 ting the question to you in your official capacity, which 
 forms the heading of my letter, and I invite public 
 opinion in this country to weigh dispassionately what- 
 ever answer you may be pleased to return to it, or else 
 to draw such conclusions from your silence as the nature 
 of the case may suggest, should you resolve on letting it 
 pass unheeded. 
 
 It is not, however, solely by any means on account of 
 the exalted position which you occupy that I address 
 myself to you. We were neither of us born or bred in 
 the Communion in which we now are. The evidences 
 which determined you to embrace the Communion of 
 the Church of Rome, for the most part determined me 
 likewise. You preceded and I followed : yet I neither 
 followed you nor any one else blindly, as a party leader. 
 According to the best of my judgment, I followed truth 
 whithersoever it led me, and by whomsoever it was 
 suggested. Still, I should be the last to deny — why 
 should I not be always proud to acknowledge ? — the 
 many difficulties that I had unravelled for me in my 
 searchings after truth continually by yourself, by the 
 inimitable lucidity and high-souled earnestness of your 
 
discourses as a preacher : and by the noble example of 
 devotion and self-sacrifice which you exhibited as a ser- 
 vant of Christ, in acting to the uttermost up to what 
 you believed to be true. The result of it all was that 
 ultimately my convictions led me to follow in your wake; 
 though there are still others, whose profound learning, 
 and honesty, and piety, I have never for one moment 
 ceased to respect equally with your own, as deliberately 
 convinced as ever of the righteousness of the position 
 abandoned by us as untenable so many years ago. 1 
 was far from undervaluing their testimony, even when 
 I subscribed to your own in preference : and once re- 
 moved to our new abode, I must confess my course to 
 have been deliberately the exact opposite to what I be- 
 lieve yours to have been ever since. You, and very 
 many more probably, seemed to have joined the Roman 
 Communion not only pledged never to find fault with 
 it, but to see with its eyes, hear with its ears, under- 
 stand with its understanding, stand or fall by its judg- 
 ment. Your argument, I presume, would be that the 
 Church of Rome claims to be infalHble : that you sub- 
 mitted yourselves to it as such, in the fullest confidence 
 that its decisions can never mislead you : that they are 
 God's voice speaking to you, which you are bound at 
 the peril of your salvation never to mistrust, much less 
 dispute. I joined the Roman Communion on other 
 grounds, and was accepted. Practically, no doubt, the 
 Church of Rome claims to be infallible, and anybody 
 who concedes, is dearer to her than anybody who dis- 
 putes, her claim : but I was never required to profess 
 this on entering her Communion, and perhaps might 
 never have entered it, if I had been. *' Sanctam cath- 
 olicam et apostolicam Romanam Ecclesiam, omnium ec- 
 
clesiarum raatrem et magistram, agnosco," a mediaeval 
 phrase, of which I knew the full historical value, was 
 the uttermost to which I gave my adhesion. And I 
 said to myself on that occasion, if she is really infallible, 
 she can stand much more searching criticism than the 
 one which I am leaving for her sake, on behalf of which 
 no such claim has ever been made. For I considered 
 that after the extreme rigour with which the claims of 
 the Church of England had been examined by us all, it 
 would be the height of disingenuousness in us to shut 
 our eyes to any weak points of the system that we were 
 embracing in preference, should any such exist. I felt 
 that if I found the claims of the Church of Rome to be 
 thoroughly in accordance with facts, I should ever after- 
 wards regard her with tenfold reverence from having 
 verified them myself. If they were true, analysis, im- 
 partially conducted, could only confirm them: if they 
 were false to any extent, or exaggerated, I conceived 
 we should be bound in common honesty to tell our 
 friends that we were to that extent, in reality, no better 
 ofi" than we had been where we were before. But till 
 I had actually been received into communion with 
 Rome, it was my own impression, and I was assured by 
 members of the Roman Communion over and over 
 again, that I could never judge of her system at all fair- 
 ly or adequately : and this was one of my chief reasons 
 for embracing it when I did. Afterwards I resided in 
 various countries where it was dominant, and studied its 
 worship in town and country, comparing them with 
 what I had abandoned for it at home. Then I returned 
 and set myself to work to improve my previous knowl- 
 edge of its history in past ages, and its relations with 
 other Churches : paying especial attention to the causes 
 
"which had produced estrangement between it and them 
 for a time, or till now. All this has been my constant 
 employment for the last dozen years or more : so that 
 I cannot be said to have drawn my conclusions hastily. 
 Now this occupation, and the temper of mind which is 
 the fruit of it, whether you approve of it or not in those 
 who have become members of the Church of Rome, you 
 certainly seem to wish to encourage in those who are 
 still members of the Church of England. You criticise 
 their system, and invite their criticising it under your 
 guidance. You appeal to them as men of fairness and 
 honesty to listen to you, and to take to heart what you 
 say. Should they find it to be true, then your advice 
 to them is to abandon a Communion against which so 
 many objections exist which they cannot answer, for 
 another whicli you represent to them is infallible — I re- 
 fer more particularly to your well-known, and most per- 
 sons will admit, appositely-timed, letters on the Crown 
 in Council — " The Crown in Council on the Essays and 
 Reviews:" and "The Convocation and the Crown in 
 Council." Whether you ever received any reply from 
 the "Anglican friend " to whom they were addressed, I 
 am unable to say : but 1 presume that when you wrote 
 you must have contemplated the possibility of his rejoin- 
 ing, and that you were prepared to attend to any coun- 
 ter statement coming from him in the same spirit of 
 candour and impartiality in which he had been invited 
 to listen to you : that in the event of his succeeding to 
 retort the difficulty with which you had pressed him, 
 you would not have been above looking it full in the 
 face, and endeavouring to explain it to his satisfaction : 
 or else, if you felt obliged to admit that it could not be 
 explained satisfactorily, you would never have conde- 
 
scended to have recourse to any subterfuge that you 
 would have condemned in him, but would have confessed 
 yourself answered. Allow me, therefore, for the time 
 being, to personate your Anglican friend : conceive that 
 it is he who speaks : imagine him accredited to speak in 
 the name of all those whom you have addressed through 
 him, as well as his own, and to rejoin as follows : — 
 
 ** I might admit every word that has fallen from you 
 on the power exercised amongst us of the Church of 
 England by the Crown in Council, without being the 
 least obliged to follow you to your deductions from it, 
 for this simple reason, that * two blacks don't make a 
 white/ There has been, and is, too much of the 
 ' Crown in Council ' by half, if all that I hear is true, 
 in your Communion as well as our own. In my hum- 
 ble opinion, we may fairly claim to have learnt our les- 
 son from you, to have copied the example which you set 
 us in our infancy, and to have faithfully followed out 
 your own principles, according to the circumstances in 
 which we were placed. I will not inquire whether, in 
 virtue of the well-known Sicilian monarchy, the de- 
 scendants of King Roger have not, or at least might not' 
 have, exercised the same authority * in all causes, and 
 over all persons, ecclesiastical as well as civil,' by favour 
 of the Pope, that the descendants of Henry VIII. have 
 ever succeeded in exercising, in spite of the Pope : but 
 answer me this one question honestly. The creed which 
 you and the Archbishop of Canterbury recite still in 
 common at each celebration of the Lord's Supper, is it 
 the Church's Creed or the Crown's Creed ? I will tell 
 you the grounds which have convinced me irrevocably 
 that it is the latter. I have read somewhere, and seen 
 the original authorities cited at length in proof of it, 
 that this is its history. 
 
8 
 
 " There were two forms of this Creed rehearsed and 
 authoritatively promulgated by the Fourth (Ecumenical 
 Council : the Nicene, and the Constantinopolitan. In 
 neither of them, in the articles relating to the Holy 
 Ghost and His procession, are those words found, ^ and 
 from the Son.' The Council went on to say in its for- 
 mal definition that this Creed, as it had just been re- 
 hearsed, 'explicitly taught (^xd^ddaxei.)^ the perfect 
 doctrine (t6 Teleiov), concerning the Father, Son, and 
 Holy Ghost.' Besides asserting this dogmatically,* the 
 holy and CEcumenical Council,' — I am quoting the exact 
 words in each case — * decreed that it was lawful for 
 nobody to propose, that is, compile, put together, hold, 
 or teach others, another faith. Those who dared either 
 to put together another faith, or produce, teach, or 
 deliver another symbol to any desirous of returning to 
 a knowledge of the truth from Hellenism, Judaism, 
 or any heresy whatsoever, were, if bishops or clergy, to 
 be deposed : if laymen, to be anathematised," all which 
 was recited word for word, and reaffirmed with equal 
 solemnity, — creed, canon, and definition alike, — by the 
 ^Fifth and Sixth Councils in succession. And could their 
 meaning admit of any doubt, it could be shewn by ref- 
 erence to every contemporary writer or writing that deals 
 with it, to amount to this ; that not a word was ever 
 to be taken from or added to this creed as it then 
 stood and, with the single deviation above mentioned, 
 stands now. Most explicit on this head was the oath 
 taken by the Popes themselves. According to the ear- 
 liest form preserved* in their ^ Liber JDiuruns,' sls it is 
 called, every Pope on his election swore to preserve 
 
 *Migne's Patrol, tom. cv, p, 40, 
 
unmutilated the Decrees of the first five Councils, and, 
 in a subsequent clause, of the sixth as well '''' usque ad un- 
 um apicerrC — to teach all they taught, and to condemn- 
 all they condemned. By this, he was pledged d fortiori 
 to their Creed, ' usque ad unum apicevi' in the same 
 degree. ' Siprmter hcec' aliquid agere prcBsumpsero^ vel 
 ut prcRSumatur permisero^ eris rnihi {Deus)^ in ilia ter- 
 rihili die judicii depropitius,'' was the imprecation 
 which he was made to pronounce on his own head, in 
 the event of his proving faithless to his obligations. I 
 call especial attention to these words, because T find 
 them cancelled in the Pontifical oath of the eleventh 
 century ; and by that time, though the innovation had 
 received several checks in its progress, I find all the 
 Churches of the West, with that of Rome at their 
 head, using the Creed of which I have spoken, with 
 those words added to it, ^ and from the Son.' But I 
 look in vain for any canon or definition of any General 
 Councils authorizing or enjoining their insertion. I look 
 in vain for any Papal Encyclic, such as that which eman- 
 ated from the reigning Pope when the Immaculate Con- 
 ception of the Blessed Virgin was made a dogma, pro- 
 claiming that they had been, or explaining why they had 
 been, inserted with his full sanction. On the contrary, • 
 I find from authentic histor}^, that they were first intro- 
 duced into the Creed by stealth, and ultimately maintain- 
 ed there by force ; the power striving for their introduc- 
 tion being pre-eminently that of the " Crown in Coun- 
 cil," ani the power resisting it that of the majority by 
 far of the contemporary Church, backed by the Pope, 
 to say nothing of all the previous (Ecumenical Councils 
 to which they appealed. You will correct me, if 1 am 
 guilty of any historical mis-statement. I find, then. 
 
10 
 
 that its original introduction was due to a king, named 
 Reccared, of a barbarous, and, till then, heretical race 
 in Spain, who, a.d 589, in the act of abjuring Arian- 
 ism, promulgated the Creed in question ignorantly 
 or wilfully, with this addition, at the head of the Bish- 
 ops of his dominions, many of them neophytes from 
 Arianism like himself. No Pope could have taken 
 the lead more in the doctrinal as well as the disciplina- 
 ry enactments of this Council, the third of Toledo, than 
 the king did then. Nobody conversant with its acts 
 can deny this. Such was what may therefore be call- 
 ed the lay -baptism of the new clause. So obscure was its 
 origin, that it was not so much as noticed at the sixth 
 Council, where the Creed was once more promulgated 
 in the exact form settled by the fourth Council, as if 
 nothing had happened. But in the eighth century, 
 just before the seventh Council met, the Emperor Char- 
 lemagne — I say emperor by anticipation — happened to 
 be on extremely bad terms with the Imperial Court of 
 the East. More than this, the brother of the new Pa- 
 triarch of Constantinople, S. Tarasius, who took the 
 lead at the Seventh Council, was a prisoner of war in 
 his hands, having been captured in a hostile encounter 
 with his forces in Italy. The Council, however, met 
 A. D. 787, legislated, and was confirmed by the Pope, who 
 forwarded its decrees, as well as his own approval of 
 them, to Charlemagne. Charlemagne fired with ran- 
 cour against the East, immediately set about composing 
 a work to refute them ; and when it was ready for pub- 
 lication, summoned a Council at Frankfort of all the 
 Bishops of his dominions, at which the decrees of the 
 seventh Council were formally repudiated, and his own 
 work, which he, with the assistance of his theologians, 
 
11 
 
 had written against them, approved. This work he 
 forwarded to the Pope, who had confirmed them. One 
 of his principal charges against them was, that the Coun- 
 cil enacting them had been silent or ambiguous on a 
 point which he deemed it his duty to prove to the Pope 
 at great length, namely the Procession of the Holy 
 Ghost from the Son : in other words, that while it had 
 received a profession of faith from the new Patriarch, in 
 which procession through the Son was affirmed, it had 
 said nothing at all on that subject in its own Creed, 
 with which he was therefore dissatisfied, as wanting the 
 addition which had been made to it in Spain by King 
 Reccared. 
 
 " What defence the Pope made for S. Tarasius we 
 need not pause to inquire : but this is what he says in 
 reply to the objection urged by the monarch against 
 the Creed. 
 
 " We have already proved the divine dogmas 
 of this Council irreprehensible, as the works of the 
 principal of the Holy Fathers abundantly testify. For 
 should any body say that he differs from the Creed of 
 the above-named Council, he risks differing (or seems to 
 differ), with the Creed of the six holy Councils: inas- 
 much as these Fathers spake not of themselves, but 
 according to what had been holily defined and laid 
 down before : as it is written in the book of the sixth 
 holy Council, Amongst other things, 'This Creed had 
 been sufficient for the perfect knowledge and confir- 
 mation of religion ... for concerning the Father, Son, 
 and Holy Ghost, what it explicitly teaches is perfect.' 
 
 •* I ask you, my Lord, as a plain-spoken Englishman, 
 whether it would be possible to conceive the Creed of 
 the Church more deliberately impugned by the Crown 
 
12 
 
 in Council in the teeth of the Pope ? I am persuad- 
 ed at all events that there has been nothing approach- 
 ing it in the history of the Church of England since the 
 Reformation. Charlemagne, as the mouth-piece of the 
 Council of Frankfort, composed of his own subjects or 
 allies, took formal objection to the Creed of the Church, 
 as it then stood, and had just been promulgated for the 
 fourth time by a General Council confirmed by the 
 Pope, because in the article defining the procession of 
 the Holy Ghost it wanted those words * and from the 
 Son :' and the formal answer of the Pope thus appealed 
 to, was, that its explicit teaching was perfect, though it 
 wanted those words. 
 
