THE REPLY OF THE ARCHBISHOPS TO THE POPE. T HE reply
of the Archbishops of Canterbury and York to the Pope's Bull on the insufficiency of Anglican 'Orders is not only a very temperate, but a very mild, and indeed friendly, document. It acknowledges cordially the goodwill of the present Pope in reconsidering the question of the sufficiency or insufficiency of Anglican Orders, and while maintaining that the Pope's decision against their sufficiency would invalidate the Orders not only of Eastern Churches which the Roman Catholic Church has never• invalidated, but even the Roman Catholic Orders themselves, it insists upon the right of separate Provinces and national Churches to alter the forms of ordination or consecration for themselves so long as they do not omit any of the words which make the inten- tion of the Church, " as far as it is externally manifested," to confer the various offices and powers of -deacon, priest, and Bishop, severally, in a fashion quite plain to the people. We do not see how any Church can guard against a deficiency of " intention," which exists only in the heart of the officiating Bishop who ordains or con- secrates for any of these offices. All that can be legitimately required of any people in complying with the purpose indi- -cated by the divine founder of a Church, is that they should hold fast to the aims of that founder and of those to whom he committed his authority, and do all things "decently and in order," so that the limits of authority in the various offices conferred are not confused and obscured. It is clearly the duty of those who believe that a special rite was ordained by Christ, and committed to the hands of specially chosen members of his Church, to confine that rite to the administration of men so selected, and not to let it be administered by any one who chooses to administer it. Whether in the State or the Church, such carelessness would strike at the root of all authority. The elaborate care which Parliaments take that no Member should be elected who has not complied with all -the conditions required by the State in electing Members of Parliament, sufficiently shows what secular bodies think of any want of precision in complying with legislative rules ; and it can hardly be supposed that there should be more laxity in administering the functions of a spiritual organisation than in administering those of a secular organisation. But so long as the rules which were provided by the original founder of any organisation are carefully observed and guarded against abuse, it is all that human power can effect. To go behind these regulations and insist that even though the rules are perfectly complied with, it may be in the power of an unfaithful minister to vitiate the whole process by his own vitiated purpose, is just as fatal to the orders of every Church as it can be to the orders of any particular church. What is requisite is that there should be public evidence of the intention to do carefully what it is admitted that the Church has always thought it necessary to do in order to comply with the purpose of the original authority by which it was founded. If that is not cared for, there is no real authority at all. If that is cared for, then any failure in the secret purposes of those who -unfaithfully do what every one supposes that they are doing faithfully, does not and cannot concern the moral or spiritual welfare of the members of that Church, who may fairly trust that God will not allow them to suffer for a deficiency of which they could not have been aware, and against which therefore they could not have guarded. The strongest ground on which the Pope's attack on English Orders rested, was his assertion that no suffi- ciently clear distinction was made in the Anglican ordinations, of the particular kind of office which it was intended to confer,—that it was not made as plain as it should have been that the higher office of Bishop was intended to be conferred by consecration, or again, the office of priest by ordination. To that charge the Archbishops reply with sufficient plainness and force. They hold justly enough that the rites by which these offices are conferred must be taken as wholes, and that if. there is no possibility of the public mistaking what office has been conferred, and if the rite by which it is con- ferred is appropriate to the conferring of that special office, there can be no invalidity in the form simply because the special name of the office is not used in one or other of the sentences in which the usage of the Roman Church has made it the custom to name it. What is wanted is perfect clearness and publicity as to the intention of the Church, as well as words adequate to the duties which are imposed by the Church on the officers newly admitted to its hierarchy. The chief immediate interest of the Archbishops' reply to the Pope is, to our mind, the effect it will have on the Anglican Communion. Will it be regarded by the High Church party as attaching sufficient importance to the rites of ordination and consecration ? Will it be regarded by the Evangelicals as attaching a great deal too much importance to those rites ? We do not see that either party in the Church will have any legitimate ground of offence. Of course, the distinction between the two sections of the Church is this, that the High Church party regard ordination and consecration as actually con- veying to the newly ordained or consecrated minister a new power which he could not have obtained without going through those rites ; while the Evangelicals hold that, while he is bound to conform to the traditional customs and services of his Church, any other man might, by the will of God, receive sufficient spiritual grace with- out those rites, to do all, or more than all, than any given minister of the Church can do,—indeed to extend the range and establish the authority of Christ more effectually in the world. But we do not see that so long as both sections of the Church agree that it is quite necessary for the order of the Church that all her rites should be scrupulously ad- ministered, either of these sections can be offended by the Archbishops' reply. The highest Churchmen, whether in the Roman or the Anglican Church, would not scruple to admit that, by the will and grace of God, even a layman might receive power to do more for the King- dom of Christ than the very highest ecclesiastic, though he had not received power to administer any sacra- ment except the sacrament of baptism. And the lowest Churchmen, who hold both ordination and consecra- tion to be essential rather to the decency and order of the Church than to its spiritual efficacy, would not scruple to admit that there should be no carelessness in observing the ecclesiastical traditions which for some divine purpose had been either appointed by Christ or provided by his Apostles for the purpose of guarding the Church against internal dangers. We do not in the least question the very wide theological difference between those who believe that ordination and consecration confer a new power, and those who believe only that these forms are necessary to secure the " decency and order " of Church government. We recognise that difference to the full, and regard it as the chief excuse for the Roman Catholic distrust of Anglican Orders ; for Roman Catholics very naturally think that a Church which admits both views can hardly be theologically at one with their own Church in repudiating the Protestant view. But as our Church does admit both views, and as those who hold the Protestant view do not find any difficulty in conforming to rites which unquestionably had, if not their origin, at least their elaboration, in the Roman Catholic view of their efficacy, we do not think that they will be inclined to take offence at the Archbishops for showing that so far as the Re- formers changed the Roman formularies at all, they only changed them in the direction of a greater simplicity, and a closer conformity to what the Bishops of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries regarded as the more primitive practice of the early Church.
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