Project Canterbury

Anglican Disunity and the Idea of Western Orthodoxy

Address given by H. A. Hodges, S.C.M. in 1957 to the Fellowship of St. Alban and St. Sergius

Transcribed by Ian B. Pitt
AD 2001

I The Problem of Anglican Disunity

This paper is written in the belief that the friendly relations which now subsist between the Orthodox Churches and the Anglican Communion ought to be made closer and more intimate, and that the Anglican Churches ought to approximate more and more to Orthodoxy until at last they could be recognised as actual members of the Orthodox family. With this belief goes another, viz. that the desired end can never be attained unless the Anglicans search their hearts, as well as their minds, more deeply and seriously than they have yet done, and ask themselves some fundamental questions about their own Church, its faith and its status in Christendom. The Church of England as we now know it is a product of the Reformation. Here, perhaps, already we have the clue to an understanding of it. Find the governing principle of the Reformation, and you will have found the governing principle of the Church of England. That seems fairly simple; but is it really so? What, in fact, is the governing principle of the Reformation? The Churches which issued from or participated in that great movement are very various in doctrine, discipline, and ethos, and if we are to understand the Church of England as one of them, at least we must understand it in its distinctiveness as well as in what it shares with the rest. We must ask what features make it a member of the Reformation family, but also what features make it different from the other members of that family. It is not clear at the outset whether the likenesses or the differences will ultimately be found to preponderate. What have all the Reformation Churches in common? Hostility to Rome? It is true that they are all ‘hostile’ to Rome, at least to the extent of refusing to accept all the Roman claims; and the Church of England shares in this ‘hostility’, if that is the right word for it. But this is a negative characteristic; and even if we give it substance by detailing the numerous points in which the Reformation Churches do differ from Rome, however detailed and circumstantial our account of them may be, it is still a purely negative account. And this will not do. Great movements are not made and sustained on a pure negation. The rejection of Rome and her words and works must have some positive ground. We do not believe what Rome says because we believe something else which is incompatible with it. What then is this something else? What is the positive faith from which the Reformation springs? And what has the faith of the Church of England in common with that of the other Reformation Churches? The world in general has a name for it. The world in general calls it ‘Protestantism’; and under that name it conceives a type of Christian faith and life which, however hard to define precisely, is not hard to recognise, until we come face to face with the Church of England, and then we begin to wonder. For the majority of people, both without the Church of England and inside it, believe that this Church is a Protestant Church; but there are many, especially inside the Church of England, who are concerned to insist that it is Protestant and something else as well; and there are many extremely vocal Anglicans who say that it is not and never was truly Protestant at all, but that it is and always was ‘Catholic’. Is this perhaps a matter of words? If we make the word ‘Protestant’ a common designation for all those Christian communities which separated from Rome in the sixteenth century, of course the Church of England answers to this definition; whereas, if we define ‘Protestant’ by reference to the theological systems of Luther and Calvin, it is clear that the Church of England never assented unreservedly to either of these. So there is no real disagreement, only a difference of linguistic habits, and we can all be happy together. This solution is too simple, and is false. Protestantism does not consist merely and precisely of the theological systems of Luther and Calvin. There is a ‘Protestantism’ which is not so clear-cut as these, but is yet an undeniable fact and a powerful force in the world, and we all know what its leading characteristics are. Its presence as one element in the Church of England is obvious enough. And though the Church of England may not be officially and systematically Lutheran or Calvinist, she often adopts the characteristic teachings of these and other Protestant leaders, echoes their phrases, and uses forms of public worship which were remodelled under their influence. But then what of all those Anglicans who regret these facts, deny them where possible, and do everything to minimise their importance? These too are Anglicans, and their presence in the Church of England is a significant fact about that Church. It seems then that the Church of England is a problem. But there are some Anglicans who like to present it rather as the solution of a problem. Avoiding the word ‘Protestant’, they describe the Church of England