CARDINAL VAUGHAN AND THE LAMBETH CONFERENCE.
CONTROVERSIALISTS do not always know the virtue of reserve. They heap together arguments of various degrees of force, and forget that the stronger are quite as likely to suffer from the neighbourhood of the weaker as the weaker are to gain by the presence of the stronger. Cardinal Vaughan seems to us to have fallen into this mistake in his address at Ebbesfleet on Monday. His object, of course, was to establish the claim of the Roman Hierarchy in England to be the true successors of St. Augustine. They cannot, indeed, show the material evidence of this descent which is afforded by continuity of possession. The throne of St. Augustine, the Cathedral of St. Augustine, the title of St. Augustine belong to others. There is an Archbishop of Canter- bury to-day as there was in Augustine's time, and he sits in the Church which has taken the place of the earlier Church which Augustine founded. But this Archbishop is not Cardinal Vaughan ; and, when the Cardinal says Mass at Canterbury it is in a humbler edifice than the Cathedral. It is only natural, then, that the Cardinal should wish, on an occasion like that of Monday, to rebut the evidence of buildings and titles. He is convinced that he himself—not the Archbishop of Canterbury—has the right to trace back his spiritual lineage to the Apostle of the English people, and he is anxious that the world outside should admit the validity of his preten- sions, however cheap they may hold their importance.
Now the stoutest Anglican must acknowledge that Cardinal Vaughan has at his command a very powerful primII-facie argument. Augustine came here not of hie own will, but at the bidding of Pope Gregory, and the Pontifical chair is filled to-day by an undoubted successor of Pope Gregory. Consequently, the first impulse of any one suddenly invited to pass judgment on the respective claims of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Arch- bishop of Westminster to speak in Augustine's name would be to ask,—Which of them is recognised by the Pope ? Leo XIII. sits in Gregory's seat ; which does he regard as the true representative of the man whom Gregory sent forth ? Here, at all events, the Cardinal is on firm ground. He has a letter from Leo XIII. in which the Pope of to-day recalls the work of the Pope of thirteen centuries ago, and congratulates the English Roman Catholics on their "union with the centre of unity," with that same Roman Pontiff from whom "Augustine and the other Apostles of Britain received their office and authority." There is an answer, no doubt, to the argument founded on this "union with the centre of unity," but it is an argument which needs answer- ing, an argument that cannot be allowed to lie un- noticed. Why, then, does Cardinal Vaughan, with this stout sword in his hand, trouble himself to talk of singing the same litanies to the same chant, of wearing the same pallium, of using this or that ceremony which Augustine also used ? These things, as Cardinal Vaughan would be the first to admit, are mere accidents. The Anglican Church might copy Augustine in every one of these particulars—in a good many Churches, indeed, the imitation is already pretty close—and yet not be a bit nearer "the centre of unity," and it is surely a tactical mistake to treat similarity in accidents as a foundation for serious reasoning. When we say that there is an answer to the Papal argument we have no intention of submitting to our readers a refutation of the Papal claims. What we mean is simply that the truth of these claims must be proved before the fact that Augustine conceded them can be used to show that the Archbishop of Westminster is, and the Archbishop. of Canterbury is not, the legitimate successor of Augustine. The close connection of the former with the Pope and the entire severance of the latter from the Pope are not of themselves sufficient to decide this point. If the Papal claims are unfounded, the Church of England is right in rejecting them, and there is no ground for supposing that Augustine, had he lived in the sixteenth century instead of in the sixth, would not have rejected them just as his successor, Cranmer, rejected them. Cardinal Vaughan, of course, is perfectly assured on this point, and.speaking to an assembly of his fellow Roman Catholics, he had a perfect right to recall the original association between Rome and Canterbury, and to dwell on the transfer d that association to the new See which Pius IX. set up in place of Canterbury. All we contend is that the continuance of the association in the case of the Anglo-Romans, and its severance in the case of Angli- cans, is a fact, not an argument. If the association can be shown to be necessary, then its presence or absence becomes an argument. Until it is shown to be necessary, the fact that one Archbishop has maintained it, while the ether has abandoned it, proves nothing as to their identity with the Church which Augustine founded.
Cardinal Vaughan attaches very great importance to Resolution 34 of the Lambeth Conference. "It narrows," he says, "the controversy between Anglicans and Catholics to a single point." It " sets aside certain popular theories which have hitherto served only to obscure the real issue." By "narrowing the controversy" the Cardinal means that there is no longer any need to prove to Anglicans "that the unity required by Christ among Christians" is not "that invisible unity which Protestants say "—and for that matter, we suspect, which Cardinal Vaughan himself would say—" binds all good men together." The Lambeth Resolution goes much further than this. It declares that "the divine purpose of visible unity among Christians" is "a fact of Revelation."
• God did not mean Christians to be visibly separate, he meant them to be visibly united. This is the position of the Lambeth Conference, and undoubtedly it does narrow the controversy between the two Churches. They are agreed as to the aspect which Christendom ought to present ; they only differ as to the character and cause of the very different aspect which it does present. The "peculiar High-Church theory" which Cardinal Vaughan thinks so mischievous is the theory that "the Church of Christ is made up of three branches, the Anglican, the Greek, and the Latin," and this theory, he declares, the Lambeth Resolution "condemns and rules out of Court," because it "declares that the unity must be a visible unity, whereas these three branches form visibly separated, antagonistic, and independent bodies." The Cardinal, as it seems to us, first mistakes the purport of the theory, and then mistakes the bearing of the Resolution. No one has ever pretended that the division of the Church into Anglican, Greek, and Latin is more than a description of a state of things actually existing. Such a description implies no opinion whatever as to the cause or legitimacy of this state of things. It is not, of course, a description which Cardinal Vaughan can adopt, because in his view only one of these three parts can properly be called the Church of Christ. But for any one who is not prepared to accept the Roman doctrine on this point it serves the purpose sufficiently well. Nor does the Lambeth Resolution embody any condemnation of it. That Resolution does not "declare that the unity must be a visible unity ; " it only says that visible unity among Christians is a part of the divine purpose. So it is a part of the divine purpose that brethren should dwell together in unity and that nations should live at peace with one another. If we proclaim this as the divine rule for families and among peoples, are we forbidden to recognise that, as a matter of fact, brothers do sometimes quarrel and nations do some- times go to war with their neighbours. The divisions of Christendom are a fact, and in so far as the Lambeth Resolution notes that they are a lamentable fact, incon- sistent with the divine purpose. it does bring the Bishops who agreed to it nearer to Cardinal Vaughan. But it says nothing, and was meant to say nothing, as to the cause of the fact or as to the distribution of the responsi- bility created by it. Cardinal Vaughan would trace it to the wilful revolt of non-Roman Christendom. The Lambeth Conference would trace it to the extravagant pretensions of Roman Christendom. To the closing up of this, the real gulf between Lambeth and the Vatican, the Resolution contributes nothing.
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