THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM

Press, Volume LXXII, Issue 21802, 6 June 1936, Page 24

THE DIVISIONS OF CHRISTENDOM

• TO TBB EDITOR OF TH» PRESS. Sir,—l thank you for the opportunity of concluding the correspondence on the divisions of Christendom. I have prayed this morning at the offering of the Holy Sacrifice at our altar that I may be helpful. You will say that I take the matter seriously, I do, indeed. Add all the people together who go to different pla, .s of worship, and they will not, in my opinion, be so many as those who read your paper, and probably this letter.' No subject, I think, interests so many people in Christchurch as religion and about no subject are they so confused. I want above all things to be lucid. (1) Christianity is a revealed religion. Your correspondents and readers frequently forget this. Their independent opinions and speculations about the nature of God and the ’unseen world are not Christianity. Christianity is a gift from God, not a discovery of man. We accept it or reject it. (2) Christianity is a revelation from God that He is a Trinity and that Jesus Christ is the Second Person in this Trinity, Incarnate in human flesh. Can anybody really be called a Chris, tian unless he has beA baptised and believes this? We have to take these truths in their proper order. Cardinal Manning told his priests in London that it was no use talking about the rosary and holy water to people who were not sound on the incarnation. We Anglicans not always put first things first. •To find out if one is really a Christian it is well to ask “What think ye of Christ?” (3) This Christianity revealed by God Incarnate was put into the keeping of a society. Our Lord chose 12 men and trained them for three years to be guardians and of His Truth. Here much is involved. The Christian religion is not written down. It is organised by its Founder. It is given to men, who are told to go with it into all the world. This is the one divine society with the Gospel or the catholic faith (they are the same thing) to proclaim. They continue “the pillar and ground of the truth,” as St. Paul calls them, for a thousand years without division.

(4) We have the Bible, precious as it is, only by the way. Our Lord founded the Church. It dispensed His truth and grace for many years without the New Testament, and now that the Church has produced it under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, it is of but secondary imnortance. The Church is the teacher, the Bible interpreted by the Church supports that teaching. Quotations from the Bible are valueless unless thev are interpreted in accordance with the teaching of the Church. (5) The only way to enter the divine society is by baptism. All who have been with water and into the name of the Trinity are catholics, Presbyterians, Methodists, Anglicans—all the baptised are members of the one Church of Christ. They do not all continue the catholic life, but they are catholics. So to be a Christian and to be a catholic are one and the same thing. We may not like to acknowledge it, but to be accurate a Christian is not so much one who lives a Certain kind of life, but one who has been baptised. He is either a good Christian or a bad one. . (6) So far all catholics, I think, are agreed. Now I must speak about the divisions and from the oint of view of an Anglican. The first division took place in 1054 .between the East and the West, the next between Rome and Canterbury in the sixteenth century. 'We must by no means exaggerate these 1 divisions. 1 We still say that the Church is one as she is holy and

catholic. Fundamentally she is one. She has all through the East and the West and Anglican parts the bishops, the priests, the creeds, the Sacraments, the calendar, and that which holds the Church together, the Apostolic Succession. These are the features which form the family likeness which has never been destroyed. Quarrels do not destroy a family likeness. (7) But there have been differences about the Sacrament of the Bishop of Rome on the one hand and the abandonment of many things which belong to the one historic Church on the other. Anglicanism appeals to the thousand years of the councils of the undivided Church. That appeal is historic; it is scholarly. Anglicans do not say that they alone are the Church. However insular they may appear to have been on minor points, they have never been insular in this. They believe that all who live in communion with bishops and priests anywhere are practising the Catholic religion, and that all who have been baptised are already catholics and capable of developing the catholic life. The appeal of the Prayer Book to the undivided Church is large hearted as well' as historic and scholarly. (8) When an instructed Anglican prays for the reunion of Christendom he prays for the visible union of Eastern Romans and Anglicans, not for that unity which has never been destroyed. He prays that there may be a return to the authority of the collective episcopate of the first thousand years when altar was not set up against altar and priest against priest. Hr also prays that those in Englishspeaking countries who have, though catholics, deserted the episcopate and the priesthood, may return to their original allegiance. We are encouraged in our prayers by the already consummated reunion with the old Catholics, by the acknowledgment of the validity of Anglican orders by patriarch after patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church, by the directions of the Pope to the “monks of unity” to study the question and by sympathetic articles in "Blaickfriars” and other Roman Catholic journals, especially those on the .Continent, We Have not alas! so much encouragement from our nonconfcwmifit friends, but then

they do not sufficiently consider Christianity to be a Divine society organised for all time. That may come by love and prayer.—Yours, etc., CHARLES PERRY. June 4, 1936. [This correspondence is now closed. s *- Ed., "The Press.”] ; ' ,