Objection:—Movement issued from the National Church
Personal Experience as Anglican
Anglican Ordinances Absence of Certainty Spiritual Gifts
Grace Given to All
Grace Given Two Ways in a Sacred Ordinance
Inward Disposition Can Account for Effects
Others have Same Evidences
Catholics have both External and Internal Evidences1
1.
I AM proposing, my brethren, in these Lectures, to answer several of the objections which are urged against quitting the National Communion for the Catholic Church. It has been a very common and natural idea of those who belong to the movement of 1833, as it was the idea of its originators, that, the Nation being on its way to give up revealed truth, all those who wish to receive that truth in its fulness, and to resist its enemies, are called on to make use of the National Church, to which they belong, whose formularies they receive, as their instrument for that purpose. I answer them, that their attempt is hopeless, because the National Church is strictly part of the Nation, in the same way that the Law or the Parliament is part of the Nation; and therefore, as the Nation changes, so will the National Church change. That Church, then, cannot be used against the spirit of the age, except as a drag on a wheel; for nothing can really resist the Nation, except what stands on a basis independent of the Nation. It must say and will say just what the Nation says, though it may be some time in saying it. Next, having thus shown that the National Church is absolutely one with the Nation, I proceeded further to show that, on the other hand, the National Church is absolutely heterogeneous from the Apostolic or Anglo-Catholic party of 1833; so that, while the National Church is part of the Nation, the movement, on the contrary, has no part or place in the National Church. To aim, then, at making the Nation Catholic by means of the Church of England, was something like evangelizing Turkey by means of Islamism; and, as the Turks would feel serious resentment at hearing the Gospel in the mouths of their Muftis and Mollahs, so was, and is, the English Nation provoked, not persuaded, by Catholic preaching in the Establishment.
And I rest the proof of these two statements on incontrovertible facts going on during the last twenty years, and now before our eyes; for, first, the National Church has changed and is changing with the Nation; and secondly, the Nation and Church have been indignant, and are indignant, with the movement of 1833. I conceive that, except in imagination and in hope, there are no symptoms whatever of the National Church preventing those changes of Progress, as it is called, whether in the Nation or in itself, though it may retard them: nor any symptoms whatever of its welcoming those retrograde changes, to which it is invited under the name of primitive and Apostolical truth. The National Church is the slave of the Nation, and it is the opponent of the Movement; which, after all, has done no more than form a party in the one to the annoyance of the other.
And now I come to a second objection, which shall be my subject today. An inquirer, then, may say, “This is a very unfair and one-sided view of the matter. I grant—indeed I cannot deny—that the movement has but formed a party in the National Church. I grant it has no hold on the Church, that it does not coalesce with it, that it hangs loose of it: nay, I grant that this want of congeniality comes out clearer and clearer year by year, so that the Anglican party has never appeared more distinct from the Establishment, and foreign to it, than at this moment, when State and Bishops and people have cast it off, and its efforts, whether to alter the constitution of the Establishment, or to preserve its doctrine, have failed and are failing. I grant all this; I am forced in fairness to grant it;—or rather, whether I grant it or no, it will be taken for granted by all men without waiting for my granting. But still, so far is undeniable, that that movement of 1833 issued forth from the National Church; this, at least, is an incontrovertible fact: whatever light, life, or strength it has possessed, or possesses, from the National Church was it derived. To the Sacraments, to the ordinances, to the teaching of the national Church, the movement owes its being and its continuance; and, if it be its offspring, it belongs to it, it is cognate to it, and cannot be really alien from it; and great sin and undutifulness, ingratitude, presumption, and cruelty, there must be committed by those who, belonging to the movement, abandon the Church.” This is a consideration which is urged with great force against affectionate and diffident minds, and acts as an insurmountable difficulty in the way of their becoming Catholics. It is pressed upon them—“The National Church is the Church of your baptism, and therefore to leave it is to abandon your Mother.”