THE HIGH CHURCH VIEW OF THE EPISCOPAL OFFICE.
MR. HATCH, in the February number of the Contemporary- Review, speaks of the canonical vow of obedience to the Bishop by the Priests of the Church as not flowing " from any- thing inherent in the Bishop's office." " The obligation," he- says, "is that of a contract. On the one hand, all Clerks have- entered into a certain contract at their ordination, but that. contract is defined and limited by its terms ; it is a promise of: submission, not to a Bishop as such, nor to any purely spiritual authority, but to the Ordinary,'—that is, the Index Ordinartus, whoever he may be, whether Chancellor or Vicar-General,. Bishop or King. On the other hand, all beneficed clerks (except in the few cases in which institution' is not required) have entered into a sacred contract by which they have given to their Bishop the same promise of obedience which they would,. in feudal times, have given to any other feudal lord; but this obedience is limited by the adjective canonical,' and by the phrase, in all things lawful and honest.' The concep- tion of a Bishop as being entitled to obedience, and that an almost unlimited obedience, on the part of his clergy,. by 'virtue of the spiritual character which his consecra- tion has conferred upon him, is as much at variance with ecclesiastical history and present fact, as it is with the great currents of Christian opinion which are already shaping the policy of the Churches of the future." It will be observed_ that this definition of the meaning of canonical obedience de- eided:y bears out the technical. sense in which that duty has recently been understood by the High-Church party of the. Anglican Communion, to whom nothing would seem to have been more foreign than that deferential attitude of mind towards their Bishops which Cardinal Newman describes in his " Apologia ", as having been his own at the time of his greatest activity as a.. member of the Anglican Communion. Dr. Newman at least seems always to have had the idea that obedience was due to
"something inherent in the Bishop's office." In writing to Bishop Bagot,—the then Bishop of Oxford,—Dr. Newman says :-" In your Lordship's Charge for 1838, an allusion was made to the Tracts for the Times.' Some opponents of the Tracts' said that you treated them with undue indulgence I wrote to the Archdeacon on the sub- ject, submitting the ' Tracts' entirely to your Lordship's disposal. What I thought about your Charge will appear from the words which I then used to him. I said, A Bishop's
lightest word, as cathedra, is heavy. His judgment on a book cannot be light. It is a rare occurrence.' And I offered to withdraw any of the Tracts' over which I had control, if I were informed which were those to which your Lordship had objections. I afterwards wrote to your Lordship to this effect, that I trusted I might say sincerely that I should feel a more
lively pleasure in knowing that I was submitting myself to your Lordship's expressed judgment in a matter of that kind, than I could have even in the widest circulation of the volumes in question." And Dr. Newman steadily treated the Charges of the Bishops against the " Tracts for the Times" as a very solemn witness of the Anglican Church against these " Tracts," —so solemn, as to leave an Anglican of that period little choice between the duty of reconsidering those of his opinions which were inconsistent with the theological testimony of the Anglican Bishops, and the conclusion that the Anglican 'Church was destitute of divine life in its dealings with subjects of this kind. In a word, Dr. Newman, as the spokes- man of the High Anglican party of that day, regarded the practical authority of a Bishop as entitled to an almost implicit obedience, simply because it was a Bishop's ; while he regarded the unanimous dogmatic testimony of the Bench of Bishops as almost amounting to proof of the actual creed of the Church in which they were the rulers, whether that creed were right or wrong, because he could neither believe that, if the Bishops were collectively wrong, the Church could still be right, nor that if the Bishops were right, the recent revival of eccle- siastical principles could be in any way justified.
' We suppose that few High Churchmen would follow Dr. Newman in this matter in the present day. They would regard his disposition to obey a Bishop's injunction, as if it were something having a sacred presumptive claim on his allegiance, almost with amusement ; they would, for the most part, laugh at the doctrine that the testimony of the Bench of Bishops, as a whole, is any trustworthy index of the dog- matic creed of the Church to which they belong. For the most part, our modern High-Church clergymen look at the vow of obedience to the Bishop as one involving no sort of mystical deference or spiritual loyalty, but one requiring only a purely technical interpretation. And as to the dogmatic authority of the Bench of Bishops in relation to the creed of their Church, the High Churchmen are often disposed, we think, rather to assign it a negative value,—that is, to hold that it is at least very improbable that what all the Bishops alike sustain, is likely to cover the central truth—the essential truth—of the Anglican creed.
