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YALE UNIVERSITY
LIBRARY

From the
COLLECTION OF OXFORD BOOKS
made by
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Bodley's Librarian

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A PAPEE EEAD IN CHEIST CHUECH, OXFOED,
* IN MAY. 1878, BY THE EEY* C. GOEE,
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TXTHEN we are unhappily brought into controversy
' ' with Roman Catholics, we are surprised by learn
ing that the exercise of faith is by them regarded as
impossible in the English Church. Faith, they say,
is a simple act; it is the submission of the reason,
once for all, to an external infallible authority. To
make faith possible, you must have a Church possess
ing unity in itself, uttering one clear, unmistakeable,
infallible voice on religious matters, and claiming for
itself this simple, unreserved act of submission once for
all. Now, before we consider whether, on such a de
scription of faith as this, the English Church affords
scope for its exercise, it seems desirable to examine a
little more fully what faith is ; whether it stands in such
marked antithesis to reason ; whether it is really this
sort of simple act, this sort of abnegation, once for all,
of private judgment on religious matters. The im
portance of .having a clear idea what the Christian
quality of faith 'is no one can doubt, for on all show
ing it is the corner-stone of the Christian character.
Without further preface, therefore, we proceed : —
(1.) To consider what faith is, and what is its place
in human life.
(2.) To consider what is the function of the Church
in regard to the exercise of faith.

4 The Nature of Faith, and
(3.) To examine the objections brought against the
Church of England as an organization unable to fulfil
the functions of a Church, i.e., as not affording scope
for the exercise of faith.
(1.) "When we approach the consideration of faith,
perhaps what strikes us first is, that the antithesis of
faith and reason, which is what we constantly hear
in the present controversy, is not the Scriptural one :
the antithesis there is between faith and works, or
between faith and sight*. This latter antithesis is
a suggestive one, because it takes as the opposite of
faith a reliance on what may be— not thought or con
ceived — but seen, on this visible world, that is, and the
things of sense. "Worldliness, not rationality, is the
Scriptural antagonist of faith. This seems at once to
indicate, that the content of the idea of faith has some
what changed since the Apostle's time : it has become
less a moral, and more an intellectual quality. This
will be further apparent if we consider St. Paul's
favourite antithesis of faith and works.
When St. Paul speaks of justification by faith as
opposed to justification by works, what does he mean ?
Just this : that we are to be saved not by acting as
if we were in an independent position of contract with
Grod j not by standing, as it were, over against God,
He exacting orders, like a task-master, and we stand
ing or falling according as in our own 'independent
strength we fulfil them, or fail in the attempt (which
is justification by works), but by recognizing our own
weakness and incompleteness, and in this conviction
» St. John xx. 29; Hebrews xi. 1. There is, of course, a "wisdom
of the wprld" which is opposed to faith, of which something' will
be said.

the Conditions of its Exercise. 5
giving ourselves up to God, taking Him at His word,
who has manifested Himself in Christ as loving us
and willing to save us.
" Lege operum dicit Deus, fac quod jubeo :
Lege fidei dicitur Deo, da quod jubes b."
By and in ourselves we are helpless: we find our
strength, we are justified, by surrendering ourselves
in perfect trust to God, to live as His, that He may
do in us what He wills : this is faith. Its ground ,
lies in our moral weakness and want. Of this God
convinced man by the Law ; by the operation of an
external law He made man know his impotence, and
cry the cry of a blind faith, " Oh set me up upon
the Rock that is higher than Ic;" and in answer
to this cry Christ appeared, with the words, " Come
unto Me all ye that travail, and I will give you rest."
So far, then, we see that faith is trustful self-surren
der to God ; the motive to faith is the sense of moral
want, the desire for holiness, which can find no sat
isfaction in ourselves ; the object of faith is Christ,
the manifestation of God as faithfulness and love.
It is most important to keep clearly in mind from the
first, that faith has primarily a moral, not an intellec
tual basis. Its whole interpretation as a faculty in
ourselves, and as the culmination of God's dealings
with human nature, presupposes in us this hungering ,
and thirsting after a righteousness not to be won in
our own independent strength, which alone can give
b St. Augustine, "De Spiritu et litera," cap. xxii. The whole pas
sage expands this idea of the antithesis of works and faith ; see esp.
Galatians iii. 19, 20, and Lightfoot in loc.
' Rom. vii. 9^-25 ; Gal. iii. 19—24.
a2

6 The Nature of Faith, and
it a meaning and a content. " Who shall deliver
me from the body of this death ? I thank my God,
through Jesus Christ our Lord ! " To put it in other
words, the immediate cause of the Incarnation and
God's revelation of Himself was man's need of salva
tion from sin and its consequences, which is therefore
also the raison d'etre of faith.
We must now ask, in what relation does the intel
lect of man stand to the claims of faith? Faith in
Jesus Christ, — the " I know whom I have believed," —
confessedly involves intellectual assent to certain pro
positions, — as that God is ; that He hates and punishes
sin; that He sent Jesus Christ to redeem man from
sin ; that this Jesus Christ is the Son of God, God
Incarnate; that He was declared to be such with
power, by being raised from the dead ; that when He
left the world He gave His Spirit to abide in it for
ever. Christian faith involved, at starting, assent,
at least, to such propositions as these. But here we
must notice, first of all, that these are not abstract
or speculative intellectual propositions. God did not
send His Son to declare and prove miraculously to the
intellect certain dogmas before which the human rea
son was to bow itself : on the contrary, He sent His
Son to draw men by moral suasion ; " Por he who
intends to lead men by the hand to heaven, must,
of necessity, lead them upwards from below. And
thus was the transaction managed : for first men be
held Him (Christ) as man upon earth, and then came
to know Him as GodV Drawn by moral compulsion
to His human character, they found it more than
human, they found their discipleship to involve them
d Chrys. Horn, in Epist. ad Bom., 432 a.

the Conditions of its Exercise. 7
in an intellectual assent to the truth of His divinity ;
but the intellectual truth, or truths, assent to which
was from the first found to be involved in the at
titude of faith in Christ, are those which are most
essentially connected with the moral life, those which
rise most irresistibly out of moral experience, and
which have least the character of speculative propo
sitions. The intellectual element in the Christian
faith of St. Paul and St. John is simply overwhelmed
in the moral.
But does this apply to faith in a physical fact, like
the miraculous Birth or Resurrection of Christ ? Here
equally we must take note primarily, that it is at.
least as true to say that belief in Christ made pos
sible a belief in His Resurrection, as that His Re
surrection proved His Divine Nature. Both proposi
tions are in fact true ; but it must be insisted on that
the fuller the moral faith in the person of Christ, as
something wholly transcending mere human charac
ter, the less do miraculous circumstances in His Birth,
Life, and Death, seem unnatural and unreasonable.
The unreadiness of the Apostles, and St. Thomas es
pecially, to believe in the Resurrection, was due, not
to "intellectual difficulties" in the way of accepting
a proposition or dogma, but to want of moral faith.
The Death of Christ had driven them to despair;
their trust in Christ had not strength to bear up
against the overwhelming adversity ; untrustfulness,
not pride of intellect, was their fault e.
e The faith spoken of in Habakkuk ii. 4 : " The just shall live by
his faith," (the verse to which the New Testament Doctrine of
faith is constantly referred back), is this same moral faith.-^trust-
fulness, holding on through the black, dark times of despair.

