OCR Text |
Show EARLY BRITISH CHURCH. Salt Lake City, Utah, May 23, 1.908'. To the Editor of the Intermountain Catholic, Salt Lake City, Utah: Dear Sir With the hope that some abler pen than mine would call attention to the fale position posi-tion you have taken in your editorial a few weeks ago on "Henry VIII and the Reformation," I have postponed until now calling your attention to a few errors of history you fell into in that article. I cannot allow to go unchallenged your assumption , that, until the time of Henry VIII, the Anglo-Catholic Church was always in union with the Roman Chair. If we turn to history we will find that the Church of England was established in Britain not later than the close of the Second century; that she was independent of Rome, and that she has had an unbroken continuance from then until now Tertullian, writing in A. D. 157, says that districts dis-tricts of Britain inaccessible to Rome had been subdued to Christ. In the year A. D. 314 the church sent delegates (Bishops and priests) to the Council Coun-cil of Aries, and to that of Sardica, A. D 347. Ongen. A. D. 239. tells us that Britain had but one religion in his day the religion of Christ. Chrys-ostom. Chrys-ostom. writing A. D. 367, speaks of the British Isles as possessing churches and altars. When Augustine. Au-gustine. A. D. 593, came to England as head of the Roman Mission he found a Bishop Luidhart. and his attendant priests at the court of the-yct heathen heath-en Ethelbert. And, again, he met seven British Bishops at Bangor. From Bede we learn that when the Saxons landed in England they slew Bishops and priests in heaps, thus proving that long before be-fore Augustine (of Rome) set foot in England there were hundreds of Bishops and priests. Augustine, that he might establish uniformity of customs and practices between the British Church and that of Rome, invited British Bishops to a conference, but they literally refused to acknowledge Augustine's Augus-tine's jurisdiction. This British Church, which was instrumental in the conversion of the greater part of the British Isles, was merged under Archbishop Theodore of the Italian mission into the Church of England. The church thus united has ever sinct been spoken of as the Church of England. It was the selfsame Church of England which, in A. D 790, rejected the veneration and service of images, though commanded by the Pope. It was that selfsame self-same English Church which the Pope, A. D. 1114, complained of as treating the Pope with scant reverence. rev-erence. The great Magna Charta. the charter of English liberties, signed by King John, June 19 1215, declares that the Church of England shall bi free and untrammeled by any power. What further fur-ther proof is necessary to convince you that the Church of England of today is the same as the Magna Charta decreed "shall be free"? You persist in calling our church Protestant. Will you kindly point out for me where, in our "Book of Common Prayer," which is for us what the Missal and Ritual are for you. may this word Protestant be found? We belong, jke you, to what Origen called the Church of Christ, our church is Anglo-Saxon, and those who call us Protestant mark their epithet with a note of discourtesy. Now, sir, in the interest, of truth, may I request you to publish these facts of history, that your subscribers may read something on our side of the subject? Very respectfully yours, ANGLICANUS. We do not think that our correspondent Angli-canus Angli-canus is fair to himself or to us when he, intentionally inten-tionally or not, omits a very important item from his letter. It has long ago been understood, and acted upon by educated and impartial writers, that in all controverted issues the attack and defense, when citing written authorities in support of their positions, shall give the chapter and the page of the book quoted. This is not alone a law of controversial con-troversial ethics, it is a courtesy due from one gentleman gen-tleman to another. Take, to illustrate our contention, conten-tion, Paxton's edition of Gibbon's "Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." published with annotations, anno-tations, in ten volumes. s It would be manifestly unfair, un-fair, in an amicable discussion, to assert that "Gibbon "Gib-bon says this and Gibbon says that," and not to tell us where in the ten volumes "this and that" may be found. A citation unverified, we may remind re-mind Anglicanus, has no weight or authority with scholars. Our correspondent, we are satisfied, omitted through inadvertence this most important accompaniment to his letter. Until he conforms to this very reasonable ordinance of controversial ethics we decline to discuss in detail the historic truth of the assertions so boldly, yet courteously, proclaimed in his letter. "Anglicanus" disclaims