 " Yet the ' Crown in Council' we must conclude, was 
 more intimately versed in theology than either the 
 Church in Council or the Pope, for it carried its point 
 after all — either this, or the Church of Rome in adopt- 
 ing those words submitted to its dictation : for there is 
 no other alternative. Still, for some time matters re- 
 mained as they were : Charlemagne seems to have ta- 
 ken no further action in public for the moment, though 
 he went on using the addition of King Reccared in 
 singing the Creed in his own chapel. Whether it was 
 at his instigation or not that some monks of his empire, 
 carried it afterwards to .Jerusalem, and deliberately 
 made a parade of it in one of the Eastern Patriarchates, 
 where they had obtained a footing, is perhaps uncer- 
 tain, though far from improbable. Two things are cer- 
 tain: 1, that the Easterns at once detected and unani- 
 mously condenaned the innovation ; and 2, that the 
 monks excused themselves, as far as the Creed was 
 concerned, by pleading that it was so sung in the 
 Imperial chapel. This had the efiect of reviving the 
 
13 
 
 discussion, which the Emperor, if he had not contrived 
 himself, lost no time in coming forward to settle in his 
 own way. At the head of his bishops once more, he 
 expounded what he considered to be the orthodox doc- 
 trine on the subject in question to the Pope, and this 
 time it was a Pope greatly beholden to him — Leo III. — 
 and ended by requesting to have his adopted version of 
 the Creed authorized. This time the Pope admitted 
 his doctrine to be correct, but would have nothing at 
 all added to the Creed. * As I understand, then,' re- 
 joined one of the Imperial deputies * your Paternity 
 orders that the clause in question be first ejected from 
 the Creed, and then afterwards lawfully taught and 
 learnt by anybody, whether by singing, or by oral tra- 
 dition.' * Doubtless that is my desire,* returned Leo: 
 *andIwould persuade you by all means so to act.' 
 That the Pope had great misgivings as to whether his 
 instructions would be obeyed, is evidenced by his hav- 
 ing the Creed subsequently engraved in Greek and 
 Laiiln^without those words, 'and from the Son,' on two 
 silver shields, and hung up in the most conspicuous 
 place of his church, ''pro cauteld orthodoxcejidei,^ as he 
 said himself, and not merely that the Creed might re- 
 main intact. That his misgivings were well founded is 
 proved from what ilLneas, Bishop of Paris, reported 
 about fifty years after : namely, that the whole Gallican 
 Church chanted it every Sunday in the form for which 
 Charlemagne had contended. Previously to this, its 
 admirers, in endeavouring to import it into Bulgaria, 
 had elicited a much more angry protest from the East 
 than when it was first tried at Jerusalem. But, mean- 
 while, the party that had twice disobeyed Rome in re- 
 taining it, had made themselves' so useful to Rome in 
 
14 
 
 other respects that they had disarmed her opposition. 
 Two centuries more, and Rome herself conformed to 
 their Creed, silently and clandestinely : no decretal, 
 encyclical, or synodical, announcing her adhesion. The 
 thing was done in a corner, and but for a curious litur- 
 gical writer of the Western Empire, who went to see his 
 sovereign Henry II. crowned at Rome, a. d. 1014, by 
 the Pope, nobody could have guessed when it occurred. 
 Berno therefore records what he witnessed with his 
 own eyes and ears : and being engaged himself in a 
 work on the Mass, he would naturally be very particu- 
 lar in his inquiries when he came to Rome, of all places, 
 how things were done there. Now his account is that 
 * up to that time the Roman,* that is, the Church of 
 Rome generally,' had in no wise chanted the Creed af- 
 ter the Gospel : but that the lord emperor Henry would 
 not desist, till with approval of all he had persuaded the 
 apostolic lord Benedict to let it be chanted at High 
 Mass.' There has been a vast amount of learning ex- 
 pended on this passage, but the only Creed chanted at 
 Mass in the West then being the interpolated Creed 
 adopted by Charlemagne, it stands to reason that no 
 other could have been pressed upon the Pope by the 
 Emperor. Hence, whether or not it had been in use 
 there previously, it was now for the first time ordered 
 to be -chanted at High Mass there after the Gospel, as it 
 had long been elsewhere throughout the West, in defer- 
 ence to if not by command of the Emperor. Benedict 
 had been restored from exile by Henry the year be- 
 fore, and therefore was pledged on every account to con- 
 sult his wishes, yet it seems to have cost him a struggle 
 to give way on this point. 
 
 " Thus Reccared inaugurated the addition : Charle- 
 
15 
 
 magne patronised it : and Henry 11 got it adopted by 
 the Popes themselves. When this had been done, the 
 pontifical oath was changed. Later Popes of course 
 shrank from imprecating a judgment upon themselves, 
 according to the terms of their oath, in case they failed 
 to keep the decrees of the General Councils enumera- 
 ted in it, * usque ad unum apicem,^ when they felt they 
 had notoriously failed to do so by the Creed. That 
 clause was accordingly struck out. In the correspond- 
 ing clause of the oath that was afterwards taken by 
 them — the way in which Cardinals are mentioned in it 
 associates it with the well-known decree of Nicholas II., 
 1059, respecting the Sacred College — they are made to 
 say simply, ' May God be merciful to me in that awful 
 day if I do my diligence to keep all these things sworn 
 to by me.' Had it been intended to intimate that they 
 had been now and then forced to do otherwise, it could 
 not have been differently worded. 
 
 *' How, after this, the Creed used by us both in our 
 Liturgy can be called the Church's Creed, and not the 
 Crown's Creed, I am at a loss to comprehend : how 
 Rome can, after this, be exculpated from the charge of 
 having succumbed to the ' Crown in Council,'' infinitely 
 more than England, I should be pleased in all honesty 
 to learn from you. For this, as I presume you would 
 admit, is no mere matter of * antiquarian research' or 
 'dreary speculation.' The formal definitions of the 
 Church are still as obligatory, still as dogmatically 
 correct, as when first promulgated. And one of them, 
 repeated by a series of General Councils in the same 
 words, says that what the Creed taught explicitly 
 with reference to the Trinity was perfect when it was 
 without those words, 'and from the Son'. Now, to 
 
16 
 
 contend that there can be any further explanation of 
 that which is explicitly perfect already, is to deprive 
 words of their obvious meaning and to insult common- 
 sense. The majority by far of the Church was with 
 Adrian I. and Leo III. when they defended the unin- 
 terpolated Creed against Charlemagne : the majority 
 by far of the Church was against Benedict VIII. when 
 he yielded to the threats or persuasion of Henry II. 
 The same majority of the Church broke off com- 
 munion with the Pope for abandoning, and finally 
 submitted to be annihilated and cut off from the face 
 of the earth itself,' sooner than abandon the Creed of 
 the Church for that of the Crown. I am utterly unable 
 to see where the parallel fails in principle. Reccared, 
 Charlemagne, and Henry II., prescribed a Creed for 
 the West, at least as much as Henry VIII., Edward VI., 
 and Elizabeth prescribed one for England. Subse- 
 quent acceptance cannot alter their origin in either 
 case : and whether one consisted in a compound word 
 of four syllables, and the other in thirty-nine articles, 
 embodying six hundred propositions, the fruits were 
 the same ; a schism in each case followed, and both 
 schisms are still in force. When the West separated 
 from the East, the East constituted the majority of the 
 Church by far ; when Englaild separated from Rome, 
 the majority of the West by far sided with Rome. 
 Thus it came to pass that Rome was literally paid back 
 in her own coin. Adding to the Creed of the Church 
 produced one schism : subtracting from the Creed of 
 the Church of Rome another. The Reformation was at 
 once the avenger and the logical offspring of the schism 
 between the East and the West. The West became a 
 prey to disunion, split into fragments, and had its own 
 
17 
 
 Creed questioned, retributively for its conduct towards 
 the East, which it trampled on for upholding the Creed 
 of the Church. Then if Anglican orders are denied by 
 Rome, Western orders may be confronted by Creed, 
 Canon, and Definition of the fourth, fifth, and sixth 
 Councils: by their definition affirming their creed to be 
 perfect as it then stood : by their canon ordaining that 
 any bishop or clergy substituting another creed for it 
 as it then stood should be deposed. Unless this canon 
 is to be construed in a non-natural sense, I cannot see 
 that there is much to choose between Anglican and 
 Roman orders : as to this day its operation must extend 
 to every bishop and priest in the West using the Creed 
 of Reccared and Charlemagne instead of that of the 
 Church. If its operation has become obsolete, it is 
 because the power of enforcing it has passed away : in 
 other words, because the executive of the Church is 
 defunct, negligent, or unable to act. Let me add a few 
 words on the nature of the Canon. For some time 
 past a misconception has been prevalent respecting this 
 Canon which has impaired its force. People have spo- 
 ken of it in general as the seventh Canon of the Coun- 
 cil of Ephesus, and therefore regarded it as any other 
 Canon of a General Council; and with neither more 
 nor less reverence. This account of it is far short of 
 the truth. It was indeed first promulgated at Ephesus, 
 but it was not intended to apply to any but the origi- 
 nal form of the JNicene Creed then, that form alone 
 having been used there, as we learn from the ' Acta/ 
 And it came seventh in order of the Canons passed 
 there. But it was re-enacted under very difierent cir- 
 cumstances at the Council of Chalcedon, where it 
 appears no longer among the canons, but immediately 
 2 
 
18 
 
 m 
 
 follows the definition. The Nicene Creed in its origi- 
 nal form, and the same Creed in the enlarged form 
 given to it by the Council of Constantinople, having 
 been both recited and authoritatively placed on the 
 same footing by the Council, the formal definition of 
 the Council was then appended to them, and to it this 
 Canon. Thus a new rank was given to it, which the 
 fifth and sixth Councils alike confirmed. It ceased to 
 be a canon in the ordinary sense of the word, and be- 
 came a dogmatic canon, of as permanent and universal 
 obligation as the definition itself to which it was append- 
 ed : just, for instance, as the judgment appended by 
 the Nicene Fathers themselves to their Creed. ' Those 
 who say there was a time when He was not,' and so 
 forth. As well might the Popes have consented to any 
 modification of these clauses as of this Canon. 
 
 ** There is one more point in connection with it that 
 I would fain submit for your more special consideration 
 before I conclude, namely, what justification can you 
 and your subordinates plead for your modern practice, 
 so directly opposed to this Canon, of requiring all who 
 come over to you from Anglicanism to recite and testify 
 their acceptance of the Creed of Pope Pius, when this 
 Canon, as binding as ever on the whole Church, ordains 
 expressly, that persons coming over to the Communion 
 of the Church, from any heresy whatsoever^ shall have 
 the Nicene Creed, and no other, proposed to them for 
 their acceptance ? Every time you violate this iujunc- 
 tion, you incur the penalty denounced against such by 
 the Church that has lost her voice. This is surely 
 something like living in a glass house yourself, my 
 Lord — I beg you will excuse the metaphor — is it not ?" 
 
 Such, then, is the answer which I conceive Anglicans 
 
19 
 
 might fairly make to your letters on the *' Crown in 
 Council" — by publishing them you must have intended 
 them for more than one — and I give publicity to it both 
 on their account in order that they may adopt it if they 
 think fit, and on my own, to satisfy the dictates of my 
 conscience whether they adopt it or not. For I feel it 
 imperative to state publicly to them and to you how 
 materially fliy inquiries into this one question have 
 modified my estimate of the Roman claims, and thougfi 
 the re-union of Christendom, which has been the dream 
 as well as the prayer and study of my whole life, seems 
 absolutely looming in the distance, I desire to record 
 my solemn conviction, that it cannot be, that it ought 
 not to be, till material guarantees have been secured 
 that Rome shall never again be what she has been, and 
 to some extent still is : so irresistible to my mind are 
 the evidences that it is her conduct, more than anything 
 else, which has divided Christendom — her conduct since 
 she became a Court as well as a Church — not her 
 faith, but her policy for the last thousand years, dating 
 from her endowment under Charlemagne. Eminent 
 saints and doctors of the middle ages, if they mean 
 anything, have asserted as much : I have nothing to do 
 but adopt their language: their denunciations were 
 loudest when they were by no means levelled against 
 the particular vices of this or that Pope. S. Bernard is 
 not attacking his old pupil Eugenius, when he tells him 
 in unvarnished language of the '* murmurs and com- 
 plaints of the Churches" of his day.* *' They cry 
 loudly that they are mutilated and dismembered. . . 
 Abbots are exempted from bishops, bishops from arch- 
 
 ^De Consid. iii. 4. 
 
20 
 
 bishops, archbishops from primates or patriarchs. Can 
 this be good in theory ; can it be excused in practice ? 
 , . . Can you possibly think it lawful for you to 
 dismember the Church, confound order, disturb the 
 boundaries which your fathers have set? If it be just 
 for each to preserve his own rights, how can it accord 
 with justice to take from a person what belongs to him ? 
 You err, if you think that your Apostolic power, as it is 
 the highest is the only power ordained by God. . . • 
 Your power is by no means the only power from God : 
 there are likewise intermediate and still lower powers 
 — and as they are not to be separated whom God has 
 joined, so neither are they to be made one whom He has 
 divided ? " "I remember once," says John of Salis- 
 bury, '' going as far as Apulia, to see my lord Pope 
 Adrian" — his countryman and ours the English Pope — 
 " who had admitted me to very great intimacy, and I 
 passed nearly three months with him at Beneventum. 
 In the course of conversation, of which we had at least 
 the average amount that friends usually have, he ask- 
 ed me frankly and earnestly what men thought of him 
 and of the Church of Rome. I told him in reply, very 
 candidly and explicitly, the evil things which had come 
 to my ears in the provinces. For, as was said by many, 
 the Roman Church, which is the mother of all Churches, 
 exhibits herself to the rest rather in the light of a step- 
 mother, than of a mother As for the Ro- 
 man Pontiff, he is a universal oppressor, and well-nigh 
 
 past endurance That is what is said by the 
 
 people, most holy Father, since you ask me to tell you 
 what people say." f 
 
 t De Nugis. vi. 23. 
 
21 
 
 '^0 Pope," exclaimed the great prophetess of the 
 north by revelation, after three more centuries had 
 passed, '* thou art worse than Lucifer, more unjust than 
 Pilate, more of a foe to me than Judas, more of an 
 abomination to me than the Jews themselves." t Not 
 that she was speaking of the vices of any one Pope in 
 particular, but of the Papacy, such as it was then. I 
 could fill pages from medieval writers of approved name 
 to the same effect. What they meant and what with his- 
 tory before us we cannot venture to contend they de- 
 nounced extravagantly, were the principles and pi-actices 
 of a system known and stigmatised as the Court of Rome, 
 for this was its head-quarters, which had clearly been 
 inaugurated under Charlemagne and his successors, par- 
 ties to the ''donation" and had usurped precedence of 
 the self-denying mould and pastoral gifts inherited from 
 S. Peter. Their sway was no sooner established, than 
 bad Popes found themselves omnipotent to do mischief^ 
 and the best Popes comparatively powerless to do good. 
 Eugenius III. had not commenced, and he was impo- 
 tent to resist, the changes in the constitution of the 
 Church so bitterly denounced and deplored by S. Ber- 
 nard. 
 
 All this I knew, and had well considered long before 
 I joined the Roman Communion, as my books testify. 
 I thought then, and am doubly convinced now, after 
 reading ecclesiastical history through again as a Roman 
 Catholic, that if there ever was a justifiable revolt from 
 authority, it was the revolt we call the Reformation : and 
 most certainly had it been a revolt from a mere secular 
 
 } Mansi, tom. xxx. pp. 715 — 18, with Cardinal Turrecre- 
 mata's comments. 
 
22 
 
 power, like that of the United States of America from 
 England, I for one should never have dreamt of trans- 
 ferring my allegiance from the Anglican to the Roman 
 Communion, any more than I suppose any citizen of 
 the United States in his sober senses would now dream 
 of transferring his own principle to the British Crown. 
 But all scripture told me that there should be but one 
 Church : and all history told me that a Primacy from 
 time immemorial in that one Church belonged to the 
 see of Rome : all history told me, moreover, that from the 
 foundation of the see of Canterbury to the Reformation, 
 the Church of England had been one with Rome, had 
 voted freely and deliberately for the doctrine and dis- 
 cipline upheld by Rome, including the supremacy of 
 the Pope, for centuries ; and was at least as responsible 
 for the corruptions that had accumulated in the middle 
 ages and precipitated the catastrophe of the sixteenth 
 century, as any other of the Churches in communion 
 with Rome on the continent. Hence, it certainly 
 seemed to me that the Church of England had done 
 wrong in separating from the body of which she had been 
 so long a foremost member, and affecting to care for noth- 
 ing so long as her own boat got off safe, instead of 
 standing manfully by her colours, and assisting by every 
 means in her power to bring the old ship safe into port. 
 At all events what excuse was there for our continued 
 isolation ? If I could trust to the Roman Catholic di- 
 vines of this country, whose teaching I took to be faith- 
 fully reflected in a work entitled the " Faith of Catho- 
 lics," reprinted in 1846, for the third time, by a living 
 dignitary, since promoted, and dedicated to the late 
 Bishop Walsh, I felt there was nothing in the Roman 
 Catholic system now, to which I could not honestly, and 
 
23 
 
 'would not willingly subscribe, for the sake of breaking 
 down the barriers that estranged us from the Churches 
 abroad, with which our forefathers had lived and died 
 in happy communion. It may be that I trusted those 
 divines too implicitly : it is not long since I heard the 
 term " ministers*' applied from the pulpit by a living 
 preacher, who may be supposed your mouth-piece, to 
 those who believed no more : though it would be dif- 
 ficult to produce any Roman Catholic catechism in use 
 throughout England in which more was taught. But 
 this by the way. More intimate acquaintance with the 
 Continental Churches, and a much more searching 
 investigation into the merits of the schism between the 
 East and West than I had ever been able to give to it 
 before, has modified my views on the whole question 
 considerably between England and Rome. Let me be- 
 gin with the last first. 
 
