What is the nature or the evidence of this hopelessly invalidating animus? There are two ways, if we may gather from the Bull, in which it has expressed itself in the matter of the Ordinal. The one is the fact that Anglicanism has presumed to alter the Roman Pontifical. The other is the fact that, in altering, it has suppressed the explicit mention of the 'potestas offerendi.' Now these two facts show conclusively, the one that Anglicanism ventures to challenge, and does in fact, separate herself from, the precise proportions of the Roman definition of priesthood;—the other, that Anglicanism makes overt refusal of obedience to the paramount authority of Rome. And this is the whole matter. There is, as of course, not a thought of any such question as whether, in criticizing or disagreeing with Rome, we are affirming or denying the truth of God. There is no attempt to justify the Roman definition which we criticize, or to show that the premisses of our criticism are wrong. To criticize Rome is to swerve from the truth of God. To adopt practices based on independence of Rome is to take a position outside of the Church of Christ. Principles like these are assumed as self-evident. The only argument necessary is to show that Anglicans do so differ from the Roman-which presumes to call itself the Catholic Church.

This is all. We do not, in practice, implicitly obey, we do not, in doctrine, perfectly symbolize with, Rome. Therefore we are outside the Church. Therefore nothing that we believe, define, or practise, comes anywhere into the history, or the evidence, of what has been practised, defined, or believed, within the Church of Christ. Rather, therefore, our whole animus or spirit, being intentionally antagonistic to 'the Church,' is so wrong as to vitiate

it is something by its nature internal, but in so far as it is manifested externally she is bound to judge concerning it. . . . If the rite be changed, with the manifest intention of introducing another rite not approved by the Church, and of rejecting what the Church does, and what by the institution of Christ belongs to the nature of the Sacrament, then it is clear that not only is the necessary intention wanting to the sacrament, but that the intention is adverse to and destructive of the Sacrament.' The question-begging words which I have ventured to italicize, and the introduction, in the preceding clause, of the [Roman] Church,' entirely neutralize the words, apparently reasonable, which my citation has omitted, 'When any one has rightly and seriously made use of the due form and the method requisite for effecting or conferring the Sacrament, he is considered by the very fact to do what the Church does.' These words therefore do not mean what they seem to say.

in detail everything, however inherently justifiable or effectual in others, which we do or attempt. It is the naked claim, after all, to infallible perfectness, and to absolute autocracy.

The real position, then, of Anglicanism, historical or theological, is never for a moment so much as glanced at. It is, to the Bull, unknown, or unimaginable. Possibly it may be said that this is only a logical result of Romanism. The fundamental hypothesis of Romanism may make, perhaps, any effort of approach to an independent inquiry into the truth of Romanism -and therefore into the truth of any position which challenges the truth of Romanism-little other than an impossible contradiction. For the present, and on present hypotheses, yes. This is but to say that, in the providence of God, the time is not yet ripe, when any such independent effort after truth can be made with seriousness in the name of Rome.

Let any one, even for a moment, make the mental effort to imagine that, owing to a certain intellectual rigidity and hardness, the mediaeval conceptions as to priesthood, though dealing with truth, had lost something of the perfect symmetry and proportion of truth; that they leant over much to a materializing of the spiritual; that their 'outward' was not quite perfectly harmonized as the outward of an 'inward'; that to call a presbyter bluntly a 'sacrificing priest 1,' without being literally untrue, was yet a coarse

1 A form of statement in which Cardinal Vaughan appears to revel. At the beginning of Nov., 1896, if rightly reported in the daily papers, he shaped his public challenge to the Anglican bishops thus :-'Not one of them had dared to say that he was a sacrificing priest, and that all the clergy of the Church of England were sacrificing priests.' In commenting again in March upon the letter of the Archbishops, he asked: 'Did they claim the power to produce the actual living Christ Jesus by transubstantiation upon the altar according to the claim of the Eastern and Western Churches?' He went on to argue that the Anglican Eucharistic sacrifice' was an essentially different sacrifice' from the Roman, because the Anglican priesthood 'claimed no miraculous, supernatural, sacrificial powers such as were exercised by the Eastern and Roman Churches.'

I need not comment upon his reference to the Eastern Church. The Eastern Church will, no doubt, take excellent care of itself. Meanwhile, the Cardinal has certainly done his best, on behalf of Romanism, to make the two conceptions of sacrifice ‘essentially different.' He has done his best to reduce the spiritual mysteries of Christian Eucharist and priesthood to the level of a merely vulgar thaumaturgy; and many a thoughful Romanist must have writhed under the naïve recklessness of his polemics. Unhappily, since the Bull, it seems that even Cardinal Vaughan is justified.

and grating representation of what was only true, after all, in the sphere of things spiritual and mystical: let him try to make all the mental effort necessary to such a hypothesis,—and add to it a recognition of the bare possibility that it may not be the ordinance of our Lord Jesus Christ that the Bishop of Rome should wield despotic power over the consciences of mankind: and hehold! in a moment the whole of the alleged case against Anglicanism and Anglican Orders has vanished into thin air. There is absolutely not a shred of suggestion left. From end to end of the Bull there is not one syllable of argument, or even of suggestion, which is not wholly dependent, for very existence upon the two fundamental Roman assumptions,—that Roman definitions or practices are infallibly right, and that the Roman autocracy is Divine.

