Forbes on Article XIX: Of the Church

FROM the beginning, under the name of the Church, many have understood, in its more restricted sense, the reunion of those who, believing and professing the faith of Jesus Christ, are members of the society established by Him and in Him on earth, in view of salvation. In its larger sense, it is the society of God’s creatures who

Lave a share on earth in the effects of redemption, or who in heaven have remained faithful to God.

This idea of the Church is expressed in Holy Scrip ture by figures setting forth its nature and destiny ; as “the kingdom of God,” ” the city of God,” ” the house of God ;” but the most sacred and mysterious concep tion is that of St. Paul, ” the Body of Christ a.”

The first notion with regard to the Church is its visibility. This is in accordance with the teaching of the early Church. It is a light b, the city set upon a hill c. It is the visible means whereby we attain to Christ who is invisible d, whereby we keep His life in ourselves, whose pattern we have 110 longer before our eyes e.

” The ultimate reason of the visibility of the Church is to be found in the Incarnation of the Divine Word. Had that Word descended into the hearts of men, without taking the form of a servant, and accordingly without appearing in a corporeal shape, then only an internal invisible Church would have been esta blished. But since the Word became yfcs/i, it expressed itself in an outward perceptible and human manner. It spoke as man to man, and suffered and worked after the fashion of men, in order to win them to the king dom of God, so that the means selected for the attain-

a Klee, Histoire des Dogmes Chretiens, i. 76. b S. Iren. v.

20. n. 1. S. Cyvr. de Unit. c S. Chrys. in Jes. Horn. ii. n. 3;

S. Aug. Unit., c. xvi. n. 40; Cont. Litt. Petiliani, ii. 104. n. 23<J. * S. Aug. Serm. 238. 3. c Aug. de Fide Her. qu<z non videiitur,

c. iv. 11. 7. Klee, Hist, des Dogmes Chretiens, vol. i. p. 94.

ment of tins object fully corresponded to the general method of instruction and education determined by the nature and the wants of men. This decided the nature of those means whereby the Son of God, even after Tie- had withdrawn Himself from the eyes of the world, willed still to work in the world and for the world. The Godhead in Christ having put forth its operations under the ordinary way of humanity, the form also in which His work was to be continued, was thereby traced out. The preaching of His doctrine needed then a visible human medium, and must be entrusted to visible envoys, teaching and instructing after the wonted method ; men must speak to men, in order to- convey to them the Word of God. And as in the world nothing can attain to greatness but in society, so Christ established a community; and His divine Word, His living will, and the love emanating from Him, exerted an internal uniting power upon His followers, so that an impulse implanted by Him in the hearts of be lievers corresponded to His outward institution. And thus a living, well-connected, visible association of the faithful sprang up, whereof it might be said, There they are, there is His Church, His institution, wherein He continueth to live, His Spirit continueth to work, and the Word uttered by Him eternally re sounds. Thus the visible Church, from the point of view here taken, is the Son of God Himself, everlast ingly manifesting Himself among men in human form, eternally renewing His youth, the permanent Incar nation of the same, as in Holy Writ the faithful, too,

are called the Body of Christ. Hence it is evident that the Church, though composed of men, is yet not purely human ; nay, as in Christ the Divinity and the Hu manity are clearly to be distinguished, although both are bound in unity; so is He in undivided entireness perpetuated in the Church. The Church, His perma nent manifestation,, is at once divine and human ; she is the union of both. He it is who, concealed under earthly and human forms, works in the Church ; and therefore she has a divine and a human side, yet in both undivided ; so that the divine cannot be sepa rated from the human ; nor the human from the divine. Hence these two sides change their predicates. If the divine, the living Christ and His Spirit, constitute un doubtedly that which is infallible and eternally in errable in the Church, so also the human is inerrable and infallible in the same way, because the divine with out the human has no existence for us ; yet the human is not inerrable in itself, but only as the organ and manifestation of the divine f.”