8 The Nature of Faith, and
It would be worth while, in this connection, con
sidering at length the arguments adduced by St.
Paul against those who disbelieved in a resurrection
(1 Cor. xv.). Here I can only notice very briefly
that they depend throughout on the supposition that
our resurrection stands or falls with the resurrection
of Christ, and that they fall under two heads : for the
physical fact of Christ's resurrection, which they do
not appear to have denied, he recalls to their minds
the simple evidence ; but he goes on to shew that this
physical fact of Christ's resurrection, involving as it
does that of all Christians, is the simple correlative
of moral facts — of the whole hope which animates the
Christian Church — of their whole moral attitude to-
. wards life.
And it is at least as important to observe, that
where St. Paul is speaking of the intellectual obstacle
to belief among the Corinthians, that is found not in
the doctrine of the Resurrection, but in the doctrine
of the Cross ; his intellectual antagonist was that sort
of vain and self - satisfied worldliness, which would
not listen to a doctrine of salvation, basing itself on
a recognition of sin and an atonement through hu
miliation and death.
So far, then, we have seen that our modern anti
thesis of faith and reason is false, or at any rate over
strained. Faith does indeed involve the acceptance
by the intellect of certain truths, but these truths are
such as lie most immediately on the border - land
of the moral sphere ; they are not arbitrary proposi
tions, but admit of verifibation, either by the intel
ligence, or the moral experience of the rational man.
Intellectually, then, faith means much what it means

the Conditions of its Exercise. 9
morally — in both cases it is the recognition by man
of his own insufficiency to himself, of his own de
pendence. " Grace," says St. Augustine, ," is not op
posed to nature, but is the restoration of nature," and
faith is natural and rational to a man, as being the re
cognition of the truth that his intellect is not the
supreme, absolute intelligence, but is "in the Image"
of One greater than he. As, morally, the self-sub
mission of faith finds its justification in the strength
which it gives to the life, so, intellectually, the self-
submission of faith finds its justification in the clear
ness of spiritual knowledge with which it can an
swer the religious needs of the soul; but at the
same time, just as faith does not paralyse, but gives
activity to the moral faculties of man, so also it gives
a similar activity to the intellect. Let the intellect
recognize its subordination, and it may claim its
rights — it must work — as a true part of our nature,
it must be restored to its normal and free activity.
Morally, man was striving after holiness and failing;
Christ came and gave strength. Intellectually, man
was dimly feeling after and finding the truth which
should support and give a basis for his spiritual
struggles, was vaguely worshipping an unknown God ;
Christ came, and gave clearness where vagueness was
before, certitude instead of guessing, light in place
of dimness. Thus, in having faith in Christ, man is
restored through all his nature to his normal state of
freedom in conscious dependence upon God ; and the
obstacle to faith is morally and intellectually the same,
viz., self- satisfaction, of which faith, involving the
reaching out beyond oneself to dependence upon some
thing greater, is the direct opposite.

10 The Nature of Faith, and
The object of this discussion has been simply to in
dicate, what we are perhaps apt to forget, that the
prime object of faith is moral strength. Revelation
was given, not to answer questions or supply infor
mation, but to save from sin. No doubt, at times in
the history of the Church, the acceptance of Chris
tianity has been found, as it is at present, probably
in greater part by the Church's own fault, to involve
more intellectual difficulty to thoughtful minds than
it did in St. Paul's time, — and we may add, than it
ought to do; but what is to be insisted on now is
simply, that faith is, in its central idea, not the sub
mission of the intellect, but the surrender of the whole
self to the saving work of Christ in the soul ? If we
take St. Paul's view of the object of the Incarnation,
we shall never in future make it an objection to a
Church that she does not settle disputed questions, —
as to the state of the departed, for instance, in an
other world, — or because she does not profess a power
of developing new dogmas, and requiring the in
tellect to bow itself before them. Once for all have
been revealed to us those truths on which our life
is based, which %vail to make faith sure, and hope
strong, and love active : to the end of time the Church
will have, in the life of the individual, the power of
rising to meet new complications of difficulty in the
spirit of the truths, ever new and ever old; but to
satisfy curiosity, or to make discoveries of new doc
trines, this is not her mission. The end of the com
mandment is, and remains, love out of a pure heart,
and a good conscience, and faith unfeigned ; and St.
Paul gives no countenance to the attempts of those

the Conditions of its Exercise. 11
who would enter upon discussions which tend to
" minister questions," rather than godly edifying.
(2.) The next question to be asked is, what is the func
tion of the Church in regard to the exercise of faith ?
That Christ intended to found a visible Church is not
now under discussion : by the visible Church we mean
the society of Christians which organized itself by the
operation of the Spirit within it, under a government
of Bishops, Priests, and Deacons, and was bound to
gether in a mystical unity by the Sacraments, which
were the channels of Divine Grace, and made it the
extension, so to speak, of the Incarnation, — Christ's
Body, — "the fulness of Him who filleth all in all."
The purpose which such a Church could fulfil is not
hard to see. The organization would perpetuate the so
cial idea of the Christian life : the sacramental system
secured — as, so far as we can see, nothing else could
have secured it — the apprehension of grace as an " ob
jective " reality and gift of God. So far, then, we see
that it is to be asked of a Church that she should per
petuate and carry out the ancient mould of Church
organization, and duly administer the Sacraments.
But the Church has another function; she is the
guardian of the Truth. It was committed not to indi
viduals, but to the society : she " is the pillar and
ground of the Truth." In fulfilment of her function
in this capacity, she threw off in her earliest days, by
an almost unconscious instinct, the one-sidedness of
Gnostic and Ebionite heresies; on the one side and
the other, the dreamy unreality of Docetism, and the
wildness of the Montanist: with something more of
conscious effort she rid herself of the harshness of
Novatian Puritanism ; and in the fourth and fifth cen-