as ‘Catholic and Reformed’. But here is another ambiguity. If by ‘Reformed’ they mean Calvinist, the statement is untrue and indeed absurd. If on the other hand they merely mean that the Church of England has undergone a reform, we are left in the air; for what we want to know is, what kind of a reform? Only one thing is dear. By using the word ‘Catholic’ these people mean to imply that it was a conservative and traditionalist kind of reform, revising rather than abolishing wherever that was possible. Yet in fact many things were abolished. On what principle? What really was the governing idea? Some would describe it as ‘non-Papal Catholicism’. Catholicism, we are to understand, is one thing, and Papalism is another, a destructive parasite upon the first. Get rid of the Papacy and of everything which is consequential upon it, and you will recover true unadulterated Catholicism; and this is what the Church of England is alleged to have done. It is what the Old Catholics also claim to have done; so that the fact that the Anglicans are in full communion with the Old Catholics, and with no one else out side the Anglican Communion itself, fits in well with this view. If Papalism is an excrescence upon Catholicism, we naturally conclude that there must have been a time before it appeared. Before that, presumably, true unadulterated Catholicism prevailed, and to appeal to a pure non-Papal Catholicism is to appeal to the religion of the Church as it was before the Papal perversion. And when did the perversion take place? Not at one precisely determinable date; it was a gradual process; but it came to a head about the same time when that other gradual process, the estrangement between the eastern and western Churches, came to a head. There is even a connection between the two processes, for the resistance of the East to the rising Papal demands was one of the causes of the estrangement, while on the other hand the gradual loss of effective contact and consultation with the East left the Roman patriarch on a solitary eminence, and so made it easier for him to take a false view of himself. But if the Papal perversion is coeval with the schism of East and West, non-Papal Catholicism must be the faith of the as yet undivided Church. And in fact the claim to hold the faith of the undivided Church’ is a claim often made by Anglicans. So far everything still fits. Must we not take a further step? Since the schism the western Church, deeply involved with the abounding energies of the western world, has changed and developed in many ways, in doctrine, devotion, and discipline. Some of these changes have been consequential upon the Papalist perversion, others have been incidents in a violent revolt against it; but all forms of western Christendom have moved far from the mind and temper of the days before the schism. In eastern Christendom that mind and temper survive substantially unchanged. This absence of change, which makes the eastern Church appear to some in the West as lifeless and fossilised, nevertheless guarantees the identity of its faith and order with those of the undivided Church. If, then, the Anglican Reformation was an attempt to recover the faith of the undivided Church, is not that equivalent to saying that it was an attempt to return to Orthodoxy? Anglicans are not in the habit of putting it so precisely. Why is this? Is it because they are not sure that the Orthodoxy of today is the faith of the undivided Church which they are seeking? And if so, is it because they think they can see points in which Orthodoxy has departed from the norm, or is it simply because they know so little about it that they feel they cannot hazard a judgment? Or do they feel that the existing Orthodox Churches, being eastern, are not a useful model for the reformation of a Church of the western family? Or is it just that they are not imaginatively awake to the great fact of the Orthodox world? Probably it is a combination of all these reasons. To those who are deeply involved in the eternally inconclusive controversies of the West, a Church which stands so largely outside the area of these disputes may easily appear to have no contribution to make; though in fact this very detachment may be what the western disputants most need to bring them to their senses. And after all there are in post-Reformation Anglican history some very notable signs of interest in Orthodoxy. There are the borrowings from the eastern liturgies in the Prayer Book, with which we may link the use made of them in Bishop Andrewes’ Preces Privatae, and the more recent popularity of eastern hymns in translations by Neale and others. There is the approximation to the Byzantine model in the Elizabethan settlement of the relations between Church and State, and the subsequent development of the Anglican Communion into a family of Churches whose relations with one another so closely resemble those between the Orthodox Churches. There is an evident and conscious affinity of spirit in theological discussions, due largely to a common dependence on the Greek Fathers. There are the successive attempts, in every century since the Reformation, to establish close and