THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION. A LIVELY DUNEDIN CONTROVERSY.

New Zealand Tablet, Volume 51, Issue 51, 22 April 1898, Page 18

THE APOSTOLIC SUCCESSION. A LIVELY DUNEDIN CONTROVERSY.

Bishop NkviLt/h sermon wan undoubtedly one of the events of Jubilee week. lake a stone thrown into a smooth pond, it raised far-circling wavelets which are pulsing to this hour. His Lordship stated, among: other things, that Presbyterianism was unknown for the first 1500 years of the Church's existence. The statement is absolutely true in fact. It was probably made with no contentious intent. None the less, from the connection in which it was uttered, it was tolerably sure to arouse controversy. A lively guerrilla Presswar had raged for several weeks around it when Rev. Dr. Watt came upon the scene. He delivered a lengthy discourse on the sub* ject to a considerable audience of clergy and students at the Presby* terian Theological College. It was published in full in the Otatjo Daily Times and the Evening Star last week, and judging from the circumstances in which it was delivered, may be safely considered as the official reply of the Presbyterian body to Bishop Nevill.

WHERE IT TOUCHES Us.

The rejoiner of Bishop Nevill will, we assume, come in due course. The controversy concerns the Catholic body thus far : that no discussion on the subject of Apostolic succession — or as Dr. Watt haw made it, Prepbyterianism rmti/n Episcopalianism— can be carried on without touching a fundamental principle of Catholic Church Rovernment— namely, the episcopate. And this is one of the Catholic principles which Anglicanism— the religion of compromise — retained after its rejection by others of the reformed creeds of the sixteenth century. The cockpit of a debate on the subject must ever be the apostolic and early sub-apostolic days. For

even Presbyterian writers admit that episcopacy was well-established within a few decades after the death of the last Apostle, and we may add, so well established that all recollection of a previous (supposed) different state of things had quite vanished from the Church. Even Dr. Watt admits that the supposed change from an assumed Presbyterianism to Episcopacy set in " in the Church very early." In fact, he meets the full-fledged Catholic system — Pope, bishops, priests, Saints Clement, Ignatius, Irenaeus, and the rest — at the farthest dim dawn of the Church's history. In dealing with his topic he had, therefore, perforce to refer to the Catholic system. It was a necessity of the situation. But it is a matter of regret that he felt himself called upon to adopt towards the oldest and the greatest religious body in Christendom a tone of discourtesy as marked as it was unexpected and uncalled for. Such terms as " Popish," " Papist," and •' Romish " may be well left to the slums of religious controversy. In the mouths of men of learning and refinement these fierce epithets of the penal code bear at least the semblance of intentional offence. The Rev. Doctor has. in effect, taught his pupils the use of these theological " swear- words." The law of the land and the canons of good society have alike discarded them. Even learned Doctors might well follow suit. WHY WE WRITE. The subject dealt with by Dr. Watt is too vast and many-sided to be dealt with adequately in the amplest space we could allow ourselves in the N.z. tablet, much less in the restricted and uncertain space allowed in the correspondence columns of a secular daily paper. The purpose of this and the following papers is merely to give the lay reader a general grasp of the subject, referring him for fuller information to books dealing with the matter in crtcnso. HOW HE FAILED. At the outset we may state that our objection to Dr. Watt's treatment of the Apostolic succession covers his discourse as a whole, and, in addition, each of the five leading positions he has taken up, and almost every statement he has made. When we saw that the learned Doctor was on the warpath against Episcopacy, we had thought that he would have gone on the trail with shield as well as tomahawk and arrow — with weapons of defence as well as of offence. In undertaking to establish the Presbyterian character of the early Church he should have (1) Advanced arguments to establish his claim — if he could. (2) He should, moreover, have at least made some attempt to demolish the very serious facts and arguments, both from Scripture and from ecclesiastical history, which, on the face of them, tell against his contention. how's this 1 Dr. Watt has done neither the one thing nor the other. (1) He has treated us to a division of the One Fold into two camps — " the ministry " and " the Church." He has favoured us with some of his private ideas as to the workings of grace, and as to what, in his judgment, the all- wise God ought to have done (but did not do) in founding His Church. The good Doctor has declaimed. He has scolded. But he has quite forgotten the one thing needful : from beginning to end he has not made one serious attempt at proving the thesis which he stated with so much fl ire of trumpet and beat of ecclesiastical drum. The omission is significant. The reader may divine its cau=e. VIMIY SIGXITICANT. (3). It is usually an easy matter to establish a plausible ca«e by suppressing all reference to facts or arguments that tell the contrary way. This Dr. Watt has done. And even with this advantage of loaded dice, he has — for the reason stated above — signally failed to score. The objections against his contention lare derived from Scripture and from ecclesiastical history. 'J hey are many and fatal. Some of them will bj stated by us in the next of our articles on this subject. Dr. Watt may believe, or affect to believe, that they are flimsy and of little weight. That is not the question. It is sufficient for him that such difficulties are stated and are notorious. A more urgent reason for dealing with them lies in the fact that they brought conviction to thousands of the greatest minds that Christendom has produced Even Grotiuß. himself a member of the Presbyterian body, held that the Angels of the Churches in the Apocnlijpxr of St. John were diocesan bishops and nothing else. All tins might well have urged Dr. Watt to deal adequately with some at least of the tangle of difficulties in which a man finds himself involved when he sets forth to prove that the early Christians were Presbyterians. In Catholic Theological Seminaries all over the world objections to the Church's dogmas are strongly and persistently urged. Her doctrines are tested by a -very Bearchlight of fact and logic. Dr. Watt is apparently not a believer in extending such a system to the examination of the question of Episcopacy versus Presbyterianism, by the pupils of the Theological College. He has given NO WHISPER, not a breath, regarding the biblical and historical difficulties with which his thesis is bristling on all sides, No one reading his lecture could gather from it a hint as to the nature, or even the existence, of these difficulties. Still less could he learn that they have swayed the beliefs of the whole of Christendom for 1500 years, and of the vastly greater part ever since Presbyterianism arose rather late in the day. We are not called upon to hazard an opinion as to the results of feeding the youthful theological mind on such half-ideas on a great question which divides the Presbyterian creeds from the rest of Christendom. We had looked for a strong and scholarly treatment of the subject from the learned Doctor. He has given us only evidences of conscious weakness. The fault lies with the theme, not with the man. So much for a general review cf the subject. We purpose to touch on matters of detail in our next issue.

(To be continued.)