12 The Nature of Faith, and .
turies, in the power of a theology now developed to
a fulL reflectiveness, she read out the instincts of her
devotional attitude towards her Lord, Divine and
human, yet one and the same Being, into the formu
lated logic of her Catholic Creeds. And in all this she
was doing nothing more than guarding the central re
vealed truths which lay at the bottom of her devotional
life. Without these creeds arid this theology, how, as
far as man can see, could the true faith in Christ have
lived on unimpaired, through the deep, black ignorance
and dire confusion of some periods of the Church's
history, or through the intellectual strife and scep
ticism of others ? In all this, the Church was laying
down no dogma which was in any sense new, which
had not been involved all along in the devotional life
of the Church ; and more than that, no dogma for the
verification of which she could not reasonably appeal
to Scripture, and to the religious experience of the
individual consciousness. This latter point must be
noted, because the individual Christian has a true
hold of no doctrinal truth, so long as he holds it
simply on the authority of an external voice. The
external voice is necessary as a norma, or rule, which
is to afford the starting-point in education, and to
guide the religious consciousness of each succeeding
generation f ; but it is only the starting-point, which is
' In Aristotelian language, we should say that the Creeds, the ex
ternal voice of the Church, are the expressions of the ivepyeia, the
already actualized faith, which is to guide the actualization of the
(Sim/its, the faith yet merely potential. Tb ivepytiq 6v ylyverai e«
ivv6.jj.ii ivTos for' ivepyely Svtos, i.e. that which exists in actuality,
presupposes (1.) a potentiality out of which it has developed; (2.) a
pre-existing actuality to guide its development. We all have the

the Conditions of its Exercise. 13
to enable the individual to realize the truth as an in
ternal voice, the utterance of his own spirit. It is
not merely the Church, but the spiritual individual,
q TrvevfiariKos, who is judged of no man s.
These considerations will enable us to add to the
already - specified functions of a Church, that she
should be guardian of the true faith, as well as of
the Sacraments, and organization of religion; that
she should always, and under all varieties of circum
stance and error, hold out in her present teaching, and
in the formulas of her Creeds and Articles, or, what
is the same thing in another form, in the implications
of her liturgy, the external authoritative utterance of
the true rule of faith on those matters which underlie
the Christian life, — the doctrine of God, of Jesus
Christ, of the Sacraments, &c.
At the same time, we see that it is not, as far as we
have seen, the function of a Church to make disco
veries in religious truth by ever so slow or fast a pro
cess of evolution, or to profess to afford an authoritative
answer to religious questions of a more or less specula
tive character.
(3.) Having so far cleared the ground, we may now
proceed to consider the sort of objections which are
brought against the Church of England, as an organ
ization not affording scope within her pale for the due
exercise of faith, observing, at starting, that she at
first sight so obviously does so, that it lies altogether
with her antagonists to shew cause why her professions
should be doubted.
potentiality or capacity of faith, but we need the Creeds — expressing
the already actualized faith in its most legitimate form — to guide
our development. e 1 Cor. ii. 15.
a3

14 The Nature of Faith, and
Her antagonists, then, on the Roman side, appear to
urge that she is a sham, and no real Church at all,
not on the score of moral inadequacy, but on the
ground that she has no authoritative voice. " Notice,"'
they urge, " how incomplete her voice is. It may give
you the Creeds, and be dogmatic on the Trinity, but
point us to its clear dogmatic utterances on the Sacra
ments, or our relation to the Saints, or Purgatory.
It has a voice on central truths, that is to say, it uses
on these points the voice of the early Church, but when
you get beyond this to newer problems, what voice has
it, what living voice ? It is a Babel, a confusion of
tongues. One preacher will tell you the Church of
England teaches almost Roman doctrine on the Sacra
ments, the Saints, and Confession ; but you go to an
other, still in the Church of England, and there you
hear that the Church of England is a Protestant body,
repudiating the Roman doctrines on just these subjects.
Who represents the English Church," they tauntingly
say, "Dr.Pusey, Mr.Mackonochie, Dean Burgon, Canon
Ryle, or Canon Farrar? The truth is, your Church
is no Church, but a number of Englishmen associated
in the use of an old-fashioned Prayer-Book, made long
ago as the result of a compromise, and bound together
by the external tie of a Church Establishment. Take
away the external tie, and the Church would go to
pieces, because it lacks a living bond of spiritual unity.
As to dogma, the Church of England is always throw
ing back an enquirer on himself and his Bible. It
confesses it has no voice : and just for this reason she
affords no scope for the exercise of faith. She treats
the soul which comes hungering after sacramental
grace and dogmatic certitude in this way; half her

the Conditions of its Exercise. 15
Bishops throw cold water on the sacramental system.
The utterances from the places of Church authority
have the ' hollow ring ' of a voice tuned to suit the
ears of parliament, or populace, or king. True, there
is a party which teaches Catholicism, maimed indeed,
still Catholicism; but they only borrow it. Look at
their devotional books and practices; they bear un-
mistakeable marks of being full of simply borrowed
goods: they borrow Rome's voice, because their own
Church cannot speak."
Thus we may attempt (as sympathetically and reck
lessly as we are able, that we may not be accused of un
fairness) to reproduce the sort of attack made by Roman
Catholics on the English Church, as affording no scope
for the exercise of faith. There is & prima facie force
in it which makes it worth while, at any rate, to ex
amine it carefully. We proceed to clear the ground
with some preliminary observations.
Pirst, then, it is to be observed, that the question
is not, — Has the Church of England her own difficul
ties ? Of course she has ; and it needs very little his
torical study, and very little examination of the pre
sent condition of countries where the Roman Church
has had for centuries a field, free of all rivals, to work
in, to convince an enquirer that the Church of Eng
land is not alone in having difficulties, though they
should prove very grave ones. But we will let that
pass for. the present, and confess ourselves, — The
Church of England sinned from the first, under the
pressure of difficult circumstances, in submission to
State control : let us assume it. Certainly she suffered
from the great Puritan wave which passed over the
country: it entered into her, and partly took posses-

