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The Heart of Catholicity

THE HEART
OF CATHOLICITY

"TeU the unbeliever that God has revealed Himself to His Church, and he
retorts : 'Then show me that all your things are done in charity,
show me that the Church is fuU'of love, for God is love,' "
Aubrey L. Moore.

Rev. FRANK N. WESTCOTT, Ph.B.
Author of "Catholic Principles," and "The Church and the
Good Samaritan"

MILWAUKEE
THE YOUNG CHURCHMAN CO.
MCMV

copteioht by
The Youno Chdeohman Co.
1905

CONTENTS.
CHAPTER. PAGE.
Introduction  vii.
I. The Popular Idea of Catholicity ... 1
II. The Heart of Catholicity  29
III. The Chtokch and the Incarnation ... 36
IV. The Church the Creation of Christ . . 56
V. The Catholic Faith  78
VI. The Catholic Priesthood  103
VII. Catholic Sacraments  121
VIII. Catholic Worship  138
IX. The Spirit of Love and "Exolusiveness" . 154
X. Catholicity and "Intolerance" .... 170
XI. The Spirit of Lo-ve, and Roman Catholicism 194

INTEODTJCTION.
SOME time ago, in an assemblage of Evangelical
ministers -who were discussing the famous West
minster Catechism, someone rose and remarked that he
thought the least that they could do -would be to put
the love of God in a footnote.
This suggests the sad fact that , in many sectarian
creeds, and in much religious controversy the love of
God is conspicuous only by its absence; and, instead of
being the one great inspiring theme of those who
assume to teach in the Name of Christ, it is crowded
out into some "marginal footnote," as if it were a
quite unimportant element in the religion of the Son
of God. Not only is this true of controversies between
various Protestant sects, but it is also characteristic
of the way in which the claims of the Catholic Church
have been presented to Protestants for their considera
tion. It is astonishing how much can be written con
cerning the Church which is in itself perfectly true,
yet which utterly misrepresents the real spirit of Cath
olicity, and makes it seem hard, and narrow, and, of
course, repellent to any man who loves God and his
fellow-m«n. If we as Catholic Churchmen are to teach
men to understand and to love the American Church,
there are certainly two things we must do: We must
try to understand and appreciate to its fullest extent
both the truth our opponents hold, and the genuine

viii. THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
fruits of the Holy Spirit's work which many of them
plainly show in their daily lives; and, again, we must
not forget that, however Catholic the Church may be
in her doctrine, and true nature, her practical illustra
tion before the public of her Catholic character is often
exceedingly imperfect and sadly misleading. We have
not only to contend with the prejudice born of sectarian
ignorance and insularism, but with a prejudice which
the Church itself creates by the narrowness of its own
children; therefore Catholic Churchmen ought to be
very humble, and patient, and loving, when they teach
concerning the Church.
The sole purpose of this book is to emphasize and
illustrate one great truth: the fact that the Catholic
Church, being mystically and historically "the exten
sion of the Incarnation," is therefore a provision and
expression of the love of the Son of God for man.
The writer has not attempted to vindicate the
Catholicity of the Anglican Communion by giving his
toric data concerning her apostolic origin, her accept
ance of the Catholic Faith, and the validity of her Or
ders, as this work has been so thoroughly done in a
large number of available Church manuals written for
that purpose. He holds that the Anglican standard of
Catholicity is based on the acceptance of the Catholic
Faith as voiced in the Nicene Creed, the Holy Scrip
tures as interpreted by the Apostolic Fathers, the
formal definitions of the General Councils, and such
traditions as have had universal acceptance; and he
believes that Catholicity, as thus understood, is not
a cold, mechanical, intolerant system, but a living Or
ganism, with a heart fuU of the love of the Son of
God for man.
If this great truth be constantly borne in mind.

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. ix.
and frequently re-stated and illustrated in the typical
spirit of Churchmen towards others, then men will
come into the Church, not because they have been
worsted in a hotly contested argument, or cornered by
a clever arrangement of well-authenticated facts; but
because they will be drawn and won by that true spirit
of love which the Catholic system so abundantly illus
trates. We must not only show that the Church is
right in her belief, and rests on an Apostolic founda
tion, but, also, that she reflects the beauty and love of
her Incarnate Master, and therefore her children love
her and defend her for His sake.
If there be anything in this book which seems to be
a violation of the spirit of love, then the -writer begs to
withdraw it, and hopes that it will be soon forgotten.

The Heart of Catholicity
CHAPTEK I.
THE POPTJIAB IDEA OF CATHOLICITY.
TT is one of the most familiar axioms of Christ
ian thought that those who worship the Lord
Jesus Christ as their Creator and their Redeemer,
ought for His sake to understand and love each
other. However sad and deplorable those misunder
standings and prejudices may be which separate
Christians from each other, one thing is very cer
tain: there is a peculiar reason why Episcopal
Churchmen ought to preserve a feeling of sym
pathetic and brotherly appreciation for members
of the various Protestant denominations, and that
is the fact that such vast numbers of laymen and
priests of the Episcopal Church received their
early religious training in Protestant families,
and under evangelical influences. Sometimes a
lack of sympathetic understanding as between
members of different religious bodies is excusable

2 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
on the ground of mutual ignorance of each other's
true position; but a great majority of Churchmen
cannot plead any such excuse as this, because all
their early associations with religious things were
formed, not in the Church which attracted them
and won their allegiance later in life, but in the
Protestant denomination in which their parents,
and possibly their grandparents, lived and died.
Under the influence of staunch Protestant tra
ditions they, as little children, were taught from
their mother's lips to learn to love the Son of God
as their Saviour, to trust in God's constant loving
care, and to form habits of prayer and self-control ;
and under such refining influences as these, they
grew up into Christian manhood and womanhood.
In due course of time, they felt it their duty to
make an open profession of faith in Christ before
the world, and they joined the church to which
their parents and friends belonged, as a matter of
course ; and all this was perhaps a very solemn and
real turning point in their religious lives. The
worship to which they were accustomed and which
they learned to love, was very simple, very earnest,
and very sincere ; and many of the men and women
who knelt with them at "the Lord's Supper," or
poured out the burdens of their hearts to God in
the freedom of the prayer-meeting, or told of their
inner soul's experience as a public testimony of
the Lord's great love to them, and were very self-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 3
denying that they might save in order to give gen
erously to missions, these people showed most un
mistakable evidence of the sanctifying power of
the Holy Ghost in their hearts.
Perhaps in some revival the Holy Spirit
seemed to work miracles of spiritual inspiration,
and spiritual healing, and God was among them,
and loved them, and blessed them, and they never
had any reason to doubt it. Moreover, under the
same Protestant traditions they were taught great
respect for the Holy Scriptures and learned many
Gospel truths which were helpful and uplifting.
They believed in the Bible as the Inspired Word
of God, and they called it their Creed. From
some Methodist, Presbyterian, or Baptist pulpit,
perhaps, they heard strong loyal defences of some
of the great dogmas of the Paith, more partic
ularly the dogma of the Atonement which was the
basis of their personal trust in the Lord's forgive
ness of their sins. And all this was their religion,
their Christianity, the only type of it they knew,
and it satisfied them, and helped to make them
Christlike. The vital element of it all was per
sonal loyalty to Christ, and so controversial dis
cussions of dogma, creeds, or the claims of any
one religious sect seemed to them to be of no vital
consequence. Well, the day came for each one of these people
when, for some reason, he was no longer quite

4 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
satisfied. Perhaps he craved a different type of
worship; or some little book which fell into his
hands opened up new realms of truth to him along
certain lines, until the pressure of conviction be
came so great that he felt that, cost what it might,
he must break old ties which were very dear to him
and find a new "church-home" other than the one
in which he had been brought up. Surely, a
change of this sort must at best be a very serious
and trying one to any sober-minded man who has
learned to know and love the Lord Christ in the
denomination in which he was born, and which his
mother loved.
Then, after the matter is finally settled, and
the change is made, how can it be possible for him
to look back at his old church, and his old-time
Christian brethren, with any feeling but that of
love and tender sympathy, especially when he re
members how his departure from them wounded
their hearts. He may have come to think that
their system is seriously defective, and that their
views about some things were insular and narrow ;
still, how can he forget that under the providence
of God, he owes everything that he is to his Christ
ian training among these people, his faith, his
character, and his knowledge of divine things ? If
¦with the arrogant zeal of a new convert he scorns
his old associations and repudiates them gladly,
the man not only writes himself do-wn a cad, but he

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 5
convicts himself of being deficient in that cardinal
virtue of Christian charity without which he is
spiritually dead, and he assists materially in con
firming his old associates in their traditional ha
tred of the Cliurch.
If be feels that he has found in his new en
vironment "wider ranges of helpful spiritual truth,
special means of grace which support and comfort
him, a greater certitude of obeying the full will
of the Son of God, and a type of worship which
lifts him into a new and wonderful realization of
God's Presence, surely this conviction ought not
to make him forget the past, or deny the reality
of his former religious experience which from
childhood was wrought into the very texture of
his soul. On the contrary, his conviction ought
rather to inspire the strong desire to share tlhe
newer blessings with the older friends, simply be
cause these friends are dear to him, and he appre
ciates bow truly Christian, and loyal, and fine they
were, and are, even without many of the privileges
he now enjoys.
Perhaps, after he is confirmed and has learned
to know and love the Church as she can reveal
herself only to those who do love her, he remem
bers how very differently he himself once felt to
wards the Church. He recalls how she was mis
understood, and how cordially she was disliked by
those among whom he was brought up ; and now he

