THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND AND REUNION
[To the Editor of the SPECTATOR.]
Sue,—There would be no quarrel between your two correspondents, Mr. G. F. Pollard and Dr. Sydney Carter, if they would be content to quote the whole of the documents of the Church of England and not just that half which looks their own way. For example, both writers have forgotten what the Reformation was. It was a return to the (a) Bible, recovered after one thousand years of the Middle Ages, as interpreted by (b) the First Four General Councils ending A.D. 451, and (c) self-evident reason. These fhree salient points are to this day defended in turn by the three parties in the Church of England, namely, the Evangelical, the Anglo-Catholic and the Modernist. But for no one of these positions does the Church of England stand, but for all ! Nor is _there any disagreement between these three points of view. Each is necessary to the other. There is a circumincessio abOut-this trinity-in-unity_ of doctrinal truth.
Mr. Pollard thinks that by sloughing off not only the word Protestant, but the doctrines that stand behind it, he is paving
the way to Reunion. I would agree if I were living in Mr. H. G. Wells' world and not in the world of present-day realities. Does Mr. Pollard realize that the Church of Rome is semper cadent and that she has long left behind (a) the Fathers, (b) the Bible and (c) -self-evident reason ? I will quote her -latest champion, who more than' any single individual brought about- in 1870 the decree of Papal
infallibility - - -
" All appeals to Scripture-alone or to Scripture AND Antiquity . . . are no more than appeals from the DIVINE VOICE of the .living CHURCH and, therefore, essentially rationalistic. . . . It was the charge of the Reformers that the Catholic doctrines were not primi- tive. And their pretension was to 'revert to Antiquity: But the appeal to Antiquity is both a treason and a heresy. It is a treason because it rejects the Divine Voice of the Church at this hour, and a heresy because it denies that Voice to be divine.—(Cardinal Man- The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost, introd. and C. V.)"
The Rectory, Devizes,
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