16 The Nature of Faith, and
sion of her. Certainly we sinned last century in Eras-
tianism and its attendant faults ; and as certainly the
sins of our fathers are visited on us now, as we find
ourselves' crippled, wanting in freedom, wanting sorely
in discipline, and therefore in clearness and unity of
spirit. But the question is not, has the Church of
England grave difficulties ? but, is she a Church ?
She has brought us up hitherto, — we belong to her:
no difficulties or hindrances in her path can justify us
in separating from her ; it is, indeed, the very func
tion of faith to look behind difficulties and hindrances.
Nothing can justify separation from the Church of
England except the conviction that she is not part
of the Body of Christ, that grace and salvation are not
given in her; and the question whether this is true
is not so much a question for the intellect, as for the
spirit and the soul. We must go back upon first
principles. The function of the Church upon earth
is to perpetuate the Incarnation upon earth : the! end
of the Incarnation is to unite us to God. Clearly,
then, so long as a man hungering and thirsting after
grace and truth finds his needs satisfied, finds that in
this Church into which he was born he can grow to
the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ, can
go onward, finding Christ in her to be wisdom, sanc-
tification, and redemption, and can thus become in her
what Christ wills him to be, he may not leave that
Church. Here, then, we have quite a different ques
tion before us : not, has the Church of England difficul
ties? but, has she grace? Difficulties may distress us,
but the responsibility of leaving the Church we were
born into may not be undertaken except at the bidding
of a call, addressing itself to the real moral and spiri-

the Conditions of its Exercise, 17
tual wants of our nature, when we feel that they can
not find adequate satisfaction where we are. This con
sideration will perhaps shew us that Roman Catho
lics are apt to put a false issue before us.
Again, we must make a distinction between de
fects of doctrine and defects of discipline. It will be
seen, that where fault can be justly found with the
Church of England, that fault is generally of disci
pline rather than of doctrine. If it can be shewn that
the real voice of the Church has a sound and true
ring, and yet false voiqes are allowed to be heard un
checked within her pale, that is a fault, not of doctrine
but of discipline. If she suffers the grave scandal of
having her Bishops appointed by the State, and often
from political motives, that again is a fault of dis
cipline. Now faults of discipline are serious things,
but they give no adequate cause for leaving a Church;
and, we may add, there is no Church not chargeable
with such faults. When a Roman Catholic is taunted
with the fact, that " not only had the once-powerful
school of Gallican divines emphatically repudiated "
Papal Infallibility; "not only had Catholic Bishops
and clergy in Ireland, not very many years back, put on
formal record their denial of it ; not only had such an
approved manual as Keenan's Controversial Catechism
declared it to be " no article of Catholic belief," but
many European Bishops had in recent times distinctly
denied it to be part of Catholic doctrine ; and American
Bishops, just before the Council and during the Coun
cil, had expressed their conviction " that it was out
of harmony with Scripture and tradition : " he may
reply, that " he has never understood that Gallican
divines, Irish, European, and American Bishops, or

18 The Nature of Faith, und
even Dr. Keenan, were infallible*;" but a similar
reply must be allowed to us. The then condition of
the Roman Church did not exclude diversity of voice
on an important point. Again, want of moral dis
cipline is at least as great a slur on a Church as want
of doctrinal discipline. Heresy unexcommunicated
is better than a state of general tolerated concu
binage of the clergy; and in this respect a terrible
indictment must be filed against the Roman Church,
if not now, in any part of the world, at least in for
mer ages. The laxity of moral discipline was hideous
enough at the time of the Councils of Constance and
Basle ; so hideous, indeed, that it seemed incapable of
being reformed from inside the Church. There are
few sadder spectacles than that of the Catholic Gerson
and his coadjutors at Constance falling back, as it were,
in blank helplessness befpre the sickening mass of
tolerated corruption in the Roman Church generally,
and the priesthood particularly, and turning to occupy
themselves in burning Huss and Jerome, as though
to profess that if the Church was too bad to reform
herself, she would at least not suffer the work to be
done from outside, or in ways unauthorized.
Again, it needs to be pointed out, that the creation
of new dogmas is not the true sign of a Church's life.
The formularization.of dogma up to a certain point was
necessary to preserve the central truths of the Chris
tian religion; but these central truths are compara
tively few in number, and it is obvious that their formu-
larization of dogma is thus by no means a task without
an end. Moreover, if the Church of England had no
Articles, no dogmas but the Creeds, that would be no
h " The Divine Teacher," W. Humphrey, S.J., pp. xi., xii.

the Conditions of its Exercise. 19
sign that her life had ceased at the period when
the Creeds were formulated. A Church can express
itself in an ^0os, or temper, manifesting itself in its
liturgy, or in its habitual utterances, quite as much
as by dogmas, and this expression of itself may be suf
ficient. Not only has a Church no authority to create
new truths, but even the formularization of old truths
into the form of dogmas, while it may be a necessity
from time to time, is always, in some respects, a dis
advantage. The fewer the dogmas by which a Church
can guard the truth the better ; dogmas not required
for the preservation of the faith, " once for all (airai;)
delivered to the saints," are unnecessary, and there
fore oppressive. Not by dogmatizing, but by activity,
does a Church best shew the reality of her life.
Finally, it may be pointed out that the accusation
against a Church that she is learning from outside,
if it is true, proves nothing against her. The Church
of Christ ought to be co-extensive with all the good
in the world. Unfortunately, in her visible mani
festation, she is not; still less is any one branch of
the Church. And a Church therefore only shews
its wisdom, by appreciating and assimilating what
she lacks of spirit or organization from outside.
Rome has before now shewn that she possessed this
wisdom. These preliminary observations may, perhaps, have
put us in a better position for meeting the main charge
— that the Church of England has no real voice, and
is no real Church.
What sort of dogmatic voice has the Church of
England? Clearly, a dogmatic voice of some kind
is necessary for a Church ; what sort has the Church

20 The Nature of Faith, and
of England? Pirst, then, she speaks confessedly
with the clear dogmatic utterance of the Catholic
Church on the central verities of. the Incarnation,
the Atonement, and the Trinity. About this there
is no doubt. These Catholic Doctrines are impressed
on the mass of her people by the English Church,
at least as unmistakeably and prominently as by the
Roman Church ; and impressed, we must notice, not
only by creeds and formulas, which might be taken
as the survivals of an extinct Catholicism, but as the
present mind of the Church, by her ordinary teach
ing. On the most central and important Christian
doctrines then, which confessedly admit no rivals to
the first place, the Church of England speaks with
undoubted clearness, and shews daily — as well as in
the particular cases, when the doctrines were im
perilled by the teaching of Voysey and Colenso, or
by the attack upon the Athanasian Creed — what store
she sets on them.
But it may be said, the Incarnation even is not
rightly held where it does not lead on to a doctrine
of the Sacraments. How, then, does the Church of
England stand on the Sacraments? Here, again,
the case seems very clear. Her teaching on Baptism
and the Eucharist is as Sacramental as it could be.*
She excludes in her Articles certain extreme views
on either side, as to the Sacrament of the Eucharist,
and beyond this she chooses not to define the mode of
Christ's presence in the elements, taking her stand in
this respect with the great Fathers of the Church ;
but the whole implication of her Eucharistic office, as
well as of her Baptismal office, is profoundly Sa
cramental, and her minor offices of Confirmation