 To the facts, which some pages back I put into the 
 mouth of your Anglican friend, you will doubtless re- 
 member my calling your attention privately just 
 twelve months ago. Your only reply to me, so far as 
 they were concerned, was that they were already known. 
 This I construed as an admission on your part that 
 I had stated them correctly. But if so, what other in- 
 ference can be deduced from them, than that for the 
 last 1,000 years the Roman Communion has been com- 
 mitted to the use of a Creed which is not that of the 
 Church, but of the Crown ? I do not say therefore to 
 the use of a Creed which is heterodox. On the the- 
 ological question involved in it I would wish to speak 
 with becoming reverence : but thus much is certain, 
 that the addition which forms its distinguishing feature 
 was made and had been in use many centuries before 
 
24 
 
 any Pope judged it allowable, much less necessary: 
 many centuries before theologians in the West had 
 agreed amongst themselves whether the terms "mission" 
 and " procession '* were distinguishable. Doubtless it 
 has since found able defenders : but among them there 
 are scarce two who give the same account of it, historical- 
 ly or doc trin ally : and some of them are neither con sis. 
 tent with each other nor with themselves. Others, in 
 arguing for it against the Easterns, have grievously 
 mis-stated facts, and numberless passages have been 
 adduced in support of it from the Fathers, either wholly 
 spurious or interpolated. I know of no parallel to it in 
 this respect in any religious controversy, before or since. 
 If the Athanasian Creed was not expressly coined for 
 this controversy, it was employed in this controversy 
 first as a polemical weapon. At Florence, where the 
 whole question of the Creed was gone into formally for 
 the first time, the number of spurious passages adduced 
 on the Latin side stands out in painful contrast to what 
 was produced on the Greek side, in which even modern 
 criticism has not been able to discover a single flaw. In 
 the Florentine definition itself there is one clause which 
 runs as follows: "We define that those explanatory 
 words, *and from the Son,' were to the end that the 
 truth might be elucidated, under the necessity which 
 existed then, lawfully and with good reason added to 
 the Creed." The history of this clause is that it was 
 urgently required by the Pope, who was present, and 
 presided in person, as urgently resisted by the Easterns, 
 and only conceded on the express understanding that it 
 was not to prejudice their own use of the Creed in any 
 way. What it means has yet to be shewn. Admit it 
 historically, and it binds us to aflirm that those words 
 
25 
 
 were '^lawfully and with good reason added to the 
 Creed " two centuries before Rome was so much as 
 consulted on them : four centuries before she received 
 them herself. Admit it dogmatically, and what follows ? 
 I take my stand on the definition of the fourth, fifth, 
 and sixth Councils, and affirm the explicit teaching of 
 the Creed on the Trinity perfect, as it stood then : 
 namely, without those words, "and from the Son." 
 This makes me deny by implication all that this 
 clause asserts : for how, I repeat, can explicit teaching 
 which is perfect, admit of any further explanation ? I 
 must assert the contrary to this, or get over its obvious 
 and genuine meaning in some shifty way, to be able to 
 attach any dogmatical value to the Florentine clause ; 
 or else I must fall back upon the history of the Floren- 
 tine clause once more. S. Antoninus, afterwards 
 Archbishop of Florence, who was present at the Coun- 
 cil, and a great canonist, says of those words, "and 
 from the Son," emphatically : "It is certain, nor is it to 
 be believed that they were added unless by some Pope 
 or Council, for who else would have presumed to have 
 added them ? albeit by what Pope or Council is by no 
 means certain."* It seems hardly possible to doubt 
 that the Florentine clause was framed on this hypoth- 
 esis, and must be regarded accordingly, now that the 
 facts are known. S. Antoninus, we may be sure, nev- 
 er contemplated our believing what we know to be 
 not fact. The remainder of the definition, good and 
 excellent as it is, in reality left the main point untouch- 
 ed. That is to say, it explained and harmonised the 
 arguments by which the Greeks and Latins had defen- 
 
 *Chron. P. in. tit iii. c. 13, § 13. 
 
26 
 
 ded their respective views since the schism, accommoda- 
 ted their views to each other, and ruled what should 
 be taught in future by both : but it had not a word to 
 say on what had been the doctrine of the Whole 
 Church before the schism commenced : when Council 
 after Council had declared the explicit teaching of the 
 Creed on the Trinity to be perfect, as it stood then. 
 To this, Mark of Ephesus had called the attention of 
 the Council in the most formal manner, by reciting 
 their acts : but here precisely the definition stopped 
 short, as if by instinct or from design, and said nothing. 
 So far from determining the relation which the two 
 forms of the Creed, the old and the interpolated, bore 
 to each other — to the amazement, as we are told, of 
 the ambassadors from England who came to the Coun- 
 cil — it neither recited nor alluded to any Creed at all, 
 much less promulgated either form as the Creed of the 
 Church. It abstained from affirming them identical : 
 it abstained from pointing out how they differed : it 
 gave no directions of any kind about their use. If the 
 use of the old Creed was not interdicted for the future, 
 neither was the use of the interpolated Creed enjoined. 
 In conclusion, as if to stamp the whole business — as if 
 to typify the union between the Creed of the Crown 
 and the Creed of the Church that had taken place- 
 both Emperor and Pope subscribed to the definition of 
 faith side by side, a prodioy without parallel in the an- 
 nals of (Ecumenical Councils, before or since. 
 
 Therefore, my Lord, with the facts of this controver- 
 sy before me, I find this conclusion inevitable : that 
 whether absolutely inerrant or not in matters of faith 
 herself, Rome has abundantly proved, during the last 
 1,000 years, that she can be a most negligent, hesita- 
 
27 
 
 ting, fickle,^ self-seeking, hypocritical guide to others, 
 even where the Faith is concerned. Such, at all events 
 has been her conduct by the Church's Creed; each 
 epithet describes it at each stage : the last, the worst. 
 Sad presage for the re-union of Christendom, in a Gen- 
 eral Council presided over by the Pope, that the only 
 General Council [of the East and West] over which a 
 Pope ever presided in person should have been the 
 only Council ever convened exclusively for restoring 
 union to the Church — I am using a phrase of the Pope 
 who held it — and this the Council of Florence under 
 Eugenius IV. ! Of all Councils that ever were held, I 
 suppose there never was one in which hypocrisy, duplic- 
 ity, and worldly motives, played a more conspicuous 
 or disgraceful part. How the Council ot Basle was out- 
 witted, and Florence named as the place to which the 
 Greeks should come : how the galleys of the 
 Pope outstripped the galleys of the Council, and bore 
 the Greeks in triumph from Constantinople to a town 
 in the centre of Italy, where the Pope was all-power- 
 ful : how they were treated there : and why they 
 were subsequently removed to Florence, would reveal 
 a series of intrigues of the lowest order, if I had space 
 to transcribe them ; unfortunately, they were too pat- 
 ent at every stage of the Council for the real objects of 
 its promoters to admit of the slightest doubt. Between 
 John Palaeologus and Eugenius it was a barter of tem- 
 poral and spiritual gains from first to last. One had his 
 capital to guarantee from attack : the other his position 
 in Italy to establish. Each hoped to be victorious 
 through the other, Eugenius over the Basle fathers, 
 Palaeologus over the Turks. The more sailors and 
 soldiers the Pope promised, the greater submission the 
 
28 
 
 Emperor engciged to extort from liis bishops to the 
 teaching of the Latin Church. Three cardinals solemn- 
 ly notified to the Emperor what succours he might 
 expect from the Pope when the union of the Churches 
 had been accomplished, just as he had succeeded in 
 getting all his bishops but one to declare for it. There 
 would be ships and money to take them home : three 
 hundred soldiers for the defence of their capital to be 
 maintained there at the cost of the Pope. Two galleys 
 would remain on guard there at his cost likewise. 
 When the Emperor had need of ships of war, the 
 Pope would supply twenty, and maintain them for 
 him at his own expense for six months. And in case 
 the Emperor should need help by land, the Pope, ly 
 Christy would do his utmost to get Christian nations to 
 send an army to his assistance." When union was 
 imminent, the Emperor said : " The time draws near : 
 we must be thinking of our departure." The Pope 
 replied, *'I have seen to it already and will see to it. I 
 sent a captain all in good time to prepare ships, and 
 should anything else be needed for your return, I will 
 give orders for it at once : meanwhile, take this paper 
 from me, and when you have read it, let me have 
 your re-ply." This was the definition ; not, indeed, in 
 the precise shape in which it passed : but ships and 
 money were to be forthcoming when it was signed. 
 Such were the preliminaries to the joint declaration of 
 the two Churches on the Procession of the Holy Ghost, 
 translated literally from the Acts of the Council. Shall 
 I avow it, my Lord ? my blood curdles as I transcribe 
 them : but the worst is not told. 
 
 Eugenius, the only Pope who ever presided over [such] 
 a General Council in person, what does history say of 
 
I 
 
 29 
 
 his general character — of the holy zeal exhibited by him 
 while the Council for re-uniting Christendom was sit- 
 ing, or in conciliating adhesion to it after it was over ? 
 One might have expected antecedently that his pres- 
 ence and example would have influenced the Council, 
 as no other Council had ever been influenced before, 
 f5r good. " Eugenius,'' says his most partial biographer 
 — I am quoting from Ciaconius, " was esteemed con- 
 stant in adhering to his engagements, unless he happen- 
 ed to have promised anything which it were better to re- 
 cal than to perform." He was exchanging angry cen- 
 sures and excommunications with the Council of Basle, 
 all the time that he aflected to be promoting.^union at 
 Florence with all his might. " Alas," exclaimed the 
 great Archbishop of Palermo, one of his own cardinals 
 subsequently, " what kind of union will this turn out, 
 fraught at its very commencement with so much discord 
 and scandal to the Latin Church f' Never were fore- 
 bodings more fully justified by the event. Blondus, the 
 Pope's secretary, is lost in wonder at the vast sums of 
 money expended by his master in conciliating the high 
 dignitaries or indigent prelates of the Greek Emperor 
 with presents — Syropulus, one of the number, less scru- 
 pulously calls them bribes — and in maintaining, at no 
 less cost, his own army simultaneously j at the head of 
 which, operating against Nicholas Piccinino, Philip of 
 Milan, or Francis Sforza, petty chieftains of some rival 
 factions, was John Vitellius Vitelleschi, cardinal of Flor- 
 ence and Latin patriarch of Alexandria. Such were the 
 interests to which the Pope found time to attend, and 
 such the ministers to whom he consigned their execu- 
 tion, while the Council of Florence was sitting. Before 
 the Council was over, Vitelleschi was suddenly seized 
 
30 
 
 and put to death, without any trial, by his orders. 
 " Such is the fickleness, and such are the vicissitudes of 
 human affairs," says the cardinal's biographer, '' that he 
 who was treated to-day with scorn and contumely, was 
 two days before ordering about everybody, and dispos- 
 ing of everything at pleasure, within the domain of the 
 Church ; governing Rome, the patrimony, the duchy, 
 Campania, the coast, and whatever else belonged to the 
 Church." Let us see who succeeded him. Lewis, Arch- 
 bishop of Florence — the city in which the Council was 
 still sitting — Patriarch of Aquileia, made cardinal^ we 
 are expressly told, not for aught that he had done at 
 the Council, but for having defeated in battle Nicholas 
 Piccinino. ' *' He," says his biographer," merited the 
 love of Eugenius to that extent by his military prowess, 
 that he became first Bishop of Dalmatia, then Archbish- 
 op of Florence, finally Patriarch of Dalmatia, being the 
 first Venetian who fiad ever held that See." Eugenius, 
 a true-born Venetian, was fond of his race ; and when 
 they had approved themselves good soldiers — anything, 
 alas ! but the soldiers of Christ — they merited his ex- 
 ceeding love. The culminating distinction reserved for 
 his fellow-townsman was to succeed the patriarch of 
 Aquileia as commander-in-chief of the papal army ; 
 and the first thought of the new patriarch of Aquileia 
 on entering upon office was not to keep Eugenius to his 
 engagements to the Greek Emperor of succouring him 
 against the Turks, but to engage the Pope in hostilities 
 against his own rival in adventure, Francis Sforza, whom 
 from that time forth Eugenius, acting under the advice of 
 his commander-in-chief, the archbishop, bent all his ener- 
 gies to crush, writing at the same time to Constantinople 
 with the utmost assurance, to tell Constantine PalaBolo- 
 
31 
 
 gus, the brother and heir of John, that it was the su - 
 pineness of the Emperor in carrying out the terms of 
 the union, and nothing else, that had delayed his fulfil- 
 ling his engagements to him. The Greeks had agreed 
 to the Florentine definition, and left Florence on the un- 
 derstanding that they might retain their own rites and 
 their own Creed : it was not till Eugenius thought he 
 could tell Europe that they had conformed to the Roman 
 rite — we have this in his own words — that he con- 
 descended to aid them as he had promised : and even 
 then, Hungary,, not Constantinople, was his uppermost 
 thought. 
 
 Such, therefore we learn from history, was the conduct 
 of the only Pope who ever sat at the head of a Council, 
 all through the time when he was sitting and acting as 
 such in the only Council that ever met exclusively for 
 re-uniting Christendom. Now, what guarantees have 
 we, my Lord, or can we have, that the same conduct 
 may not be displayed again, while the same system re- 
 mains in full force ? The personal holiness of the reign- 
 ing pontiff may be some security while we are blessed 
 with it, but it may be laid in the grave to-morrow ; and 
 against this, strong as it is, there is the undjing system 
 which has always proved immeasurably stronger than 
 any Pope, when its interests were threatened. Are 
 there not papal Zouaves to be cared for as well as bishops 
 and papal territory to be thought of and battled for, as 
 well as dogma ? And have we never read of Pius IX. 
 ^ms^Z/'anxiously negotiating with a Protestant premier 
 for a supply of 7,000 or 8,000 muskets of light calibre 
 for his civic guard, which he thought imperative, but 
 was unable to pay for, and unwilling to procure from 
 
32 
 
 ^* Naples, Turin, or Austria" just then ?* Nobody would 
 contend that Pius IX. was indebted to the system for 
 his many virtues: and history shews that Eugenius 
 €Ould not have acted in most cases as he did, had it not 
 been for the system. Therefore, by all who are praying 
 and hoping for the re-union of Christendom in a corporate 
 sense, Eugenius at the headof the Council of Florence 
 cannot to be scanned too closely. Look at his acts there in 
 the practical light in which alone the men of this age will 
 ever be disposed generally to regard them. Of what 
 conceivable advantage can his presence be said to have 
 been to the Council ? Did it prevent hypocris)^, deceit, 
 and secular intrigue from reigning there : rather was it 
 not the prime cause of their reigning there, to the con- 
 fusion of all the good and learned men on both sides ? 
 They prayed and argued to little purpose under such a 
 head. Can his presence have been as much as a nega- 
 tive safeguard against error ? This is probably the ut- 
 most that can be conceded : and even this admits of 
 some question, at least as long as the proposition insert- 
 ed in the definitioh at his instance remains unreconciled 
 with history, or with previous dogma. Meanwhile, the 
 main point in the controversy was never explained at 
 all : though it had been waiting seven hundred years 
 for a settlement. Policy, that was as old as the contro- 
 versy, forbade this. 
 
 I pass from questions of Faith to questions of Morals, 
 — for on both Rome claims to be infallible, — and once 
 more I limit my criticisms to the Rome of the last 1000 
 years, and to her trustworthiness as a practical guide. 
 How has duty to man — the suum cuique of political jus- 
 
 
 *Guizot's Last Days of Louis Philippe, p. 321. 
 
33 
 
 tice — fared at her hands ? What we have heard from 
 S. Bernard already may help to determine this. *' Ab- 
 bots are exempted from Bishops, bishops from archbish- 
 ops, archbishops from primates or patriarchs. Can this 
 be good in theory, can it be excused in practice ? Can 
 you possibly think it lawful for you to dismember the 
 Church, confound order, disturb the boundaries which 
 your fathers have set?" I used to estimate those words 
 very differently ten or twelve years ago from what I do 
 now. I used to consider S. Bernard and all other com- 
 plainants of his stamp in the middle ages indirectly re- 
 sponsible for the evils which they denounced, as having 
 consented in themselves or in their forefathers to the sys- 
 tem out of which they flowed. That system could nev- 
 er have thriven, or become possessed of any coercive 
 power, without their aid or acquiescence. The Papacy 
 could never be said to have made conquest of mediae vai 
 Europe by force of arms. It took root, because the soil 
 was congenial : its fruits were tasted, and found palata- 
 ble When it had been proved beneficial to the body 
 politic in general, or rather incomparably better than 
 anything else that offered to men then, it was encourag- 
 ed by all. It had its abuses unquestionably : all honour 
 to its supporters for their candour in denouncing them : 
 still jn estimating their language I could not honestly 
 shut my eyes to the fact that they clung to the system 
 under which they lived, were parties to it in practice, 
 and never dreamt of exchanging it for another, thus 
 proving that it existed in the main, abuses excepted, 
 with their full concurrence. I also remembered that 
 there were numbers amongst ourselves who could be elo- 
 quent on the evils of parliamentary government, and 
 dwell forebodingly on the omnipotence of the House of 
 3 
 
34 
 
 Commons, without at all meaning to assert that any one 
 of our constitutional changes had been brought about il- 
 legally, without in any sense wishing to go back to what 
 we had been under the Tudors or Plantagenets. 
 