This leads us on to the next term in the definition : ’ In the Church the pure Word of God is preached, and the Sacraments duly administered.”

If Christ the eternal Truth hath built the Church ; truth, transformed by the Spirit into love, is become living among men. The Divine truth, embodied in Jesus Christ, must thereby be bodied forth in an out ward and living phenomenon, and become a deciding authority if it is to seize deeply on the whole man,

and put an end to pagan scepticism, — that sinful un certainty of the mind, which stands on as low a grade as ignorance s. It is, then, the duty of the Church to preach the pure Word of God ; to communicate, on the authority of God, those truths with regard to the nature of God and the destinies of creation which He has re vealed ; to impress upon the intellects of men the true •doctrine of Christ, — by oral instruction, by the develop ment of a school of theology, by symbolical and sug gestive rites, by catechetical instruction, by preserving and interpreting Holy Writ. Its emphatic office, so far as regards the intellects of men, is to impress upon the minds of men an abiding conviction of certain truths ; which truths not merely lead to a holy life here and to salvation hereafter, but of which the mental acceptance is itself a part of the integral Christian life, one phase of that supernatural life which, begun in this life, receives its fulness in the eternal world. Thus one department of the Church is to be the Eccksia docens. To the hierarchy, as dis tinguished from the great body of Christians, is com mitted the duty of handing down and communicating these truths, — not merely as spiritual nourishment to those within the fold but also to those without, — to heathens and strangers, that they may be brought to share in the supernatural blessings which attach them selves to this blessed yvwais.

But this is not all. When we come to consider the question of the Sacraments, we shall see that these are

e Mohler, vol. ii. p. 12, 15.

the channels whereby the virtue that proceeds from Christ our Head flows into His Body in general, that is, the Church Catholic, and into us the members in par ticular. From all antiquity the custody of the Sacra ments has always been attributed to the Church; in fact, they are among other things tesserae of membership with her. And, given this custody, it is the duty of the Church to administer them. iNext to the teach ing office of the Church comes the ministerial : next to the appeal to the intellect and heart comes the ap peal to the purely spiritual part of the nature, and this is made by the Sacraments. A Sacrament does not appeal to the intellect. It does not move the soul by any intellectual consideration. It only per aceidcns touches the heart. It works solely by virtue of the institution of Christ. It derives its power from Him, nay, in a primary sense He Himself operates in all the Sacraments as the High-Priest of the new law, using the earthly minister as the organ only.

But the Sacraments are so far influenced by the elements of the world that they have their proper mat ter and form ; that is, there are certain conditions that must be observed, very simple ones indeed, but still definite, which go to give validity to each ordinance. Therefore the Article makes it a note of the Church, that in it the Sacraments are duly administered accord ing to Christ’s ordinance ; that all the necessary con ditions to a valid Sacrament are observed. Thus there is no true baptism without the water and certain words ; the water alone, or the words alone, are not sufficient :

moreover, only certain definite words may be used with profit and effect. So, to a valid consecration of the Holy Eucharist, in addition to a definite matter, that is, bread and wine, and a definite form of words, there must be the action of a priest, episcopally ordained, else the Body of Christ is not consecrated (conficitur}.

” As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and An- tioch have erred, so also the Church of Rome hath erred, not only in tJtch’ living and manner of ceremo nies, but also in matters of faith/7

The emphatic word here is theirh. It refers to the human side of the Church, or rather to the individuals in the Church who do not live up to the graces be stowed on them. ” The Church as the institution of Christ hath never erred, hath never become wicked, and never loses its energy; which it ever preserves, although the proof may not always be so obvious to the eyes. To exhibit the kingdom of God upon earth, and also to train mankind for the same, she has to deal with men who were all born sinners, and were taken from a more or less corrupt mass. Thus she can never work outside of the sphere of evil ; nay, her destination requires her to enter into the midst of evil, and to put her renovating power continually to the test1.”

