III THE ANGLICAN CHURCH The peculiar position of the Anglican Church. Catholicity not originally claimed. Anglicans quoted: Cranmer, Fisher, et al. The criticisms of a Roman Catholic. The evangelic elements of the Prayer-Book. The Anglican Church has broken succession. Its history is recent. The British Church. The Anglican Church a secession. The catholic claim an obstacle to unity. III THE ANGLICAN CHURCH THE position occupied by the Anglican church is peculiar. It has within it both a catholic and an evangelic tendency. The former is perhaps the stronger, at least more pronounced, to-day, claiming that the Anglican is the truly catholic Church. Concerning this claim, put forth by a party in the Episcopal Church in England and America, it must be immediately noted that it is a party and not a church claim. Dr. Schaff says: ("Creeds of Christendom," Vol. I, p. 607), "The Church of England has never officially and expressly pronounced on the validity or nonvalidity of non-Episcopal orders. The Thirty-nine Articles are silent on the subject, though Bishop Burnett says that the wording of the Articles on church and ordinances was expressly selected for the exclusion of the idea that apostolic succession was requisite to the valid dispensation of the sacraments." That is to say, the Anglican church does not claim that the ministry and the service of this church are of direct appointment from Christ, but are a matter of human arrangement; not, of course, excluding the operation of the Holy Spirit upon individual minds and hearts. Cranmer asserted the parity of bishops and presbyters, and sought to bring to pass a general council to frame a concensus doctrine. To unchurch the other protestant churches was a thought which never entered Cranmer's mind. Writing to Calvin, he urges that harmony of doctrine will tend to unite the Church of God. Fisher said that "A prelate like Whitgift had no disposition to find fault with the foreign protestant churches for the lack of episcopacy." Hooker contended, despite his belief that episcopacy had prevailed since the time of the apostles, that there may be sometimes very just and sufficient reasons to allow ordination without a bishop. That reason, he admitted, was valid in the case of the foreign churches. When Laud first declared that there could be no church without a bishop, he was reproved by the Oxford authorities, because he cast a bone of contention between the Church of England and the Reformed on the continent. In 1647 Bishop Hall said in his Irenicon, "Blessed be God, there is no difference in any essential between the Church of England and her sister Reformed churches. The only difference between us consists in our mode of constituting the external ministry. And, even with respect to this point, we are of one mind, because we all profess to believe, that it is not an essential of the church, though, in the opinion of many, it is a matter of importance to her well-being." Hall, though himself a pronounced defender of episcopacy, again says, "The foreign churches lose nothing of the true essence of a church, though they miss something of their glory and perfection," without episсорасу. Usher and Baxter desired a modified episcopacy. As lately as 1903 the Bishop of Durham wrote in the Contemporary Review that he was "distinctly with " Canon Henson in his "powerful appeal for the frank recognition, as churches, of the non-Episcopal societies, such as the Methodists"; for "I know," he said, "that however boldly modern manuals may tell us that no Bishop, no Church,' is a primary Christian truth, that tenet was denied by such Anglican Bishops as Andrews, Hall, Usher and Cosin, to name only those four names out of well-nigh the whole succession of our greatest Churchmen from the Reformation onward till within quite modern times." In the same review more recently the Rev. Dr. Rashdall, Fellow of Oxford, described the theory of apostolic succession as a "gigantic figment." (See also in his "Christus in Ecclesia.") In an article in the Presbyterian Review (Vol. IX, p. 35), Dr. Welch (of Auburn Seminary) cites Jewell, Field, Stillingfleet, and of course Whateley,-as rejecting high church claims for Episcopal ordination. In this article, he quotes Bishop Fleetwood as saying, "We had many ministers from Scotland, from France and from the Low Countries, who were ordained by presbyters only and not by bishops, and yet were never reordained." A statute of Queen Elizabeth requires those who had received non-Episcopal ordination to subscribe only to the Articles of Religion, and did not exact reordination. In fact, it would be hard to find any one of the |