turn for the Church and for St. Augustine? Is it not as difficult to prove the authority of the Church and her doctors as the authority of the Scriptures? We Catholics answer, and with reason, in the negative; but since they cannot be brought to agree with us here, what argumentative ground is open to them? Thus they seem drifting, slowly, perhaps, but surely, in the direction of scepticism. ("Discussions and Arguments," p. 366.)

SECTION II.-ANGLICANISM.

THE ANGLICAN VIEW OF THE VISIBLE CHURCH.

THE high school of Anglicans

of a visible Church as firmly as Catholics, and the only question between the two parties is, what and where the Church is; in what it consists; and on this point it is that they differ. This Church, this spiritually endowed body, this minister of the Sacraments, teacher of Gospel truth, possessor of that power of binding and loosing, commonly called the power of the keys, is this Divine creation coincident, as Catholics hold, with the whole extended body of Christians everywhere, so as to be in its essence one and only one organized association? or, on the other hand, as [Anglicans insist,] is every separate bishopric, every diocesan unit, of which that whole is composed, properly and primarily the Church which has the promises, each of them being, like a crystallization, only a repetition of the rest, each of them, in point of privileges, as much the perfect Church as all together, each equal to each, each independent of each, each invested with full spiritual powers, in solidum, as St. Cyprian speaks, none subject to any, none bound to union with other by any law of its being, or

condition of its prerogatives, but all free from all, except as regards the duty of mutual love, and only called one Church when taken in the aggregate, or in its Catholicity, though really multiform, by a conversational misnomer or figure of speech, or abstraction of the mind, as when all men, viewed as one, are called "man."

Now it is very intelligible to deny that there is any divinely established, divinely commissioned, Church at all; but to hold that the one Church is realized and perfected in each of a thousand independent corporate units, co-ordinate, bound by no necessary intercommunion, adjusted into no divine organized whole, is a tenet not merely unknown to Scripture, but so plainly impossible to carry out practically, as to make it clear that it never would have been devised except by men, who, conscientiously believing in a visible Church, and who, conscientiously opposed to Rome, had nothing left for them, whether they would or would not, but to entrench themselves in the paradox, that the Church was one indeed, and the Church was Catholic indeed, but that the one Church was not the Catholic, and the Catholic Church was not the one.

If it be asked of me how, with my present views of the inherent impracticability of the Anglican theory of Church polity, I could ever have held it myself, I answer, that, though swayed by great names, I never was without misgivings about the difficulties which it involved, and that as early as 1837, in my volume in defence of "Anglicanism, as contrasted with Romanism and Popular Protestantism," I expressed my sense of these difficulties.' ("Essays, Crit. and Hist.," vol. II. pp. 90-99.)

1 1 [See p. 37.]

THE "BRANCH THEORY."

WHAT is called the "Branch Theory" is, that the Roman, Greek, and Anglican Communions make up the one visible, indivisible Church of God which the Apostles founded, to which the promise of perseverance was made; a view which is as paradoxical when regarded as a fact, as it is heterodox when regarded as a doctrine. Such surely is the judgment which must be pronounced upon it in itself, and as considered apart from the motives which have led Anglicans to its adoption, for these, when charitably examined,. . are far from reprehensible; on the contrary, they betoken a goodwill towards Catholics, a Christian spirit, and a religious earnestness, which Catholics ought to be the last to treat with slight or unkindness.

Let it once be admitted that in certain minds misconceptions and prejudices may exist, such as to make it their duty in conscience (though it be a false conscience) to remain in Anglicanism, and then this paradoxical view of the Catholic Church is in them better, nearer the truth, and more hopeful than any other erroneous view of it. First, because it is the view of men deeply impressed with the great doctrine and precept of unity. Such men cannot bear to think of the enormous scandal-the loss of faith, the triumph to infidels, the obstacle to heathen conversion-resulting from the quarrels of Christians with each other; and they cannot rest until they can form some theory by which they can alleviate it to the imagination. They recollect our Lord's most touching words, just before His passion, in which He made unity the great note and badge of His religion, and they wish to be provided with

some explanation of this apparent broad reversal of it, both for their own sake, and for that of others. As there are Protestants whose expedient for this purpose is to ignore all creeds and all forms of worship, and to make unity consist in a mere union of hearts, an intercourse of sentiment and work, and an agreement to differ on theological points, so the persons in question endeavour to discern the homogeneity of the Christian name in a paradoxical and compulsory resolution of the doctrines and rites of Rome, Greece, and Canterbury, to some general form common to all three.

Nor is this all; the kindliness of the theory is shown by the strong contrast which it presents to a persuasion, very strong and widely prevalent in the English Establishment, in regard to the Catholic Church. The palmary, the most effective argument of the Reformers against us, was that Rome was Antichrist. It was Mr. Keble's idea that without this tenet the Reformers would have found it impossible to make head against the prestige, the imposing greatness, the establishment, the momentum of Catholicism. There was no medium; it was either from God or from the Evil One. Is it too much to say, that wherever Protestantism has been earnest, and (what is called) spiritual, there this odious imagination has been vigorous? Is it too much to say that it is the received teaching of Anglican bishops and divines, from Latimer down to Dr. Wordsworth? Have Catholics then no bowels of compassion for [those who] adopt such a Via media towards the Church as I have been describing?..

The third motive which leads religious Anglicans to hold the doctrine in question is one of a personal nature, but of no unworthy sort. Though they think it a duty to hold off from us, they cannot be easy at their own separation from the orbis terrarum, and from the Apostolic See,