CARDINAL VAUGHAN AND ANGLICAN ORDERS. T HE correspondence on Anglican orders
started by Cardinal Vaughan, and continued in the Times by a variety of writers, is a remarkable instance of the con- viction which many people entertain that there is no such thing as progression in religious controversy. What Cardinal Vaughan says about Anglican orders is pretty much what English Roman Catholic writers have said for some three centuries. He seems content to repeat this without troubling himself to consider whether his con- clusion follows from his premises. " Catholics," he says, "understand ordination to be the bestowal upon men, first, of a power to change bread and wine so that in their place our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ becomes truly and sub- stantially present on the altar Second, of a power to forgive the sins of men with a divine efficacy."Sofar, the Cardinal's meaning is plain. These are, in his view, the essentials of the priesthood, and if it can be shown that these powers are not conferred in Anglican ordinations, the Cardinal has proved his case. That the Church of England confers the second of these powers, he wisely does not deny. The words addressed to the candidates for priests' orders, " Whose sins thou lost forgive they are for- given," cannot be got rid of. But when it comes to the doctrine of the Real Presence, and still more of the Eucharistic sacrifice, the Cardinal is more outspoken. He points to the emission of any express mention of these doc- trines in the Anglican forms for consecration and ordination, and to the contemporaneous removals of altars as evidence of the intention of the English Reformers. " The acts and words of those who drew up the new form of ordination cannot be doubtful. They intended positively to exclude the ancient idea of a sacrificing priesthood, as they had already banished that of the Eucharistic sacrifice. Ordina- tions held by men repudiating the Catholic doctrine of the priesthood, and using rites designed to emphasise this repudiation, must ever be subject to, at least, the most overwhelming doubt." It will be seen that Cardinal Vaughan assumes that men cannot confer powers in the existence of which they do not believe. In other words, to constitute valid orders there must not only be a Bishop competent to ordain, but he must intend to do what the Roman Catholic Church does whenever it ordains a priest. This is known as the doctrine of intention, and if Cardinal Vaughan is right in his implied definition of this doctrine, it would be difficult to maintain that the consecrators from whom the present Anglican Episcopate derives its succession satisfied this indispensable condition. But this implied definition of intention is very far from being the only definition given by Roman theologians. There is another view of the doctrine, which has supporters of great authority both in France and Germany. According to this view, all that is necessary to a valid consecration or in- tend is that the consecrators or ordainers shall n- tend to do what, as they believe, the Church does. It is obvious that this theory makes intention a simple question of bona fides. It must be enough for the Church to do what Jesus Christ did. Consequently, if the con- secrating or ordaining Bishop intends to make a Bishop or a priest in the sense in which he believes Jesus Christ to have made Bishops and priests, he has all the intention that is necessary. He means to make a true Bishop or a true priest,—a Bishop or priest, that is to say, possessing the powers which Jesus Christ intended them to have. There is no possible reason to suppose that the Elizabethan Bishops meant to give anything less than this. If they really believed what they taught about the Eucharist, they thought they were conferring the precise powers that Christ himself conferred on the Apostles. If they believed more than they taught, and only concealed their faith from fear of persecution, they would naturally have intended to confer the same powers as the old forms had directed them to confer. Cardinal Vaughan takes no notice of this theory of intention, nor do we say that he was bound to take any notice of it. But the existence of such a theory makes his own more rigid doctrine merely one among several, and so deprives it of any special claim to recognition. This is a very much better answer to Cardinal Vaughan than that given in the Times by "X." This gentleman argues that if Cardinal Vaughan is right, there can be no valid orders anywhere, since the power to make Christ substantially present in the consecrated elements was unclaimed and unknown for the first eight centuries. In that case, the Church of England has been no worse off since the Reformation than she was before the Norman Conquest. However satisfactory this argument may seem to " X.," or may be in itself, it is worthless as an answer to those who maintain, as Cardinal Vaughan maintains, that the doctrine of the Real Presence has been held from the foundation of Christianity, and that what is novel in " Transubstantiation " is not the thing, but the name. There are two arguments on which much stress used to be laid by Roman controversialists, one of which Cardinal Vaughan leaves altogether alone, while of the other he makes only a passing mention. The latter is the consecra- tion of Barlow, which is doubtful, just so far as any fact is doubtful of which the documentary proof has been lost. If this objection is pressed, there is probably not a line of Bishops in Christendom that cannot show a similar flaw. All the arguments from probability make in favour of Bar- low's consecration, and it is not too much to say that, except for controversial reasons, the fact would never have been questioned. The other argument is that derived from the changes made at the Reformation in the form of ordaining a priest and consecrating a Bishop. If all that is con- tained in the existing Roman formularies were essential to valid ordination and consecration, there would be no more room for controversy. Much that is in use in the Roman Church now, much that was in use in the English Church before the Reformation, has disappeared from the Anglican Ordinal. There was a time when this difference seemed more important than it seems now. The history of Christian rites was little known, and in the West there were few opportunities of studying Eastern Liturgiology. As soon therefore as a Roman controversialist looked at the Anglican Ordinal he condemned it as essentially defective. Reflection has shown him that if he holds consecrations and ordinations according to the Anglican rite to be invalid, he must extend his censure to consecrations and ordinations of whose perfect validity there has never been any doubt. Much that is in the Roman Ordinal is com- paratively modern. It did not come into existence for many centuries ; it is not universally in existence now. One by one therefore the arguments against the validity of Anglican orders have disappeared, until everything has come to turn upon the doctrine of intention,—upon the amount of intention, that is, which is necessary to make an ordination a fact and not a farce. If Cardinal Vaughan's view were the only one, and a valid intention requires a conscious intention of doing what the Roman Church does, there would, from the Roman point of view, be an end to the controversy. The Anglican Ordinal says nothing about making a sacrificing priest, and from the fact that all mention of it is excluded it is not unreasonable to infer that the Bishops of that day intended nothing of the kind. But then Cardinal Vaughan's view is not the only one—considering the learning of those who differ from him on this point, it is not even the probable one— and remembering this, we are unable to attach any special controversial weight to his letter.
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