Project Canterbury
REPORT OF THE SECOND
ANGLO-CATHOLIC CONGRESS
LONDON, JULY 1923
General Subject: The Gospel of God
PUBLISHED FOR THE COMMITTEE OF THE CONGRESS
London, 1923
transcribed by Thomas J. W. Mason
AD 2001
The Address
Out of the many opening words which I might have chosen to inaugurate this wonderful gathering, I am going to choose first a word of welcome to our Chairman, the Bishop of Zanzibar. I think it is a good omen that while the first Anglo-Catholic Congress in London was inspired by the Bishop of Zululand, and ended on a missionary note and a gift of £50,000 for work overseas, so the second should have as its Chairman one of the best-known and best-loved Bishops in the overseas Mission-field. It will enable us to begin the second Congress held in London with the note on which the first ended, and will proclaim to all the world that to be a Catholic is to be a missionary, and that those who use the word are pledged to aim at converting the whole world.
My next word must be to say how deeply I sympathise with the main object and motive of this great Congress. Its main object is not in any was controversial; a glance at the agenda would convince anyone of that. It is, on the contrary, as the Chairman so truly said in his introductory letter, to get rid of party spirit, to wait upon God for a further message, and to ask the Holy Spirit so to guide us into all truth, that we may leave nothing out in proclaiming the revelation of god’s love, and in doing so, to be bound more and more in love and charity with all men.
One more preliminary word before I settle down to the substance of my address, and that is to congratulate Mr. Prestige on the wonderful series of little green books. I have read all fifty-two of them, and I am still alive; not only alive but all the better for having read them I do not commit myself to agreeing with everything therein written, but nothing was more wanted than the old penny tract; and although these, owing to post-war prices, have to be 3d., I do believe that many who may not have the patience to read the papers, which no doubt will be published after being read to the Congress, but who will read the little books, will come to the conclusion that Anglo-Catholic teaching is not so very dreadful after all, and if they study the reasons for believing in this and that Article of the Christian Creed, may be grateful all their lives for the saving truths so persuasively set forth by the respective writers.
I
For, and this is the first point I want to make plain at the start:—
(1) The Anglo-Catholic Movement is out for Truth, and not primarily ceremonial at all. One of my favourite verses in the Bible is a saying of St. Paul’s: "You can do nothing against the Truth but for the Truth." What is the Truth about the Being of God? What is the Truth about his character? What is the Truth about the Incarnation? What is the Truth about the coming of the Holy Ghost? What is the Truth about the Church and the Bible and the Sacraments? To find out this is the main and primary aim of every Anglo-Catholic who knows his business; everything else is secondary. Ritual and ceremonial are only important in so far as they express Truth, or safeguard or teach Truth. Undoubtedly the most Catholic service ever held was when, without any ritual at all, the Shepherds bowed before the new-born Babe lying in the manger.
I speak for all the leading Anglo-Catholics, I know, when I say that their demand is this: "Let us have liberty to teach what we hold to be the Truth, and we can wait for everything else in the world."
(2) But the true Anglo-Catholic goes further: he believes that this Truth is what the world is waiting for, and that it is for the lack of it that humanity is so sore stricken to-day.
Mr. Gordon Selwyn, in a sermon in St. Alban’s Holborn, the other day, which was widely reported, laid his finger very surely upon this truth.
It is the Catholic Truth in all its fullness, with its teaching of forgiveness and brotherhood and chivalry which alone can bring peace to the world-wide sweep from one end of the earth to the other which alone can unite nations an turn humanity from a collection of warring tribes into the brotherhood they were meant to be: for nothing can shake the fundamental belief of the Catholic Church, that "God made of one blood every nation upon earth."
(3) But while Truth is our main concern, no one wishes to deny that the Anglo-Catholic does believe that God’s House should be the most beautifully furnished House in the parish, and that the worship offered to God in it should be that which has cost us something. And it is possible for anyone in the Church, of what-ever school of thought, not to rejoice in the wonderful change in the conduct of the services throughout the Church of England in the last sixty years? Some of us can remember still from our childhood’s days the infrequent Celebrations, the slovenliness (which was not meant to be irreverent, but which was irreverent) with which even the Communion Service itself was conducted; and we should be most ungrateful if we did not pay honour to-day to the pioneers, who, often amidst much misunderstanding and even bitter persecution, brought in the far happier state of things throughout the whole Church which exists to-day.
