John Wicked-life* what Christ meant in the Gospel when he gave His Body in the Eucharist? And did Christ thus leave His spouse, the Church of the whole world, deprived of the possession of the true faith, in order to cleave to this Wycliffian harlot? Surely the portentous ambition of this new sect is alone deserving of eternal punishment. You wretched, deluded men, does it really seem to you a trifle to believe in Christ as you profess to do, and to disbelieve in His Church? To believe in Christ the Head and to sever from Him His mystic body? To begin the creed with, I believe in God, and to terminate your counter-creed with, I deny the Catholic Church?" '† Granted that the Lollard negations prepared the way for 'the wider and ever-widening negatives called by the general name of Protestantism,' that they did not take real hold of the masses is abundantly proved in many a chapter of the History of the Holy Eucharist, embracing the generations that came and went before the Reformation was forced on an unwilling people.' And to show that they did not affect the choice specimens of human wisdom and virtue, we have only to recall the names of men and women like Robert Grosseteste, the upholder of our national liberties; William of Wykeham, the illustrious Bishop of Winchester; Elphinstone of Aberdeen, churchman, lawyer, and statesman; Margaret, Countess of Richmond and Derby, mother of Henry VII. and founder of Corpus Christi College, Oxford; John Fisher, the great patron of learning, Bishop and Cardinal; Thomas More, Chancellor of England and martyr. John's character and acts proved that what is called the Reformation that is to say, the perpetual and self-imposed interdict of the Catholic religion in England-might have come some centuries earlier than it did had it only depended on the will of kings. Such men as Rufus and John were quite as willing as Henry VIII. to sacrifice the souls of their people to the gratification of their own avarice, lust, and hate. Remedies such as that made use of by Innocent were possible in the thirteenth century, but would have been found useless in the sixteenth. They depend for their efficacy on the strength of faith, not merely in one country, but throughout Christendom. When a great number have come to be of the opinion of John, that temporal prosperity is more important than religion, and boast how well a country can get on without Mass-like John's fat buck-then it would be an idle threat to deprive them of what they already disregard.' "A Joanne, cognomento impiæ vitæ." If my translation is correct, this pun on Wycliffe's name must have been well known in England, since the Latin would convey no meaning to any but an Englishman. †Thomas Netter (Waldensis), "Doctrinale Fidei," iii. 35. How in the sixteenth century so great a number came to be of the opinion of John as to bring about the tremendous revolution that made the national faith of centuries a penal offence Father Bridgett does not tell us. Passages such as the one last cited foreshadow and anticipate the momentous epoch in the History of the Holy Eucharist when the doctrine of the Real Presence was reviled as a blasphemous fable and a dangerous deceit, when the offering of Mass by a Catholic priest was punished with a cruel death, and the repudiation of it was required as the price of social preferment or of civil liberty; but that is all. The volumes we have been rapidly glancing through bring us down to the Reformation, and there they stop. Happily the reason is not far to seek, nor disconcerting when found. In a notice prefixed to the first volume the author tells us that he had collected materials to complete his History to the present day; but when he found that a third volume would be required to treat adequately the Reformation and post-Reformation periods, he thought it better to make the early and medieval periods complete in themselves, and he has done so. And moreover he promises the third volume. It cannot well be more important than the two volumes before us. But if we have not shown that it will be of very great importance as the completion of a work that has hitherto been wanting to the popular apprehension of our national history, we have gravely failed in our duty. ART. VIII.-ON SOME REASONS FOR NOT DESPAIRING OF A NATIONAL RETURN TO THE FAITH. [This Paper was read by the writer before the Academia of the Catholic Religion.] A MOST able and thoughtful Paper on the conversion of England, which was read by an Academician at the last session in June last, elicited from several members, including the present writer, the expression of an opinion more favourable to our wishes than that to which he inclined. The accomplished author of that Paper appeared to believe that, whereas there were many signs of a growing tendency on the part of individuals, alarmed at the swift and wide-spread movement of this age and country towards disbelief in all and every form of supernatural religion, to fall back on the Catholic Church as the alone adequately tutelary system of historic and doctrinal Christianity, yet anything like a national return to the faith of our fathers seemed hardly to be possible. It is with the hope of being able to marshal a few facts and draw from them some inferences less unfavourable to our wishes, that I make the following remarks, which I trust may serve as topics on which we may have the advantage of reading others more competent to treat of such matters. 1. My first topic in mitigation of the less hopeful view is a historic consideration to which in the ardour of controversy we may perhaps have not been quite fair. I mean the fact that the first lapse of the national establishment of religion under Queen Elizabeth was the worst. The tone of the Anglican formularies and that of their defenders since that lapse has been on the whole an improving tone. Compare the uniform downward tendency of the other separatists of the sixteenth century in this and in other lands with that of the Established religion, and you will see a marked contrast. "Lutherans," says John Henry Newman, "have tended to rationalism; Calvinists have become Socinians; but what has it become? As far as its formularies are concerned, it may be said all along to have grown towards a more perfect Catholicism than that with which it started at the time of its estrangement; every act, every crisis which marks its course, has been upwards. It never was in so miserable case as in the reigns of Edward and Elizabeth. At the end of Elizabeth's there was a conspicuous revival of the true doctrine."