friendly relations between the Church of England and the Orthodox world, in spite of the great difficulties which for so long impeded the attempt. The present friendship between the two groups of Churches has solid grounds in Anglican history. Further, if we can accept this view that the Anglican Reformation was a feeling-out towards Orthodoxy, it will provide us with a clear explanation of the difference between the Church of England and the other Reformation Churches. All of them alike were in revolt against Rome and the Papacy. All of them alike were trying to return to a pure model of Christianity which they sought in the past, in days previous to the rise of the Papacy. But the majority of the Reformers believed that corruption had set in before the specifically Papal errors began, and that the Church of patristic times was already involved in false doctrines and mistaken practices which modern Orthodoxy retains. For them therefore there was no way but to seek the true model in the Bible, using it to judge the Church of the patristic period instead of using that Church to interpret the Bible. Such has been the Protestant way at all times. What the Fathers are to the Orthodox, the Reformers are to Protestants, the standard interpreters of the true Scriptural faith. But in this respect the Anglicans, or at any rate a large and influential party among them, sided with the Orthodox. One need only compare the Book of Homilies, or the theological works of Cranmer and other Anglican Reformers filled as they are with references to the Fathers, with the clear, stern, exclusively Biblical approach of Calvin, to see and feel the difference. It is a difference which has persisted. If this account of the nature of Anglicanism could be accepted as true and adequate, no one would be more pleased than I, for it would authenticate my original reasons for being an Anglican at all. I am not Anglican by upbringing, but by my own choice, made in adult life. I was converted to Catholicism though not to Papalism, and I sought to live out that faith in the Church of England because I was given to understand that the Church of England was an embodiment of it. There are Anglicans who have all the appearance of sincerely thinking that it is. But, as the great Duke said to the man who addressed him as Jones, ‘If you can believe that you can believe anything.’ The Church of England is a body in which non-Papal Catholicism is held and taught and lived, which provides a home for it and a centre for its diffusion, but for all that the Church of England cannot be defined or fully described in terms of non-Papal Catholicism. There are other elements in it, especially Protestant elements, which demand recognition. They are manifest in the daily life of the Church of England, they find voice in a continuing theological tradition, they draw strong support from the Prayer Book and Articles, the documents by which the dogmatic position of the Church is ostensibly defined, and by which Anglican devotion has for centuries been shaped. The cardinal doctrine of the continental Reformers was the doctrine of justification by faith alone,’ and by justification’ the Reformers mean not ‘being made righteous’ but ‘being accounted righteous’; that is, they make the word refer not to the moral and spiritual state of the redeemed, but to their status as having been reconciled and brought into the family of God. In Article I I the Church of England also proclaims justification by faith alone, and refers us for an explanation of it to one of the Homilies; here the doctrine is expounded clearly and forcefully and in a typically Protestant way, and we are told that the acceptance of it as so expounded is the acid test of who is or is not a Christian. The doctrine of sanctification, though of course not denied, is pushed into the background in the Anglican as in the continental Protestant texts. The episode of justification plays so decisive a part in their doctrine of salvation, that justification’ and ‘salvation’ are sometimes spoken of as if they were the same thing. Nothing is more characteristic of the Protestant Reformers than their conception of the Word of God, which they drew from the Bible, especially perhaps from the Old Testament, and made central in their theology. The most important fact about the relation between God and man is that God speaks and man can hear and obey. We have God’s Word written in the Bible, and spoken in the day-today preaching of the Church; the sacraments too are in essence a way of preaching the Word by visible signs. When Christians meet for worship, it is always primarily to hear the Word; it is never to offer sacrifice, for we cannot ‘give’ or ‘offer’ anything to God, except of course thanks and praise for the gifts which He bestows on us, and especially for the Word which He speaks to us. The Church is defined as a society in which the Word is preached, the ministry is a ministry of the Word, and Church and ministry alike stand continually under judgment in the light of the written Word. All these features of Protestant doctrine find an echo in the Anglican Prayer Book and Articles. The Church is defined in