Individuals will never uin their living” come up to the perfect ideal, and the moral taint will tell upon the belief. It will affect the acceptance by the intellect

h It is not in the Latin version, nml therefore must have been put into the English with a purpose. ’ Miihler, vol. ii. p. 29.

of those truths which belong to it, not to grasp, but to yield a reverent submission to. Hence corruption of life will always be correlative to corruption of doc trine, and in proportion as men fail to practise the moral and practical parts of the Christian religion, in that measure will they fail to apprehend those delicate intuitions which are the fruits of a true faith. A man who lives as though there were no retribution, though he may in words acknowledge what the Creed says on the subject, can, in only a most imperfect sense, be said to believe it; and still more will that be the case with regard to the finer truths. Practical love to God will alone enable a man really to believe in the Holy Ghost, the love of the Father and of the Son; and practical righteousness and Christian wisdom alone enable a man to realize the righteousness and wisdom of God.

The Article is then directed against the practical and doctrinal corruptions of ” members” of the Church of Home, and these errors are declared to be similar to the errors in the Churches of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch. Now by these terms we are not to under stand the Jacobite communities which devastate these provinces with the miserable heresy of Eutyches. These, having been cut off from the Church by the Council of Chalcedon, which the Church of England acknowledges, cannot by her be termed in any sense the Churches of those countries. The errors in the Church of Rome, therefore, are compared with any errors of the orthodox and believing remnants that have remained in the East testifying to the faith of

Jesus. Now, not only has the Church of England never taken any formal step against the orthodox Eastern Church, but it has always acknowledged the East as a true branch of the Church of Christ, not without many corruptions, the effects of ignorance, and practical deformities, but still honourable and venerable in the highest degree ; and therefore the censure here passed upon the members of the Church of Ptome must be compatible with this view of the subject. In short, such censure only is intended as was implied in the general cry for reformation which prevailed all through Europe at the time of the publication of the Articles., and which the Council of Trent, partially indeed and imperfectly, but still in a measure actually, tended to correct.

Since no doctrine formerly received by all the Ortho dox Eastern Patriarchates can be pointed out, which the Church of England can be held to have had in view when it declared that those Patriarchates had erred, then neither, by the force of the terms, is any doctrine formerly received of the Latin Church intended, when it says that the Church of Rome had erred. The two clauses are strictly antithetical, and the same degree of error must be meant in both. It may be that the writers of the Article had in their minds tacitly to protest against the infallibility of the Church of Rome by itself, or that the Church of Rome, as a particular Church, and not as in harmony with the rest of the Church Catholic, was liable to error, which is histori cally true, e.g. Eugenius IV. has got all ritual writers

into endless perplexities by his ignorant definitions of the form and matter of the Sacraments k ; it may be, that they meant to convey that corruptions had crept into the Roman Church too, which required reforma tion. But neither statement lies in the words of the Article. All which the Article states is an historical fact as to the past. It says of the Church of Rome that it has erred in time past ; ” hath erred ;” as it says of the other Patriarchates that they ” have erred.” The Article binds to nothing more than this fact. Whatever lies beyond it must not be imported into the Article, since it says nothing thereon.

” The boldness with which through Christendom, and especially in Italy, censures were uttered against the Papal Court, and the corruption that had crept into the Church, is well worthy of attention. Dante and Petrarch have spoken with virulence, but were neither personally reproved, nor were their books prohibited. The novels were full of witticisms and adventures at the expense of the monks. Poggio describes the exe cution of Huss and Jerome of Prague so as to excite compassion toward them and hatred of Home. His shameless Facetiae, in which the manners of the Roman Court and of its ecclesiastics are held up as laughing stocks, were printed at Rome in 1467. Pictis of Mi- randula in the Lateran Council, declaimed against the ambition, the avarice, and the immorality of the clergy with a boldness never surpassed by any reformer1.”

k Cone. Lall., t. xviii. 1222 and 544. 1 Cantu, Storia d’Italia, Eng. trans, p. 21.

T

“274 ARTICLE XIX.