the Conditions of its Exercise. 21
and Matrimony are of a piece with them in this
respect. The same is true of the Priesthood. The Church
of England quite undoubtedly believes in, and asserts
the grace of, Orders in the most Catholic language
of her ordinal: in the matter of Confession, again,
it is plain enough what her teaching is as to the
authority which she acknowledges in her Priests,
and as to her intention of retaining the ordinance.
We may notice in this connection, that candid out
siders, English and Foreign, are not at all backward
to recognize the Sacramental character of the English
Prayer-Book '.
It must of course be acknowledged, that the Sa
cramental aspects of Christian life have been, in time
past, notoriously neglected in the Church of England ;
that even now great numbers of her clergy teach what
is utterly un-catholic upon these points without im
perilling their position, and that the utterances of
authorities have often a very doubtful ring ; but these
are evils which belong not to her doctrinal system,
but to her discipline — this, as we have owned, is lax,
and the peculiarities of her position make it hard for
her to assert herself in this respect; but of this we
have spoken above.
It may, however, be asked, How can you shew that
those who teach un-catholic doctrine, have not just
as good a position in the Church of England as those
whose teaching is Catholic and Sacramental? On.
this point we can appeal to the judgment of competent
' See e.g., James Martineau's " Studies of Christianity," " Chris
tianity without Priest and Eitual;" "Eitualismus und Eomanis-
mus in England," Yon E. Mittgenberg, Bonn, 1877.

22 The Nature of Faith, and
outsiders, to popular opinion, and to history. Com
petent outsiders, whenever they examine the character
of the Anglican Church, are pretty sure to arrive at
the same conclusion as to which side has the most
natural home within her fold. Popular opinion, again,
never fails to identify " Churchmanship," or "An
glicanism," with high Sacramental doctrine, and in
fact, the more really Churchmen men become, the more
they tend to believe these doctrines. All this would
indicate that the one set of views really belongs to
the Church of England, while the other merely holds
on to it; and this is, on the whole, the undoubted
verdict also of history. Enthusiasm for the Prayer-
Book has been the traditional characteristic of the
High Church party, and the traditional Anglican
theology belongs to them. The English Church then
has a voice, as she should have, on the central Chris
tian Truths, and on the Sacramental doctrines. If men
are allowed, within certain limits, to teach false doc
trines from her pulpits, this is a fault of discipline ;
but the voice is there, and is identified on all sides
with Churchmanship. " But this voice is not a living
voice." This, again, is untrue. There is undoubtedly
a system, a doctrine, an ^8o<s in the world, which is
called Anglicanism. It is not merely that there exist
certain creeds, and a certain Prayer-Book composed at
a particular date in the interest of a particular class of
opinions ; but this Prayer-Book expresses a living body
of doctrine, taught by a living body of clergy from
the pulpits of our churches, — a body of clergy ready
to fight hard for any part of this doctrine which is
threatened with attack. Anglicanism is not a dead
formula, it is a living doctrine.

the Conditions of its Exercise. 23
Moreover, as she asserts positive truths, so as de
finitely she refuses to teach, or directly condemns, what
she considers as wanting in authority, or erroneous.
She asserts the limits of revelation, refusing to recog
nize the Church's power to formulate an immense
system of teaching on the subject of Purgatory, for
which she can find no ground in the original revela
tion; refusing, again, to draw unauthorized conclu
sions, and establish a dogma on the mode of Christ's
presence in the Eucharist. In the same spirit she
would keep the Eucharistic elements to the use for
which they were given. Again, though the " Romish
doctrine" of Article XXII. is not the Tridentine
decree, yet the spirit and tradition of the English
Church undoubtedly condemns the practice at least of
the Roman Church in the cultus of the Virgin and the
Saints, as a most material innovation upon the Scrip
tural and primitive temper of worship. In all these
points she has a negative, as well as a positive voice.
It must be owned that the Church of England has
on some points a defective voice : we regret that she
may seem to ignore Prayers for the Dead in her public
formulae, and, perhaps, tends not to give adequate pro
minence to the sacrificial aspect of the Eucharist. On
these points she has suffered by re-action. At the
Reformation, the then Purgatorial system had to be
emphatically rejected ; the Communion of the people
emphatically restored to its true position. In empha
sizing what had been hitherto obscured, we suffered
ourselves in some points to compromise matters too
much. But in a case where we have suffered in this
way from re-action, who shall divide the blame? If
we have lost the emphatic assertion of these doctrines,

24 The Nature of Faith, and
we have not lost their substance, or the tradition
and power of teaching them — their substance, in the
whole form of the Eucharistic office : the tradition, in
Anglican theology. If the Church does not teach
them clearly enough, at any rate she does not deny
them ; they are, indeed, involved in, and of a piece
with, what she does teachi
But it is said again, the voice of the Church of
England is a " State voice : " the State can gag it,
or decide, as in the Gorham case, what it is to be.
On this subject we may be brief. However often the
Church of England may have sinned by Erastianism,
this at least is not true. Can any one read the news
papers and still believe it. Do not such expressions
as " Churchmanship," " Anglicanism," " Anglican
pretensions," "Church feeling," and such like, point
to a body of teaching existing in the State, and not of
it, — upon which, indeed, the State is apt to look some
what jealously? However much the action of the
Church is restrained by the State, no man can say
now that the Church is the voice of the State, or a
branch of the Civil Service. The Civil Service, in
deed, looks not very kindly upon it, and is sometimes
sorely puzzled to know what to do with it.
We now come to a more important point. " The
Church of England," it is said, " when it is pressed on
any point, throws the enquirer back upon his reason
and the Scripture, interpreted by himself, and in this
way abrogates her function as a Church." Now this
is first of all only partially true : it requires very im
portant qualification. We have seen that the Church
of England has a real voice on Christian doctrines :
jf a loyal English Church clergyman is asked, Is

the Conditions of its Exercise. 25
Christ God ? Did He establish a priesthood in His
Church ? Did He leave His Sacraments as channels
of grace? he will not send the enquirer back to the
Bible, and say, Go and find out the truth there for
yourself, why ask me ? In no sense such as this does
the Church of England turn the enquirer back on
himself and his Bible. She does not leave such ques
tions open and undecided. But when this has been
said, there is a sense in which it remains quite true
that the English Church sends every man, enquirer
or not, to his Bible, acting thus in a manner quite
different from the Roman Church.
The Roman Church seems to teach that the single,
simple rule of faith is the present voice of the Church,
which comes almost to mean, the voice of any recog
nized teacher; and faith is the submission of the rea
son and whole nature to this external, infallible voice.
In this way she gives the individual Christian no
cneck upon this external authority. She regards as
more than suspicious any appeal to history inter
preted by himself k; the Church, she says, interprets
history for you. In the same way, she will not let
him appeal to Scripture for himself. The Church,
she says, has translated and gives you Scripture '-
k To " constitute the reason a judge by critical enquiry of . . . the
witness of antiquity," i.e. the critical appeal to history, is one of the
signs of " Bationalism." — Manning's " Temporal Mission," p. 9.
1 " Catholics readily admit that they do not go to the text of Scrip
ture for their devotion, as others do who are out of the unity of the
Church." — Manning ut supra, p. 212. " The Church puts into the
hands of its people books of devotion, which represent the whole order
and completeness of revelation, and not the partial and unordered
aspect of Scripture," p. 210; "the level and dim surface of the
Sacred Text," 208, cf. pp. 170—174.