 Subsequent investigations have shewn me the one- 
 sidedness of this explanation. It contemplated the West 
 either as the whole Church, or else as competent to 
 modify the discipline of the whole Church at will to suit 
 its own predilections or well-being. S. Bernard, by his 
 mention of patriarchs, had evidently travelled beyond 
 the limits of the West for his facts. His words there- 
 fore — '* Can you possibly think it lawful for you to dis- 
 memher the ChurcTi,, confound order, disturb the boun- 
 daries which your fathers had assigned them" — had a 
 deeper and a wider meaning than I had assigned them 
 formerly. He preferred a charge with which my ears 
 had long been familiar in another application.. The 
 West had a perfect right to alter its own ecclesiastical 
 polity, so far as the constitutions of the whole Church 
 permitted. This was precisely the liberty claimed for 
 themselves by the champions of the Church of England 
 at the Reformation. But the West had no right at all, 
 in legislating for itself, to innovate upon the existing 
 and unrepealed ordinances of,the whole Church. This 
 was precisely the charge brought against the Church of 
 England by the late Archdeacon Wilberforce, and which 
 I for the time thought unanswerable. Therefore, admit- 
 ting the allegations of S. Bernard to be true to the let- 
 ter, with what face could I deny the Church of Home to \ 
 have been a much greater offender than the Church of I 
 England so far — a much greater offender, because, [ 
 claiming to be the executive of the whole Church, she j 
 ought to have been the first to enforce, the last to con- 
 
35 
 
 travene its existing statutes ? The question remained, 
 how she had carried her point ? This, of course, S. Ber- 
 nard could not have answered. The Church of Eng- 
 land had taken advantage of the Reformation to carry 
 hers, and a schism between her and Rome had been the 
 consequence. I now asked how far the conduct of 
 Rome in this respect could have contributed to the ear- 
 lier schism between the East and West, and I am bound 
 to say that history replied with twice the clearness and 
 twice the sternness that it had previously replied in the 
 case of the Creed. History deposed in short unhesitat- 
 ingly that Rome rose to the eminence whicfi she occu- 
 pied in the thirteenth century when at her zenith — and 
 from which in the Providence of God she has been grad- 
 ually, but surely descending ever since — most unright- 
 eously, as concerns the Cliurcli — the whole Church I 
 mean — by fraud and force : by the weapon of the weak, 
 and the weapon of the strong, alternately put into her 
 hand, and employed by her as legitimate, for the spread 
 of her own power, to the dismemberment and destruc- 
 tion of the Church at large : the most striking specimens 
 of each kind being the Pseudo-decretals, including of 
 course the Pseudo-donation, and the Crusades. By 
 these means, her bishop aspired to become Patriarch of 
 the whole Church as well as Pope. I must find space 
 for a few words upon each. 
 
 1. No certain proof, to the best of my belief, has been 
 discovered as yet, that the pseudo-decretals and pseu- 
 do-donation were manufactured at Rome, or by order 
 of Rome ; for all that, Rome stands committed to them 
 no less than if she had done both, as we shall see. They 
 purported to embody the formal teaching of her earliest 
 pontiffs. She must have known from the first therefore, 
 
36 
 
 or been able to ascertain, whether they came from her 
 archives or not : yet she studiously forebore from in- 
 quiring, and said nothing. It was enough for her that 
 their genuineness came to be generally believed in, that 
 they favoured her aggrandisement, and could be em- 
 ployed with decisive effect against those who contested 
 it. She cared nothing for the palpable contradiction 
 between them and the acknowledged Canons of the 
 whole Church which she was bound to uphold and en- 
 force. As this is just the point which has been eluded 
 hitherto by the apologists of the pseudo-decretals, it 
 will need unfolding at some length. 
 
 That what is called the " Code of the Universal 
 Church " was in existence as a collection at the time 
 of the fourth Council is established by Justellus and 
 others indisputably from the manner in which a hooTc 
 of Canons was referred to there in the ninth and elev- 
 enth Actions, canons being in each case cited from it as 
 the 83d and 84th, 95th and 96th, according to the ex- 
 act numbering which they bear there now. For the 
 same reason it can have been no other collection that 
 was authoritatively confirmed by the first Canon of the 
 same Council in these words : *' We pronounce it to be 
 fit and just that the canons of the holy Fathers made in 
 every synod to the present time be in full force." * To 
 these subsequently the Council appended its own : all 
 of which down to the 28th were passed unanimously : 
 and this I omit on the ground that it was never con- 
 firmed by Rome, the old rule being, as we are told by 
 Socrates, Sozomen, and Theodoret, all of them Greeks, 
 that no canons could be passed without the consent of 
 
 *I adopt Mr. Johnson's translation. Vade Mecum vol. 
 II, p. 41, et seq. 
 
37 
 
 the Pope. The code of the Universal Church there- 
 fore down to this 28th Canon of Chalcedon is unquestion- 
 ably binding on the whole Church still, and always has 
 been, except in cases where it can be shewn to have 
 been modified by subsequent legislation of equal author- 
 ity. Now in this code there is no mention whatever 
 of the See of Rome, as a supreme power, or even ulti- 
 mate court of appeal, though its primacy is implied 
 throughout. Hence when the subject of its appellate 
 jurisdiction came before the heads of the African 
 Church in the fifth century, among whom was S. Au- 
 gustine, their deliberate finding, which they reported to 
 the Pope, and on which they acted themselves, was, 
 that "the Nicene decrees plainly committed both the 
 inferior clergy and the bishops themselves to their own 
 metropolitans : having most wisely and justly provided 
 that all things shall be determined in the very places 
 where they arise ; for that the grace of the Holy Spirit 
 will never be wanting in every province, whereby equi- 
 ty may be prudentl}^ discerned and constantly main- 
 tained by the ministers of Christ, especially when every 
 man has liberty, if he be offended with the determina- 
 tion of his judges, to appeal to a provincial, or if need 
 be to a general Council." The African bishops confine 
 their remarks to the Nicene Canons, not feeling them- 
 selves under the circumstances called upon to examine 
 more : but nobody who has studied the remaining can- 
 ons comprised in this code could maintain that its regu- 
 lations, on the subject of appeals, as it stood then, could 
 have been stated more fairly. Since then indeed the 
 Sardican Canons authorizing bishops in extreme cases — 
 and bishops alone — to appeal to the Pope, which were 
 then unknown to the African Church, have been receiv 
 
ed in the East and West alike : yet against them we 
 must always remember is to be set the 9 th Canon of 
 the fourth Council, and therefore one of this code to 
 which Rome is bound — allowing that *' if any bishop or 
 clergy should have a dispute with their metropolitan, 
 they may apply to the exarch of their diocese, or else 
 to the throne of Constantinople, and have their case 
 tried theie.* More persons are thus authorized in this 
 code to appeal to the See of Constantinople than m the 
 Sardican Canons themselves to Rome. And except on 
 this one subject of appeal, jurisdiction in all its branches 
 is both explicitly and rigorously restricted to the local 
 boundaries in force then, and never to be enlarged. 
 jLhe consent of Rome to the 28th Canon of Chalcedon 
 was emphatically refused and persistently withheld on 
 these grounds. The 2nd Canon of Constantinople is to 
 this day a standing witness against the See in whose in- 
 terests the 28th of Chalcedon was framed : " Let not 
 bishops go out of their diocese to churches out of their 
 bounds : but let the bishop of Alexandria, according to 
 the Canon, administer the affairs of Egypt, and the 
 bishops of the East the affairs of the East only, with a 
 salvo to the ancient privileges of the Church of Antioch 
 
 mentioned in the Nicene Canons And let 
 
 not bishops go out of their dioceses to ordinations, or 
 any administration, unless they be invited. And by 
 the aforesaid Canon concerning dioceses being observed 
 it is evident that the provincial synod will have the 
 management of every province, as was decreed at Ni- 
 caea. The Churches amongst the barbarians must be 
 governed according to the customs which prevailed with 
 their ancestors." 
 
 * The 17th Canon is to the same effect. 
 
39 
 
 This Canon was occasioned by the irregular proceed- 
 ings of the Patriarch of Alexandria ; it may be said to 
 embody the spirit of the whole code. Another Canon, 
 the 8th of Ephesus, occasioned by the attempts of the 
 Patriarch of Antioch upon the independence of Cy- 
 prus, is not less worth our attention and runs as fol- 
 lows : — " Our fellow-bishop Reginus, beloved by God, 
 rnd Zeno and Evagrius, most religious bishops of the 
 province of Cyprus, with him, have publicly declared 
 an innovation contrary to the ecclesiastical laws, and 
 the Canons of the Holy Fathers, and which touches the 
 liberty of all. ... The holy General Synod hath 
 therefore decreed that the rights of every province 
 formerly, and from the beginning, belonging to it be 
 preserved clear and inviolable, and that ancient custom 
 prevail : every metropolitan having power to take 
 copies of the things now transacted for his own s^cu 
 rity. But if any one introduce a regulation contrary 
 to the present determination^ the Holy General Synod 
 decrees that it be of no forced 
 
 To that extent were the Fathers of the Third Coun- 
 cil persuaded that unity in the Church would be much 
 more imperilled by superseding ancient and immemo- 
 rial rights to secure system, than by leaving a few 
 isolated bishops here and there independent of any ec- 
 clesiastical superior, and " autocephali," to discourage 
 innovation. I pass straight from these canons to the 
 pseudo-decretals and pseudo-donation, f that the con- 
 trast between them may be seen more readily. For 
 instance, S. Anacletus in an encyclic addressed to the 
 faithful is made to say : — " Should more difficult ques- 
 
 t Migne's Patrol., vol. exxx. 
 
40 
 
 tions arise, or should the case be one of high impor- 
 tance, or concern bishops of high standing, let them be 
 referred, in case of appeal, to the Apostolic See ; for 
 this the Apostles appointed ly command of our Lord^ 
 that all greater and more arduous questions should be 
 brought before the Apostolic See on which Christ 
 founded His universal Church." And again : '* The 
 Apostolic See was appointed by the Lord, and no one 
 else, head and hinge of all the Churches : and as a door 
 is swayed by its hinge, so, by disposal of the Lord; all 
 Churches are swayed as this holy See may dispose." Or, 
 as Constantine in his pseudo-donation is supposed to 
 have decreed, "We decree and ordain that it — the 
 Roman See — should have dominion as well over the 
 four principal Sees of Alexandria, Antioch, Jerusalem, 
 and Constantinople, as over all the Churches of God in 
 the'whole earth besides : and that its pontiff for the time 
 being should be superior and prince of all the w^orld, 
 and all things necessary to be ordained for the worship 
 of God, or for the faith of Christians, to be regulated 
 by his judgment.'* 
 
 Where have we a syllable, my Lord, of all this in the 
 genuine code of the Church : and can it be gainsaaid 
 for a moment to which of these two theories of jurisdic- 
 tion — that of the pseudo-decretals, or that of the code 
 — the development of the Papacy was due, or that it 
 was not effected literally by *' disturbing the bounds as- 
 signed by the fathers," as S. Bernard says, among 
 which are, conspicuously, the canons to which I have 
 called attention ? If the universal jurisdiction claimed 
 by the Roman Pontiff in the middle ages was not based 
 on the authority of the pseudo-decretals, why were they 
 so constantly cited in its support ? Where is the 
 
 ^\ ■ 
 
41 
 
 law of the whole Church that either attests or sanc- 
 tions it ? 
 
 Local synods and local churches cannot undertake to 
 legislate for the whole Church, much less repeal what 
 the whole Church has ordained. Concordats with kings, 
 a fortiori^ can do neither. Is it credible, that the Pa- 
 pacy should have so often appealed to these forgeries 
 for its extended claims, had it any better authorities — 
 distinctive authorities — to fall back upon ? Every dis- 
 putant on the Latin side finds in these forgeries a con- 
 vincing argument against the Greeks. " To prove this," 
 the universal jurisdiction of the Pope, said Abbot Bar- 
 laam, himself converted by them from the Greek Church, 
 to convert his countrymen — *' one need only look through 
 the decretal epistles of the Roman Pontiffs from S. 
 Clement to S. Silvester." In the twenty-fifth session 
 of the Council of Florence the provincial of the Do- 
 minicans is ordered to address the Greeks on the rights 
 of the Pope, the Pope being present. Twice he argues 
 from the pseudo-decretal of S. Anacletus : at another 
 time from a synodical letter of S. Athanasius to Felix : 
 at another time from a letter of Julius to the Easterns : 
 all forgeries. Afterwards, in reply to objections taken 
 by Bessarion, in conference, to their authority, apart 
 from any question of their authenticity, his position in 
 another speech is, *' that those decretal epistles of the 
 Popes being synodical epistles in each case, are entitled 
 to the same authority as the canons themselves." Can 
 we need further evidence of the weight attached to 
 them on the Latin side ? Popes appealed to them in 
 their official capacity as well as private doctors. Leo 
 IX. for instance, to the pseudo-donation in the prolix 
 epistle written by him, or in his name, to Michael Ce- 
 
42 
 
 rularius, Patriarch of Constantinople, on the eve of the 
 schism. Eugenius IV. to the pseudo-decretals of S. 
 Alexander and Julius, during the negotiations for heal- 
 ing it, in his instructions to the Armenians. But why, 
 my Lord, need I travel any further for proofs, when in 
 the Catechism of the Council of Trent, that has been 
 for three centuries the accredited instructor of the 
 clergy themselves, recommended authoritatively by so 
 many Popes, notwithstanding the real value of these 
 miserable impostures having been for three centuries 
 before the world — I find these words ;% "On the Pri. 
 macy of the Supreme Pontifi*, see the third epistle 
 (that is, pseudo-decretal) of Anacletus"! Such is, 
 actually, the authority to which the clergy of our own 
 days are referred, in the first instance^ for sound and 
 true views on the Primacy ; afterwards, when they 
 have mastered what is said there, they may turn to 
 three more authorities, all culled Hkewise from Gratian, 
 which they will not fail to interpret in accordance with 
 the ideas they have already imbibed. Nor can I refrain 
 from calling attention to a much more flagrant case. 
 On the Sacrament of Confirmation there had been 
 many questions raised by the Reformers calculated to 
 set people thinking, and anxious to know the strict 
 truth respecting it. On this, the Catechism proceeds as 
 follows : 
 
 " Since it has been already shewn how necessary it 
 would be to teach generally respecting all the Sacra- 
 ments, by whom they were instituted, so there is need 
 of similar instruction respecting Confirmation, that the 
 faithful may be the more attracted by the holiness of 
 
 X De Ord. Sacram., § 49. 
 
43 
 
 this Sacrament. Pastors must therefore explain that 
 not onl3'«was Christ our Lord the author of it, but that, 
 on the authority of the Roman Pontiff S. Fabian (the 
 pseudo-decretal attributed to him, that is), He instituted 
 the rite of the chrism, and the words used by the Cath- 
 olic Church in its administration." 
 
 Strange phenomenon indeed, that the asseverations of 
 such authorities should be still ordered to be taught as 
 Gospel from our pulpits in these days, when everybody 
 that is acquainted with the merest rudiments of ecclesi- 
 astical history knows how absolutely unauthenticated 
 they are in point of fact, and how unquestionably the 
 •authorities cited to prove therm are forgeries. Even 
 Estius says, "PZer/^'we opinantur Ajjostolos in confer- 
 endo conjirmationis sacramento^ chrismate nunquam 
 usosfuisse" though in his day men still believed in the 
 genuineness of the pseudo-decretals. Absolutely, my 
 Lord, with such evidence before me, I am unable to re- 
 sist the inference that truthfulness is not one of the 
 strongest characteristics of the teaching of even the 
 modern Church of Rome : for is not this a case palpa- 
 bly where its highest living authorities are both indiffer- 
 ent to having possible untruths preached from the pul- 
 pit, and something more than indifferent to having for- 
 geries, after their detection as such, adduced from the 
 pulpit to authenticate facts V Jealous enough they may 
 be that what they teach should be believed as true : 
 that it should be in strict accordance with actual truth 
 is another point, to which with the evidence before me 
 1 must suppose them callous. This, again, strongly re- 
 minds me of a conversation I had with the excellent 
 French priest who received me into the Roman Catholic 
 Church some time subsequently to that event. T had 
 
44 
 
 as an Anglican inquired very laboriously into the genu- 
 ineness of the *' Santa Casa : " and having visited Naz- 
 areth and Loretto since, and plunged into the question 
 anew at each place, came back more thoroughly con- 
 vinced than ever of its utterly fictitious character, not- 
 withstanding the privileges bestowed on it by so many 
 Popes. On stating my convictions to him, his only re- 
 ply was : " There are many things in the Breviary 
 which 1 do not believe myself." Oh ! the stumbling- 
 blocks of a system in the construction of which forger- 
 ies have been so largely used, in which it is still thought 
 possible for the clergy to derive edification from legends 
 which they cannot believe, and the people instruction 
 from works of acknowledged imposture ! Let us hope 
 that this will be one of the very first questions ventilated 
 at the ensuing Council. 
 
