Contradiction with a Lesson

New Zealand Tablet, 15 September 1921, Page 13

Contradiction with a Lesson

Older folk amongst us can remember the time when no one would speak of a clergyman of tho Established Church as a "priest" (says the London Catholic Times). Most clerics of the Establishment are still content to be legally and formally described as "clerks in Holy Orders," and colloquially as "clergymen" of the Church of England. Many of them repudiate the title of priest. In most places in England to this day if one asks where the priest's house is, one will be promptly directed, not to the Anglican rectory or vicarage, but to the Catholic presbytery. The late Bishop of Carlisle devoted an elaborate article in tho Nineteenth Century to an attempt to prove that there was not and never had been any priesthood in the Christian Church, and used to warn his ordination candidates that they were to be ordained as "Ministers of the Word" not as sacrificing priests. The late Bishop of Hereford also maintained that "the Kingdom of Christ had no sacerdotal system." The Anglican prelate who succeeded him at Hereford and now occupies the See of Durham is also an anti-Sacerdotalist. But other Anglican Bishops maintain that there is a real priesthood in the Established Church, and the High Church clergy have for some time delighted in styling themselves "priests," and many of them announce the Communion service in"their churches as "the Mass," notwithstanding the denunciation of the Mass in the Thirty-Nine Articles as a "blasphemous fable" and a "dangerous deceit." Both parties remain "brethern in the Church of England," and both assert they are teaching its doctrine, and further there seems to be no power in that Church to say which is right and which is wrong, though one party flatly contradicts the other on vital matters of doctrine and practice. Neither party seems to have the least idea of the obvious conclusion from these facts—namely that a ' Church which allows its prelates and pastors to teach contradictory doctrines cannot be the Church of God, to which its Divine Founder promised the guidance of the Holy Spirit to the end of time.