I did my best ten days ago to pay honour to one—Father Wainwright—who for fifty years has worked continuously in London Docks. It is such men as he who have really been not only pioneers but martyrs in the cause. Critics who sum up the whole revival as a mere "matter of clothes," do not realise that while this matter of ritual and ceremonial can degenerate into merely fussy externalism, it is the spirit of reverence behind the dress that really matters. In every other department of life the greatest care is taken to be correct in matters of deportment and dress. there are no such ritualists as your Freemasons or Buffaloes. Again, a soldier’s medals on parade must be correct to the quarter inch; and it scarcely becomes those who would die with shame if they entered the presence of their earthly king not in court dress, if court dress was ordered, to sneer at those who seek to find out the right directions as to what they are to do or wear in the presence of the King of kings.
(4) But the external side of the Anglo-Catholic Movement, which naturally attracts more attention than any other from the outside public, has important bearings, as I tried last year to explain to the great lawyers and judges in the Temple Church, upon the historical claim of the Church of England to be part and parcel of the great Catholic Church throughout the world.
As we shall see in a few moments, the English Church has its own particular position and bears its own specially witness, and is perfectly justified in carrying Pope Gregory’s advice to St. Augustine, that it might be allowed to have ways and customs of its own; but the fact remains that it is historically a part of the Holy Catholic Church of Christ, and therefore old customs of the Church, always so far as they teach no doctrine rejected at the Reformation, are valued as we value the old colours of regiments which we hang in our cathedrals with reverence and honour.
When I was in America in 1907, I found that many imagined that the Church of England had begun in the reign of Henry VIII. I asked them then, as I ask to-day, how, then, have the Bishops of London (with the exception of twenty years under Cromwell) managed to live at Fulham Palace for 1,300 years? I told the Americans that the frogs in the moat at Fulham and the jackdaws in the steeple of Fulham parish church were laughing at the idea that the Church of England began in the reign of Henry VIII., for they had seen Bishops there for 1,300 years.
(5) But there is yet another reason for careful ceremonial which we must never forget. We have our hopes set very high—and especially since the Lambeth Conference—on the Reunion of Christendom. Never did we seem nearer than we are to-day to the great Orthodox Church in the East. The Archbishop of Canterbury, in his interesting speech to Convocation with his usual thoroughness, went into the details. On the other hand, we have never given up hoe that the great Church which has its centre at Rome will lay aside some day those Ultramontane claims, so clearly pointed out by Mr. Williams in his "Case against Rome," which at present make reunion impossible with any other self-respecting Church; and if also that part of its teaching which we consider unscriptural is eliminated, we may still be able to come to terms.
But how can we hope for such reunion with either if we are careless about our own Orders, or our method of conveying Orders, and lay aside every custom or ordinance, or ornament which is common to East and West. And if it be urged that the shedding of such relics of the past is the price which we must pay for reunion with our Nonconformist brethren, with whom also we are in friendly negotiation, I would answer that it is never suggested that all who join this reunited Church should be forced to use the same ritual or even the same prayers. In our two years’ consultation with the Weslyan Methodists it was never so much as suggested that the Weslyans, if they joined up into a reunited Church, should be forced to use a certain type of ritual. On the contrary, they were to be Missionary centres throughout the land, just as we already have in many places Mission churches with the simplest ritual and the most informal prayer meetings; but the difference would have been that, instead of having rival Ministries, we should all be joined together in one Church and united in one common effort to convert the world.
II
But it would be affectation to speak as if there were no dangers on the other side. I am thinking at this moment of a robust Evangelical who found fault with me the other day for seeming to represent that the difference between Catholics and Evangelicals to-day was a mere matter of less or more ceremonial. To such a man the question is one of loyalty to truth, and he truly believes that the sacred cause of truth is being endangered.
(1) For instance, he imagines that the Anglo-Catholic Movement is heading straight for Rome.
And here I must put in my first warning note. Those who imagine, or teach as if they imagined, that what Rome does is therefore right, and what Rome does not do is therefore wrong, are not true Anglo-Catholics.
There was a bitter jibe said to be made at a roman Catholic function the other day. Someone by accident knocked over a chair. "Be careful," said some guest, "the Anglo-Catholics will be doing that to-morrow."
Do let us save ourselves from the contempt of the world by not talking as if we were the nervous and renegade subjects of the Pope.
As Mr. Williams points out in his clear lectures, the primacy of the roman See in matters of faith and history, even if granted, is a totally different thing from the sovereignty of the Roman See. In the present Ultramontane view, the independent bishop practically disappears—and no one who has studied the grossly impertinent interference of the Bishop of Rome in the affairs of the English Church, and even in the affairs of the English nation, before the Reformation, can fail to sympathise with the historic declaration that "The Bishop of Rome has no jurisdiction in this realm of England."