 2. A few words on the Crusades, and I sum up. My 
 thesis is that they completed the ecclesiastical aggrandise- 
 ment of the Papacy by force. Various judgments have 
 been formed of them from their having a social and po- 
 litical, as well as ecclesiastical side, from their having 
 been espoused by so many good as well as bad men, 
 from their having been commenced in enthusiasm though 
 they ended in crime. But view them iu what light we 
 please, they could never have taken place without the 
 Pope, and therefore, for good or for evil, he stands com- 
 mitted to them in every sense. Now even socially and 
 politically, I contend they were productive of much 
 greater calamity to mankind than good, but ecclesiasti- 
 cally beyond dispute they entailed as much ruin on the 
 Religion and Church of Christ as the worst that has 
 ever befallen either under the Turks. Socially, they 
 carried but little religion or virtue with them into the 
 
45 
 
 East apart from chivalry : which those who remained 
 there soon lost from tyrannising over those whom they 
 had come to set free : while those who returned deluged 
 Europe with their vices. Very different were the com- 
 modities imported into Europe by the fugitive Greeks 
 from Constantinople when it fell under the Turks. 
 Merchants, peacefully trading with the East, would have 
 supplied our ancestors with all the real improvements 
 supposed to have been derived through the Crusades, at 
 less crime by half Politically, the Crusades proved a 
 fatal mistake for humanity, let alone* true religion. It 
 has been often set to the credit of the Popes that they 
 saved Europe from the Turks. History says that they 
 opened the door by which the Turks came in. It is cer- 
 tain that the Latins proved the ruin of the Greek Em- 
 pire much more than the Turks. Had the Greek Em- 
 pire been left to itself, or helped honestly, it would have 
 barred the Turks from Europe to this day, and pre- 
 served all the civilization, population, and Christianity 
 contained in it for man. But ecclesiastically, that is, in 
 the province of all others appertaining to the Popes as 
 Heads of the Church, I can discover no redeeming fea- 
 ture whatever in the Crusades from first to last. The 
 combination of the cross with the sword demoralised all 
 orders alike. Under their influence Christian bishops 
 became generals of armies and shedders of blood in 
 hand-to-hand conflicts with spear and shield. What 
 was attempted by all after their first burst of enthusi- 
 asm was over, was to subjugate the Churches of the 
 East to that of Rome in a way opposed to the canons 
 immemorially and universally received by the Church. 
 The Easterns were trampled upon for maintaining their 
 rights, ejected from their churches as far as was possible, 
 
46 
 
 and supplanted by a rival hierarchy wherever the Cru- 
 sades conquered. The researches of the late Sir Fran- 
 cis Palgrave go far to prove that they actually set out 
 with this object : some of the first letters written home 
 by them to the Pope who organised them shew, at all 
 events, that the idea dawned upon them with their first 
 success. " As for the Turks," say they, *' and Pagans, 
 we have overcome them : but the heretical Greeks and 
 Armenians, Syrians and Jacobites, we cannot over- 
 come. Only come over to us, and complete that which 
 you have commenced with us, and the whole world will 
 obey you."* Now this was exactly what Innocent III. 
 completed on the capture of Constantinople by the 
 Franks and Venetians. Of all breaches of the canons 
 in ec(51esiastical history, it would be difficult to find one 
 more flagrant than the act of Innocent in consecrating 
 Morosini Patriarch of Constantinople, his own " vener- 
 able brother," as he had styled him but a short time be- 
 fore, John Camater, the rightful patriarch, being alive, 
 and expelled by force, without any previous trial or in- 
 quiry. The excuse for Innocent is that he believed in 
 the genuineness of the pseudo-decretals, and was acting 
 in accordance with other established precedents of 
 might made right. But his own letters testify to a mind 
 in perpetual conflict between his own better feelings 
 and the requirements of his office. He had excommun- 
 icated the Venetians already for having invaded Chris- 
 tian territory : he is subsequently found accepting their 
 conquests, and with his own hands consecrating their 
 nominee; What a plight for one calling himself Head 
 of the Church to be reduced to by his worldly ties I To 
 
 * Baluz. Miscel. iii. 60, cd Mansi. 
 
47 
 
 have to consent to the desolation by fire and sword of 
 what was then infinitely the largest and most flourishing 
 part of the Church by the other in contempt of his own 
 orders ; to look on while the ancient landmarks of the 
 Church were one after another uptorn by violence ; and 
 then, by accepting a share of the spoils himself, to iden- 
 tify not himself merely but his See forever, with the out- 
 rageousness of the whole proceeding ! What frightful 
 hypocrisy, what downright profanity for this ever to 
 have been designated a Crusade, a holy war, a war 
 waged in behalf of the life-giving Cross ! Who can 
 possibly believe in a God of justice, and doubt his hold- 
 ing the Papacy heavily responsible for all this ? 
 
 My Lord, there is a solemn document before the 
 world — I may say one of the solemnest — addressed to 
 us all without exception, of which the meanest is there- 
 fore justified in requesting explanations, should it con- 
 tain anything hard to be understood, or beyond his ken. 
 I confine my request to the following passage : "Known 
 unto all are the unwearied cares wherewith the Roman 
 pontiffs have laboured to defend the deposit of faith, the 
 discipline of the clergy, and their education in sanctity 
 and doctrine, as well as the holiness and dignity of the 
 matrimonial state, have promoted more and more the 
 Christian education of both sexes, and have studied to 
 provide for and to cherish religion, piety, and good 
 morals : to defend justice, and the tranquility, order and 
 prosperity of civil society." If this assertion is to be 
 understood de jure^ as a declaration of what the Roman 
 pontiffs ought to have done in all ages, nothing could 
 be more true : but if de facto^ as a declaration of what 
 they have done for the last thousand years, the history 
 of the Crusades alone would suffice to determine the 
 
48 
 
 extent to which the reverse is more true. Further com- 
 ment is needless. 
 
 What, then, are the conclusions ensuing from the 
 facts which have been adduced ? First, that although 
 Rome may have never erred from the Faith in point of 
 dogma, she has trifled with it on one point in practice 
 so often for the last thousand years, that her conduct 
 has been a stumbling-block to others, and occasioned a 
 division of the Eastern and Western Churches on doc- 
 trinal grounds. Secondly, that by allowing the primi- 
 tive code of the Church to be stealthily supplanted by 
 a new code based upon forgeries, which she herself ac- 
 cepted without examination, and endeavored to make 
 binding upon others by violence, she has occasioned a 
 division of the Eastern and Western Churches on disci- 
 plinary grounds : in other words, that it is to the flagrant 
 unfaithfulness and injustice of her governmental policy, 
 both as regards doctrine and discipline, that secession 
 from her Communion has been, and is still, due. 
 
 I am not aware that any demur to this conclusion, in 
 theory, can be raised even by maximisers. But I will 
 begin with what I trust I may designate without offence 
 the high orthodox. In a Review, stated on its title- 
 page to be '* Par les Peres de la Compagnie de Jesus," 
 and therefore committing the whole Society to its con- 
 tents, I read, exactly two years ago this month, as fol- 
 lows, in a paper on the pseudo-decretals.* "Cette nou- 
 velle discipline" — that of the pseudo-decretals, what he 
 had just called " la reforme pseudo-Isidorienne ! ! ! — 
 6tait bonne assurement." It would have been difficult 
 for the writer to have said otherwise, for the reasons 
 
 ^ Etudes Religieuses, No. 47, p. 392. 
 
49 
 
 he gives — " Adoptee par S. Nicholas en 865 par le 
 huitieme concile oecumenique en 870" — not received by 
 the East — ^'confirmee far le concile de Trent en 1564, 
 elle est dej^uis neufsiecles le droit commun dans VEglise 
 Catholiquey I ! ! Have I said more than this, namely, 
 that our existing system originated with, and is lased 
 on, the pseudo-decretals V To his infinite credit, the 
 writer adds, " Mais Tancienne discipline 6tait bonne 
 aussi, puisque, pendant les huit premiers siecles, I'Eglise 
 n'en avait point connu d'autre ... La nouvelle disci- 
 pline pouvait par consequent etre utile: elle n etait 
 point necessaire. Ce qu'il est impossible de justifier et 
 meme d'excuser, c'est le moyen employe par le pseudo- 
 Isidore pour arriver a ses fins. Le mensonge demeure 
 toujours un mal, meme lorsque celui qui en use se pro- 
 pose un bien. Non faciamus mala ut'ceniant bona, Et 
 que Ton ne vienne pas nous dire : il n'y a pas un im- 
 posture, mais seulement malentendu. Que Ton ne re- 
 jette pas la meprise, dont le monde Chretien d Qtk. la 
 dupe pendant sept siecles^ sur un concours de circonstan- 
 ces independantes de la volonte du pseudo-Isidore. 
 Non, il y a eu de sa part mensonge premedite." In 
 fine : " Les fausses decretals. ?^'on^ produit que du maV 
 Aye, but whose business was it to see'that Christendom 
 should not have been duped and damaged in this way, 
 and to have said " non possumus" a thousand times be- 
 fore they allowed it, instead of becoming active parties 
 to it themselves ? However, it is admitted on all hands 
 that Popes may make " serious mistakes' as Church- 
 governors. " To every Pope," said the DuUin llexieiCj 
 in July last, " appertains the office on the one hand of 
 teaching the Church : on the other hand, of ruling and 
 piloting her. It is admitted by all Catholics without 
 4 
 
• 50 
 
 exception that a Pope may make serious mistakes in 
 exercising this latter office, though they well know that 
 on the whole he obtains most special assistance of the 
 Holy Ghost in ifs execution." Certainly, nothing but 
 " the most special assistance of the Holy Ghost" could 
 have prevented their "serious mistakes'' from becoming 
 more serious, or overruled the effects of their misrule 
 so as to exhibit the entire dialogue between our Lord 
 and S. Peter on a well-known occasion, interpreted by 
 the light of events in the clearest manner. Doctrinal 
 inerrancy was promised by our Lord to S. Peter, stand- 
 ing at' the head, and speaking in the name, of all the 
 Apostles, in reply to a question addressed to them all, 
 and not to him alone. His successors, down to the 
 President of the Council of Florence himself, have ac- 
 knowledged, as I shall point out presently, that they 
 have never spoken in the name of the whole Church 
 since the schism. 
 
 The very first time S. Peter essayed teaching on his 
 own judgment, after his confession^ and apart from the 
 rest, he was told by our Lord authoritatively ; " Thou 
 savourest not the things that be of God, but those that 
 be of men." The other Apostles, therefore, had they 
 followed or upheld him in what he then taught, would 
 have done wrong. In the same way, admitting all the 
 doctrinal inerrancy possessed by S. Peter to have been 
 bequeathed by him to his successors, as it has not plain- 
 ly preserved them from allowing the Creed of the 
 Church to be interpolated at the will of kings uncanon- 
 ically : from upholding forgeries as authentic testimo- I 
 ny: from perpetrating the most iniquitous acts them* 
 selves, under cover of their authority, and citing them 
 in proof of some of the gravest points in their own dis- 
 
51 
 
 tinctive teaching respecting the Sacranients, unsupport- 
 ed by other testimony, it cannot follow from the mere 
 possession of this gift by them ever so completely, that 
 corporate union with Rome can never be maintained 
 too dearly, or that disunion with Rome may never have 
 been a duty. The Popes are not to be followed where 
 they have erred, any more than S. Peter : therefore, 
 when they made fellowship with their errors indis- 
 pensable to fellowship with their See, so that one 
 could not be maintained without the other, the only 
 course left was to abandon both. Unerring faith is nec- 
 essar}'- for the Church, but it is not all that is necessary 
 — honesty, justice, truthfulness, meekness, and self-de- 
 nial, are among the determining principles that bind 
 Christians together, as well as their faith. Unerring 
 faith must govern in conformity with all these, or it must 
 cease to govern. It cannot bear its possessor harmless 
 for moral obliquities of what kind soever in the conduct 
 of the body politic: it will but serve to enhance the 
 guilt of its possessor, like the prophetic gift of the high- 
 priest who condemned Christ ; and ceasing to govern, 
 it must cease to speak, for it is tied to speak at the head 
 and in the name of the whole body. The lungs are in 
 the body, though the mouth is in the head : therefore, 
 when separated, neither can utter in the same sense as 
 when united, not that their separation need in the cor- 
 porate sense be fatal to their vitality. Every truth 
 which they had enunciated infallibly when united might 
 be retained equally by both after they had parted com- 
 pany, and both might be preserved from error in their 
 isolation by a special providence, till their re-union. 
 Both too might speak, and speak the truth equally, but 
 what they said would not be beyond question or revi- 
 
52 
 
 sion. It might prove as true as any of the most infalli- 
 ble truths ever promulgated, but not having the promise 
 of infallibility attached to it under the circumstances 
 under which it was uttered, it would require that ple- 
 nary confirmation whicl^ union alone can ensure. 
 
 This theory, besides harmonizing with facts which it is 
 impossible to gloss over or dispute, receives additional 
 countenance from the action as well as the language of 
 the Popes since the schism, and explains existing phenom- " 
 en a much more reasonably, as I shall hope to shew, than 
 any other. In general, the action of Kome has been 
 prompt, peremptory, and decisive, almost to a fault ; 
 bold almost to rashness ; unhesitating almost to ario- 
 gance: she seems intent on impressing people with 
 nothing so much as her own self-sufficiency : her utter 
 inability to commit a mistake of any kind, or be in the 
 wrong. Contrast this with her extraordinary shiftiness ■ 
 and indecision on the two Creeds, the old and the inter- 
 polated. When has she ever affirmed them to be doc- 
 trinally the same : what, according to her, is the exact • 
 difference between their respective professiorjs on the 
 Procession ? As to their use, we can onl}^ go back to 
 ground already traversed. Leo III. forbade the use of 
 the interpolated form. His successors winked at it, and 
 ended by adopting it themselves : still, they doubted a- 
 bout enforcing it on those who clung to the oid form. 
 Gregory X. read the letters of the Easterns at the Sec- 
 ond Council of Lyons, begging to be excused using the 
 interpolated Creed, without answering them: but the 
 Creed was thrice chanted there in that form exclusive- 
 ly notwithstanding. Innocent v., 'who succeeded him,, 
 was imperative that the " Filloque" clause '' should not 
 be omitted on any account by them in chanting the: 
 
53 
 
 C!reed." Nicholas III. went further, and added that 
 '' as unity of faith could not consist with diversity in those 
 that professed . . . therefore, the desire of the Roman 
 Church was, that it should be chanted uniformly with 
 the additional clause by the Greeks as well as the Lat- 
 ins." This was, in eflect, deciding that the old form of 
 the creed should be superseded : but it was never car- 
 ried out. When the subject was revived at the Coun- 
 cil of Florence, Rome was more diplomatic than she had 
 ever been previously. No Creed at all was recited 
 there, nor was any hint dropped whether both forms 
 conjointly, or one without the other, should be considered 
 the Creed of the Church. These various policies having 
 to be reconciled with each other, it was at length ruled 
 by Clement VIII. and Benedict XIY. successively . 
 <* Grmci credere tenentur etiam a Fllio Spiritum S. pro- 
 cedere, sed non tenentur pronuntiare, nisi subesset scan- 
 dalum." I am indebted to you, my Lord, for directing 
 my attention^to this position more particularly. Let us 
 see how it' would have read in the mouth of S. Athana- 
 sius. " Ariani credere tenentur Filiurn Homousion esse 
 cum Patre, sed non tenentur pronuntiare^ nisi subesset 
 scandalum." The Alexandrine fathers, a. d. 362, under 
 S. Athanasius, probably went greater lengths in conde- 
 scendence than any Council before or since : but to the 
 extent of allowingTthe Nicehe Creed to be recite^ by 
 heretics without the very word inserted in it to con- 
 found their heresy, Pope Liberius himself, had he been 
 present, could not have induced them to go ; What then ? 
 Were Clement VIIL and Benedict XIY. either-of them 
 disposed to be lukewarm with heresy ? I think not. 
 The true meaning of their decision must be that in their 
 inmost souls they were far from considering the Greeks 
 
64 
 
 heretics. How, indeed, could they, seeing that at the 
 Councif of Florence the representatives of the Eastern 
 Church sat, debated, and subscribed on the same terms 
 as the Western ? There had also been a passage in the 
 original decree passed at Basle for inviting them thither, 
 deliberately cancelled, because the word " heretics" or 
 " dissenters" had crept into it unawares, as was said, 
 in speaking of the Greeks. Further, on what grounds 
 had the Councils of Lyons and Florence themselves 
 been summoned ? As Gregory X. puts it : — " Because 
 of his extreme bitterness in beholding the rent of the 
 Universal Church foreshadowed in the net of Peter the 
 fisherman, that hrahe for the multitude of fishes which 
 it enclosed : we do not say divided as regards its faith. . 
 . . but notoriously and lamentably divided as regards 
 its faithful members." Or, as Eugenius IV. told his en- 
 voys ; " It is for the union of the Western and Eastern 
 Church, so long and ardently desired by us, that you are 
 sent ;" or, as he told the Greeks when he despaired of 
 union : "In what shall we be benefitted {"f we fail to 
 unite the Church of God ?" * It was in strictest con- 
 formity with this view that the Council of Florence was 
 to have been accepted on both sides, had it succeeded, 
 as the Eighth ^Ecumenical Council : the title under which 
 its acts were literally first published in Latin, a. d. 
 1526, in the Pontificate of Clement VII, and under which 
 Cardinal Pole still speaks of it in his work of so much 
 interest to us all, *' The Reformation of England," dated 
 Lambeth, 1556. And now, in our own days, there is 
 the Letter Apostolic of Pius IX. "to the bishops of the 
 Churches of the Eastern Rite" not in communion with 
 
 *I have collected many more such passages in Part 11. of i 
 my book, v. pp. 259—61, ahd 337—40. 
 