* It is true that these are the words of an illustrious writer who was at that timean Anglican; but I think the facts are as he states, however differently we, and no doubt he himself now, would estimate their value and importance. I also conceive him to be speaking, as I do now myself, of Anglicanism in the restricted official sense of the term. Similarly, what a vast improvement in the doctrine and tone of the "Caroline " Divines over those of the so-called Reformation! and though the storms of the great rebellion for a time swept all before them, these were more akin to an external persecution, affecting rather the outward conditions of the establishment of religion than its inward and spiritual character. In the next century, again, the Socinian elements in the Protestant Church may be fairly said to have been checked, if not eliminated, by her own action; and the eighteenth century will figure in the minds of orthodox Anglicans, nay, of fair-minded historians, rather as that of Butler, and Wilson, and Horne, than as that of Tillotson, Warburton, Newton, Hoadley, and their successors and imitators. The undisturbed Erastianism of the last age, again, has in its turn gradually given way to the higher conception of the * J. H. Newman, Catholicity of the English Church: "Hist. and Crit. Essays," vol. ii. p. 55. Church and her office which is now current among Anglicans. If, for instance, we compare an assize sermon preached at the beginning of this century by a very able and excellent man, whose name and principal work is still familiar to elderly Oxonians, Mr. Davison, some time Fellow of Oriel, with such compositions at the present day, we shall see what a great advance has been made in the interval of some sixty or seventy years. In the discourse alluded to, the preacher, speaking of the importance of some public authoritative instrument for teaching and impressing, warning, or fortifying. the public mind, never once directly or indirectly alludes to the Church as a divine, or even as a human, institution directed to this end; but speaks of human and civil law as their "most certain instruction," as furnishing them with "at least some stock of ideas of duty," and as their "plainest rule of action." I have said not even indirectly does he allude to the Church, but this is incorrect; for I find in the same passage (by Newman in his article on Davison) the following fine apostrophe: "As if the Mother of Saints were dead or banished, a thing of past times or other countries, he actually applies to the law of the land language which she had introduced, figures of which she exemplified the reality, and speaks of the law as 'laying crime under the interdict and infamy of a public condemnation."" (Ib., p. 409). Lastly, let me remind you that whereas in the first age of Anglican Protestantism the universal and unchallenged belief in the real absence of our Lord on her altars was fitly symbolized by the sordid table and side-benches placed lengthways in the body of the churches, now I believe I am right in saying that, with scarce an exception, and irrespective of the parties and their shades of belief, or unbelief, which divide the Anglican Establishment, all Anglican Churches contain a communion-table placed altarwise, and, in a very large number of instances, intended and contrived to look more or less like a real altar. If we assume this fact to have but a slender, or even no, dogmatic significance, still the fact remains, and, like other facts, has to be accounted for. I believe that the origin of the upward tendency in this as in other particulars is distinctly to be traced in the Anglican canons of 1603, and again in those of 1661. 2. Next I will remark on the distinct increase of religious practice which characterizes this latter half of the nineteenth century. I remember that one of the broad issues which challenged my attention when first, some forty years ago, I began to think of the religious question, was the palpable fact that, whatever might be the alleged superior purity of Protestant doctrine over that which it supplanted, in point of religious practice there was no question the so-called Reformation was a vast decline from the ante-Reformation standard. The mere fact * that the pre-Reformation churches were always open, on feast day and on feria, that the services succeeded each other from early dawn till noon-tide, and that they were attended by crowds of people of all ranks and conditions, whereas after the religious revolution the churches remained shut, the great service which brought men to them was abolished, and the times seemed to have come on this land which God foretold by the mouth of His prophet when all his solemnities and festival times should cease, this mere fact is a prima facie condemnation of the whole so-called reformation of religion. Well, whatever stress we justly lay on it, we must in equity proportionately mitigate when, as at the present time, we see a vast number of churches once more opened and frequented, and a most remarkable increase of services, so as in some places to imitate the Catholic use of churches in the repetition at frequent intervals of the Holy Mass; nor only so, but the services thus repeated are specially those in which that dim and shattered image of the Eucharistic sacrifice, which the so-called Reformers substituted for it, is repeated, as if in emphatic repudiation of the Anglican article, which denounces the reiteration of the Mass as an abuse to be by all means and for ever done away. Moreover, not only has an extraordinary revival of church services and church frequentation and observance characterized this time, but the ritual, as we all know, has undergone such a change in the Catholic direction as would have simply astounded our immediate progenitors if, as is the case in rare instances still, they had survived to behold the change. Even in my own recollection the service and ritual of the Anglican Church throughout the land has undergone an astonishing revolution. Instead of a huge pile of woodwork often entirely obscuring the squalid communion-table and its deserted septum, and containing, on three stories, receptacles for a preacher above, a praying minister in the middle story, and a very "pestilent fellow," called a "clerk," on the ground-floor, it is now universally the case that the preaching and praying desks, cut down from their sometime lofty estate to a moderate height, or even disappearing altogether, leave the altar not only visible, but dominating the chancel and whole church. The "clerk," with his grosteque utterance and costume, is an extinct species, and the duet between the parson and this functionary, which represented the devotions of the whole congregation, is heard no more. Then as to the administration of the supposed sacraments and sacramentals of the Establishment, a no less momentous change has taken place. Even distinctly low Church and dissenting * Osee ii. 11. |