6 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
can appreciate how very natural and sincere all
this feeling was. Not only so, but he also sees how
very much to blame the Church itself was for all
this popular prejudice against her. For example,
there may have been in the village where he lived,
a little, weak, insignificant, "episcopalian" church,
the only representative of this "denomination"
to the Protestant Christians of the place, the one
from which they must form their ideas of what
Churchmanship or "Catholicity" meant. These
"episcopals" were a handful of shallow, worldly
people, mostly women, who "danced, and played
cards, and went to the theatre," and quarreled
and bickered among themselves, and half starved
their rector, and were always in debt, and appar
ently "never had any experience in vital heart-
religion, and probably had never been con
verted." Or perhaps, if the man's home was in
the city, then the Church was represented to him
and his fellow Protestants by a large, fashionable
church, with high-priced pews filled only by the
best society, full of starch, and buckram, and re
spectability, who liked the Church because of its
"incomparable Liturgy," and felt a comfortable
satisfaction in belonging to a church which could
claim as members, G«orge Washington, and most
of the signers of the Declaration of Independence.
The pompous rector of these people preached the
service, intoned a sermon full of unctions plat-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 7
itudes, and went out to dine with the complacent
satisfaction of duty politely done. What was
there in all this to suggest anything vital or inspir
ing, or anything which wotild entitle this denom
ination to call itself in any sense "the" Church
unless by this was meant the Church of the rich,
the exclusive, the narrow-minded, and the irrelig
ious ? What was there to suggest that the mem
bers of the Church were in any way inspired with
love for their Christian brethren, or that the
Church system itself was anything but narrow
and repellent? What reason had any Protestant
to suspect that the Church really stood for some
thing which was very true, very holy, and very
beautiful ? All this was bad, but it was not the
worst in Protestant eyes.
For, let us suppose that a little village parish
church under the administration of a new rector,
begins to develop unmistakable symptoms of "rit
ualism." The little, cheap, packing-box of an altar
is removed, and a larger and more conspicuous one
takes its place. On this are placed a cross, and
some candles which are lighted at the celebration
of the Holy Communion. The priest wears certain
special vestments at the Communion Service, to
which the people have not been accustomed. The
Holy Communion is celebrated at an early hour,
before breakfast, and perhaps again, as the chief
service of the day. Possibly a choir of vested men

8 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and boys is introduced, with vested servers to as
sist the priest at the altar. Much of the service
itself is sung, and some attitudes and expressions
of devotion come gradually into use with which
again the congregation have not been familiar.
The number of services is greatly multiplied.
The church is repaired, cleaned, and kept open all
day for private prayer. It is even reported about
town that some of the parishioners have gone to
the rector to confess their sins, and have found
much help and comfort in so doing. The priest
is strict in his observance of the laws of the
Church, and he often refers to something which he
calls "the Catholic Church," which is very per
plexing, because apparently he does not mean the
Roman Catholic Church.
Well, how does all this impress the Protestant
element in the village ? How can it impress them
save as an imitation of the Church of Home, which
seems, possibly dangerous, and certainly puerile.
They conclude that the peculiarities of the little
"high-church" parish are simply the fads of a small
party in the Church to which the rector happens
to belong ; or, if they are to be taken seriously, as
representing any prevalent tendency or serious
movement throughout the Church itself, then this
tendency is Eomeward, and its object is appar
ently to undo all the work of the Eef ormation for
which their ancestors fought and died, and to

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 9
bring men again under the bondage of forms and
ceremonies and the tyranny of the Pope. Of
course this natural but utterly superficial and mis
leading view of the matter simply emphasizes the
popular notion that "high-church episcopalians"
are even more anxious than their low-church breth
ren to get as far away as possible from their Prot
estant brethren in "other Protestant churches,"
and to confine their sympathies and interests en
tirely to the narrow limits of their o-wn party.
And yet, curiously enough, as time goes on, and
Protestants learn more about these "high-church
men," they make the discovery that they are tre
mendously in earnest, that they understand what
they believe, and know very well how to defend
themselves. They are devoted to the Church, and
as a class do not seem in the least inclined to go
over to Eome. Moreover, while the priest of the
local parish may not be a man of very extraordi
nary intellectual ability, he certainly is very plain,
courageous, and direct in his preaching. He
works hard, and is devoted to the sick and the
poor, and is said to be very sympathetic and gentle
towards those who go to him in trouble, and he
can actually say a prayer without a book, and he
possesses a certain amount of "real good, old-
fashioned Methodist piety which may save his soul,
and might be of great use in saving the souls of
other people if he would only drop all his foolish

10 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
high-church notions, and behave like other men."
Again, sooner or later, the discovery is made
that all this "high-church business" instead of re
pelling all loyal Protestants, as it certainly ought
to, seems rather to attract many of them, and the
movement has spread and is to-day spreading -with
astonishing rapidity among the most intelligent
and devout classes in the Church, and every little
while the community is startled to find that some
well-known Methodist, or Presbyterian, or Bap
tist brother has been led astray by the enticements
of these "high-churchmen," has forsaken his old
love, and has turned "ritualist." What can it all
mean ? What is the secret of the attraction which
seems to lead intelligent men to prefer the bondage
of dogmatism, rather than the spiritual freedom
of the Protestant religion ? Can it be possible that
there is really some great truth behind all this
ritualism which lends it power, and insures its
success ? It would almost seem as if there might
be, because the men who are concerned in it are
in many cases such devoted and scholarly Christ
ians. Now, if the testimony of thousands and ten-
thousands of converts from the various Protestant
denominations can have any significance, it most
unmistakably points to the fact that there is some
thing in the nature of the "Episcopal" Church not
withstanding all its many defects, which proves

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 11
helpful, and inspiring, and wins the love and devo
tion of its adopted children in a wonderful way.
Moreover, these converts have discovered that the
true attitude of the Church towards Protestants is
not necessarily "bigoted," "narrow," or "intol
erant" ; and just because they have found in the
Church so much that is true, holy, and beautiful,
they long to have their old Protestant friends
know what they know, and see what they see, and
thus learn how unjust the popular idea about the
Church really is.
Moreover, these same enthusiastic Churchmen
are not in the least blind to the local weaknesses
of their o-wn Church system, any more than they
are blind to the splendid missionary successes, and
wonderful generosity of Protestants like the Meth
odists, in supporting missionary work; or any
more than they are blind to the vast number of
saintly lives which have been trained under
Protestant influences, as among the Presbyterians,
and the Society of Friends. Churchmanship does
not involve blindness of any sort; it is rather a
deeper spiritual insight into the divine order of
the Church of Jesus Christ which He established
by His o-wn personal acts and words, which enables
men to see that beneath all that is worldly, and
selfish, and narrow, and partisan, the Church is
really divine; divine in its gifts of truth, and
grace, divine in its pledge of the Lord's abiding

12 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Presence with His people, and most divine as an
expression and provision of His love for all men.
But how can Protestant Christians be brought
to realize all this unless they learn to know the
Church itself? When a devout Churchman says
to some Protestant friend, "I have found some
thing very helpful and beautiful in the Catholic
conception of the Church, and I wish that you
might share it with me," he is apt to be met with
the old retort: "Can anything good come out of
Nazareth?" And what can he say in reply but
"Come and see." Suppose for example, that you
had two friends whom you were anxious to bring
together because you loved them both, and thought
that if they could only learn to know each other,
they would find their friendship mutually helpful
and pleasant. Then suppose that when you pro
posed the introduction, the first man should say:
"Oh, I don't want to meet your friend. I have
heard a lot of unpleasant things about him. He
does not agree with my politics. I don't like the
clothes he wears, and he indulges in certain amuse
ments of which I do not approve, and some of his
family connections are far from what they ought
to be. When he meets me he is always cold, and
conceited, and oflish, and he does not look as if he
cared anything about anybody but himself, and
really, I must decline the introduction."
What would you say to a reply like this?

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 13
Would you not answer at once, "I must admit that
sometimes my friend does not seem very cordial
to strangers, and that perhaps he is not always as
particular about his dress as he ought to be, and
he has a blunt way of speaking which is sometimes
misunderstood. But, after all, these faults are
really superficial, and if you will only take the
trouble to get acquainted with him, you will find
that your whole idea of the man is a mistaken one ;
and that beneath his rather rough exterior he has
the kindest of hearts, and is capable of the most
delicate sympathy, and loyal friendship. You
would find that you both had a wonderful fund of
truth and good sense in common with each other.
You make a great mistake if you allow any super
ficial prejudice to prevent you from making his
acquaintance, especially as he takes considerable
interest in you and is anxious to meet you."
The Catholic movement in the Anglo-Amer
ican Church which to the average Protestant seems
to be nothing but "ritualism," has accomplished
some very wonderful things in the last sixty years
in England and America. Beginning in the
Church of England at Oxford in 1833, its object
was not to make the Church Catholic, but to wake
up the priesthood and laymen of the Church who
had been Puritanized, and Calvinized, and ration
alized into practical unbelief and indifference, to
some realization of the fact that judged by its his-

14 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
toric position, and the plain teaching of the Prayer
Book, the Church of England was Catholic, and
that nothing could save her from utter collapse
and apostacy but the historic vindication of her
ancient Catholic character.
Led by no one man, it proved to be a movement
no man, however high in authority, and no party
of men could check or control. It has survived
suspicion, abuse, insult, oiEcial persecution, pan
icky legislation, desertion by some of its most con
spicuous friends, the imprisonment of some of its
holiest priests, and has gro-wn and spread in its
ever widening influence until the whole Anglican
Communion has been profoundly affected by it;
and it has won its title to recognition and respect
even from its enemies. It now confronts the
world with the Prayer Book in its hands as its
charter, and as the absolute vindication of its
teaching. It began at first, not as a "ritualistic" move
ment, but rather as a doctrinal re-preaching of the
great Dogma of the Incarnation of the Son of God
in all its logical and mystical application to the
spiritual needs of penitent men. It was prima
rily a revival of faith in the office of the Church as
the "extension of the Incarnation" ; and a revival
of spiritual life in the hearts of individual priests
and laymen. It issued numberless books of devo
tion, it translated the ancient Apostolic Fathers,