55 
 
 him, containing the following sentence, of which the ink 
 is scarce dry : ^'We conjure you to come to this General . 
 Council, as your predecessors came to the Second Coun- 
 cil of Lyons, held by the blessed Gregory, our predeces- 
 sor of venerated memory, and to the Council of Florence^ 
 celebrated hy our predecessor of happy memory, Euge- 
 nius IV. : that, thus renewing the bonds of ancient af- 
 fection, and recalling to life that ancient peace, the 
 heavenly and blessed gift of Christ, which in the course 
 of ages has become lost to us, we may make the serene 
 brightness of longed-for union shine resplendent before 
 all, after being sadly clouded, and after the painful dark- 
 ness of long-lived discussion.'* 
 
 If the Easterns are invited to come to this General 
 Council as their predecessors came to the Councils of 
 Lyons and Florence, the inference is inevitable that his 
 present Holiness equally throws himself into the senti- 
 ments of his predecessors, and adopts their language. 
 That is to say, Pius IX. beholds, and has acted on be- 
 holding, the same spectacle that caused Gregory X. 
 so much anguish — the rent of the Universal Church 
 foreshadowed in the net of Peter the fisherman, that 
 brake .... not, indeed, divided as regards its 
 faith .... but notoriously and lamentably di- 
 vided as regards its faithful members : and his object at 
 the forthcoming Council will be what Eugenius IV. as- 
 sured the Greeks his was, "to unite the Church of God" 
 in that sense. Therefore, not less inevitably, the formal 
 teaching of the Popes, ever since the schism began till 
 now, has been that the Church is divided as regards her 
 members, and that* there are Churches forming part of 
 the Catholic Church, which are, and have been for ages, 
 out of communion with their See. The Popes, indeed, 
 
56 
 
 have never practically said this of any Churches but 
 the Eastern, and of the Eastern but those communicat- 
 ing with the Patriarch of Constantinople ; Still, in ad- 
 mitting thus much, they most unquestionably concede 
 that what we call the Roman Catholic Church has not 
 constituted the whole Church, nor they themselves con- 
 sequently spoken at the head of the whole Church, since 
 the schism. To an impartial observer it would appear 
 as though they were far from feeling easy themselves 
 under the circumstances : far from certain, that if their 
 title-deeds were examined into, their de facto position 
 might not be shaken : unable to divest themselves of the 
 idea that the Easterns had not been wholly to blame for 
 withdrawing from their Communion, nor were chargea- 
 ble with heresy for withholding their assent to the adop- 
 tion of the '•''Filioque '' clause. Else, why not have sum- 
 moned a General Council long since to condemn them 
 as heretics, instead of inviting them to a General Coun- 
 cil again and again to discuss doctrine under their pres- 
 idency ? 
 
 To the West, where they ruled by patriarchal as well 
 as papal right, they might well be supposed to have 
 adopted a more confident tone since the Reformation ; 
 but the closer it is scrutinised the further it is seen to be 
 from unhesitating and decisive. Those w-ho had re- 
 nounced their Communion were invited to the Council 
 of Trent not to be condemned, but to be heard. If Lu- 
 ther was excommunicated twice, the Confession of 
 Augsburg has never as yet been anathematized: if 
 Queen Elizabeth was deposed, the Council of Trent had 
 abstained deliberately from affirming that the bishops 
 w^ho had been consecrated in her reign and at her bid- 
 ding were no bishops. Even the Thirty-nine Articles 
 
57 ^ 
 
 escaped censure. Hence, ever since the Council of 
 Trent separated until now, attempts have been made 
 continually; whether successful or not, to reconcile the 
 Confession of Augsburg and the Thirty-nine Articles 
 with its decrees. Anglican Orders, if they have not 
 been recognized in practice, have never been declared 
 invalid, still less the grounds of their invalidity set forth. 
 It might be said that all this has been the effect of 
 moderation and paternal tenderness on the part of the 
 Popes : there can be little doubt that it has commend- 
 ed itself to their policy ; still, as one of the most warmly 
 debated points in modern times has been the' power of 
 the Popes and their true relation to the Church, who 
 can fail to be struck with the absence of any formal as- 
 sertion on their part that the terms " Catholic " and 
 " Eoman Catholic " are strictly convertible — with the 
 fact that they have never striven to appropriate the 
 term " Catholic," pure and simple, to their own Com- 
 munion, but have commonly called it themselves, and 
 been content that it should be called by others, the Ro- 
 man Catholic Church, as being its strict and adequate 
 title. No doubt they have never failed to assert the 
 doctrine of their own headship by divine right over the 
 whole Church in the strongest terms, and the teaching 
 of all those who obey them has always been that^ the 
 Catholic Church has a visible Head upon earth, under 
 Christ, called the Pope : still all such teaching, read by 
 the light of their own admissions respecting the Eastern 
 Church, is seen to be but a declaration of what ought to 
 be, not of what is ; a picture of the ideal or of the prim- 
 itive, not of the actually existing Church. Where, in- 
 deed, is the part of Christendom seriously purporting to 
 call itself the Catholic Church in these days ? Roman- 
 
58 
 
 ■if 
 
 Cailiolic, Anglo-Catholic, Episcopal, Orthodox, or Pres- 
 byterian, all in their degree seem influenced by some 
 hidden spell to abstain from arrogating to themselves 
 or attributing to each other the epithet of '* Catholic " 
 without qualification, as it is applied to the Church in 
 the Creed. Test existing phenomena by this theory, 
 and the results are plain and straightforward. One of 
 its logical results would be that the administration of the' 
 Christian Sacraments might be frequented with profit 
 outside the pale of the Roman Communion. Is this 
 confirmed by experience ? My Lord, my own expe- 
 rience, which is confined to the single Communion in 
 which you formerly bore office, that of the Church of 
 England, says emphatically that it is : and there is no 
 canon or ordinance that I know of forbidding me to 
 maintain it. You have preceded me yourself in expa- 
 tiating on thjB workings of the Holy Spirit in the Church 
 of England with your accustomed eloquence, and have 
 not hesitated to attribute to its members many graces 
 in virtue of the Sacrament of Baptism which you allow 
 they administer on the whole validly , but there you 
 stop. I feel morally constrained to go further still. If 
 I had to die for it, 1 could not possibly subscribe to the 
 idea that the Sacraments to which I am admitted week 
 after week in the Roman Communion —Confession and 
 the Holy Eucharist, for instance — confer any graces, 
 any privileges, essentially diffierent from what I used to 
 derive from those same Sacraments, frequented with the 
 same dispositions, in the Church of England. On the 
 contrary, I go so far as to say, that comparing one with 
 another strictly some of the most edifying communions 
 that I can remember in all my life were made in the 
 Church of England and administered to me by some 
 
59 
 
 that have since submitted to be re-ordained in the 
 Church of Rome ; a ceremony, therefore, which, except 
 as qualifying them to undertake duty there, I must con- 
 sider superfluous. Assuredly, so far as the registers 
 of my own spiritual life carry me, 1 have not been able 
 to discover any greater preservatives from sin, any 
 greater incentives to holiness, in any that I have receiv- 
 ed since : though, in saying this, I am far froin intending 
 any derogation to the latter. I frequent them regular- 
 ly : I prize them exceedingly : I have no fault to find 
 with their administration or their administrators in 
 general. All that I was ever taught to expect from 
 them they do foi me, due allowance being made for my 
 own shortcomings. Only I cannot possibly subscribe to 
 the notion of my having been a stranger to their bene- 
 ficial effects till I joined the Roman Communion, and I 
 deny that it was my faith alone that made them what 
 they were to me before then, unless it is through my 
 faith alone that they are what they are to me now. 
 Holding myself that there are realities attaching to the 
 Sacraments of an oljective character, I am persuaded, 
 and have been more and more confirmed in this con- 
 viction as I have grown older, that the Sacraments ad- 
 ministered in the Church of England are realities, ob- 
 jective realities, to the same extent as any that I could 
 now receive at your hands : so that you yourself there- 
 fore consecrated the Eucharist as truly when you were 
 Vicar of Lavington as you have ever done since. This 
 may or may not be your own belief: but you shall be 
 one of my foremost witnesses to its credibility, for I am 
 far from basing it on the experiences of my own soul. 
 My Lord, I have always been accustomed to look upon 
 the Sacraments as so many means of grace, and to esti- 
 
60 
 
 mate their value, not by the statements of theologians, 
 but by their effects on myself, my neighbours, and man- 
 kind at large. And the vast difference between the 
 moral tone of society in the Christian and the pagan 
 worlds I attribute not merely to the superiority of the 
 rule of life prescribed in the Gospels, but to the inher- 
 ent grace of the Sacraments enabling and assisting us 
 to keep it to the extent we do. Taking this principle 
 for my guide, I have been engaged constantly since I 
 joined the Roman Communion in instituting compari- 
 sons between members of the Church of England and 
 members of the Church of Rome generally, and be- 
 tween our former and our present selves in particular ; 
 or between Christianity in England and on the Conti- 
 nent ; and the result in each caje has been to confirm 
 me in the belief which I have expressed already, that 
 the notion of the Sacraments exercising any greater in- 
 fluence upon the heart and life in the Church of Rome 
 than in the Church of England, admitting the disposi- 
 tions of those who frequent them to be th ^ same in both 
 cases, is not merely preposterous, but as contrary both 
 to faith and fact as is the opinion that the Pope is Anti- 
 christ and the Man of Sin. My Lord, there is no per- 
 son in his sober senses who could affirm that you, for 
 instance, began to be a devout, earnest, intelligent follow- 
 er of Christ, an admirable master of the inner and the 
 hidden life, a glorious example of self-sacrifice, a deep 
 expounder of revealed mysteries and Gospel truths, 
 when you embraced the Roman Communion ; or that 
 all those graces which you exhibited previously in the 
 sight of men could be deduced from the one rite which 
 you received unconsciously as a child, counteracted by 
 all the bad and unwholesome food on which, according 
 
61 
 
 to this hypothesis, you must have lived ever after- 
 wards. 
 
 In the same way there is no ordinary person in his 
 sober senses who could affect to discover any fundamen- 
 tal change for the better in you, morally or religiously, 
 now from what you were then. There are some, on 
 the contrary, to my knowledge, of your existing flock 
 who profess that they have not half the liking for the 
 sermons which they hear you deliver as Archbishop of 
 Westminster that they have for the dear old volumes 
 which you published as Archdeacon of Chichester, a& 
 fresh and full of fragrance to their instincts as ever. And 
 I have heard the same said of another, whose parochial 
 sermons, hailed as a masterpiece on their first appear- 
 ance, have just burst forth into a second spring. Peo- 
 ple say that the sermons which ci-devant Anglican cler- 
 gymen of note preached formerly, read so much more 
 natural than any that they have since delivered from 
 Roman Catholic pulpits. They argued impartially, 
 then, as men whose sole desire it was both to get at the 
 truth, and uphold it at any cost: they never feared look- 
 ing facts in the face, and were as little given to exag- 
 gerate those that made for them, as to keep out of sight 
 or evade by subterfuge those which they could neith- 
 er excuse nor explain. They were never tired of con- 
 fessing their own sins or shortcomings. In a word, their 
 tone was frank, honest, and manly. Now, they may 
 preach with the same energy, but it is as though 
 they preached under constraint or dictation. Either 
 they are high-flown and exaggerated : or else punctil- 
 ious and reserved : weighing each word as if they were 
 repeatmg a task : always artificial, never themselves : 
 as if committed to a thesis, which they must defend at 
 
62 
 
 all risks, and to which all facts must be accommodated, 
 or else denied. Hence, do what they will, there is a 
 distinction between themselves and the cause they ad- 
 vocate, which cannot fail to strike the most ordinary 
 listener ; their words no longer carry the moral argu- 
 ment {rfiiaij nioTig) with them that they once did even 
 among their followers : and the judgment of public 
 opinion on them is that they are vapid and destitute of 
 . force by comparison. What people say of those gene- 
 rally who have become Roman Catholics in England of 
 late years, is that they have deteriorated as a body rath- 
 er than advanced. The foremost of them have not pro- 
 gressed in any perceptible degree — perceptible by oth- 
 ers, that is beyond the high standard to which they had 
 attained before, as their lives, their writings, and their 
 sermons testified : others, every allowance being made 
 for the peculiar trials to which they have been sub- 
 jected, have notoriously descended to a lower level 
 of Christianity since they became Roman Catholics, 
 from that in which they had been working previously ; 
 and some have been driven from their moorings — in ap- 
 pearance at least — altogether. All this I hear said ; and 
 as far as my own experience goes, it is quite true : and 
 for the life of me I cannot infer any thing else from it 
 than that sacramental grace is equally derivable from 
 the same ordinances in both Communions, according to 
 the dispositions of those who frequent them, and is not 
 more indefectible in the one than the other.. What I 
 have seen of Roman Catholics myself, since joining 
 their Church, all points to the same conclusion. Till then, 
 I knew them only by report, which, founded on preju- 
 dice, was far from being in their favour : and I was 
 horrified to find how shamefully it had misrepresented 
 
63 
 
 them. 1 found them— I mean the educated classes— all 
 that in a general estimate, members of a Christian 
 Church should be: God-serving, charitable, conscien- 
 tious, refined, intelligent: and I could discover nothing 
 idolatrous or superstitious in their worship, nor anything 
 at variance with first principles in their daily life. At 
 home or abroad I was equally surprised to find them 
 so different from what my traditional informants had 
 described them, with so much to admire where I had 
 supposed there was so much to reprobate. But after- 
 wards — when my first emotions consequent on this dis- 
 covery had subsided — when I came to ask myself the 
 question, are these, then, the only true Christians that 
 you have ever known in life : and till you conversed 
 with them, had you never conversed with a true Chris- 
 tian before ? I can scarce describe the recoil that it oc- 
 casioned in me ! Why my own father and mother would 
 have compared with the best of them in all the virtues 
 ordinarily possessed by Christians living in the world 
 and discharging their duties conscientiously towards 
 God and their neighbours, in, through, and for Christ. 
 *' All for Jesus" was as much their motto as it could .be 
 of any parents in Christendom: and well indeed would 
 it be for all Roman Catholic children if they were bles- 
 sed with no worse fathers amd mothers than mine. 
 Then I have, or have had, relatives and friends in num- 
 bers members of the Church of England, whose homes 
 I will undertake to say are to all intents and purposes 
 as thoroughly Christian as any to be found elsewhere : 
 and it would be sheer affectation or hypocrisy in me 
 were I to pretend the contrary : or else to claim for 
 my own friends and relatives any peculiar excellence 
 distinguishing them from average specimens of the Ang- 
 
64 
 
 lican body. For a calm, unpresutning, uniform stan- 
 dard of practical Christianity, I have seen nothing as 
 yet amongst ourselves in any country superior to that of 
 the English parsonage and its surroundings : go where 
 I will, I am always thrown back upon one of these as the 
 most perfect ideal of a Christian family : a combination 
 amongst its members of the highest intelligence with the 
 most unsullied purity and earnest faith 1 ever witnessed 
 on earth. It was a privilege to have witnessed it. It 
 was not far from Brackley. You may have known sev- 
 eral such yourself. On describing the ** daily round" 
 of Christian life in the English Church— such as I had 
 been accustomed to from a child— to the excellent 
 priest who received me into communion on the Conti- 
 nent — our family prayers, .our grace before and after 
 meals, our readings of the Scriptures, our observance of 
 Sunday, our services at church, our Sunday Schools — 
 what did he do but mount his pulpit the Sunday follow- 
 ing, and embodying all that I had told him in a fervid 
 discourse, expatiate to a fashionable congregation in 
 Paris on the many lessons of piety which they had to 
 learn from their separated brethren on the other side 
 of the Channel. '' Such, too, was our general practice," 
 he said to me in a private conversation, *' before the 
 Revolution : and we hope to recover it : but as yet 
 there are few families where it exists." Of my coun- 
 trymen he observed, '^ Leur bonne fol est acceptee pour 
 leur vraie foi." I took this explanation on trust at the 
 time, but have since given it up as inadequate. For if 
 it be said that faith and integrity of purpose make 
 members of the Church of England what they are with- 
 out ihe Sacraments in mature life, by what argument I 
 should like to know can it be proved that it is not to 
 
65 
 
 their faith and integrity of purpose solely that members 
 of the Roman Catholic Church are indebted likewise for 
 all the progress they make ? The only test of the effi- 
 caciousness of the Sacraments appreciable by common 
 sense lies in their influence upon conduct. If therefore 
 it were capable of proof, as distinct from assertion which 
 it is not, both that all the Sacraments administer- 
 ed in the Church of England but one were shams: and 
 all administered in the Church of Rome, without excep- 
 tion, realities, how comes it that we are not incompara- 
 bly more exalted characters ourselves than we were 
 formerly : or that Roman Catholic countries on the 
 Continent are not incomparably more penetrated to 
 the core with Christianity than England ? Both these 
 points, I dare say, might be affirmed by some : but 
 they are denied, and I maintain with much more reason, 
 by others : and therefore at best it can only be the de- 
 gree to which the thing exists, not whether it exists at 
 all, which is in question. 
 