(2) But, further than this, we must recognise that the Church of England has some special principles of its own, as opposed to Rome; one is its reverence for Holy Scripture, although a late ultimatum from the Pope leads one to hope that Rome now sees its past errors. I have no time to develop this to-day, but I can only refer you to the Bishop of Bloemfontein’s pungent and racy little book entitled "Conversion, Catholicism, and the Church of England." He points to the Church of England’s perpetual reverence for Holy Scripture. "She is Catholic," he says, "and in the last resort could assert Catholic authority, but she is not in a hurry to assert that authority because (1) she strictly limits that authority in vital matters to doctrines confirmed by Scripture; (2) she trusts in rather an easygoing way to the acceptance of her teaching in the long run on grounds of its native and intrinsic truth. You will never alter the temperament of the Church of England. To try to make her Italian or Spanish or French is merely to kick against the goad. We shall never persecute—it is not in our blood; we shall never have an Inquisition; we shall never be absolutely rigid and clear-cut. We have too much regard for liberty, and prefer a certain haziness of horizon to a sharp delimitation which would hurry or overpress the delicate explorations of souls seeking truth."
And he goes on to point out the healthiness and saneness of souls who have been nurtured on the Scriptures as opposed to those who feed only upon small devotional books.
And it is in connexion with this that we must be careful to maintain the Church of England’s reserved but deeply reverential attitude towards the Blessed Virgin Mother herself. Blessed must she ever be among women and blessed the Fruit of her womb, but anything which even remotely suggests that she takes the place of the one great Intercessor and Mediator between God and man must be resolutely laid aside. Holy Scripture gives her no such position; and the Church of England, ever true to Holy Scripture, does take and means to take a different position on this question from the position into which the church of Rome has drifted.
(3) But it is not only Scripture for which the Church of England has so great a reverence, but for Reason itself. Nothing is more alien to the method of the Church of England than the popular misrepresentation of the teaching of the Anglo-Catholic party. "Here is the Catholic Faith, take it or leave it!" On the contrary, "picture, prove, persuade" is the method of the Anglo-Catholic who understands his job; and in this connexion I would mention a reverent effort lately made to explain the history and meaning of Confirmation by means of a film, which will be exhibited at some time during the Congress. I was at first apprehensive as to whether this could be done with reverence, but, after seeing it, I can only say that to those who believe that more people can be reached through the eye then through the ear, such a method may prove a way of teaching which may "picture, prove, persuade" beyond expectation. Whether it can be used to explain even deeper mysteries is another matter altogether.
(4) But I must not let my opening address take up too much time of the Congress, and I will therefore content myself with one other distinguishing mark of a true Catholic Church, and that is the extreme value which it attaches to sound learning. It was my predecessor, Bishop Creighton, who said that the Reformation was "a return to sound learning," and no one had a better right to say that this was true than himself. I do beg that the Anglo-Catholics will not be obscurantists in the matter of sound learning. All who can afford the time and money should read the great books written to elucidate the Christian Faith, but to those with little leisure such a book, for instance, as Professor Nairne’s "Everyman’s Story of the Old Testament," which is within the reach of all, sweeps away three-quarters of the difficulties about the Old Testament. It is not too much to say that nearly all the old so-called "Bible difficulties" were created by the ignorance of those who wrote about the Bible and were not difficulties created by the Bible itself, so we cannot be too grateful to men like Dr. Swete or Professor Nairne for giving us in reverent and clear form the result of modern criticism which only brings into clearer light the historic Faith.
And so I welcome here, from all over the world, this great gathering of Anglo-Catholics. Don’t be ashamed of being Anglo-Catholic, for such as you have a special contribution to make to the life of the Catholic Church as a whole, and may indeed be the keystone of the arch which shall one day reunite Christendom.
I shall never forget Bishop Lightfoot’s words in his last sermon at a Church Congress: "By the Church which shall be found to have the historical orders in one hand and the open Bible in the other, will Christendom one day be reunited." God grant that prophecy may be true, and, as a step towards that consummation, may God’s best blessing rest on the Anglo-Catholic Congress in London of 1923!
[1] "The Congress Books," edited by the Rev. L. Prestige, B.D., for the Anglo-Catholic Congress Committee (London: The Society of SS. Peter and Paul).