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 15
it revived scholarly habits of research in the study
of doctrine and Church history. It established
Confraternities, and Brotherhoods, and Sister
hoods, and unions for intercessory prayer. It
held Missions and Eetreats for the cultivation of
the spiritual life among laymen. It taught the
necessity of spiritual discipline, and opened the
way for closer spiritual intercourse with the clergy
through sacramental confession. It restored be
lief in the sacramental system of the Church as
the chief means of union with our Lord's glorified
Human Nature. It vindicated the doctrine of
our Lord's sacramental Presence in the Blessed
Sacrament of the Eucharist, and exalted that "Un
bloody Sacrifice" to its old place as the chief act
of Christian worship. It opened, cleansed, and
beautified neglected churches, it stimulated spir
itual work among the poor and the neglected, it
substituted plain and earnest ex tempore addresses
for the more formal ethical discourses in vogue.
It vindicated the Anglican claim of Catholicity
as against the papal claim of an exclusive Roman
Catholicity. It met Eome on her o-wn ground
and answered her claim of supreme authority, and
practically stopped perversions to her from the
ranks of the Church of England. It has won and
is winning to-day, as statistics abundantly prove,
many converts, both from Eome and the Protest
ant denominations, and so in all this it has stamped

16 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
as utterly false the assertion that Catholicity be
gins and ends with "ritualism."
The Catholic movement in the Church of Eng
land, and the American (Episcopal) Church has
certainly accomplished many wonderful things;
but its hardest task still lies before it, in the effort
to break down the great wall of misunderstanding
which prevents any real appreciation of its true
meaning on the part of Protestant Christians. To
them it is mere ritualism, or what is far worse, a
revival of the sacerdotalism, dogmatism, and sacra-
mentarianism which belong to the darkness of the
Middle Ages, and which is therefore cold, and nar
row, and unloving. But when intelligent Protest
ants come into the Church from conviction that she
is what she claims to be, and so find out what she
really is, they are the first to gladly testify that
their old-time idea of the Church and the Catholic
movement was a curiously mistaken one, and they
know that Catholic Churchmen appreciate, re
spect, and admire all that is true, and unselfish,
and sweet, and loyal, in the lives of Protestants.
We affirm gladly and most thankfully that indi
vidual Protestants who have been baptized with
water "in the Name of the Father, and of the Son,
and of the Holy Ghost," are members of the Cath
olic Church quite as truly as we are. We do not
for one moment deny that a Protestant minister
may be called by the Holy Spirit in his heart to

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 17
preach the Gospel; and we know that vast num
bers of such ministers preach many Gospel truths
"with much power, and that God has blessed such
preaching by using it as the instrument for the
conversion of many souls. We see no reason to
doubt that through participation in the ordinance
of "the Lord's Supper," as administered by
Protestant ministers, the Protestant Christian's
faith may be strengthened, and his heart may be
comforted. We know, much to our shame, that
some Protestant denominations have far surpassed
' the American Episcopal Church in their generous
gifts to missions, a type of generosity which is be
yond all praise.
Moreover, when baptized Protestants are re
ceived as communicants of the Church through
Confirmation, they are not re-baptized; they are
received as those who are already members of the
Church, and who simply need the grace of Con
firmation to prepare them for the life of a com
municant in the Church. Again, they are not re
quired to give up any positive truth which they
have held before, and which has been a comfort to
them. They simply bring their truth, whatever
it is, and add to it the truth which the Church
teaches them, to make their o-wn truth full and
complete. They find in the Church everything
which they believed before, that is, everything
which is positive, and affirmative, and helpful.

18 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
The Church obliges them to leave at her doors,
before they enter, merely that which is negative,
narrow, factional, and petty, the spirit which
denies, and protests, and excludes, and dogmatizes ;
and in the Church the Protestant finds ample
room for tbe play of individual opinion concern
ing matters which are not "of the Faith."
In so far as Protestant teaching is positive and
constructive, it is usually Catholic; and the more
conservative orthodox Protestant denominations
who are loyal to the Dogmas of the Holy Trinity,
the Incarnation, and the Atonement, hold much of
the Catholic Creed, and so have very much in com
mon with the Faith of Catholic Churchmen. And,
strange as it may seem, those Protestants who love
and adore the Son of God as their Saviour, and are
jealous for the truth of the inspired Word of God,
will some day discover that in the midst of the
rising tide of modern rationalism they will have
far more in common with "high-churchmen," than
they will A\dth many of their fellow-Protestants
who have drifted and are drifting far away from
all the old anchorages of evangelical truth.

CHAPTEE II.
THE IIEAET OF CATHOLICITY.
CHEEE are in the world to-day over three
hundred millions of Christians who call them
selves Catholics, and who claim to belong to the
Catholic Church: about two hundred and twenty
millions of Eoman Catholics, one hundred millions
of Greek or Orthodox Eastern Catholics, and
twenty-five millions of Anglican Catholics, includ
ing the members of the Church of England and
her colonial pro-vinces, together with the members
of the American Episcopal (or American Cath
olic) Church.
The name "Catholic" is generally applied by
Protestants only to members of the Roman Cath
olic Church, because most Protestants are not
aware of the fact that there are over one hundred
and twenty-five millions of Christians who are
Catholics, and yet not Roman Catholics. Members
of the Church of England and of the American
Episcopal Church, for example, refuse to surren
der the exclusive use of the Catholic name to

20 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Roman Catholics, because it belonged originally to
the whole Catholic Church, of which the Church of
England, and the Greek Churches were provincial
parts, and were for many centuries in open com
munion with those Catholics who were under the
lawful jurisdiction of the Patriarch of Eome, in
the Eoman or Italian Church.
Moreover, we find the name Catholic used to
define the Church in the earliest times, as for
example, in the writings of St. Ignatius, the dis
ciple of St. John, in the ancient creeds, and the
primitive liturgies; and it was used by all parts
of the Church the world over, by Greeks, An
glicans, and Eomans, many centuries before the
modem papal claim of universal and exclusive
jurisdiction was ever heard of.
The word Catholic occurs in the Apostles'
Creed of the American Episcopal Church (the
creed which is used in the Choir Offices of Matins
and Evensong) and also in the Nicene Creed,
which is recited at every celebration of the Holy
Eucharist. Hence every member of the American
Church as well as of the Anglican Church through
out the world, be he Bishop, priest, deacon, or
layman, confesses himself a Catholic every time
he goes to church ; and in his worship he prays to
be defended from the "sins of heresy and schism,"
and that he may "die in the communion of the
Catholic Church." So whatever individual mem-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 21
bers of the Church may happen to think about
it, in their worship they constantly profess that
they are Catholics in some very real sense.
Moreover English and American Churchmen
cannot remove the word Catholic from their Creed,
because the Creed belongs to the whole Church,
and is the official definition of that Truth which
has been believed always, everywhere, and by all
Catholics, from the beginning, and was formulated
and set forth by the Church as a whole. Hence no
one provincial part of the Church, like the Ang
lican Communion, has any right to tamper with
the Creed or alter its phraseology. Again, Amer
ican Catholic Churchmen have no desire whatever
to remove the Catholic name from their Creed, be
cause rightly understood, it stands for certain great
truths and principles which are very dear to them,
because these truths represent the Mind and Will
of Jesus Christ, and furnish, as Churchmen be
lieve, the only possible basis of reunion between
Christians, a reunion for which all Catholics con
stantly hope and pray.
Now, although most unfortunately intercom
munion between the three great provincial parts
of the Catholic Church is at present suspended,
and although Anglicans, Greeks, and Eomans are
divided in sentiment and belief about certain
things, they are all united by much which they in
herit from the same source, and hold in common.

22 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
For example, they all believe that our Lord,
as a necessary part of His Mediatorial work,
founded one, and only one visible, self-perpet
uating Church, which was to last always, and ex
tend everywhere throughout the world. To this
Church the Lord committed certain gifts of Sacra
mental grace, and revealed truth which are ordi
narily necessary for salvation, because through
them the Lord brings men into healing touch with
His glorified Manhood, and by them the benefits
of the Lord's sacrificial death are applied to men
individually. All Catholics believe that the Lord
dwells in and works through His Church so really,
though invisibly, that they must belong to the
Catholic Church, and no other, in order to be sure
of obeying Him, and sure of receiving all gifts of
grace which He wills to give them. Again, all
Catholics believe that the Catholic Church, having
been commissioned to teach by Christ's own words
and acts, is the only body competent to teach in
His Name and by His authority ; and they believe
that the Faith of the Church, formulated by
the whole Church under the promised guidance of
the Holy Spirit, taught always, everywhere by all
Churchmen from the beginning, is the only pos
sible ground of certitude in matters of faith.
All this is of course very different from the
Protestant theory concerning the Church ; because
the Protestant believes that God saves men as indi-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 23
viduals apart from any "church," through working
in each man's heart by the Holy Spirit, and con
verting him from sin to holiness. By this act of
individual conversion the man becomes a Christ
ian, and is then left to make up his o"wn Creed
out of the Bible, and join any church which hap
pens to suit his taste, or which agrees with his
views of the Bible. To him all "churches" being
created by men, each for some special purpose, all
are on the same level, and are not in the least
necessarily connected with his salvation, and can
have no special claim on his allegiance.
The Catholic, on the other hand, believing that
the Catholic Church is the creation of Jesus Christ,
and the means of his salvation, finds it quite impos
sible either to make, or to belong to, any substi
tute for the Church, and impossible to substitute
his o"wn individual views for the Faith of the
Church. American Episcopal Churchmen claim that
their Church inherits through the ancient Church
of England valid orders, valid Sacraments, and
the Catholic Faith, and is historically a provincial
part of the Catholic Church ; hence they refuse to
surrender the use of the Catholic name to any one
part of the Church, be it Greek, or Eoman.
It certainly is a singular fact in the history of
religious controversy that this Catholic name,
which has been confessed from the earliest times

