Boultbee on Article XVI: Of Sin after Baptism

The expression ^peccatum mortale,^ or * deadly sin,’ may require a few words, inasmuch as our Church has been cen- sured for using it, both here and in the Litany, as seeming to lavour the Roman distinction of mortal and venial sin, whereas all sin is deadly or deserving of death.

But we observe that in fact our Church has avoided any such classification, and has nowhere assigned any marks or gradations by which sins might be distinguished into classes.

It is difficult to produce a clear and authoritatiye Roman definition of the distinction in question. The Council of Trent ^ decrees that all mortal sins must be Confessed, but that * venial sins, by which we are not excluded from the grace of God, may be concealed without feult, and expiated by many other remedies.’ For a more exact account we must refer to the casuistical writers of the Roman Church. And here we find that practically the casuists of the Jesuit school have for the most part prevailed in modem Romanism. This brings us to such definitions as those of Bellarmine: * Mortal sins are those which cast men out of God*s favour, and deserve eternal damnation; venial sins do somewhat displease God, yet deserve not eternal death, but are pardon- able of their own nature.’ Further, venial sins are described as being involuntary and sudden passions — or volimtary sins of a light amount, such as stealing small coins, &c.

The essence of sin consists in its relation to the spiritual condition of the sinner. The very same act committed by two different individuals entails widely different measures of guilt. Any classification, therefore, such as those of Jesuit casuists, which only or chiefiy takes account of the measure or even nature of the outward act, must be fundamentally unsound and untrue.

All sin is deserving of death ; nevertheless, some sins com- mitted in some states of mind have a peculiar heinousness as being more directly against grace. Sins of presumption, sins against light, are manifestly most deeply injurious to the soul, and may be so even when they injure our neighbour little or scarcely at all. Without defining these more exactly, our Church here distinguishes them by the epithet * deadly ’ from the ordinary sins of infirmity, which were spoken of more particularly in the last Article.

The present wording of the Article is very slightly varied from the Fifteenth Article of 1552. Archdeacon Hardwicke^ says that it is borrowed chiefly from the Augsburgh Con- session. Bishop Browne also adopts this opinion. But a

close comparison of this Article with the twelfth of the Con- session of Augsburgh will hardly bear this out. There is scarcely any verbal coincidence between the two.

The. Chief Divisions of Article XVI.

1. Even heinous sin after baptism is not necessarily un- pardonable.

2. The nature of the sin against the Holy Ghost.

3. The liability of the regenerate to &R from grace, and the possibility of their restoration.

4. The condemnation of two classes of opponents.

A scriptural exposition and proof of the Article may follow this arrangement.

The Homan Doctrine on Sin after Baptism.

The Fourteenth Session of the Council of Trent dealt with Penance, and therefore with the present subject. The follow- ing extract from the second chapter of the decree of that session may suffice for the purpose of the present Article : * If the baptized afterwards defile themselves by any trans- gression, it is not the will of Christ that they should be cleansed by a repetition of baptism, which is on no account lawful in the Catholic Church, but they should be placed as offenders before the tribunal of penance, that they may be absolved by the sentence of the priests, not once only, but as often as they penitently flee thereto, confessing their sins.’

Observations on Article XVI.

Early writers expressed themselves with various degrees of severity on the subject of sin after baptism. The practice of the Church in the second and third centuries exacted pro- longed periods of penitence (the * godly discipline ’ of our commination service) before flagrant transgressors, and more especially apostates, were restored to Communion. Yet the Church Catholic always held the duty of restoring peni- tents, and it was reserved for the sects of the Montanists in the second century, or the Novatians in the third.

and their successors, to maintain the harsher practice in this matter.

The present Article would assure us that these rigid ideas were revived at the time of the Reformation. And we find that it was so. That this was one of the many forms of Ana- baptist excess we learn from Calvin :* * Our age also has some of the Anabaptists not very imlike the Novatians… . For they pretend that the people of God are r^enerated in baptism into a pure and angelical life… . But if any man &il after baptism they leave nothing to him but the inexorable judgment of God.’ Bishop Hooper * speaks in similar terms : * A man, they say, who is thus regenerate, cannot sin. They add that all hope of pardon is taken away from those who, afler having received the Holy Ghost, fall into sin.’ It is of some importance thus distinctly to identify the contemporary errors which were before the writers of this Article. In this point of view the quotation from Calvin is the more important, especially as a learned writer of the present day presses the supposed Lutheran origin of the Article to do dogmatic duty in his interpretation of it. In this Article neither Luther nor Calvin speaks individually. It is the earnest protest of the Church against the fanatical sectaries who narrowed the pale of salvation. It is tlie voice equally of Luther, of Calvin, of the Church of England; all in this, matter at one.

Bishop Browne, in treating on this Article, discusses at length the doctrine of final perseverance of the elect, which he thinks it was intended to controvert. Other writers, however, though of different theological schools, do not seem to notice it imder this Article, to which indeed it can scarcely belong. The most extreme Calvinists would admit that the truly regenerate may and do fall into sin — ^but (they would add) not finally.

They would not, therefore, recognise the doctrine of final perseverance as being even touched upon here. And it is certain that some of those who had much to do with filming the Articles held that doctrine. It is, therefore, omitted here, as not coming within the scope of this Article.

Institutes, IV. i. 23. * Original Letters, Parker Soc. p. 65.

The Sin against the Holy Ghost.

The Article now under consideration was followed in the Articles of 1552 by another, there ranking as the sixteenth, which is here subjoined : —

’ Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost,

• Blasphemy against the Holy Ghost is, when a man of malice and stubbornness of mind doth rail upon the truth of God’s word manifestly perceived, and being enemy thereunto, persecuteth the same. And because such be guilty of God’s curse, they entangle themselves with a most grievous and heinous crime, whereupon this kind of sin is called and affirmed of the Lord impardonable.’

It was, probably, a wise exercise of discretion in Elizabeth’s divines to strike out tiiis Article, and to abstain fix>m an attempt to define authoritatively the sin against the Holy Ghost. At the same time we may note that the Anabaptist extravagances occupy much less space in the thirty-nine than they did in the forty-two Articles. Those sects had declined in the intervening ten years, or it had become manifest that their adherents were of less consequence than had been sup- posed. And as the Article quoted above was, doubtless, in- tended to meet the case of consciences disturbed by the Anabaptist denial of * a place of repentance ’ noted in the foregoing Article, the partial subsidence of the error allowed the Elizabethan divines to determine on its omission.

The doctrine of the Sin against the Holy Ghost has been the subject of many anxieties and much reasoning. Bishop Burnet at once dismisses its present possibility by limiting it to the original occasion recorded in the Gospels. Bishop Beveridge ^ thus deals with it : * It shall therefore only never be pardoned by God, because never repented of by us. For if it could be repented of by us it could not but be pardoned by God, the promise of pardon to repentance running in general terms, that if a man do confess his sins to God, God will pardon his sins to him.’

Article XVI.

This seems the only treatment of the subject in harmony with the whole of Scripture. When we have marshalled and considered the grand array of Gospel promises, and asked ourselves what it is which excludes irom a share in them, the answer cannot well be any other than this. It must be a spiritual state incompatible with the conditions of those pro- mises. In other words, it must be a finally impenitent state, since the promises to repentance are so full and firee. And since the Holy Ghost is the source of all true spiritual life and feeling, we may well understand why such a desperate condition is described as the result of the sin against the Holy Ghost.

ABTICLE XVn.

Notes

• Session XIV. c. 5. * * Hist, of Articles/ chap. v.