Movement Sought Basis for Church Authority
In Prayer Book and Bishops
In Anglican Divines
In Fathers of Church
Summary
System Destroyed by Fathers’ Support of Rome
Why You cannot Continue as a Party
To Remain as Party is to Profess Private Judgment1
1.
I KNOW how very difficult it is to persuade others of a point which to one’s self may be so clear as to require no argument at all; and, therefore, I am not at all sanguine, my brethren, that what I said in my last Lecture has done as much as I wished it to do. It is not an easy thing to prove to men that their duty lies just in the reverse direction to that in which they have hitherto placed it; that all they have hitherto learned and taught, that all their past labours, hopes, and successes, that their boyhood, youth, and manhood, that their position, their connections, and their influence, are, in a certain sense, to go for nothing; and that life is to begin with them anew. It is not an easy thing to attain to the conviction, that, with the Apostle, their greatest gain must be counted loss; and that their glory and their peace must be found in what will make them for a while the wonder and the scorn of the world. It is true I may have shown you that you cannot coalesce with the National Church; that you cannot wed yourselves to its principles and its routine, and that it, in turn, has no confidence at all in you;—and, again, that you cannot consistently hang about what you neither love nor trust, cumbering with your presence what you are not allowed to serve; but still, nevertheless, you will cling to the past and present, and will hope for the future against hope; and your forlorn hope is this, that it is, perhaps, possible to remain as an actual party in the Establishment, nay, an avowed party; not, on the one hand, rising into ecclesiastical power, yet not, on the other, disorganized and contemptible; but availing yourselves of your several positions in it individually, and developing, with more consistency and caution, the principles of 1833. You may say that I passed over this obvious course in my foregoing Lecture, and decided it in the negative without fair examination; and you may argue that such a party is surely allowable in a religious communion like the Establishment, which, as the Committee of Privy Council implies, is based upon principles so comprehensive, exercises so large a toleration, and is so patient of speculatists and innovators, who are even further removed from its professed principles than yourselves.
Thus I am led to take one more survey of your present position; yet I own I cannot do so without an apology to others, who may think that I am trifling with a serious subject and a clear case, and imagining objections in order to overthrow them. Such persons certainly there may be; but these I would have consider, on the other hand, that my aim is to bring before those I am addressing, really and vividly, where they are standing; that this cannot be done, unless they are induced steadily to fix their minds upon it; that the discussion of imaginary cases brings out principles which they cannot help recognizing, when they are presented to them, and the relation, moreover, of those principles to their own circumstances and duty; and that even where a view of a subject is imaginary, if taken as a whole and in its integral perfection, yet portions of it may linger in the mind, unknown to itself, and influence its practical decisions.
With this apology for a proceeding which some persons may feel tedious, I shall suppose you, my brethren, to address me in the following strain: “The movement has been, for nearly twenty years, a party, and why should it not continue a party as before? It has avowedly opposed a contrary party in the National Church; it has had its principles, its leaders, its usages, its party signs, its publications: it may have them still. It was once, indeed, a point of policy to deny our party character, or we tried to hide the truth from ourselves, but a party we were. The National Church admits of private judgment, and where there is private judgment, there must be parties. We are, of course, under a disadvantage now, which then did not lie upon us; we have, at the present time, the highest ecclesiastical authorities in distinct and avowed opposition to our doctrines and our doings; but we knew their feelings before they expressed them. This misfortune is nothing new; we always reckoned on an uphill game; it is better that every one should speak out; we now know the worst; we know now where to find our spiritual rulers; they are not more opposed to us than before, but they have been obliged openly to commit themselves, which we always wished them to do, though, of course, we should have preferred their committing themselves on our side. But, anyhow, we cannot be said to be in a worse case than before; and, if we were allowably and hopefully a party before, we surely have as ample allowance to agitate, and not less hope of success, now.”