” The spirit of Paganism had however penetrated <3veii the Pontifical Court. Men of genius found favour there without regard to the use the}’ made of their talents. Bembo speaks of vows to the goddess of Fame, of appeasing the manes of the subterranean gods. Bembo and Ippolito d’Este, not only had sons but openly acknowledged them. Leo X. accepted the de dication of a most indecent poem by Ariosto, and caressed the base Aretini. TJlric Von Hutten says that those who came to Home came away with three things, — a bad conscience, an impaired stomach, and an empty purse : that three things were not believed in Rome, — the immortality of the soul, the resurrection of the dead, and the existence of hell : that three things were traded in, — the grace of God, ecclesiastical dig nities, and women m.”

Thus the “living” of the members of the Church of Rome was, unhappily, notoriously bad. If Florence was the Athens, and Venice the Corinth of mediaeval Italy, the imperial city and metropolis of the Church did not escape the contaminating influences of the times. Italy was at the head of the civilization and refinement of Europe, and alas, of its wickedness. Macchiavelli had destroyed its political morality. The secession to Avignon, and the great schism, shook the confidence of Europe in the Papal See. The Borgias and Pope Julius were strange vindicators of the spiritual king dom of Christ. The heathen movement, from Nicholas V.’s time, when the Vatican Library was founded in

m Cantu, p. 27.

1447, and Laurentius Valla began that bright galaxy of scholars, which culminated in the time of Leo X., shocked the moral sense of the Church. Complica tions, caused by the union of the temporal and eccle siastical powers, such as certain sanitary arrangements in which the moral health of the community was sa crificed to the physical, became scandals. As has been said, the spirit of Paganism pervaded the Curia Montana. Yet, that error should creep into the different Churches, had long been recognised as possible. As early as the days of St. Pacian of Barcelona, who died in extreme old age before A.D. 392, and who represented the mind of St. Cyprian, we read such words as these : ” There fore she (the Church Catholic) is also a fruitful and rich vine, with many branches, and the varied tresses of many a tendril. Look ! Are there everywhere large clusters, is every grape full swelled? Have none of these suffered from the winter cold ? Have none en dured the rough hail ? Have none to accuse the burn ing heat of summer ? One bud is studded thicker with shoots ; another is stronger ; another clearer : one bursts forth into fruit; another only into exube rance of leaves. Yet is she a vine, in every part beautiful11.” Moreover, sufficient stress has not been laid upon the note of sanctity, and its operation on the organic Church ; perhaps because, inasmuch as God only knows those who are His, men prefer to deal with that which is tangible and visible. They therefore appeal, perhaps too exclusively, to the note of unity. And yet

surely the same laws affect both. If man’s free-will can affect the sanctity of the Church, so it may affect the unity; and the same laws and circumstances that affect the one, may affect the other. The distinction between the objective and subjective in sanctity and unity must be maintained : the one, that wrought by God only; the other, that which is produced by the co-operation of man. Men ever come short of God’s gracious purpose with regard to them, and this applies to the Church as well as individuals.

A thoughtful person has said that the whole of the latter part of the Article is probably best illustrated by a thoughtful study of the Epistles to the Seven Churches in the Apocalypse. Those words of the Di vine Head of the Church — with the exception of those addressed to St. Paul, standing alone in their pre eminent majesty and significance as the only words spoken by the Son of Man (hiring the Christian dis pensation — seem to lift the veil of His dealing with the Church, and to shew that the trials, and failings of the local portions of the One Church Catholic may be widely different in kind, and their consequences diverse in degree.

To those whose strong polemical instincts lead them to be perpetually inclined to “unchurch” — be it the Church of Rome, or be it our own, — it might prove a not unsoothing study to meditate at times upon the patience of our Divine Lord, not only in His Passion, but in His ascended glory, remembering that in the local portions of the Church Catholic, even

Notes

• Mbhler, Symlolifc, vol. ii. p. 7.
• Ep. iii. 30, Oxf. Tr. 300.