26 The Nature of Faith, and
Such a spirit as this in a Church must, it is obvious,
have resulted, as in fact it has, in Scripture being
an almost closed book to an ordinary Roman Catholic.
Whatever the theory of the Church of Rome is, in
practice, a Roman Catholic hardly ever, as is admitted,
reads the Bible for himself freely and systematically.
He feels.no responsibility in the understanding of the
faith ; it is given to him ready-made, and he has only
to listen, not enquire.
The English Church takes a different line. She
gives the enquirer the "norma fidei" in her Creeds
and Prayer-Book. She claims his acceptance of it as
the voice of the whole Church, but she does not say,
" Accept it, and cease further enquiry ; my authority
is enough for you." She says rather, "You might
not have been able to deduce all this rule from Scrip
ture for yourself, but, having received it on my autho
rity, go back to Scripture, and look for yourself if
Scripture does not support it ; in the same way con
sult history for yourself,, and see if history does not
confirm all we say."
The rationale of this procedure of the English
Church seems to be this. The Scriptures cannot
take the place of Creeds and Articles. They were
not intended to be a " rule of faith " in the ordinary
sense of the term, and such a rule of faith is a Chureh
necessity, which the Church supplies. But the Scrip
tures are the source of religious 'doctrines, and, as well,
give us in complete fulness the Christian temper of
life and worship. Now, if the Church puts the Scrip
ture into the hands, as far as possible, of every Chris
tian, and bids him drink deep of its spirit, she will not
be imperilling her rule of faith, if it is a true one,

the Conditions of its Exercise. 27
while she will be securing unimpaired the preservation
of the original Christian type of character and worship.
If this be not done, corruptions will be always apt to
creep in and develope, till they permanently alter the
original type. If we look to history and fact, we find
abundant illustration of this tendency. No one can
deny that the materialism of the Church reached a
fearful pitch just before the Reformation. Could this
have happened if the circumstances of the times, or the
temper of the Church, had allowed individual Chris
tians to be acquainted with the deeply anti-materialistic
spirit of the Bible ? Again, there can be no doubt to
any one not a Roman Catholic, that the modern Roman
cultus of the Yirgin is a preposterous growth in Chris
tian worship. Could it have grown up if the New
Testament type of religious life and worship had been
constantly imprinted upon the mind of individual
Christians by personal study ? The tendency always
present in every religious system, to the development
of externality and materialism, is nocessarily checked
when every one is encouraged, almost forced, to know
the Bible. That will give our life its true colour
through all changes of external circumstance. In
something of the same way a general acquaintance
with the Church's history, freely read with open eyes,
will be a wonderful source of enlightenment, and a
wonderful check to exaggerated claims in the Church
of the present.
Thus the English Church urges all its members to
contribute their quotum to the general spirit of the
Church. Let each individual receiving the Church's
rule of faith, embody it for himself, and refresh his
own spirit in the Scriptures, where he can see the

28 The Nature of Faith, and
Christian spirit in its purity and perfection. She
makes her appeal to Scripture, reason, and history,
as well as to Church authority, because she believes
that her rule of faith is the Scriptural one, because she
claims that none of her dogmas are unhistorical, be
cause she believes that reason, which is God's image
in man, is not contradictory to His revelation. On
the other hand, does not the refusal to allow individual
Christians free access to Scripture and history imply
something of fear, a latent consciousness that these au
thorities will not give support to cherished dogmas ?
Scripture, Church authority, Reason — these are each
of them elements which go to making up the Chris
tian's rule of faith. None of them can be spared, if
the Church is to be in any sense complete and de
veloped on all its sides. If she neglect any one of
them, her neglect will assuredly find her out.
" These are the three great chords of might ;
And he whose ear is tuned aright,
Will hear no discord in the three,
But the most perfect harmony."
The Church of England truly adopts a via media,
in that she will side neither with those who, in con
fidence in the powers of their unaided reason, would
have each man his own pope ; nor with those who, in
despair of their capacity to find out truth at all for
themselves, would submit their reason once for all, by
a single, simple act, to an external, infallible voice.
She will not acquiesce in this Manichaean severance of
reason and authority.
And if it be urged, that the finding out of the truth
from various sources may be at times a long process,

the Conditions of its Exercise. 29
while the Christian Church has to do with men igno
rant and busy, who cannot occupy themselves in pro
longed investigations ; we reply, that these prolonged
investigations are only necessary (for one who has
received the authority of Christianity at all) on points
of more or less special theological interest. All the
main Christian doctrines are clear enough for all.
The voice of Scripture and Church authority gives
no uncertain or discordant sound on them ; and for
others we must be sometimes content to remember
that patience and diligence is an element of faith.
It will be worth while, before we leave this subject,
to see whether the early Church in this matter is with
us or with Rome.
Of course, quotations are notoriously dangerous
things, but I think nobody could have any acquaint
ance with Patristic theology, however limited, with
out becoming conscious that their attitude towards
Scripture is not at all the Roman one. They seem
to wish nothing more, than that every Christian per
son should be acquainted with Scripture for himself.
"Do not believe me simply," says Cyril of Jerusalem,
speaking as the representative of Church instruction
in his Catechetical Lectures, " unless you receive the
proof of what I say from FLoly Scriptures " (Catech. iv.
17; see Heurtley's De Fide et Symbolo). Again, in
the same Catechetical lecture, he urges his hearers
earnestly not to read the Apocryphal books, and to
give all their attention to those which the Church re
ceives as Canonical : these he bids them " zealously
study" (cap. 33, &c). And in another lecture he
speaks of the Creed as a summary of Christian truths,
which must suffice for those whom ignorance, or want