24 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
by millions of worshippers the world over as the
most devout and loyal expression of their faith in
the most solemn possible act of worship, should
in these days be regarded with scornful contempt,
and as a symbol of superstition, by a vast multi
tude of men and women who call themselves
Christians. The word itself means Universal, and
was originally applied to the Christian Church to
indicate its broader scope in contrast with the
Jewish Church, which was temporary, racial, local,
and narrow, and preparatory for something else;
whereas the Christian Catholic Church was to ex
tend everywhere, embrace all people, and last al
ways, and convey all grace, and all truth necessary
for their salvation to all men. Hence there is
nothing necessarily narrow, or superstitious, or
erroneous in the word itself; on the contrary, it
expresses the breadth, and inclusiveness, of the
love of the Son of God for man. The sad part of
the fact that the Catholic name in these days
should challenge ridicule or contempt or suspicion,
is the fact that those who call themselves Catholics,
whether Eomans, Greeks, or Anglicans, are them
selves largely responsible for this unfortunate
popular prejudice against the word, a prejudice
which they greatly deplore. With shame and sor
row must they admit the truth written broadly
over the pages of ecclesiastical history that at
times, the Catholic name has been associated with

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 25
much that was narrow, intolerant, and false, and
which was far from suggesting the gentle and lov
ing patience of tbe Son of God who came to seek
and to save the lost, and to deal very mercifully
and tenderly with the ignorance and prejudice of
men. It is not strange that Protestants should mis
understand the word Catholic, and attribute to it
a sinister meaning and spirit which does not in
the least belong to it, when they find it associated
in history with certain dogmas unkno-wn to an
tiquity, much medieval superstition, rabid intol
erance, fierce controversies, bitter persecutions, and
cruel bloodshed; and when often to-day many of
those who profess to be Catholics are worldly,
narrow, and un-Christlike.
But after all, is this any reason why we should
give up the Catholic name, or the great Scriptural
truths which it represents ? Surely no man would
throw away a gold dollar because gold dollars are
sometimes counterfeited, and are occasionally used
for some base purpose. American Churchmen re
fuse to surrender the Catholic name no matter
how much its original meaning may have been
twisted or obscured through bad associations.
On the contrary, they believe that it is their bus
iness to "vindicate it, and show if possible that it
stands to-day for all positive truth which Protest
ants themselves love and defend, and for much

26 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
more which would be a great comfort and help to
them, if they would only receive it.
We come then to this question : What does the
word Catholicity mean to an intelligent Church
man? Leaving all technical definition to come
later, we ask now, what is the very heart and es
sence of the thing itself for which the word Cathol
icity stands, the secret of the real vitality, and mo
tive power, and heavenly inspiration which the
word clothes and expresses ? We reply at once that
THE HEAET 01" CaTHOLICITT, IS THE LOVE OF THE
Son of God foe man ; the infinite, tender pity of
the Christ for all who sin and suffer, the love which
refuses to let men wander away from Him until
He has used all the resources of Divine power to
win them, and bring them back again within the
reach of His tender care and blessing. This is
the only true spirit of Catholicity; and any type
of so-called Catholicity which does not rest on the
love of God, and hold and set forth this love as the
very reason. of its being, its one adequate inspira
tion, the one central truth it is designed to defend
and express to men, such "Catholicity" must be
false, and powerless.
Sooner or later all points of controversy, all
differences in belief and practice, must be traced
back to, and tested by, the one central question of
questions, what has this thing to do "with setting
forth the love of the Son of God for man ? The

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 27
Catholic Church must have the courage to bravely
face this issue in her own defence ; and if she can
meet it, if she can show that men can know more
of the power of the love of God by knowing her,
then she justifies her claims, but not otherwise.
Now of course such a statement as this con
cerning the Catholicity of the Church will imme
diately challenge this reply: "There are multi
tudes of Christians who refuse to call themselves
Catholics, and who do not belong to any part of the
'Catholic Church,' who show most abundant evi
dences of the love of Christ in their hearts and
lives, and believe most thankfully that He loves
them ; and often such Protestant Christians mani
fest a loving spirit to all men, where 'Catholics'
are narrow and hateful. Moreover, you Church
men of all men have the least right to assert that
what you call Catholicity is an expression of the
love of the Son of God for man, because by reason
of your creed and your Church-principles you are
hopelessly committed to a narrow system. You
believe in one exclusive Church, you refuse fellow
ship with various devout and scholarly Protestant
ministers, you tie up God's free gifts of grace to
the administration of certain sacramental forms,
you make salvation depend on the 'Church' rather
than on personal holiness of life, and the necessary
and logical result of all this is, that your system
breeds intolerance and narrow-mindedness, and an

28 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
un-loving spirit towards all other Christians who
do not agree with you. What you call Catholicity
seems to us Protestants to be narrow, and hard,
and cold, the product, not of the Gospel, or of the
love of God, but of a credulous and uncritical and
provincial age, very human, and very selfish ; and
it is something which is hopelessly out of sympathy
with the typical breezy and independent Christ
ianity of the twentieth century. You certainly
cannot expect men in these days to go back again
to any mediaeval system of dogma, or to believe in
any magical sacramental forms, things which ham
per spiritual and intellectual freedom and develop
ment, and render men quite incapable of any gen
erous judgments of other men, and most certainly
do not set forth the love of God for man."
This is the substance of the reply which Prot
estants make to Catholic Churchmen, and there
can be no doubt but that individual Churchmen so
hold and teach the truth of the Church as to fully
justify this reply. That has always been the great
misfortune of the Catholic Church that she should
often be misrepresented by her own children whose
self-"will has really never been surrendered to the
softening influence of tbe love of God.
Now is this charge true? Is narro-wness the
necessary fruit of Catholicity ? Does it illustrate
the self-will of man rather than the love of God ?
Does it cramp the minds of men, and stop spiritual

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 29
progress ? Certainly it is a very terrible charge if
it is true, because the lives of some three-hundred
millions of men in the Anglican, Greek, and
Eoman Churches to-day are fashioned and mould
ed to a greater or less extent by what we call Cath
olic belief and practice ; and moreover in the same
belief untold millions of men have been born and
trained for Heaven in past ages, who have now
passed beyond the possibilities of any further pro
bation; and certainly one would naturally shrink
from assuming that such an infinite multitude of
Christians were necessarily deficient in the car
dinal virtues and graces of the Christian life.
Moreover, if the characteristic tendencies of the
Catholic Faith and the Catholic system make men
narrow and unspiritual, unsympathetic and intol
erant, and incapable of entering into the breadth
and generous inspiration of the love of God, how
did it happen that the greatest missionary tri
umphs of the Church were accomplished under
this system, and how has the Church produced the
greatest saints the world has ever kno"wn, during
the fifteen hundred years before the modern Prot
estant "breezy and independent Christianity" was
ever heard of ? Nothing can be more certain than
the fact that the principles which constitute Cath
olicity were accepted everywhere throughout the
Christian world for a vast number of centuries
from the beginning. Were then the great saints,

30 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and martyrs, and spiritual "writers, and eminent
doctors, and learned theologians, and missionary
heroes of the Church trained under a system which
breeds intolerance, and renders men incapable of
knowing what the love of the Son of God is?
Surely the thing is incredible.
All Christians are united to Christ by a three
fold bond; the bond of faith, the bond of sacra
mental grace, and the bond of love ; and this triple
bond unites them together in one Body. Because
there is "one Lord," there is also "one Faith, one
Baptism, one Body, one Spirit, and one Hope of
our calling." Hence it must be admitted (how
ever much the Church may have failed to illus
trate her o"wn ideals) that, in theory at least, the
Catholic conception of one, great, universal Christ
ian Family represents a spirit of love. Mutual
love draws and holds men together and promotes
a generous spirit of mutual toleration, and gentle
consideration for each other which would prevent
rivalries and jealousies, and misunderstandings;
and divisions which result from these things, and
that dreadful hopeless confusion of teaching which
is always the penalty of division. Hence, if we
could actually restore a primitive spirit of love
among all Christians, it would eventually neces
sitate and produce visible unity, because our spir
itual vision would be clarified, and the thought of
a multiplicity of hostile and competing sects sup-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 31
ported by those who love the same Lord, would
become intolerable to us, as it certainly is intol
erable to Him who prayed that all Christians
might be one, even as He and His Father were
One. In every case where men separated from the
old Church and formed a new sect, the separation
was due to the fact that both parties had lost that
patience with each other which is the necessary
fruit of love ; and the very fact that a denomina
tion is thus organized as a protest against some
other body, and as a competitor in the same field,
renders anything like mutual love and apprecia
tion absolutely impossible. Under such condi
tions, the so-called "heart-unity" of Protestant de
nominations has no practical existence whatever;
and the present divided condition of American
Christianity, is a very sad witness to the fact that
the hearts of many have grown cold.
Individual Protestants doubtless exhibit in
their individual lives much of the beauty of the
love of God, however defective the system may be
to which they belong ; and all Catholics rejoice to
believe that many of them share much of the sav
ing truth of the Gospel, the prevenient grace of
the Holy Ghost, and the grace of Catholic bap
tism, and so are (to that extent) Catholics,
whether they realize it or not.
Hence there is, even from the Catholic stand-

32 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
point, no reason why they should not bear many
fruits of the Spirit's work in their lives. Such
people are loving, and gentle, and saintly, not
because they are Protestants, but because they
share the grace, and have caught the spirit of a
real Catholicity, to which, alas ! many Churchmen
fail to attain. Again, while all Catholics believe
that the Lord provides the Catholic Church as
the ordinary means of salvation, and that obedi
ence to it is binding upon us who know it, and
understand what it represents, yet they do not for
one moment assert that God cannot or does not
work independently of the Church He creates, in
saving and blessing those who sincerely seek Him,
and try to live in accordance with the light that
lighteneth every man who cometh into the world.
Hence Churchmen are not in the least inclined
to undervalue sanctity of life wherever or in
whomsoever it is to be found.
When our Lord promised the gift of the Holy
Spirit to His Apostles, He said that the Holy
Ghost would lead them, not up to, but into all
truth; and so often there is a vast difference be
tween contemplating a truth from the outside, and
from the inside. The Catholic Church, and Cath
olic principles may seem very harsh, and cold, and
unattractive, when one looks at them merely at a
distance, through the mist of popular prejudice
which distorts them; but when one gets into the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 33
inside of the truth about the Church, and learns
what it means, and feels the force of it, and dis
covers the beauty of it, and the purpose of it, and
the inspiration of it, then the truth seems alto
gether different from what it did at first. A
massive cathedral on a dark, foggy Christmas
morning may seem very cold, and gloomy, and for
bidding from the outside ; but if we once enter
within the cathedral, we will find the sanctuary
brilliantly adorned with beautiful works of art,
the altar ablaze with many lights, and exquisitely
embroidered hangings, and jewelled silver, the
whole lofty vault of the clerestory ringing with
the heavenly harmony of some magnificent an
them, the sanctuary suffused "with a rose-tinted
cloud of fragrant incense, and all the great con
gregation bowing in adoring love before the sacra
mental Presence of Him who comes to bless them
on His altar-throne. Without, all was gloomy and
repelling. Within, all is beautiful and glorious.
The bane and folly of all religious controversy
has been the dreadful habit of handling the things
of Christ and of His Church as if they were our
o"wn, products of our wit, ministering to our per
sonal pride, and dependent on our cleverness for
their success. We confuse errors with persons,
and forthwith hate the person who holds the error.
We confuse Truth with our o"wn petty apprehen
sion of it ; and so mistaking the little fraction for