Though, then, it takes the form of argument, it is not in any sense really argumentative against Anglicanism. For argument between me and another must rest on some better basis than the simple assumption that I am inherently right, and that he, in precise proportion as he differs from me, must be wrong. If it is to be argument, it must, for the purpose, treat the case of either side as arguable, as deniable, as needing to be made good by evidence. In this sense it will hardly be said that the Bull is argumentative.

All this is much to be deplored. It will not, indeed, injure Anglicanism; for truth is not apt to be injured by insult or contempt; and Anglicanism herein represents the very spirit and truth of the Catholic Church, untrammelled by concealing and distorting overgrowths. Anglicanism is Catholicity, unperverted and rational. It has not stereotyped, as a part of its vital faith, mediaeval rigidities or misconceptions of spiritual truth. It has not woven itself in and in with a polity-too obviously neither apostolic nor primitive-whose impossible pretensions succeed only in opposing a barrier impassable to every such generous yearning after wider truth, every such impulse of conscientious and candid self-scrutiny, as might otherwise have borne fruit in reform and recovery. The true Catholic spirit, the spirit of the Apostolic and primitive Church, alive and expansive, without fossilizing overgrowth, in Anglicanism, appeals to, consecrates, and harmonizes, the whole nature of man. It is natural, not the

less, but so much the more consistently, because the 'natural' for it, is of one piece with, and is perfected in, the 'supernatural.' It is thoroughly at home in all the complex workings of the history of man-which, nevertheless, it has, in a perfectly real sense, revolutionized. It cannot really fear, or be alien from, any truth of criticism or of science-which are but subordinate aspects of itself. It is philosophical through and through, while it is like nothing so little as a product of philosophy. Because it is rational, reason can be wholly at home in it. Because it is spiritual, reason can in it be transfigured-can learn to partake of the nature of complete and divinely luminous intelligence. The Spirit of Jesus, which is the life of the Church, the theology of the Incarnation, which is the ordered apprehension of the fundamental truths of the Spirit in the spiritual intellect, is not alien from any of these things, but includes and transfigures them all.

The latest position of Rome will not injure Anglicanism. But its injury must needs be grave to the cause of truth and the rational harmony of religion in the churches of the Roman obedience. The impulse to be too crudely logical in definition and two bluntly material in ceremony; the inherent tendency to externalize and to petrify whatever is set to represent or consecrate the hidden movement of the mysteries of the spiritual life; to smother the inward by over-assertion of outward; to emphasize the objective and material till that immaterial subjective, which is its heart of reality, sickens unto death; this always has been a temptation naturally fascinating to the Western mind. We know it very well among ourselves—often in the more Roman form as exuberant externalism; often in the correlative extreme, as an attempt to trample on legitimate outwardness; an attempt which ends only in making of the very negation of the outward, a new fossil or fetish of outwardness-the outwardness of unauthorized ministries, unseemly ill dress, and irreverent gesture and tone. But the heart of Anglicanism is too conscious of mystery to be itself either Puritanical or material. If some element of either peril is well-known to us within-certainly neither is vital to the being of Anglicanism.

But it seems that the Papal authority has adopted without reserve this spirit of rigid externalism, which the Western mind loves. The full conception of realities like Sacrifice and Priest

hood, which, while having an aspect indeed that is material and definable, are nevertheless themselves large with the undefined mystery of spiritual life, is tightly tied up and up into just what is most questionable, because most clearcut, most dogmatic, most external, least living and large. The universal jurisdiction and the infallibility of the Pope, the explicit doctrine of Purgatory, and the direct work wrought by earthly Celebrations upon souls therein, the technicalities of transubstantiation, and the crudest statements about a sacrificing and a miracle-working priesthood; all these, it seems, are to be necessary ingredients in the 'Catholic' meaning of the word, so that those who demur to any one of these are, ipso facto, incapable of apprehending or believing in the 'Priesthood of the Church.' That Rome should once more have identified herself herein with the mental attitude about her own mysteries, that is least large, or balanced, or rational, or true; and should have re-emphasized with all her power the disproportioned corollaries to which it has led in the past; cannot but be matter of profound concern to those who desire the truth and peace of Christendom. She has made, as it seems, one more supreme effort of emphasis to stamp and perpetuate the identity of her very being with ideas and methods such as can only serve to stereotype more and more to the minds and consciences of her own most intelligent children, the divergence-amounting to a contrastbetween, on the one hand, the truths of experience and intelligence, of reason and love; and on the other, the definitions and the practices, the expressions and the theories, of (so-called) religious faith.

It might be feared that so tragic a failure as this would be likely to expose Christian thought, at a terrible disadvantage, to the reactionary prejudice of those who would cut short all mystery by explaining away, if not by denying outright, such truths as the Christian Sacrifice, and the Ministerial Priesthood, and the being and order of the visible Church. But perhaps it is not for the first time that the duty is laid by God's providence, on the Anglican Church, of making manifest the true relation between 'inward' and 'outward '-in this world where all spiritual is bodily, and all bodily meant to be spiritual; and so of conserving that true harmony (rational at once and mysterious) of spiritual realities, which the disproportion of a materialistic overstatement, upon the Roman side, had overlaid almost to death.