the word Protestant which we applied to the Church of England, and challenges us to produce a single instance in .the "Book of Common Prayer" where it may be found. Surely our correspondent cannot be ignorant of the history of the English Prayer Book which was buiit on the ancient Sarum Missal, completed and officially proclaimed "The Book of Common Prayer" in 1549. When the Book was placed in the hands of the public the "certain grave and learned Bishops and others who conferred together" wisely and for politic reasons omitted the word Prtestant. What does it matter whether the word Protestant occurs in the Book of Common Prayer when the Kings and Queens of England for more than two hundred years have made as head of the Church of England an oath to maintain the Protestant re ligion in the presence of all the Bishops of the "Anglo-Catholic" church, and not one of them that we ever heard of. raised his voice to object; each one of them, in fact, is bound to take an oath of homage to the Sovereign of Great Britain and Ireland on being appointed to his bishopric by the Government of England. Does not Bishop Potter of western Xew York always sign himself officially official-ly "Protestant Episcopal Bishop of Xew York'-'? So that - if Anglicanus objects to the "epithet" Protestant when applied to his church, his quarrel . lays with his own people, not with us. Would our correspondent state what part of England was Christianized before Rome invaded her shores, and how long those British bishops remained a separate organization after St. Augustine landed? Also: how many cathedrals were built before the landing of the Benedictine fn.on.ks, who gave England the Christian religion of the land, brought order out of chaos, changed paganism into Christianity, and baptized the King? Also, how many cathedrals, colleges and universities were built in England from 600 A. D. until 1549 A. D. by any other church than the Church of Rome; if one can rely on the well known fact that every Archbishop and Bishop, from Augustine's time to the day when Warham died, were in direct communion with Rome, offered up the mass in their cathedrals, venerated the mother of God, prayed to the saints, heard the confessions of penitents, set up monasteries and convents, and brought what they knew to 'be the Body of Christ to the dying? It is very certain that the Church of Rome was one and the same as the Church of England until un-til the day when Henry VIII created an archbishop who divorced him from his lawful wife and enabled en-abled him to marry his paramour Then he found by appealing to the cupidity of his impecunious nobles no-bles and the "Anglo-Catholic" party he could spoil monasteries and convents to the value of $50,000,-000, $50,000,-000, and burn those who denied that he was the head of the church (Lingard, Hist. Eng., vol. 4, p. 93), If our correspondent will consult Protestant histories, his-tories, such as "Cobbett's History of the Reformation," Reforma-tion," Macaulay's essay on "Ranke's History of the Popes," or "Ilallam's Constitutional History," he will find much that may enlighten him on the beginning be-ginning of his church. In his History of England (vol. Ill, p. 74) the Protestant historian James Anthony Froudc writes: "And now the once open hand was closed, the once open heart was hardened, and the creed of a thousand thou-sand years was made a crime by a doctrine of yesterday." yes-terday." This he wrote of the state of affairs in his own country twenty years after Rome was driven out. In conclusion, may we ask Anglicanus why, when, during the last two years the French Catholic Cath-olic Church was persecuted by an infidel government govern-ment when the crucifixes and pictures of Christ were removed from law courts, school rooms, hospitals hos-pitals and public buildings, and the "Minister of Worship" in France stated that he "had driven Jesus Christ from the schools and would drive Him into the Mediterranean'." no friendly voice was raised by the Anglican Church in succession to the early British Church to protest against the desecration dese-cration of God's temples in France and the blasphemies blas-phemies uttered against the sacred name of Jesus i If, as Anglicans claim, their church is one of the triple branches of the Christian Church of which Christ is the trunk, why was there no voice raised to cry out against the humiliations and sufferings inflicted on her sister in France by atheists, deists and other enemies of Christianity? On which side were and are the sympathies of the English branch of the Catholic Church then and now? Let us add that, when Anglicanus furnishes us chapter and page for his quotations, we will cheerfully cheer-fully consider his contention that the early British Church was not in affiliation witih the Chair of Peter with Rome. |