The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877Various
Religion
The Catholic World, Vol. 25, April 1877 to September 1877
Various
Catholic Church -- Periodicals
home—an arrangement more convenient for croquet-parties than
“conversions.”
Upon this another journal asks: If it be true that Anglican bishops are
corporately incompetent as advisers of lay judges, even on the doctrines
of their own particular communion, of what use are they at all? If they
cannot, without the aid of civilians, interpret the Articles, why not
make bishops of the lay judges, instead of paying thousands a year to
each of these gentlemen, who do not apparently know their own business?
In any case, how Ritualists can remain, with satisfaction to their
consciences, in a communion whose highest arbiter is not even a
sub-deacon, is perplexing to any one who regards the church as a
divinely-instituted system. We have been reminded by _Presbyter
Anglicanus_ that it is a necessary ingredient in any system of
discipline that the superior should not be judged by the inferior, the
teacher by the taught; and that the twelfth canon of the African Code
ordains that, “if a bishop fall under the imputation of any crime, he
shall have a second hearing before twelve bishops, if more cannot be
had; a priest before six, with his own bishop; a deacon before
three—_according to the statutes of the ancient canons_.” Again: “It was
a recognized principle in the primitive church that the deposition of an
ecclesiastic required the intervention of more bishops than were needed
for his ordination. The Anglican bishops notwithstanding their
professions of regard for the primitive church, are content that a
presbyter, ordained and instituted by a 'bishop,’ should be deprived by
a layman. And they talk of apostolic order!”
The writer just quoted, who is now safe in the Catholic Church,
described, just before his conversion, the present condition of
ecclesiastical discipline in the Anglican Church as follows: “The
ecclesiastical courts which survived the Reformation and the great
rebellion have been ... abolished; the bishop of each diocese has ceased
to be the ordinary of that diocese, and the whole clergy of the Church
of England are rendered amenable to, and are even directed in their
conduct of public worship by, a layman, whose office has been created in
the year of grace 1874 by the imperial Parliament, and who, besides
playing the part of a pseudo-dean of the Arches and principal of the
Provincial Court of York, is also to be the national ordinary, the
Parliamentary vicar-general of the Establishment, exercising
jurisdiction in every parish from Berwick-on-Tweed to the Channel
Islands.” And this is the system to which unquestioning, unrepining,
absolute submission is required of the clergy by the bishops of the
Anglican communion.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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