34 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
the great whole, we applaud our o"wn discrimina
tion, and take to ourselves the credit which belongs
to truth. All this of course breeds a hard, narrow,
unloving spirit which wounds the heart of Christ,
misrepresents the true Catholicity of His King
dom, and confuses and disgusts doubtful hearts in
search of the truth.
But if the one great central truth of Cath
olicity is the love of the Son of God for man, and
the Catholic Church is part of the Lord's o"wn
gracious provision for setting forth this love, and
for making it available for man's salvation, then
the discussion of the nature and function of the
Church ought to be taken out of the rut in which
religious controversy usually runs, and kept free
from all vulgar personalities, and conducted in a
reverent, humble spirit.
The devout and intelligent Catholic Church
man has one, and only one, great, enthusiastic be
lief : — The heart of Catholicity is the love of the
Son of God for man. This is the life, the hope,
the inspiration of the Church; the one adequate
justification of its name, its unity, its Creed, its
ministry, its Sacraments, its worship, its disci
pline, and its loving appeal to all men to come
into communion with it.
As Aubrey L. Moore has said, "This love for
man, real love, which will submit to be misunder
stood, which will sacrifice itself for another, is

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 35
that by which all truth in practical matters is
measured. Tell the unbeliever that God has re
vealed Himself to His Church, and he retorts,
'Then show me that all your things are done in
charity, show me that the Church is full of love,
for God is Love.' . . . Yes, the world generally
may be strangely ignorant of doctrinal and theo
logical truths, but it has a marvelously keen sight,
in discerning the divinity of love. Ours is a time
of sharp and hostile criticism of all that lays claim
to the title of religion; above all, of that which
boasts a special revelation from God. And it
seems as if a time of fiercer trial was to come.
. . . But there is a power, an omnipotent power,
to which one and all bow, a power which should be
the rightful heritage of the Church of Christ. In
the presence of that power, criticism is disarmed,
cut through like the subtle questionings of Priest
and Pharisee, by the simple truths of fact. . . .
The Church that loves most, most universally,
most unselfishly, is the Church which must tri
umph in the end, and win over its rivals to itself.
Call it by what name you will, it stands confessed
and honored as the Church which is most Christ
like, the Church that is truly Catholic. Let all
your things be done in charity, and you will be
carrying on the very work for which God became
man; nay, you will be working in that power
which is omnipotent, for God is Love."

CHAPTEE III.
THE CHUEOH AND THE INCAENATION.
TF we may venture to define the motive which
impelled Almighty God to create man, we may
say that God made man in order that He might
have some object outside of Himself on which He
could lavish the opulent wealth of His divine
affection. The crowning glory of all God's creative work
was the gift of a soul made in His own Image and
Likeness, and so capable of knowing and loving
Him, and delighting in His love. Then, when
man abused God's gift of moral freedom and
sinned through disobedience, the whole subsequent
history of the human race is the history of God's
patient, ceaseless, loving effort to win men back
again to Himself with a strength and persistence
of devotion which is beyond measure astonishing
and touching. And the most wonderful mani
festation and proof of this love was the Incarna
tion of the Son of God, by which God took our
manhood into union with Himself, and exalted it

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 37
even to the very throne of Deity. The Incarna
tion is the greatest conceivable honor and blessing
which God could give, or man could receive from
God; tbe one, supreme, eternal proof that God is
love. Apart from any form of special revelation, the
natural instinct of human fatherhood would
prompt the belief that He who is the great Father
of us all must love the children of His 0"wn crea
tion; but then there is so much in the fixed, re
morseless working of "natural law" which seems
to contradict this supposition, so much which
seems unjust, and purposeless, and purely mechan
ical, that at times we are left in agonizing doubt
as to whether the great eternal Mind which de
signed the universe cares anything at all for the
individual human atom. We cry out in the dark
for help, and we say, "surely, if we are made in
God's Image, if God does love us, He cannot leave
us in doubt about it. He must reveal Himself to us
in some way, just as any human father would
take a frightened, sorrowful child to his breast
and comfort him with his reassuring caress." So
then, when the Son of God becomes man in order
that He may bring Himself visibly and audibly
into touch "with human life at every point of pos
sible contact, when with the utmost tender sym
pathy He bears all that we have to bear, and
spends all His time from His Baptism to His

38 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Crucifixion in the loving and devoted service of
those who needed Him "for their sorrows, or for
their sins," and thus shows us the heart of God in
human terms and human ways we can understand,
then we say, "God is love after all; and just be
cause He loved us, He could not help sending His
Only Begotten Son to make us certain of His
love." "If some bright angel had come down from
Heaven with the message that 'God is love,' we
could not have believed it. We should have said,
'These are fine words, but we know the facts, and
the facts of experience contradict this fine mes
sage.' Only the Man of Sorrows could have made
us believe that it is true. And if He had been
mere man. He would not have proved its truth.
He would only have been one of many martyrs,
and it would have been no proof of Divine Father
hood that the best of men after a life of suffering
and rejection, should have been harried to death
on Calvary. But Christ claimed to be the Son
of God, one with the Father in spirit, and mind,
and being. His love is therefore God's love. It
was no one else than the very Son of God who
took our nature, entered into our pain, and clothed
Himself in all the unmerited suffering, and fail
ure, and ignominy which seem such an argument
against the divine love. Out of the very heart of
pain and failure He manifested that self-sacrific-

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 39
ing love which is nothing else than God's love ; and
by His resurrection on the third day, from the
dead, finally proved the divine love triumphant
through pain, and over pain."
"God is love ! It is the first truth we teach our
children; it is the last truth on which the soul
rests when it is about to pass into the waiting
world. It is the one thought of the returning
penitent, 'I "will go unto my Father.' It is the
gathering up into one sentence of the deepest ex
perience of the saint of God. It is the simplest of
all Gospel truths, and yet it is the one solution of
the greatest and most tremendous metaphysical
problems which have exercised the minds of phil
osophers," and it is also the very heart of Cath
olicity, the life and inspiration and power of the
Catholic Church of the Son of God.
This, then, is the first essential fact concerning
which all who call themselves Catholics are
agreed ; that the Incarnation of the Son of God is
primarily a manifestation of the love of God for
man. God, so to speak, accommodates Himself
to our limitations, comes within the range of our
natural physical powers of perception, that men
may see Him, hear Him, and speak to Him, and
be taught by His lips, healed by His touch, par
doned by His word, and cleansed by His Blood.
Thus the Incarnation is God's answer to His o"wn
children. They cried out to Him that He would

40 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
break through the awful silence and darkness of
the clouded sky, and He came to them Himself,
and they loved Him, and were comforted by His
love. Now we come to a very "vital test of the Lord's
love. The visible presence of Christ was with
drawn on Ascension Day. The Hand of God
quickly drew the filmy veil of cloud between Him
and those who loved Him, even as He blessed
them, and then — they saw Him no more. Was
that the end? Was that the final scene of God's
visible response to the universal appeal of men?
Did He give them a passing glimpse of His beau
ty, His truth, and His love, the comforting assur
ance of His personal presence for just thirty-three
years, while since then, for twenty centuries men
have been left to live and die as they did before
He came, with no visible sign, or pledge, or token
from Him, that He is still with them, that He
still loves them, and ministers to them ?
It may be said in reply that though He van
ished from the vision of men. He left a very won
derful book for their guidance. His 0"wn inspired
Word. Ah yes ! but a book, be it ever so inspired,
is not the personal presence of the Lord, and never
can be in any sense a substitute for Him, for His
own living, adorable personality. It is a comfort
to get a letter from one we love who is far away;
but a letter at best is a poor inanimate thing while

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 41
the heart longs for touch and sight. Moreover,
men may fight about a book, misinterpret it, tear
it to pieces, and reconstruct it on some new and
novel plan of their o"wn, or push it aside altogether.
At best a great part of the Bible must be utterly
unintelligible to the average man, and when he
undertakes to interpret it and find out just what it
means by his o"wn unaided judgment, he is apt to
make some very dreadful mistakes.
Again, perhaps it may be said that even though
the Lord's visible presence is withdra-wn, we know
that He is with us because He implants a comfort
ing sense of His presence in our hearts. True, no
doubt He does ; but the inner emotional apprehen
sion of His presence is often very difficult to win,
is easily lost, and is as fickle and variable as the
"wind of heaven, unless there is some outward sign
to reassure it, and keep it steady and alive. When
we long for Christ, for some certain assurance of
His nearness, and pardon, and love, we do not
want to be thrown back on our o"wn weary doubting
hearts for an analysis of our emotional self-con
sciousness, as the only pledge that we are in touch
with Him. We want to get away from ourselves,
and find something which is fixed, and changeless,
and certain.
Apparently, then, we are driven to this con
clusion : that if it was ever necessary for the Son
of God to become man in order to touch, and teach.