30 The Nature of Faith, and
of time, prevents from reading Scripture for themselves
(Cat. v. 12). " 'Tis from ignorance of Scripture," says
Chrysostom, in the beginning of his Homilies on the
Romans, "that all our evils arise; hence the plague
of so many heresies, hence our careless lives, our fruit
less labours." " They err who look not to the bright
rays of the divine Scriptures, because they walk in
darkness." The source of error, says Pope Leo in his
famous tome (Ep. xxviii. 1), is that " when men are
hindered by some obscurity in knowing the truth,
they run not to prophets, or apostles, or evangelists,
but to themselves;" they will not "labour in the
broad field of Holy Scripture m." These few examples
must suffice11. In fact, there are two things to be
noticed in the Fathers : the freedom of their appeal
to Scripture, and, at the same time, their practice of
taking the faith of the Church as the starting-point
for interpretation.
We will add one or two passages of considerable
importance, as bearing on the Patristic view of the
" Regula Fidei." The first shall be from St. Chryso
stom, and we will extract a faithful translation of it,
with just comments, from Mahan's "Exercise of
Faith0:"— "Let us take such a case, for example, as that so gra
phically described by S. Chrysostom p ; a case which might
m "In latitudine." Does, this represent the "level surface" of
Scripture, of which Cardinal Manning speaks somewhat disparag
ingly? see note1.
n For further quotations, see notes in Newman's ' translation of
Athanasius' Treatises against Arianism, under head of Scripture,
sufficiency of, and Regula Fidei, in the Index.
0 P. 68 ; the whole chapter should be read.
* Chrysostomi in Act. Apost. Horn. 33, § 4.

the Conditions of its Exercise. 31
have occurred at any time during the first six centuries,
and which may occur every day now. A heathen comeB
forward desiring to be a Christian. He consults so emi
nent and enlightened a Bishop as S. Chrysostom. He says,
' I desire to be a Christian, but to whom shall I attach my
self? In the contention, and division, and confusion among
you all, which dogma shall I take ? Which shall I prefer ?
Since all of you profess to hold the truth, which shall I be
lieve ? I know nothing at all of Scriptures ; and they who
profess to know, produce the same proofs for their respec
tive tenets.' To this Chrysostom replies, 'I am glad that
all parties agree thus far; for if we referred you only to
reason, you might be justly at a loss ; but if we send you
to the Scriptures, and they are simple and true, your de
cision is easy: for whoever accords with them, he is a Chris
tian ; hut whoever is at variance with them, is very far from
it.' But the man rejoins, ' I have searched the Scriptures,
and find that they teach one thing, and you another. What,
then, am I to do? Must I make myself a teacher, when
I know nothing of the matters at issue, and desire merely
to be a learner ? '
"Now here is the point at which, if anywhere, the in
fallible guide is needed. This is the case that demands the
simple explicit answer to the question, 'Whom and what
shall I believe?' And if Chrysostom and other Church
teachers of the first six centuries could give no such single
test of truth, and no such absolute direction as the case de
manded, it proves either that they knew no such simple
direction; or else, if they knew it, that they handled the
word of Gfod deceitfully, and perplexed the simple souls
whom it was their business to guide. In this particular
instance, S. Chrysostom, after asking the man whether he
had not a mind and judgment of his own, proceeds to give
him such marks of the true Church as he could, and leaves
him to make his way clear through the mazes of this com
plex guidance.

32 The Nature of Faith, and
. " He alludes to the fact, that those who worshipped
Christ as God, spoke of Him in every way worthily, as
of God; and also to the fact that the heresies, or sects,
were named after men; but then proceeds to show, that
¦in learning the truth there must be an exercise of indi
vidual judgment. 'For,' says he, 'if your object were
to learn how to be a physician, you would not listen simply
-(dn-XSs) to what is said (by the professors of the art), for
that would he unworthy of a man ; you would exercise your
own mind and judgment. So in buying and selling you would
not say, I know nothing about the matter ; but you would
rather take steps to become acquainted with them.' ' And
so,' he goes on to argue, 'in Christianity there are things
of a practical character, which you can put in practice at
once ; there are other things of a less practical character,
in which you can pray GOD to enlighten you; for God is
no respecter of persons, but in every nation he that feareth
Him, and worketh righteousness, is accepted with Him.' —
(Chrys. in Act. Apostol. Horn. 33, § 4.)
" S. Chrysostom could not have spoken in this way to
a perplexed inquirer, if he had known of any infallible
"witness, from whom the truth could be learned by ' simple
hearing.' "
The author adds the following just comment : —
" But were such cases uncommon in that period of Church
history ? If we consider the bitterness and violence of that
long struggle which, beginning in the days of S. John, con
tinued to harass the Church, under various forms, through
the age of the Ecumenical Councils, is it not probable that
multitudes, both out of the Church and within it, endured
mental tortures, compared with which the difficulties of
our own times are the merest trifles? For we, at least,
have a Saviour, very God and very man, Whose claim to
worship is attested by what is now 'a voice as of many

the Conditions of its Exercise. 33
waters.' We can adore and supplicate Him, and honour
Him as God, without the shadow of the shade of misgiving.
Having this Bock to stand on, a Rock which lies under every
Church of the world that holds to the Apostolic order, we can
afford in minor questions to wait for the slow-coming wis
dom of Time. But to private Christians, in the first ages
of the Church, the question was one that touched the very
heart and marrow of devotion. It related to the person
of their Lord."
This passage, then, would go to shew that St. Chry
sostom knew of no single, simple rule by which to
judge, without possibility of mistake, of the right
faith. He appeals to reason, and history, and Scrip
ture, as well as Church authority.
Our next extract shall be from Vincent of Lerins,
in his celebrated Commonitorium. The following is
Mr. Mahan's translation, which represents faithfully
the original : —
" Often have I enquired with great care and much earn
estness, of very many men eminent for holiness and doc
trine, how I might, by some certain and as it were general
and regular way, discern the truth of the Catholic faith
from the falsehood of heretical pravity : and have always
received,- from all of them, an answer of this sort: that'
I, or any other person, wishing to detect the frauds of
heresies as they rise, and avoid their snares, so as to keep
himself in a sound faith safe and sound, must, with the
help of the Lord, fortify his faith in a two-fold manner;
first, namely, ly the authority of the Law of God ; and then,
in the next place, ly the Tradition of the Catholic Church*."
"Here, perhaps, some one will ask, What need is there —
seeing that the Canon of the Scriptures is perfect, and in
itself suffices to the full, and more, for all demands — that
' Com. § 1.