terms of the Word and of the sacraments, which are the Word made visible. Throughout the Prayer Book, and especially in the Ordinal, the sacred ministry is conceived as a ministry of the Word; by the passages read from Scripture, by the prayers offered for the candidates and the questions and admonitions addressed to them, and by the actions accompanying the actual ordination or consecration, it is made plain that the office and work of a priest or a bishop is essentially pastoral and didactic, and the administration of the sacraments is merely one aspect of this. It is in the light of these facts that the claim of continuity, made in the Preface to the Ordinal, must be interpreted and qualified. Moreover, it is made plain that the Word of God is over the Church, and the Church has no authority except as the custodian and mouthpiece of the written Word. The creeds derive their authority not from the Church which propounds them, but from the Bible which is their source. The Church can err and has erred, even General Councils have erred ‘in things pertaining to God’; and to this broad statement no exceptions or qualifications are suggested. Catechism and Articles alike assert that the sacraments are means by which we receive grace. That is common ground in all systems of theology. But if we consult our texts to learn what kind of grace is given, and how it is conveyed, we are given typically Protestant answers. Article 27, on Baptism, reminds us strongly both in thought and word of Calvin, who speaks of this sacrament as ‘a kind of sealed instrument’ or legal certificate by which God assures us of pardon and purification. The Article as a whole is unintelligible unless it means that we are baptised in order that we may thereafter be able to remember the fact, and find in it a sign and seal of God’s favour towards us-a view vividly set forth by Luther in his Greater Catechism, and shared by Calvin. Again, the Prayer Book provides for confession to a priest, to be followed by absolution: but the only purpose which it ascribes to this rite is to quiet the troubled conscience, which is exactly Luther’s view of it. Again, the Catechism defines the purpose of the Lord’s Supper as ‘the continual remembrance’ of Calvary and of what it has meant to us; and a passage in the liturgy itself makes clear that this is not a solemn memorial of the Passion which we make before God the Father, but a reminder of it addressed by Christ to us, ‘to our great and endless comfort’. Many features of the Prayer Book rite are due to this governing principle, that the purpose of the sacrament is to bring comfort (i.e. encouragement) and assurance to those who partake. The Real Presence and the eucharistic sacrifice are carefully edited away. True, Cranmer in his theological writings acknowledges a real sacramental presence of Christ in the soul of the faithful communicant, but not in any way in the elements and not before the moment of communion. His revision of the liturgy was carried through in accordance with this principle. Every word or act in the Latin rite which could suggest a presence in the elements was carefully removed, and in spite of later revisions there is still nothing in the rite which unambiguously proclaims this doctrine. The Black Rubric, appended to the rite as an afterthought, denies the real presence in one form, while omitting to affirm it in any other form. The Catechism defines a ‘sacrament’ in a way which excludes the possibility of saying that the consecrated elements are the Body and Blood, and Article 28 also denies this. Article 29 says that unworthy communicants do not receive the Body of Christ; which is a regular point of Protestant teaching, though contrary to Catholic belief and to the plain sense of Scripture. As for the eucharistic sacrifice, it is not mentioned except in the so-called Prayer of Oblation, and there it is split into two elements, neither of which is the sacrifice as understood by Catholic theology. We make an appeal to God the Father in the name of Christ as Victim, but we do not now actually offer the Victim; we merely recall the one and only offering which He Himself made on Calvary, and pray that we may enjoy the benefits of it. (Such a prayer can be made at any time, in any place, and is not essentially eucharistic at all.) And we make a present offering to the Father, but it is not a propitiatory offering of Christ as Victim; it is a thankoffering of ourselves, as members of His mystical Body, in duty and service to the Father. This is a triumph of ingenuity, but after all it is Protestant ingenuity. And even the prayer in which this is done is made optional. It can be replaced by a Prayer of Thanksgiving which contains no trace of sacrificial language at all. If such be the nature of the Prayer Book liturgy, why, it may be asked, has it been able to hold the affections of so many Anglicans, including not a few whose theology was far more Catholic than its author’s? Not, assuredly, because of its omissions and tacit denials, but because of the deep and moving doctrine which3 in spite of them, it plainly teaches: the doctrine of the mystical union of Christ with the