42 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and save men in their own realm of life, the same
necessity exists now. If St. Paul, and St. John,
and Mary Magdalene, and the dying thief on the
cross, needed Him, surely we need Him too: we
are human, God is infinite; what can the finite
mind know of the Infinite ? How can it love the
Infinite, save only through the Incarnate Christ?
The lapse of twenty centuries has not altered the
needs or the limitations of human nature. If God
is going to communicate "with us, it must be
through some sign we can see, some words we can
hear, some touch we can feel, something outside
of ourselves to which we can go; and if no such
sign exists to-day, one is forced to ask "whether
the love of Christ has failed ; the love of the Incar
nate Son of God.
Now we get a hint of a very wonderful truth
in answer to this question, when we find that the
Lord Himself promised that after His Ascension,
He would come back again to men in some way.
He said, "I will not leave you comfortless, I will
come to you." "Lo, I am with you always (every
day) unto the end of the world." And when on
Easter Day He said to Mary Magdalene, "Touch
Me not, for I am not yet ascended to My Father,"
He distinctly implied that after His Ascension
there would be some way by which she could come
into touch with Him again.
Many good people who call themselves Christ-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 43
ians think of the Incarnation merely as an expe
dient on the Lord's part by which He might be
enabled to die on the cross for our sins; and be
lieving that the benefits of Christ's Atoning Death
are appropriated by each sinner through faith
alone, they naturally fail to see that our Lord's
human nature serves any other function in His
mediatorial work of saving men, and some Prot
estants even forget that once having become man.
He is man now, and throughout all eternity.
Hence we must carefully remind ourselves just at
this .point how it is or in what way our Lord saves
us from the power and penalty of sin. He does
not do it by preaching to us, necessary as His
Truth is, nor by setting us an example, beautiful
and perfect as His life was, nor merely by that
spiritual apprehension of Him which we call faith,
though faith accomplishes some very wonderful
things. Our Lord saves men by uniting their sin-
laden human nature to His perfected, glorified
Manhood, so that men are cleansed hy His precious
Blood, and their souls and bodies are healed, en
lightened, and renewed by His indwelling Pres
ence. The Lord's glorified Manhood is the chan
nel through which all saving grace comes to us ; it
is the connecting bond between us and God. For
this reason if our Lord returns to us again after
His Ascension, He must still save us through some
means of contact with His present Manhood, even

44 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
as He once healed men through the touch of His
human hand in Judea. If this thing were neces
sary, and divine love made it possible twenty cen
turies ago, surely divine love can find the way to
make it actual for us to-day. It is the Son of Man
we need, as well as the Son of God.
Now we can imagine at least two ways in
which our Lord could manifest His presence
among men to-day. First, He might reappear and
live visibly as man in some one definite locality
as He did in Judea two thousand years ago. Then
all men would have to make pilgrimages to this
place in order to find Him and receive His healing
touch and benediction; and such a pilgrimage
would be practically impossible for all except a
mere handful of men, a favored few of the human
race. Or, secondly, instead of manifesting His pres
ence in any one place. He might gather about
Himself a number of men and in some very won
derful way He might bind all these men together
in one Body, by uniting them all to Himself as the
common bond between them; and in this Body,
this Church thus formed. He might take up His
abode so truly and literally, though invisibly, that
He could use its members as the means or instru
ments through which He could again bring Him-
seK, His grace, and His truth, into touch with all
men. Thus He might form a great visible society

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 45
or Church which would extend itself throughout
the world, and last always, and voice His truth,
and pledge His pardon, and communicate His
grace to men, because He creates it for just
this purpose. And while His deity would still
be hidden from human vision as it was by His
human face in Judea, yet the Catholic Church
would be in one sense literally a remanifesta-
tion of His Incarnation, because it would be the
visible Body, "His Body," which, so to speak,
re-clothed His glorified Manhood in this world,
and in which and through which He would heal
men. Such a Church as this would be like any human
organization in that it would be composed of or
dinary men ; but radically unlike any other organ
ization in that it was created by the Son of God,
endowed with His authority, vitalized by His con
tinual presence within it, and insured against fail
ure, by His sustaining power. This was what the
ancient Fathers meant when they spoke of the
Church as "an extension of the Incarnation." The
Lord ordained the Church as the means through
which the benefits of His Incarnation, and of His
mediatorial Sacrifice on the Cross were to be ap
plied to men individually. Hence all Catholics
believe that it is our Lord who teaches through the
united voice of the whole Spirit-guided Church;
that He regenerates men in Holy Baptism;

46 THE HEAET OF CATHOLICITY.
strengthens them through the Holy Ghost in Con
firmation ; that He remits their sins in sacramental
absolution ; that He is present to offer Himself to,
and for, men in the Holy Eucharist ; that He gives
His benediction in Holy Matrimony ; that He com
missions His priests and endows them with priestly
character in ordination; that He anoints the sick
with oil as the symbol of the Holy Spirit's healing
power in the rite of Unction. And all this He does
through the power of the Holy Ghost whose work
it is in the Church to unite men to Him.
The individual men through whom He works
may be very frail, very fallible, very inconsistent,
very worldly, and very weak ; but He in His mercy
overrules their folly so that the Church as a
whole, is saved from radical error in teaching, and
from any failure in its supply of supernatural
grace ; hence its perpetual presence throughout the
world is a continuous visible pledge of His pres
ence, a token and prodf of His unfailing love.
If then the Incarnate Son of God creates a
visible Church and lives in it, and acts through it,
it necessarily follows that such a Church must
possess at least four essential attributes or char
acteristics, each one of them being essential to the
Church's perfect life, and each one an expression
of the Lord's love for man.
The Church is One, Holy, Catholic, and
Apostolic.

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 47
I. — The Ohuech is One.
It must be one, because there is but one Lord,
one Christ, and all its members are united in one
Body through union with Him. He had but one
body. There is but one Faith, because the Faith
is an expression of His Divine Mind, and the
Mind of God is One, He cannot contradict Him
self. There is but one Sacramental system because
all grace flows from His one Manhood. There is
no other source of grace. There is but one minis
terial Priesthood because the Lord gave but one
historic commission to represent Him. There is
no other source of authority, and there is only one
Lord to represent.
If the Church was originally organized by men
to represent the diversities of human opinion to
God, then we might have any number of
"churches" ; but as the Church was originally or
ganized by God to represent the unity of the Di
vine Mind to men, there can be but one Church,
one throughout all space, one throughout all time.
Moreover, the unity of the Church is an expression
of the Lord's love, because it is only through the
unity of its continuous existence in history, that
we are enabled to find it, and identify it, and be
come certain beyond a peradventure that we have
found Christ in it. A multiplicity of sects, and
a multiplicity of creeds, cannot possibly express

48 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
the love of Christ for man, because such diversity
creates confusion, and doubt, and defeats the pur
pose for which the Church was created as an
authorized teacher sent by God to enlighten the
mind and cure doubt. To leave a man to judge
between the rival claims of two hundred sects
would not be an act of love, but an act of sheer
cruelty on God's part.
II. — The Chuech is Holy.
It must be holy, because it is sanctified by the
Lord's holy presence within it, and by the presence
of the Holy Ghost who brings men into touch with
Christ through holy Sacraments, and because God
thus takes up His abode in the hearts and souls of
men, members of the Church, that they may be
furnished with the grace and power to live holy
lives, under the discipline and training of the
Church. Here again the Lord plainly shows His love for
us in that He makes the way of access to Him,
"the way of holiness," plain and simple and easily
found. We are not left to the vagaries of internal
emotion as a test of His acceptance of us, or of our
certainty of receiving grace from Him, or of our
union with Him by which our bodies and souls be
come holy. In union with Him through the
Church each one of us has the grace necessary for
the attainment of sainthood; and this is a very

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 49
merciful and loving condescension on His part,
this provision of grace for the sanctification of life
and character.
Moreover, the Lord's mystical, sacramental
Presence is diffused everywhere throughout the
Church until some part of the Church forfeits that
Presence by incurable heresy, or schism. Hence,
though intercommunion may be suspended for a
time between different provincial parts of the
Church, like the Anglican and the Eoman, or the
Greek and the Eoman, it does not follow that
either communion is thereby cut off from the unity
of the Church; and though a suspension of inter
communion is most deplorable on every account,
all parts of the Catholic Church may still share
the deeper bond of unity which is the Sacra
mental Blood-relationship of mutual union with
the Manhood of the Son of God; and so the di
visions between them are superficial rather than
radical.
III. — The Chuech is Catholic.
The Church is Catholic because Christ's mys
tical Presence is not confined to any one time, or
place, or nation, but is diffused throughout the
world in the Church in every age, and every place.
Through the Catholic Church the Lord imparts all
gifts of revealed truth, and administers all gifts
of healing grace necessary for the salvation and

50 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
sanctification of all men for all time. The
Church's mission is broad, comprehensive, univer
sal, and final, because the Lord's love reaches unto
all the world in space and to the end of the world
in time, and throughout all eternity.
Thus the Catholic Church in expressing the
universal love of Christ for all men, rises above
all class distinctions, and embraces all classes
alike, and insists that all shall be treated with jus
tice and tenderness. She welcomes all men freely
into union with her holy brotherhood, and admin
isters to them such spiritual gifts as shall enable
them to show forth in their lives, no matter who
they are, or where they are, something of the
beauty of the Lord's love.
Opposed to the breadth and comprehensiveness
of Catholicity is the narro"wness of the sectarian
principle which tends to break up the great Cath
olic Brotherhood into hostile and competing sects,
and promotes individualism, and misunderstand
ings, and fosters a spirit of rationalism which is
opposed to any expression of the supernatural, and
therefore to any revealed evidence of the great
eternal fact that God is love.
Almost equally opposed to the spirit of true
Catholicity would be an attempt, however plaus
ible, on the part of any one provincial part of the
Church (like the ancient Italian or Latin Church,
for example) to set up an exclusive claim to be