Mr. Hatch states that this grudging attitude of mind towards the Bishops is by no means a new one; that at the beginning of the eighth century, " the majority of the Churches were held by unattached Clerks (Glerici Vagantes), many of whom held Arian or other heretical opinions," but " whether unsound in faith or loose in morals," " subject to no special discipline." At present, the Bishops, in England at least, have no reason to complain of their impotence in cases of moral scandal. Public opinion sup- ports fully the exercise of authority in matters of that kind, nor are the statutes which define the Bishops' powers inadequate for the purpose of dealing with real abuses. But in relation to matters of ritual and heresy, the Bishops find their authority extremely limited, and probably nowhere more so than when they try to regu- late the doings of the High-Church party. Dr. Newman's feeling that the lightest word of a Bishop is weighty, is not only very rare at present in the Anglican Church, but particularly rare among the High-Church party. Their opinion appears to be,—and we do not wonder at it, for the experience of the last forty years has necessarily fostered it,—that the Bishops, to use a later phrase of Dr. Newman's, have always " vigorously handselled their Apostolical weapons against the Apostolical party,"—and that they are, in fact, much better disposed to be " Ordinaries " of the State, than to be the bulwarks of any kind of Church principle whatever. The result is that even those of the Clergy who con- tend most vigorously for the due transmission of the " Orders " of our Church, as the sole guarantee of the Sacramental system, attach no importance at all to the possession of these Orders considered as guarantees of either wise government or sound doctrine. They are apt to regard Bishops as prima, facie persons worthy of thorough distrust, men who must win a character for prudent administration before they are entitled to any deference at all. Of course, they will profess themselves willing to fulfil their " contract " to obey, so far as they contracted for obedience; but beyond the terms of the contract, obedience is not to be thought of, unless it has been previously justified by establishing a specific claim to confidence. Dr. Newman's personal loyalty to Bishop Bagot was the offspring of a theory which has not been since supported by facts,—a theory that the Bishops, as chan- nels of divine grace, must generally also be supposed to be chan- nels of just feeling and wise judgment on things sacred. Evi- dently our modern Clergy do not think so, nor do we know that they have any particular reason for thinking so. As a rule, we quite admit that the Bishops of the Anglican Church have not been very courageous, nor very coherent, nor very Liberal, nor generally very straightforward in their dealings with what they regarded as eccentric or dangerous views. Our Bishops have been, for the moat part, more anxious to prevent the State from with- drawing its confidence from the Church, than they have been to make the State worthy of the confidence of the Church. And through that tendency they have very naturally alienated many of those eager and ardent men who have thought, in the first place, of making Christians out of evil-doers, and only in the second place of sustaining the reputation of the Church for safe and prudent habits.
But what puzzles us is how so considerable a school can have arisen which, insisting as it does on the Apostolic inheritance of the Bishops in relation to their custody of Sacramental grace, yet regards that function as involving nothing at all further that is Apostolic, nothing of either special guidance in practical matters, or special insight in doctrinal matters, to which a presumption at least of authority ought to attach. We do not complain that the Bishops are not regarded with much veneration in either light. We rather think that they have deserved little, and have, taken as a body, been more conspicuous during the last forty years for their genuine official diligence than for any other good quality that could be named,—and even more conspicuous perhaps for worldly wisdom than for official diligence. But still, it cannot, we think, be denied that Dr. Newman's a priori conception of the weight to be attached to the judgment of such channels of sacramental and spiritual grace as, in the opinion of Anglicans, those who confer the power of baptising, absolving, and consecrating the elements, should possess, is a natural one. It is very difficult to understand how an order of men who are chosen to convey such gifts to the Church, should have been deserted by, or else should have forfeited, all special grace for the purposes of practical administration and doctrinal guidance. And yet that is, so far as we can tell, the general view of the High-Church party, who, though they consider a bishop's inter- vention essential to the due conveyance of sacramental grace to the heart of Christians, nevertheless consider a bishop's decision on things practical, and a bishop's condemnation of a dogmatic opinion, decidedly more likely to be wrong than right. It is, to our minds, difficult to understand this complete divorce between the High-Church view of " Orders," and the High-Church view of those who confer Orders. Is not Dr. Newman's veneration for the Apostolic authority of a Bishop a very natural view in a school which believes that the bishop is made the exclusive . channel for diffusing a certain most potent kind of divine grace ? Is it not bard to understand how such grace could pass, and pass habitually, through the Bishops' ceremonial activity without sending out any fertilising side-tributaries to the Bishops' intellects, consciences, and wills P
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