12 OCTOBER 1867, Page 14

THE PAN-ANGLICAN SYNOD AND THE SECOND ARTICLE.

[To THE EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR."]

am not sorry that you have commented as you have done upon the Pastoral Letter of the Pan-Anglican Synod, though in some of your remarks upon it I cannot in the least concur. I believe yon have expressed faithfully the feelings whiah it is likely to awaken in thoughtful and devout English laymen. For doing that the English clergy must be grateful to you, even if you have decided peremptorily certain Points (e. g., the error of the Apostles hi their anticipation of the speedy revelation of Christ), about which some of us, in the face of all charges of "mystical interpre- tations," "wilful distortion of plain words," &c., which would be very overwhelming if our consciences recognized them as true, presume to hold a different opinion. There is only one passage of yotir article against which I take the liberty of uttering a Complaint, because I believe it not Maly throws a doubt upon the honesty or manliness of some excellent men, but utterly perverts the sense of the document to which it refers. The passage is this :— " Again, the Bishops tell the faithful in Christ ,Jesus' to show forth that Ye are indeed the serviuds of Him who died ior us, to reconcile Its Father to us, and to be a sacrifice for the sins of the whole world.' We are well awari3 that this is the language of the Second Article, and that it was, therefore, very difficult for any Bishop to decline to sign: it again. But we are also aware that since the time when the Articles were drawn up, the controversy as to the supposed conflict of purposes between the Father and the Son suggested by this language has assumed quite different proportions, and that there is more than one Bishop who would anxiously reject the ordinary and popular interpretation of this phrase, namely, that there was a wrath in the Father towards humanity not shared by His Son, bat, on the contrary, appeased. by His submission to the Cross. The careful introduction of this language at the present time into the pastoral has a meaning of its own, and it is, we know, a moaning which some of the Bishops who have signed this pastoral have disowned, and would, we conclude, if individually appealed to, disown an."

Of course, I know nothing of the meaning of those Who intro- duced this phraire intoihe Pastoral ; but I do know that if they de- signed to sanction such a meaning as that which you have (perhaps rightly) described as a popular one, they could not have made a greater mistake than they have made in extracting a clause from the Second Article, for that Article, in the fullest and clearest language that can be chosen, asserts the entire and absolute unity of the Word or Sim of God with the Father. If the Article is true, it is heresy to speak of that conflict of purposes which you suppose that the phrase in the pastoral suggests. Those Bishops who have disowned that doctrine and every passible deductioft from it, have only to entrench themselves behind the Second Article ; they cannot be dislodged from that position ; if they cared to convict other men of subscribing that which they do not believe, they could fairly bring that charge against any who cling to the notion that there "is a wrath towards humanity in the Father which the Son does not share."

You are right that "the controversy as to the supposed con- flict of purposes between the Father and the Son has assumed quite different proportions since the Article was composed." The spread of commercial notions of divinity has immensely increased with the habit of measuring all things by a money standard. The notion that the Lamb of God died not to take away sin, but the punishment of sin, not to unite us with His Father, but to protect us from His Father, has been diffused throughout the Protestant as well as the Romanist world. These notions have assumed frightful proportions since the Articles were composed. Every clergyman, every bishop, should feel that he lives to contend against them, and against the effects which they are producing on practical morality, as well as on theology. But he `cannot appeal to the habits or the wisdom of our time against them. They have grown up under the protection of the money worship which is our charac- teristic. What is Benthamism, what is nearly every system of morals and legislation which has made any way in modern England, but an endorsement of the dogma that punishment is the great enemy to be avoided, as happiness or pleasure (Bentham was too honest to separate them) is the great end to be pursued? The Bishops who adopt the notion which you connect with the words 'reconcile the Father to us,' are not supporters of the ancient theology. They are men of the latest type, moulded in the fashion of this time, however they may try to embellish the new garment with patches from the old. Those who affirm that the Son reconciles, atones, unites the Father to us by removing the barrier of sin that sepa- rates us, and must separate, from Him in whose image we are formed—that He does this in His own Person, because there

is no conflict, but an actual _unity of purpose, will, substance between them—mutst go back to the theology Of the Creeds, to those principles which the money-worship of the age of Leo X. had effaced and contradicted, and which were reasserted at the Reformation.

Though I may agree with you that Bishops had better write id the style of the nineteenth century than affect a primitive style, which often disguises a very small amount of primitive faith and simplicity, I do not believe, as you appear tit do, that their fault is a too great estrangement from the habits and tendencies of the nineteenth century. If they are serVantis of Him who was, and is, and is to come, they will adapt themselves to the necessities of the time into which they are bora ; they will not bear the image of any time. An excellent member of the Synod, to whom you refer in your article, has said, in a recent charge, with ,deep pathos, "Alas, how solitary ever is his position who is simply seeking the truth!" No other knows precisely where he is ; and often he himself is mis- understood, doing harm where his intentions are the opposite. Yet is such a one not alone, for surely "the Father is with him."

[We should have thought that the natural language of te-day, to express our correspondent's theology, Would be to speak of recon- ciling man to the Father, rather than reconciling the Father to man, especially since the latter *or& are dragged out Of the con- text by which their Meaning is, as our coriesp-ondent justly says, modified and explained.—En. Spectator.]