 I have already spoken of the eloquent sermon I 
 heard preached in Paris, in which the Christian practi- 
 ces of my old friends in England were held up for imi- 
 tation. The preacher himself had a history of his own 
 hardly less eloquent. He had quitted the cure of one 
 of the most important churches in Paris to found a re- 
 ligious community for the purpose of raising the tone 
 of the French clergy. What had impelled him ? Sim- 
 ply, the extremely devout demeanor of two ci-devant An- 
 glican clergymen lately become Oratorians, whom he had 
 watched saying their masses at one of the altars in his 
 own church from his confessional. Certainly they could 
 not have said a Roman Mass before they became Jlo- 
 man Catholic priests; but for all their preliminary 
 
66 
 
 training in piety they were beholden as certainly to the 
 Communion which theyhad just quitted; so that they who 
 had been educated in Anglicanism were the means of 
 suggesting to a Roman Catholic priest in France how 
 much room there was for improvement in the training of 
 his fellow clergy. I have another anecdote to tell of 
 the same kind from what happened to me when in 
 Spain much more recently. I spent the latter part of 
 Lent, including Holy Week, at Seville ; and had looked 
 forward to the ceremonies immediately preceding Easter 
 there with no small interest. But when the time for 
 them arrived, I never saw services more coldly con- 
 ducted or more scantily attended, and ceremonies less 
 productive, in appearance at least, of any devotional 
 feelings. I returned from them each time pained and 
 scandalized. About the middle of Holy Week I fortu- 
 nately had occasion to go to my banker's ; and on enter- 
 ing I found a priest there waiting like myself to be 
 served. Something induced me to accost him in Eng- 
 lish, on his replying to me in the same, we soon entered 
 warmly into conversation. He turned out to be a young 
 priest who had " served his time " at the Brompton Ora- 
 tory, though not a native of England. I confided to 
 him what I thought of the services. He expressed no 
 surprise: on the contrary he dissuaded my going again 
 to the churches I named. *' Come to our church," he 
 said, " and I think you will see things done as they 
 ought to be, and a very different style of congregation." 
 I went and found it all as he had told me. There was 
 life in the services, earnestness in the celebrants, devo- 
 tion in the worshippers. The Brompton Oratory, that 
 heart-stirring creation of old Oxford and Cambridge 
 men, had sent out missionaries to evangelise^^Seville. 
 
 I 
 
67 
 
 Nobody who had frequented and compared it with the 
 churches all round could dispute its claim to be the be- 
 ginning of a new order of things there. As I am in 
 Spain already, I may as well go on. Froin Seville I 
 proceeded to a small village in the neighbourhood of 
 the Sierra of most primitive description. There I re- 
 mained several months. There was early Mass most 
 mornings of the week : but I seldom, if ever, saw any 
 but women at it : and these rarely more than from ten 
 to twenty. But on Sundays at High Mass, the church, 
 which was of considerable size for a village church, 
 was crammed full of men and women, the former 
 thronging the choir as far as it would contain them, 
 where I sat myself. I took some pains to examine, but 
 I never could discover anybody, man, woman, or child, 
 in the whole congregation who used a book besides mj^- 
 self : and whatever may have been their inmost feel- 
 ings, which I do not pretend to decipher, the coun- 
 tenances of the men bespoke nothing but listless ap- 
 athy. Vespers were invariably attended by the priest, 
 one cantor, and myself ; in all, three, and to the best of 
 my remembrance, never more. There were no even- 
 ing services of any description while I. was there. The 
 only spark of devotion I ever witnessed — and I record 
 it with as much pleasure — was that now and then I 
 used to see parties of four or five women sitting outside 
 their doors in the cool of the evening reciting their 
 chaplet. The priest was affable aiid intelligent ; and 
 seemed anxious to promote education : but he was a 
 good deal mixed up in the secular affairs of his 
 neighbours as well : and the honours of his house were 
 always done b}^ one who went by the name of his»** cu- 
 gina," but I was laughed at for supposing it meant 
 
68 
 
 the relationship that we understand by it. 1 could only 
 therefore account for the average respect that was paid 
 him on the supposition that such thinpfs were not uncom- 
 mon. Altogether I quitted this village feeling strongly that 
 there was certainly not more real Christianity practised 
 in it than in my own native parish in Wales, if so much ; 
 that the Welch there were better educated and more 
 intelligent in their devotions beyond comparison than 
 these specimens of Andalusia, and that the clergyman 
 there could not at all events have a woman sitting at 
 the head of his table who was neither his wife nor his 
 relation. Yet this was a country that had remained 
 exclusively Roman Catholic since its release from the 
 Moors. From the south of Spain I proceed to the gar- 
 den of France, the heart of Tourraine. There I passed 
 some time pleasantly enough at a country house, long 
 before T joined the Roman Catholic Church ; yet I 
 studied its workings then with no less interest. As 
 there was no Anglican church within reach, I accom- 
 panied the family to the parish church, from two to 
 three miles off, just about the distance of my own at 
 home. Church-going was confined to Mass on Sun- 
 days, high or low : Low when any of the family com- 
 municated, which was never oftener than once a month ; 
 High Mass otherwise. This was the only public service, 
 to which any body, speaking generally, went in the 
 neighbourhood: and that over, everybody met, gos- 
 siped, and promenaded up and down the village till the 
 carriages were ready to take them home. This was pre- 
 cisely the custom of my own neighbourhood : but with 
 this difference, that most of the gentry came to church 
 twice on Sundays, and some of them likewise to occa- 
 sional services during the week in Lent, Advent, or 
 
69 
 
 Christmas time. There was one circumstance connected 
 with my Sundays in France, there or elsewhere, which 
 I shall not easily forget. I was always asked to the best 
 parties, and to the best hunting or shooting on Sun- 
 days : and being a keen sportsman in those days, it was 
 no small act of self-denial in obedience to my Anglican 
 principles to forego the latter. Well ! the finest '' bat- 
 tue " to which I ever had a chance of going was at an 
 historic chateau not far from where I was staying in 
 Tourraine, where, by the way, the church stood just 
 outside the grounds, and the ^dy of the chateau, to her 
 credit be it spoken, attended Mass daily ; the usual 
 congregation, however, being herself and the acolyte, 
 besides the priest. As this battue was on Sunday, I 
 declined it equally and went to church. Immediately 
 before the Gospel— just in time to save Mass, that is — 
 a bustle was heard outside the building, which made the 
 congregation look up ; and presently the principal 
 actors in the " chasse " entered, leaving their guns, 
 dogs, and game with their retainers in the porch, who 
 were thus corporally present. With the last Gospel 
 they had disappeared to resume their sport. I thought 
 then, and still think, that so far we did things in reality 
 better in England a hundredfold, notwithstanding that 
 appearances were kept up there. I could till a volume 
 with anecdotes to the same effect, all gathered from 
 personal experience during my travels abroad in most 
 parts of Europe and round the Mediterranean ; but I 
 can only find space here for one more, which I select 
 from the point of comparison still being with my own 
 native parish in m!les. This parish was a Vicarage, 
 from which the Incumbent drew £150 a year or there- 
 abouts, and a dignitary of the Mother Church of the 
 
70 
 
 diocese £1100 or £1200 a year. The Ecclesiastical 
 Commissioners have since removed this grievance — a 
 practical grievance it was — and have subdivided the par- 
 ish. Passing one summer at Porto di Fermo when it 
 "was Papal territory, I frequented the church there jwhich 
 was always well attended by both sexes, on week days 
 as on Sundays, and was greatly edified by the earnest- 
 ness and devotion of the parish priest. I inquired what 
 his salary w^as, and was told, and if I remember right 
 he confirmed it to me with his own lips, that it amount- 
 ed to no more than £80 or two thousand francs. The 
 Cardinal Archbishop, some of the parishioners told me 
 with much warmth, was in the enjoyment of w^hat we 
 should call the great tithes : " and we never see him," 
 they added, " except as he passes to or from his vilJge- 
 giatura in the neighborhood where he spends his vast 
 wealth." I cannot, of course, vouch for the entire ac- 
 curacy of their statements, I only know that they 
 described it as a gross abuse: and were themselves 
 amongst those most constant at church. Possibly, this 
 grievance may not exist now. 
 
 To come to my conclusions. The conviction impress- 
 ed upon me by what I have heard and seen at home 
 and abroad is that English Christianity — by w^hich I 
 mean that of members of the Church of England in 
 general, I cannot speak from experience of any other — 
 is as good and genuine, and for ordinary purposes as 
 beneficial, as what is found in other nations — France, 
 Spain, and Italy, for instance — so that either it is pro- 
 duced, fed, and nourished by all the<6acraments, as theirs 
 is : or else, produced, fed, and nourished by a single 
 Sacrament, it penetrates society and forms character to 
 
71 
 
 the same extent as that which has the support of all the 
 Sacraments, and is no less efficacious for good in most 
 other respects. It may be isolated, but such is the po- 
 sition of England politically as well as geographically : 
 its peculiarities are of a piece with the national charac- 
 ter, itself having its weak as well as its strong side : its 
 shortcomings, historically traceable to the sins of our 
 forefathers in no small degree. Among the strong 
 points attributable to its influences are a strong love of 
 honesty in intention, of truthfulness in language, and of 
 uprightness and manliness in conduct : and a still strong- 
 er abhorrence of falsehood and treachery to engage- 
 ments in every form. Its virtues belong mostly to the 
 practical and domestic order. Its weak points are too 
 great self-reliance, too much disposition to criticise, too 
 little faith in the Unseen. As a general rule, Roman 
 Catholics are weak where Anglicans are strongest, and 
 strong where Anglicans fail. Such results are due to 
 the system in each case, shewing imperfections in each. 
 Anglicans may be compared with Roman Catholics in 
 this country, as boys brought up at a public school in 
 England with boys brought up at a private school or 
 else at home. Anglicans may be compared with Roman 
 Catholics abroad as men educated at Oxford or Cam- 
 bridge with men educated at the Universities of Pa- 
 ris, Munich, or Padua. Fundamentally, their faith 
 and practice is the same ; but they have been formed 
 after different models in both. I trust the day is not far 
 distant when the religiously minded in both Commun- 
 ions will iii^ist on associating together as brethren, and 
 learning from each other as Christians, and combining 
 for works of charity without distinction of nations. 
 Too long — much too long — have they been kept in ig- 
 
72 
 
 norance of each other, and thus prevented improving 
 each other, through prejudice. The two points on which 
 alone I notice any sensible difference between my own 
 devotional practices in former days and now, are pray- 
 ing for the souls of the departed and invoking the saints 
 in glory. Both practices I can unhesitatingly pro- 
 nounce from experience to be full of comfort and profit, 
 of elevating and purifying influences : I am sorry for 
 those who live in ignorance or neglect of them : and I 
 can hardly imagine any person who has tried them in a 
 spirit of faith, honestly abandoning them. Still every 
 fresh page I read of Church history in the 14th and 
 15th centuries convinces me more and more of the 
 awful profanity that had attached to both in those days, 
 and as even in the Roman Catholic manuals of devotion 
 I use myself there are frequent hyperboles of language 
 that I could never adopt, and should desire to see can- 
 celled above all things,* I cannot consider the excessive 
 caution of the Church of England altogether directed 
 against a thin^ of the past, and without excuse now. 
 Words employed in non-natural senses are dangerous 
 stumbling blocks in any Communion. Our own litur- 
 gical offices were carefully weeded at the time of the 
 Council of Trent, and contain no such extravagances. 
 It would be well if we were never on any pretext allowed 
 to exceed their measured language in our private forms. 
 
 * I instance but one such, p. 29 of our Vade Mecum, " 
 holy Virgin Mary, Mother of" Mercy, preserve me this night from 
 all evil, whether of body or soul." The meaning of course is, 
 "Pray God to preserve me." How much more would it 
 have cost to have had this pr'nted in full: or how much 
 longer time would it take to say 1 I must add that I con- 
 stantly hear sermons [up and down England] on S. Mary 
 that are little more than legends, drawn from the Apocryphal 
 Gospels, or no^better source. 
 
 I 
 
73 
 
 Neither our liturgical forms, indeed, as they now exist, 
 any more than our private forms, embodying such devo- 
 tions, were known to the primitive Church : and there- 
 fore the lack of them in the Church of England, how- 
 ever much to be regretted on all accounts, cannot affect 
 the essence, though it may impair the tenderness, of 
 the Christianity taught and imbibed there. I am there- 
 fore satisfied that the Christianity taught and imbibed 
 there differs in no fundamental quality from that with 
 which I have been conversant since joining the Roman 
 Communion. T am morally certain that I have fre- 
 quented the same Sacraments in both with profit : con- 
 sequently I feel that I could die equally well in the one 
 or the other: and can see no reason for changing from 
 one to the other except on secondary grounds, or unless 
 driven to it. " When they persecute you in this city'* 
 — of Israel^ that is — "flee ye into another" was not 
 said for the Apostles alone. In conclusion, it is my firm 
 persuasion still — indeed much more so than in 1853, 
 when I published my first book* — that should Christen- 
 dom ever be re-united, it will go down to posterity as 
 having been brought about mainly by those who had 
 been born and educated in the Church of England. 
 
 With these convictions, it may seem superfluous in 
 me to add my belief that having been ordained priest 
 in the Church of England, T am a priest still. But I 
 desire to state this explicitly because of the disparage- 
 ment lately cast upon Anglican Orders on general 
 grounds by a great name amongst us. To the historical 
 argument he will have nothing to say : therefore I will 
 only remark on it, that having examined it thoroughly, 
 I am as convinced of its tenableness as of anything of 
 
 *Called the " Counter-Theory," pp. 212—223. 
 