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 51
the whole Catholic Church, and then to enforce
this claim by wholesale excommunication of other
parts of the Church, equally old, and equally Cath
olic in character. As well might Ireland set up
a claim to be the whole of Great Britain, and re
fuse civil, social, and commercial recognition of
Scotland and England as rightful provinces of the
British Empire.
Neither the anarchy of Protestantism, nor the
Imperialism of Eome can be reconciled with a true
type of Catholicity.
IY.^^The Chuech is Apostolic.
The Church is Apostolic because our Lord
chose and commissioned twelve Apostles as twelve
foundation stones on which He built His Church,
who served as the beginning of a continuous Apos
tolic Order of ministers, and who (under the guid
ance of the Holy Spirit) completed the organiza
tion of the Church. The Apostolic Church traces
ber origin to Christ and these Apostles, obeys the
authority of their successors, and holds and teaches
the Faith once for all delivered to them.
The Apostolic character of the Church is the
seal and pledge of her changeless Faith; the
ground on which she is able to appeal fearlessly
to the witness and testimony of Holy Scriptures,
of the Apostolic Fathers, and of the General Coun
cils as vindicating her Faith, and her historic po-

52 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
sition, and the validity of her Orders. In this
way she repudiates any doctrine of development,
or any individual assumption of official infallibil
ity, which makes "an appeal to history treason"
and cuts off the Church from unity with her own
past, and leaves men in absolute doubt and un
certainty as to what the belief of the Church may
be in the future.
Perfect love, and perfect faith which is born
of love, must rest on the certainty of changeless
loyalty between those who love ; and so the Apos
tolic character of the Church is Christ's pledge
of His o-wn abiding faithfulness to those He loves
in the Church, a love that is "the same to-day,
yesterday, and for ever."
Now while the Catholic Church is essentially
One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic, no Catholic
pretends for a moment that the Church as a whole,
or any provincial part of the Church, has ever
•perfectly illustrated these four attributes of ideal
perfection. Human sin, and the perversity of the
human will, always have, and, until the Lord
comes, always will mar the Church's setting forth
of the beauty and unity of Divine love ; neverthe
less these four attributes form necessary elements
of her ideal, and in their elemental form, are nec
essary to her very being.
We have now endeavored to suggest how to the
mind of a Catholic, the Church is the outcome of

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 53
the Incarnation, the consummation of our Lord's
mediatorial work in the world, the extension of
His Kingdom, the pledge of His abiding presence,
and the necessary revelation of His love.
How then can there be anything necessarily
offensive, or narrow, or intolerant, in this great
Catholic conception of the nature and mission of
the Church? If the Incarnation of the Son of
God is preeminently a manifestation of the love of
God for man, and the Church is the logical and
mystical outcome of the Incarnation, then the
Church must be equally a provision and proof of
the Lord's love, for as we are told in one place in
the Bible, the Church is Christ.
Individual men in the Church may be bigoted,
narrow, intolerant, and offensive, and unspiritual,
and thus misrepresent the Church ; but the thought
that the Catholic Church is wholly Christ's and
not our own, not in any sense the product of our
wit or wisdom, this thought must humble us, and
fill us with reverent awe and a sense of our 0"wn
utter mmworthiness of sharing such high and
heavenly privilege.
Given a human church which we ourselves de
vise and organize to meet some supposed need of
the hour, or to represent our own personal in
terpretation of a book, or to record our protest
against the errors of some other body, or to em
phasize the fact of our own holiness, or to ex-

54 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
ploit our personal views about this, that, or the
other point of polemical theology, or to minis
ter chiefly to only one social class, or to in
sist chiefly on any one point of Christian doc
trine, and one can readily see how such a
church would be apt to beget narrowness in its
members. It is "our" church; we made it, we
0"wn it, and we exploit it largely because it is
"ours," and because we believe that it is the best
and cleverest thing yet devised by the wit of man
in competition with many other "churches,"
equally human and equally confldent of the
uniqueness of their mission.
In all this medley of competing sects which
proclaim "I am of Paul, I am of Apollos," one is
tempted to say, "they have taken away my Lord,
and I know not where they have laid Him"; for,
to the Catholic Christian, the one vital, essential,
and significant thing about the Church is that it
is Cheist's Chuech ; His in the most literal and
historical sense of the word because it owes its
being to Him, He founded it, and commissioned
it by His own acts and words at a definite time
and place, and sent it unto all the world to repre
sent Him. And again, it is Cheist's Chuech
in the mystical (though none the less real) sense
of the word, because it is His Body in which He
dwells. His Temple in which He is worshipped.
His Bride whom He loves, and with whom He

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 55
has promised to be every day unto the end of the
world. The Catholic Church is not "ours" in any
sense of the word. We did not organize it, we did
not evolve its Creed, or institute its ministry, or
invent its sacraments. It does not belong to us,
but we as Catholics belong to it, because it comes
to us in the Lord's Name, as the means of our sal
vation which He Himself provides out of the op
ulence of His great love.

CHAPTEE IV.
THE CHUECH THE CEEATION OF CHEIST.
TTIHEN we define the mystical relation which
^V exists between Christ and His Church, and
assert that the Church is a provision and expres
sion of the love of the Son of God for man, we may
be told that this is all very well as a beautiful mys
tical theory — a dream of a religious enthusiast —
this idea that Christ lives on from age to age in one
Church which He creates, but at best it is nothing
but a theory "without any practical foundation in
actual historic facts. Hence it is necessary for
us to appeal at once to the witness of the Holy
Scriptures in order to prove, and fix firmly in our
minds the one great historic fact on which the
Catholic religion depends, the fact that the Lord
did actually organize one Church which was to
last until the Second Advent.
Let it be noted that we are not now dealing
with theories, or doctrines, or mystical interpreta
tions of Scripture. We are sunply taking it for
granted that the plain historic statements of the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 57
New Testament are reliable and accurate, and that
we have a right to appeal to them precisely as we
would to any other authentic records for the estab
lishment of any other historic fact. We are simply
to let the Biblical testimony speak for itself.
It is very necessary for us to do this carefully
in order to correct the popular mistaken impres
sion that when our Lord died on the Cross, rose
from the dead, and inspired the composition of a
Holy Book, His mediatorial work in the world
was at an end; or if He ever did found any one
Church, that such Church soon became hopelessly
corrupt, forfeited its divine charter, and proved
an utter failure, so that to-day there exists no or
ganization which can in any way represent it.
Then secondly, we need to understand exactly
what our Lord actually did and said about the
Church, in order to correct the feeling which many
devout Protestants have, that there is something
almost profane or sacrilegious in associating eccle
siastical matters which so often breed strife and
bitterness, with the gentle, patient Teacher of
ethics, and unselfishness, and love, the kind-hearted
Lover of men who went about every day doing
good, healing the sick, and comforting the sorrow
ful. We are told that the whole essence of Christ
ianity is contained in the "Sermon on the Mount" ;
and that Christ came to emancipate men from the
thraldom of ecclesiastical forms, and ordinances.

58 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and dogmas, and to abolish these things forever,
because they come in between Him and us
and hide Him from us and pervert the sim
plicity of His spiritual teaching. We are told
that it belittles Christ to think of Him as car
ing anything at all about churches, and creeds,
and ordinances; and so the idea that He ever
had, or ever can have any special relation to
any "One Church" is absurd and narrow in the
extreme. Now, in direct reply to all this, we venture the
assertion that the New Testament abundantly
proves not merely that our Lord was always a
loyal Jewish Churchman, but that He Himself
founded a Church in which the Old Covenant was
continued, and in which He incorporated every
single essential element of Churchmanship found
in the older system. Hence the assumption that
our Lord taught a creedless, Churchless religion,
is as far afield of the truth as can well be im
agined. Let it be remembered that many centuries be
fore the Incarnation, the second Person of the
adorable Trinity, Jesus Christ, shared with His
Father the work of establishing a Covenant with
men through Abraham, and a Church for men,
through Moses, as the means by which men were
to be saved. In the most literal sense of the word
the Jewish Church Was Christ's Church for the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 59
Jews. And so when the Son of God became man,
it was necessary that He should do two things:
as God, He must show His approval of the Church
principle, and as Man, He must humbly obey the
divine law which He established, the law of
church-membership, and become Himself a
Churchman. So we find that our Lord submitted
to be made a member of the Jewish Church
through Circumcision when He was eight days
old, that He was presented in the Temple for a
Confirmation blessing when He was twelve years
old, that He frequently attended the Synagogue
and Temple worship, that He devoutly observed
the festivals and fasts, that He bade His disciples
observe the law of Moses, that He sent a man whom
He had healed to the priest for a certificate of
cure, that in His conversation with the Samaritan
woman who belonged to a sect which had separated
from the Jewish Church, He upheld the authority
of the Jewish Church and told her plainly that
"salvation was of the Jews," that He never went
into the Samaritan Temple on Mt. Gerizim, but
claimed the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem as "His
Father's House," and twice vindicated its sanctity
by driving out those who profaned it by secular
trade. So from first to last our Lord was a con
sistent Jewish Churchman; and while He fre
quently condemned in unsparing terms the abuses
of the Church system by the Pharisees, not one

60 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
word did He say against the Church itself, its
essential principles, and its divine authority. His
whole attitude towards the Church was expressed
in His words at His baptism when He said, "Thus
it becometh us to fulfil all righteousness."
Well, then, after our Lord's death and resur
rection, did He announce that while hitherto in
the providence of God, men had been saved as
members of one great divinely instituted Church,
henceforth the Church was abolished, the old meth
ods were all revolutionized and done away, and
men were now to be saved merely as individuals
through the power of faith alone, and "personal
religion" ?
No ; He did nothing of the kind. As a matter
of historic fact, there was no radical change of any
sort or description. He quietly proceeded grad
ually to organize a Church modeled after the older
system, not in the least as its rival, but as its ful
filment and completion, into which His disciples
were admitted by baptism, although they still, in
many ways, remained Jews. In this Catholic
Church the Jewish Church was very gradually
merged and finally lost; and so gradual was the
process that it was not complete until over forty
years after our Lord's death, at the destruction
of Jerusalem. At the opening of His ministry our Lord
begins His preaching, not by advocating holiness