believing soul. Cranmer in his theological exposition of the Eucharist dwells emphatically on this doctrine. By faith we live in Christ and He in us, and this not figuratively, but substantially and effectually, so that from this union we receive eternal life. When in the Eucharist we make our act of faith and thanksgiving, our union with Christ is strengthened and deepened; that is what is meant by saying that in this sacrament we ‘feed’ on Him. Cranmer reminds us of St. Ignatius’ phrase about the Holy Communion as the ‘salve of immortality’, and Dionysius’ reference to it as ‘deific’, with other strong and graphic phrases from the Fathers to the same effect. It is this doctrine, this spirit, which finds expression in the Prayer Book liturgy. It is this which has kept alive a vein of eucharistic devotion in the Church of England through the most arid and apparently hopeless times. This is the core, around which it was ultimately found possible to reconstruct the whole edifice of Catholic eucharistic belief and practice. But it is only the core, it is not the whole structure, and the rite which embodies it is, in spite of everything, a Protestant rite. Catholic-minded Anglicans are often too fond of cushioning themselves against the shock of this knowledge. There are various ways of doing this. The simplest is to abstain from learning anything about Protestantism; then one can happily read Catholic meanings into Protestant texts without being aware of the solecism one is committing. Another way is to impugn the authority of the documents. The Articles, we are told, are not a statement of faith issued by the Church, but a kind of henotikon drawn up by the government for a political purpose. True: but the Church whose clergy accepted this henotikon, and signed it en masse over a period of centuries, is not entitled to disclaim all responsibility for its contents. Or we are told that the Church of England is not committed to the private heresies of Cranmer or the other Reformers. True: but the Prayer Book is not a statement of anyone’s private views, it is a public document of the most solemn kind and of a definite theological complexion, and the Church which has accepted it, used it, loved it, and been spiritually nurtured on it cannot dissociate itself from the theology which it teaches. Again, because there are statements in St. Augustine about the Eucharist which approximate more closely to Protestant teaching than do the stronger and more explicit statements of St. Ambrose or St. John Damascene, it is found possible to argue that these stronger and more explicit statements do not necessarily represent the Catholic Faith, but only one tradition in the Church, and that the Prayer Book is not necessarily un-Catholic because it follows a less defined tradition. But, even if we allow that it is legitimate in this way to play off one early writer against another while ignoring the fact that there came a time when the Church solidly made up its mind, even if we allow that there were and still are two views on this matter between which it is legitimate to choose, a Church can hardly claim to be ‘Catholic’ if its official utterances take sides with the one to the exclusion of the other. In this as in other things the faith expressed in the Prayer Book is too meagre, too negative, too onesided to be a true descendant of the faith of the undivided Church. Even this is not the whole story. In addition to this theological Protestantism in -the Anglican documents; we must recognise what may be called a psychological Protestantism, or Protestant cast of mind, in many members of the Church of England who know nothing of Reformation theology. This psychological Protestantism was endemic in western Europe long before the Reformation. It entered into movements like the Hussite and the Waldensian, and helped to create the climate of feeling in which Catharism could flourish. Here in England it took the form of Lollardy, which in the fourteenth century was already causing the Church serious concern. What are the features of this psychological Protestantism? First of all, an insistence on simplicity in faith and worship, whose motive is to bring Christianity within the range of the most ordinary intelligence. Appeal is made to the ‘simple Gospel’ in contrast with elaborate systems of theology, and the simple Gospel demands also simple forms of expression in public worship. Anything in doctrine or in worship which is not readily intelligible to the ordinary man is condemned as an unnecessary and therefore harmful complication. There is a deep distrust of all ecclesiastical authority in so far as it claims to govern belief and practice. The Catholic idea of the priesthood is rejected, and in order to guard against it a low and meagre doctrine of the sacraments is insisted on. A man’s religion is his own affair, it is his personal relation with his Maker, which he must manage for himself aided by his Bible and his experience of life. No priest has a right to ‘intrude’ into this private shrine. The expression of a healthy religion is sought in righteousness of life, but sanctity as distinct from righteousness is not understood