34 The Nature of Faith, and
the authority of the Ecclesiastical interpretation should be
joined to it? Because the Holy Scripture, for its very depth,
is not taken of all, in one and the same sense ; but its ex
pressions are interpreted diversely, by one man in one way,
by another in another, so that it seems as if almost as many
opinions may be gathered out of them as there are men. . . .
It is, therefore, very necessary, on account of such windings
of so various error, that the line of interpretation of the
Prophetical and Apostolical writings be drawn by the rule
of the Ecclesiastical and Catholic sense'."
"In the Catholic Church itself, also, great care is to
be taken that we hold that which has been believed every
where, always, and ly all: for that is truly and properly
Catholic, as the very meaning and derivation of the word
show, which embraces all as nearly as may be universally.
This we shall only then do, when we follow Universality,
Antiquity, Consent.
" What, then, shall a Catholic Christian do, if some small
part of the Church cut itself off from the communion of
the universal faith? What, indeedRbut prefer the sound
ness of the whole body to the pestiferous and corrupt mem
ber ? What if some new contagion essay to spread its foulness
over not merely a small portion, lut the whole Church at once ?
Then shall he take care to adhere to antiquity, which is now
utterly incapable of seduction ly any fraud of novelty*."
*
Here we notice that St. Yincent propounds, first,
Scripture as the rule of faith; secondly, the Church
tradition to explain difficulties and solve doubts. His
rule is a double, not a single one. And he would en
quire what the whole Church says, not what Rome
says. We must also notice that in speaking of the
whole Church, he gives antiquity the preference over
» Com. § 2. ¦ Com. § 3, 4.

the Conditions of its Exercise. 35
universality. He contemplates the " living voice" of
the whole Church being corrupted, and then bids us
live by the rule of antiquity, of which the individual
must then be the judge. Like St. Cyprian, he would
have us, when the stream of present Church teaching
in any way fails, to go to the source, and find out and
repair the breach in the channel, till the water comes
to us again in as great abundance and purity as it
leaves the source *.
These extracts must be enough. They will, per
haps, suffice to shew, that in appealing to Scripture,
antiquity, and reason, the Church of England is only
following in the lines of the. Church of the Fathers.
We have endeavoured in this way, as briefly as pos
sible, to clear up the meaning of faith, to explain the
function of a Church in regard to its exercise, and to
answer the objections made against the capacity of the
Church of England to fulfil this function. In con
cluding, it may perhaps be permitted to us, as it were,
to collect ourselves, and turn round for a moment to
ask, What is this great Church of Rome, that she
should claim to be the sole sphere for the exercise of
faith ? The Church of Rome, this must mean, repre
sents the whole of Christianity ; the, Roman Church
and Christianity convertible terms. That the Church
of Rome should be part of the Christian Church ; that
she should be the magnificent and imposing represen
tative specially of the principles of authority and ex-f
ternal unity in the Church, we can easily understand ;
but she the whole Church ! The sole representative
of the whole spirit of St. Paul's Epistles ! The exer-
• Cyprian, Ep. lxxiv., near the end. The whole passage, as di
rected against Pope Stephen, is important.

36 The Nature of Faith, and
cise of faith possible in her fold alone ; and we had
fondly thought that it was she especially who had so
often obscured the moral aim of faith, and put it in
an unnatural and unnecessary opposition to reason,
and corrupted its simplicity with false issues, and cur
tailed its lawful and beautiful freedom. Does this
faith, then, whose character we had loved so in St.
Paul's Epistles, mean the submission of our reason
before a dogma such as the Immaculate Conception,
which can hardly even profess to claim any support
in Scripture or early Church theology, which answers
no large want of the human heart, and can make no
appeal for confirmation to the Christian reason, save
by a logical deduction taking us far away from the
firm standing-ground of Apostolic truth ?
Can this Church only utter the call to man to be
lieve, who, when she was left to herself, had sunk so
deep in the materialism of mere externals, that not all
the more loyal efforts of a Gerson, or a Colet, or an
Erasmus, or of the Oratory of Divine Love within her
pale, could wake her up; but it needed the violent
revulsions and strong re-actions of Luther and of the
Reformation, to revive in the world the conception
of spiritual religion, and to re-assert the principle
of faith ? Why to the sixteenth-century monk, nur
tured only_ in the Roman Church's lore, the newly-
discovered doctrine of the great Apostle of faith came
like a new revelation of spiritual truth to his soul.
Surely this Church alone cannot embody the prin
ciple of faith, unless we much misunderstand what
faith means. Surely not, if the faith we need to ex
ercise is that in which St. Paul and St. John lived.
What sort of appeal, then, does the Church of Eng-

the Conditions of its Exercise. 37
land make to us? She comes to us with a humbler
claim ; not as the whole Church, or the sole sphere
for the exercise of faith, but as that part of Christ's
Church which has a special claim on our devotion.
She owns to defects : her doctrine, indeed, is pure and
Apostolic, but she must own to defects of discipline;
still she comes, offering us the uncorrupt doctrine
of Christ and His Church, and if she has difficulties,
she would bid us notice that the difficulties in which
she is involved, the quarrels and contentions which
mar the unity of her fold, spring just from this, that
she is full of life ; she is awake now, at least, to the
consciousness of her mission ; she would shake herself
free of the bonds in which she has, during years of
lethargy, allowed herself to be entangled. Is this the
time to think of leaving her, when the life of her
awakening is so strong within her, and when her dif
ficulties and confusions are the result, in so large a
measure, of the reality of that life ? She owns to diffi
culties and faults in the past and present ; but at least
these are open and acknowledged ; she makes no claim
on us which demands that we should shut our eyes
to history or to Scripture ; she trusts our reason as
well as our heart ; she will do her best to open her
doors to all that science or criticism can claim to
teach, if only we will trust her, and commit ourselves
to her.
Boldly she refuses to believe that reason and faith
are things irreconcileable in the Christian life; she
would have a faith possible which fears no light,
nay, which draws to itself all light from every source.
Thus, with high hopes and great promise for the fu
ture, she makes her appeal to us. She has a mighty

38 The Nature of Faith, fyc.
work to do : will we help her to do it, or will we
desert her now, just when her pulses beat so quick,
when she is so full of real life, when her dangers seem
just due to this life being a little too vivid to be
quite kept in adequate disciplinary check, when she
thus needs all the help that our most loyal efforts and
our most devoted love can give her ?
The strength of her appeal to us is to be measured
by the spiritual faculties of our nature, not by any
reckoning of numerical proportions. If the Life of
the Body of Christ is within her veins, she can give
us all ^gg> need. Spiritual power is not to be measured
by numbers or territorial extension. Not once or
twice in the history of God's chosen people has it
been with a "remnant" that the special purpose of
His Providence lay. Blessed is he whose spiritual
sense is keen enough not to despise the day of small
things.

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