74 
 
 the kind in Church history. And as to the form, on 
 which he is equally reserved, I can only say that either 
 the Anglican ordinals in use now or formerly must be 
 allowed adequate, or else most of the primitive forms — 
 to say nothing of those still used in the East — must be 
 pronounced inadequate. On jurisdiction, I need not 
 reiterate what I have said already, or am about to say. 
 " Who is the custos of the Anglican Eucharist ? " is his 
 chief difficulty. " Could T, without distressing or offend- 
 ing an Anglican, describe what sort of custodes they — 
 the Anglican clergy — have been and are to their Eu- 
 charist?" My Lord, it is anything but my intention to 
 excuse or extenuate the scandalous irreverence that 
 prevailed shortly before our own days, and I fear is not 
 extinct yet, amongst Anglican clergymen in administer- 
 ing the Sacraments of the Church : but I cannot shut 
 my eyes to the fact that it followed naturally from their 
 low views of them, and that their low views of them 
 were precipitated by the audacity that centuries ago 
 was not afraid to say of the Eucharist, *' Sacerdos . 
 creat Deum;" of penance, "Deus remittit culpam: 
 Papa vero culpam et pcenam," and the like. But 
 taking our own views of the Blessed Eucharist into 
 account, is there or has there been any tale of irreve- 
 rence towards it amongst Anglicans, comparable for 
 horrors with the history of poisoned chalices and pois- 
 oned Hosts amongst ourselves formerly, the extent of 
 which is made patent to this day by the epecial pre- 
 cautions taken whenever the Pope celebrates Mass, 
 most solemnly, that no such harm may befal him— 
 " Avant qu'il arrive" —I am quoting from a well-known 
 precis of the ceremonies at Easter in Rome — " on a 
 coutume de faire Vepreuve des especes de la maniSre 
 
75 
 
 suivante : Le Diacre prend une des trois hosties qu*!! a 
 mises en ligne droit sur la pateine et la rend au Prelat- 
 Sacriste. Quand celui-ci I'a recu, le Cardinal-diacre 
 prend de nouveau Tune des deux qui reste : et apres 
 ravoii* fait toucher interieurment et exterieurement au ca- 
 lice et a la patene, il la consigne au Prelat-Sacriste, qui 
 doit la consommer aussitot, ainsi que la premiere, le vis- 
 age tourne vers le Pape. Le troisieme et derniere 
 hostie est employee your le sacrifice. Le Cardinal 
 prend les burettes du vin et de I'eau, en vers' un peu 
 dans la coupe, que lui presente le Prelat-Sacriste, dont 
 de dernier doit boire immediatement le contenu."* 
 
 Such perversion of the life-giving Sacrament to des- 
 troy life, as had to be specially guarded against in this 
 way whenever the Vicar of Christ pontificated, is abso- 
 lutely without parallel in the annals of the Anglican 
 Church since the Reformation. So that notwithstand- 
 ing our high views of it, the worst known profanations 
 of it have been amongst ourselves. ^ 
 
 T admit that up to the time of my inquiring into the 
 true causes of the earlier schism between the East and 
 West, I was not prepared to look upon the position of 
 the Church of England as favourabl}^ as I do now : be- 
 cause I regarded it as the effect of schism — wilful and 
 deliberate schism — on her part in separating from the 
 Communion to which she had been so long bound, and 
 over which, with the full concurrence of her clergy and 
 laity for ages, Rome ruled supreme. I expressed this 
 unhesitatingly three years back in the first part of my 
 book,! and am far from intending to retract all that I 
 said then : but having since discovered the general sys- 
 
 * L^mn^e Liturgique, p. 158. 
 
 t Christendom's Divisions, pp. 198-223. 
 
76 
 
 tern of Church government in which England, in common 
 with all other Western nations, had up to that time acqui- 
 esced, to have been based upon forgeries, and opposed to 
 the genuine code of the Church, I as unhesitatingly 
 recognize the right — nay, the duty paramount — of every 
 local Church to revolt against such a concatenation of spu- 
 rious legislation as this, and scattering to the winds every 
 link of the false chain that had enthralled it hitherto, to 
 return to the letter and spirit of those genuine canons, 
 stamped with the assent of the whole Church, and never 
 repealed. Supposing this done, even the act of S. Au- 
 gustine and his companions in establishing the jurisdic- 
 tion of the patriarch of the West over this island is found 
 illegal, having been declared null and void by anticipa- 
 tion in the eighth Canon of the Council of Ephesus 
 already quoted : " So that none of the bishops most be- 
 loved by God do assume any other province that is not, 
 or was not formerly and from the beginning, subject to 
 him, or those jvho were his predecessors. . . . But if 
 any one introduce a regulation contrary to the present 
 determination, the Holy General Synod decrees that it 
 be of no force." It is idle, or worse than idle, to assert 
 that S. Augustine found England subject to Rome when 
 he arrived : and it is quite true that he accomplished 
 its subjection two centuries and a half or more previ- 
 ously to the publication of the pseudo-decretals ; but it 
 is no less true that its subjection was accomplished in 
 the teeth of this canon, as well as of the protest* of the 
 native episcopate that he found in possession. It may 
 well be doubted whether S. Gregory was ever properly 
 made acquainted with their prescriptive claims : in any 
 
 * Given in Cave, Church Govt., p. 251, from Spelman's 
 Concil. Brit., a. d. 601. 
 
77 
 
 case, what was then eSected with his sanction was pre^ 
 cisely what S. Leo the Great informed the East the 
 canons would not allow of his conceding to the Con- 
 stantinopolitan patriarch Anatolius at the fourth Coun- 
 cil. The wily forger of the pseudo-decretals had his 
 eye upon all " such " accomplished facts" in the West 
 when he compiled his code, and either founded his 
 maxims upon them or else sought to legitimatise them 
 by the high authority which he claimed for his maxims* 
 Both, therefore, necessarily belong to the same category : 
 neither can one possibly stand without the other. Ang- 
 lican divines have long cited this ordinance of the Coun- 
 cil of Ephesus in proof of their canonical independence 
 of the jurisdiction of Rome : but they ou'ght in fairness 
 to have acknowledged themselves at the same time bound 
 by the Sardican canons, that British bishops assisted in 
 passing, admitting and regulating appeals to the Pope. 
 This, T conceive, will be found to be the true limit of 
 what is due to the Pope from England, according to the 
 genuine law of the Church. The primatial See of Eng- 
 land, whether at Caerleon or elsewhere, was originally 
 independent and autocephalus, and never should have 
 been made amenable to his jurisdiction as patriarch, 
 whether for consecration or any similar purpose. 
 
 I am well aware, my Lord, that this last inference of 
 mine must cut at the very root of your position in Eng- 
 land, should it prove correct : but as I have lived in the 
 investigation of these questions for the last twenty 
 years and upwards, you will scarce accuse me of being 
 influenced by personal considerations in getting to their 
 final solution. On the contrary, my wish is to give eve- 
 rybody the fullest credit for a sensitive conscience that 
 I claim myself. Neither is it against individuals nor yet 
 
78 
 
 systems, but abuses and perversfons of systems, that I 
 wage war. When I was in the enjoyment of a Fellow- 
 ship at Oxford, we were all living in the hourly neglect 
 of statutes which every one of us had sworn to observe, 
 and I was one of those who demanded that either those 
 statutes should be repealed formally, or else kept hon- 
 estly. Still as our breaches of them had accumulated 
 gradually, and become law insensibly, how could I have 
 laid the blame of them on the existing or immediately 
 preceding generations of Heads and Fellows, and revil- 
 ed them as unprincipled or dishonest men ? In the same 
 way I mean neither disrespect nor disaffection to the 
 living authorities of the Roman Catholic Church, when 
 I draw attention to the undeniable fact that they are 
 daily violating the law of the Church. What I criti- 
 cise has been the work of centuries, commenced ages 
 since, and what all of them together, were they ever so 
 righteously minded, could not possibly change all at 
 once, still less make perfection. Again, w^hat I criti- 
 cise is not the faith of the Popes, but their governmen- 
 tal policy, and that only since they became temporal 
 princes as well as bishops, and not before. Their court 
 and see having beeft all one for practical purposes 
 since the establishment of the former, it would be 
 vain to attempt drawing the line between them, espe- 
 cially as it is their joint action upon the Church, not upon 
 empires or men in general, to which the verdict of his- 
 tory is most adverse. I am well aware, and have fre- 
 quently spoken, of the services rendered by Rome to the 
 nations of Europe, morally, socially., and religiously, in 
 promoting their civilization, in many respects a most up- 
 hill task ; and for these I am inclined to think there are 
 some arrears of gratitude still due to it from Eu- 
 
79 
 
 rope, and perhaps never likely to be settled, though I 
 suppose none benefited more largely by their achieve- 
 ments in the middle ages than the Popes themselves. But 
 when I contemplate the divisions of Christendom, past 
 and present, and search history for their origin, I find 
 it is the conduct of the Popes, more than anything else, 
 for the last thousand years, in governing the Church, 
 which has divided the Church. First of all, they allow- 
 ed crowned heads to tamper with the Creed of the 
 Church, if not to the unsettling of her faith, at least to 
 the dividing of her household. Secondly, they allowed 
 a spurious code to be brought into gradual use, without 
 troubling themselves to refer to their own archives for 
 proofs of its origin, and ultimately to overlay, and be 
 taken for, the genuine laws of the Church. Thirdly, they 
 countenanced one part of the Church, then in a minor- 
 ity, making war upon, and taking possession of, not 
 merely the temporalities, but the ecclesiastical revenues 
 and sees of the other part of the Church, then in a ma- 
 jority, to the ruin of Christianity, and triumphing of the 
 Crescent over the Cross in those parts eventually, 
 whence the Gospel had first sped. They countenanced 
 all this, because it brought gain and aggrandisement to 
 themselves and to their see, conformably with the max- 
 ims of the false, but in opposition'to the maxims of the 
 true code. Fourthly, as I have proved elsewhere,* 
 they put off reforming the Church in their own patri- 
 archate by fair means, till Providence permitted that it 
 should be done by foul. Such is the verdict of history 
 upon their conduct as Church governors since they be_ 
 came princes. I am far from pretending to have brcught 
 
 * Christendom's Divisions, Part I. pp. 128^153. 
 
80 
 
 to light any facts that are not well known, though I may 
 have grouped them together in one focus. 
 
 This being the case, my Lord, I ask how it is that 
 there is cot the slightest allusion to these facts in the 
 invitations which have been issued to the forth-coming 
 Council ? Home has spoken : but I can discover noth- 
 ing in what she has said like a confession of sins, or of 
 the justice of God in punishing them — expressions of 
 regret for the past, or promises of amendment in future. 
 All Christendom has gone astray save she. Of all in- 
 stitutions, the Popedom alone stands erect : has never 
 erred on any subject whatever, has never been other- 
 wise than what it is now : has preserved its integrity, 
 as well as its faith, unsullied. It alone has never caused 
 divisions, or driven Christians into revolt : it alone has 
 never done anything for which it has cause to blush or 
 repent. "I am and none else beside me ... I shall be 
 as a lady for ever : I shall not sit as a widow, neither 
 shall I know the loss of children." — Babylon loquitur, 
 non Jerusalem. Three hundred years ago there was a 
 Pope who spoke differently, and told men the truth. 
 With what general applause, and sympathy of the 
 good and earnest in all lands, would such candour as his 
 have been reciprocated, had it been copied in what we 
 have just heard ! ''You will also say," continued Adrian 
 VI. to his legate, "that we frankly admit that God has 
 permitted this judgment to fall upon His Church for the 
 sins of men, chiefly priests and prelates of the Church 
 . . . We know that in this holy seat there have been 
 many enormities, now for some years past, and abuses 
 in spiritual things, excesses in what has been ordained, 
 all things in short perverted . . . Wherefore, it is neces- 
 sary that we should all give glory to God, and humble 
 
81 
 
 our souls before Him, and see each one of us from 
 whence he hath fallen." 
 
 An invitation to a general humiliation might well 
 have preceded invitations from the Pope to any Counc il 
 for re-uniting Christendom. Again, in inviting people 
 to a Council for that purpose, was it wise to insult 
 them ? The Easterns are adjured to come to it as their 
 predecessors came to the Councils of Lyons and Flor- 
 ence : but to each of these councils the authorities of the 
 Eastern Church received a formal invitation, designa- 
 ting them by their respective titles, and at the Council 
 of Florence sat and deliberated with Western bishops 
 upon equal terms : nor was it till they were gone, that 
 deputies from the descendants of Ubretical bodies — 
 Nestorian or Monophysite — were introduced. All 
 bishops of the Eastern rite, no matter what their ante- 
 cedents, are placed in the same category by Pius IX. : 
 for what purpose, unless to deter the most considerable 
 from coming, it would be difficult to say. In the same 
 way, non-Catholics, that is to say, non-Roman Cath- 
 olics, are treated as a rabble without guides, a flock 
 without shepherds, indiscriminately : as though all had 
 been equally bereft of organisation, and all alike were 
 devoid of intelligence. Yet part of this rabble has 
 lived under episcopal government for 300 years, and 
 every endeavor was made to get bishops sent from it to 
 the Council of Trent, and it knows something of the 
 controversy between it and Rome, to say the least. 
 Then what of its mighty offshoots in the New World 
 and in the Colonies ? Altogether the latent *' animus ** 
 that unprejudiced persons would be likely to detect in 
 both invitations is, that they shoilld be declined — de- 
 elined in order that, the Council being confined to those 
 6 
 
82 
 
 beholden to the Pope for their mitres, his prerogatives 
 might be vsecured against losing, even if they should not 
 gain, anything by its meeting. 
 
 int is otherwise — if Rome is sincerely bent upon re- 
 uniting Christendom — the whole thing lies in a nutshell^ 
 and is in fact already done. Two maxims honestly car- 
 ried out would alone suffice for re-uniting Christendom. 
 The first is ancient and well known : "Nullum tempus 
 praescribit EcclesiaB." This is apt in general to be ap- 
 plied to Church lands and endowments. It must apply 
 with infinitely more force to Church laws, accepted 
 everywhere, that have never been repealed. No mere 
 desuetude can make them null and void. The other 
 maxim has recerftly been chosen in this controversy for 
 their motto by a learned body, to whom I am never tired 
 of confessing my obligations, the Society of Jesus in 
 England — "Peace through the truth." If they will only 
 bring their immense influence to bear in enforcing this 
 maxim wherever falsehood is proved, one of the first con- 
 sequences will be that the False Decretals, and all that 
 has been founded on them, will go to the wall. I have 
 already quoted the opinion of their learned brethren on 
 the other side of the water, to the effect that this spuri- 
 ous code supplanted the discipline that had reigned 
 paramount in the Church up to that time, and is the 
 basis of the discipline that reigns now. Let it be repu- 
 diated honestly, therefore, and the ancient discipline of 
 the Church will once more be revived in full force. Let 
 us see what effect this would have on the divisions of 
 Christendom. First, in accordance with the dogmatic 
 canon appended to the definition of the 4th, 5th, and 
 6th Councils, the Nicene Creed would cease to be used 
 in any but the form in which it existed then. I need 
 
83 
 
 hardly remind your Lordship that as it existed then 
 the article in dispute was couched in Christ's own 
 words : ''Who proceedeth from the Father" — His words 
 that we have presumed to improve upon in the form 
 we use — By returning te them, we should, in reality, 
 be but deferring to Him. This, alone, would do away 
 with the principal ground of strife between the East 
 and West. Secondly, Rome would be confined, for or- 
 dinary jurisdiction, to the original bounds of her patri- 
 archate according to the 8th canon of the Council of 
 Ephesus, in other words, to the Continent of Europe : 
 but she would receive appeals from England and the 
 rest of the West according to the Sardican canons. Ap- 
 peals from the East would be carried to Constantinople, 
 in conformity with the 9th and 17th canons of the Coun- 
 cil of Chalcedon. Thus the principal ground of strife 
 between England and Rome would be removed on the 
 one hand, and all intermeddling by Rome with the 
 affairs of the East on the other. Latin patriarchs of 
 Greek sees would be out of the question. A General 
 Council, with the Pope in the first, and the Patriarch 
 of Constantinople in the second place, would be the last 
 resort — as the African bishops told Pope Celestine was 
 the true purport of the Nicene canons — for all alike- 
 Thirdly, what is of infinitely more importance to Chris- 
 tians generally, desirous of living in peace and charity 
 with their brethren all the world over, no profession of 
 faith would be required from any seeking to be admitted 
 to Communion in any Church, but the Nicene Creed, 
 according to the solemn import of the canon with which 
 we commenced. When it was passed, all the modern 
 controversies on grace had been anticipated by the fol- 
 lowers of Pelagius, and there had been questions raised 
 
84 
 
 about the sacraments and rites of the Church similar to 
 those amongst which we live. And still the language of 
 that canon is most emphatic — "Those coming oyer from 
 whatsoever heresy to the communion of the Church, are 
 to be made to subscribe to the Nicene Creed and no 
 other." The Creed of Pius IV. might be retained as 
 discipline for the clergy, but it could no longer be im- 
 posed on the laity. Plain Christians might therefore 
 traverse the world with no other passport to the Sacra- 
 ments of the Church in all lands than the Nicene Creed. 
 
 Christendom is one before God, and de jure^ so long 
 as these laws form part of the code of the Church, and 
 are not repealed. It is only disunited defacto^ because 
 they are infringed, and the executive of the Church is 
 indifferent, or else a party, to their infringement.^ If 
 Rome is really the executive of the Church, as she 
 claims to be, is really desirous of unity, she has nothing 
 to do but bestir herself to bring herself and all others to 
 observe the laws. I have heard some persons assert 
 positively that she will never be capable of this effort 
 till she has been both disestablished and disendowed. 
 May they be false prophets I 
 
 I have the honor to be. 
 
 My Lord Archbishop, 
 
 Your obedient and obliged servant, 
 E. S. F. 
 
>'A 03963 
 
 Fs 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA UBRARY