in principle and is disliked when seen in the concrete. The good Christian is above all the good member of society. The Protestant cast of mind is compatible with a real and deep spiritual life, centred on the faith-relation between the believer and Christ. That is what we find in some types of Evangelical and Free Church piety. But it can also appear without this dimension of depth, in minds which are upright and righteous but in no sense devout. Such people are often active and strenuous in social, cultural, or political life, and their religion gives direction and power to their activity. But they are not trained in theological subtle ties or in devotional niceties, and are apt to be impatient of both. Whatever in Christianity goes beyond the limits of a robust common sense is to them of secondary importance. The Church of England has its full share of such people, and they have an appreciable influence on its ethos. It is not an influence which tells in favour of the fullness of Catholic faith and tradition. And yet there are Anglicans, and they not the least intelligent and sincere, who bend all their energies to minimise these facts, or even shut their eyes to them altogether. How can they do it? If the Protestant influence in the Prayer Book and Articles is open and manifest, and if the Protestant outlook is so widespread among the members of the Church, how can these things be hidden from so many good Anglicans, who paint a quite different picture of their Church? Because there is after all another set of facts, equally open and manifest in Anglican history and experience, which differentiate the Church of England from every other member of the Reformation family. It is possible to overstate these facts, to exaggerate their significance and the extent to which they represent a divergence from Protestant norms; but it is not possible for any reasonable person to deny that they exist and mean something. The Reformation documents of Anglicanism, Protestant though they are, do breathe a different spirit from that of militant Protestantism, and have not the same significance and authority as the great Protestant Confessions. Take the Articles for instance. The Church, as I have said, cannot divest itself of responsibility for its long-continued assent to them. Yet it is true that they are a henotikon and not a systematic declaration of faith. They therefore tend to limit their assertions, to qualify their statements, to leave loopholes for the expression of a different point of view. The Prayer Book too, though undoubtedly written from a Protestant point of view, is far from being a clear Protestant manifesto. The use of Protestant words and phrases, though it is evidence of what is in the mind of the writer, does not of itself compel the reader or user of the rile to share the writer’s mind. The antithesis between Protestantism and Catholicism is of course not absolute, there is a large overlap of common doctrine, and Protestantism differs from Catholicism more by what it leaves out or denies than by what it positively asserts. The Prayer Book leaves out what a Protestant must leave out, but its omissions are not always open denials. It retains, to a larger extent than most other Protestant rites, liturgical forms and traditional phrases which carry associations and have a life of their own, independent of Cranmer’s intentions. The eucharistic rite in particular, though in itself it is a Protestant composition, can by a few judicious insertions and by the addition of appropriate ceremonial be transformed into something which a Catholic-minded person can use without strain. Even from the beginning the rite was often interpreted in a different sense from what its author intended, for the classical Anglican doctrine of the Eucharist is High Calvinist, not Zwinglian as Cranmer’s was; and the process of reinterpretation, so begun, has proved to have a momentum which has carried it much further. What is true of the documents is also true of the constitution of the Church. There is no justification in strict Protestant principle for the obstinacy with which the Church of England clung to episcopacy and the apostolic succession. True, the Anglicans of the Reformation period did not unchurch the Protestants who had not an episcopal form of government. True, there have always been Anglicans who would defend episcopacy on grounds merely of administrative efficiency. Yet a King and an Archbishop died martyrs for it, and Anglicans in England and Wales and Episcopalians in Scotland fought and suffered in its defence. It is unconvincing to ascribe all this to merely political or social motives. At the least these people would have agreed with the words of Dr. Johnson on episcopacy: ‘Why, sir, as it was an apostolic institution, I think it is dangerous to be without it.’ The Church of Sweden, which alone among the other Reformation Churches has kept the apostolic succession, is wont to speak of it in very different terms from these, and makes a point of saying that it is not a matter of principle. In fact one may say that true undiluted Protestantism, sure of its principles and theologically alert, is not at home in the Church of England. Its true place is elsewhere, and in England we must seek it in the Free Churches. These bodies, with the exception of the Methodists, arose because those in seventeenth-century England who really did conform to Protestant standards of doctrine were unable to recognise the Church of England as a true embodiment of their principles, and therefore seceded or allowed themselves to be expelled from it. Their objection was not only to the Establishment and prelatical Bishops; they were not only Nonconformists, but Dissenters. They were and are an embodied challenge to the whole Anglican system. The Methodist schism differs from the others in that it did not arise from a clear-cut opposition of theological principles, but the end-result has not been very different. The founder of the movement, at a crucial moment in its history, chose to adopt and act on Presbyterian principles, and the Methodist movement of today is firmly ranged in the Protestant ranks. All these bodies rest on the conviction that the Protestantisation of the Church of England was not thoroughgoing. They are right, it was not. And this can be put more positively by saying that pre-Reformation elements, Catholic elements, have survived the sixteenth-century revolution in this Church. It is these elements which have provided the starting-point for the astonishing counter-revolution of the last hundred years. The stubborn adherence of the Anglicans to the episcopal constitution of the Church; the care which they took to preserve the tactual succession, though without presuming to judge those who could not reform themselves without losing it; the persistent feeling of continuity with the pre-Reformation Church; the persistent tendency to appeal to the Fathers and to turn them against Rome, where the Protestant world ignores them or lumps them together with Rome under one condemnation; the refusal of some Anglicans to unchurch Rome herself; the readiness of some to learn from Roman Catholic spiritual writers and saints; the persistence of a tradition of sacramental worship and a sense for liturgy, unexampled in a Church so exposed to Swiss influences; the fact that those in seventeenth-century England who really did conform to Protestant standards of doctrine found it impossible to remain in the Church of England-these are the facts on which the High Church interpretation of Anglicanism rests. The spectacular revival of Catholic ideas and practices in the Church of England during the last century, extending from the sphere of dogmatic teaching to include a transformation of the Church’s sacramental practice and a vigorous renewal of the religious life under vows-all this could not have happened but for these starting-points which were present in the constitution and ethos of the Church as it emerged from the Reformation. In the light of all this we can understand, though we cannot defend, the state of mind of those Anglicans who do not and will not accept Protestant teaching as the true voice of their Church, even though it is set down in black and white in the Prayer Book for everyone to read. We may further observe that in many overseas provinces of the Anglican Communion, where the Church is free from the obligations of Establishment, the Articles have been dropped and the Prayer Book revised in a Catholic sense, though never so far as to make it unusable by Protestants. The fact that Anglicanism shows this wide-spread and persistent tendency is itself a significant fact about it. Anglicanism is not a form either of Catholicism or of Protestantism, for it has in it elements of both. Individual Anglicans can be either Catholic or Protestant, and the Church of England contains them both, and both can claim right of place in this Church. They fail only too often to understand one another. The remarks made by some Catholic scholars about justification by faith are a monument of incomprehension, showing clearly that those who so mishandle the doctrine have not shared the experience which ‘underlies it. But Protestant writers show equal inability to come to terms with Catholic themes. And these Catholics who misunderstand Protestantism and Protestants who misunderstand Catholicism are members of the same Church, using the same liturgy but interpreting it differently, sometimes being rude to one another and sometimes being polite, but continually failing to reach a proper understanding of one another. What sort of a Church is this? What are we to make of these differences of doctrine and ethos? They are a scandal both to the Catholic and to the Protestant of strict observance, both of whom think that a Church should say definitely what its doctrine is and require its members to abide by the definition. If the Church does not know what the true Faith is, or, knowing, is unwilling to declare it plainly, can it be a genuine Church at all? What respectable theological sense can be given to this apparent duplicity - or is it schizophrenia? What part can such a body expect to play in the life of Christendom? What must its members do, to enable it to play that part?

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