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 61
of life, not by telling men that it did not matter
any more what they believed, "or to what church
they belonged, as long as they loved Him, and
their lives were all right," but the very first thing
He does is to announce the immediate coming of
an organization, which He calls "the Kingdom of
Heaven." We read that "Jesus began to preach,
and to say Eepent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is
at Hand ! Jesus . . . went about preaching
the Gospel of the Kingdom." Moreover, He seems
so absorbed in this subject, and has so much to say
about it, that His Gospel takes its name from it,
and is called "the Gospel of the Kingdom."
Thus the Catholic Church first appears in the
Bible as a great Kingdom, which as a Kingdom,
must have a King, a definite system of law, na
tional boundaries, laws governing citizenship, and
the privileges and duties of citizenship. Ha"ving
announced its coming, our Lord forestalls the mis
take that it was to be a Kingdom in Heaven, com
posed only of the invisible, purified saints, by
showing that it would contain both good and bad
men, and that those officers to whom He gives the
keys of admission to the Kingdom were to exercise
their authority "on earth."
Moreover, men were to "enter the Kingdom"
through a sacrament of initiation having a visible
sign, "water," as well as an in"ward gift, "the

62 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Spirit," hence the Church was to be a visible
Body. His apostles are "appointed" officers of "the
Kingdom" ; and they are told to preach everywhere
that the "Kingdom is at hand," and to tell those
who heard them that in their persons, "the King
dom of God is come nigh unto you." Our Lord
spent the last forty days of His earthly life in
structing His Apostles concerning this Kingdom ;
and the whole Gospel message to the world is
summed up as "preaching the Kingdom of God,
and teaching those things which concern the Lord
Jesus Christ," that is, the Catholic religion con
sists of two elements: membership in the King
dom, and personal loyalty to Jesus Christ.
Now when St. Peter made his first positive,
open confession of faith in our Lord's Deity, say
ing, "Thou art the Christ, the Son of the living
God," our Lord promised that on this truth as a
rock. He would build His Church, and the gates
of hell should not prevail against it. Mark you,
this is a definite promise to do a definite thing, by
One whose word is the Word of God Almighty,
a promise to build a Church which shall last for
ever, and therefore cannot possibly forfeit its char
ter, or abandon its mission. Our Lord begins this
work of Church-building, by selecting twelve
Apostles, who are to receive His constant, per
sonal instructions, and serve as the nucleus of His

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 63
ministry. To these men He promises that the
Holy Ghost shall be sent, to teach them all things,
and guide them into all truth. The night before
His death. He collects these men together and
institutes with them the Blessed Sacrament of the
Holy Eucharist, and bids them offer it as a sacri
ficial memorial of Him, perpetually in the Church
until He comes again. After our Lord's resurrec
tion. He gives these men their ministerial com
mission to represent Him, sending them even as
His Father sent Him, and He breathes on them as
a Sacramental sign of ordination by which He
conveys to them the Holy Ghost, and power and
authority to remit sins. He bids these Apostles
teach all nations, go unto all the world, preach
the Gospel to every creature, baptize all men into
the Name of the Holy Trinity, and to observe
whatsoever He has commanded them. He prom
ises to be with them as a ministerial order every
day unto the end of the world, and He asserts that
they so truly represent Him, that whoever shall
receive them, receives Him, and that whatsoever
they shall bind on earth, shall be bound in Heaven,
and that they, as a continuous order, shall be wit
nesses unto Him unto the uttermost parts of the
earth. During the forty days' instruction after
His resurrection. He tells them how to complete
the organization of the Church, and perfect its

C4 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
system, and then He leaves them on Ascension
Day. Notice well that in tbe very terms of our Lord's
commission given to these men, there is distinctly
implied the perpetual existence of their minis
terial order in the Church. They as individuals
must soon die; but as an order, they were to ad
minister the Holy Eucharist "until He comes."
They are sent to teach "all nations." He is to be
with them "unto the end of the world." They are
to witness "unto the uttermost parts of the earth."
The Church of which they were members would
resist all attacks of "the gates of Hell." And
so, unless the words of the Son of God have
proved false. His Church exists to-day, and there
never has been a time when men were justified in
abandoning it, and creating a new substitute for it.
After our Lord's Ascension, the Apostles begin
to carry out His directions and choose a man to
take Judas' place in the Apostleship. Then on
Whitsunday or Pentecost, the Holy Ghost descends
on the waiting Church, accompanied by the out
ward sacramental sign of "tongues of fire," and
thus even as our Lord was conceived and became
Incarnate through the power of the "overshadow
ing" of the Holy Ghost, so through the power of
the same Spirit of God He now takes up His abode
in the Church, and the Church is filled with the
sacramental life of His glorified Manhood. This

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 65
marvellous outpouring of the Holy Ghost is the
beginning of the re-Incarnation of our Blessed
Lord in "His Body the Church." It is the fulfil
ment of His own promise, "I will not leave you
comfortless, I "will come to you." It is the visible
and supernatural seal and pledge of God's favor
which forever differentiates the Catholic Church
from all organizations of merely human origin.
It is the complete and final answer to those who
accept the Lord's deity, yet deny the supernatural
character of the Lord's Church.
The Church begins at once to teach and admin
ister Sacraments in the Lord's Name. The Apos
tles baptize men "for the remission of sins," that
they may "receive the Holy Ghost," and thus "the
Lord added to the Church such as were being
saved." Then the Apostles laid their hands on
men and women that "they might receive the Holy
Ghost" in Confirmation, which was one of "the
foundation principles of the doctrine of Christ."
In every case, "preaching Jesus" led to baptism.
The Apostles assembled together to "break bread"
in the Holy Eucharist, each "first day of the
week." Other Apostles, Elders, and Deacons were
ordained by the laying on of the Apostles' hands,
and the three orders of the ministry were com
pleted. When any question arose concerning doc
trinal definition, or ecclesiastical practice, the
Apostles assembled together, representing "the

66 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
whole Church," and under the presidency of St.
James, Bishop of Jerusalem, claimed the prom
ised guidance of the Holy Spirit, and settled the
matter by common consent, and issued decrees
accordingly, which were of binding authority on
the whole Church.
The Church thus formed, continued steadfastly
in four bonds of unity: the Apostolic Doc
trine, Fellowship, the Breaking-of-Bread, and the
Prayers. Then, sometime after the Church had
been fully organized, and the Faith began to be
defined in creed forms, the books of the New
Testament were written in the Church, by officers
of the Church; and eventually, after some years,
the Church determined which books in its posses
sion were canonical and which were not, and as
sembled those of which it approved in one volume
as we have them to-day. Hence the New Testa
ment is most distinctly the product of the Church ;
and the Church is in no sense whatever the product
of the New Testament, nor does it derive its plan
of organization, or its Faith from the New Testa
ment. In the Epistles of St. Paul he frequently re
fers to this Church thus organized by Christ and
His Apostles, as "the Body of Christ," an expres
sion which is used over thirty-three times, and
which is very significant indeed, if the Church be,
as we claim it is, a re-manifestation of the Lord's

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 67
Incarnation. When St. Paul calls the Church
"Christ's Body," he does not mean that it is some
thing the Lord owns, something external to Him
self which belongs to Him, and is His property;
but he means that the Church is Christ's Body
in the sense that it is the living organism in which
He lives, even as the soul of a man dwells in the
body of a man; and moreover we must bear in
mind that when St. Paul thus speaks of the Church
he was talking of a very definite and tangible
thing, a visible organization of men, of which he
himself was a member and an officer, the one and
only organization in existence anywhere which
claimed to be the Church of Christ.
Any man or a number of men may form an
organization of men who are bound together in one
body by a set of rules and regulations, and by a
common purpose, and a mutual interest in the
same principles or methods of work. These men
happen to think alike about some subject and forth
with they organize a society for mutual helpful
ness and inspiration. An Ethical Culture So
ciety, a Benevolent Association, a Labor Union,
a Young Men's Christian Association, a Social
Club, a College Fraternity, is an organization of
men, and consists of just what its members con
tribute to it, and nothing more. Men create it,
and most certainly they cannot endow it with any
thing which they themselves do not possess. That

68 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
which unifies the society is not life, but a com
munity of ideas. The organization has the me
chanical unity of a machine, but not the unity of a
living, breathing human body.
The one essential and radical difference be
tween any such organization and the Catholic
Church as a "Body" is that the Church is bound
together not primarily by a set of rules and regula
tions, and common purposes and beliefs, or a com-
mimity of ideas and sympathies, but by something
which its members did not possess and cannot pos
sibly contribute to it, namely, the supernatural
life of the Incarnate Son of Ood. The Lord does
not make Christians of men merely by converting
here and there an individual man and leaving them
to "organize" a religious club because they think
alike, as they would organize a labor union or a
polo club.
He Himself first creates the Church by gather
ing men about Himself into union with His glori
fied Manhood through the Sacraments, and so into
union with each other by "virtue of that which He
imparts to them, and which they never could have
created for themselves, or have obtained in any
other way. Hence the Church is not merely an
organization, it is something infinitely greater :
it is an organism, because Christ lives in it, and
His Personality is the centre of its identity, and
its life, and its unity.

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 69
This is what St. Paul means when he calls
the Catholic Church "the Body of Christ." Hence
St. Paul does not hesitate to assert that the Church
is subject to the laws which determine the growth
and development of living organisms. The Body
of Christ is visible. Of course it is, and it must
be. How can anyone find, join, support, or obey
"an invisible Church" which no one can define or
know anything about whatever? Secondly, the
Church is One Body, "the Body is one." Most
assuredly it must be one. You can divide a club
or a fraternity or a sect into twenty different or
ganizations, because such a thing is a mechanical
contrivance, an arbitrary arrangement and associa
tion of men ; but you cannot divide a living organ
ism without killing it. The Holy Scriptures abso
lutely forbid the sin of schism and rank it with
grievous crimes because to divide the Church is
to wound Christ. Then the Church is a living
organism, and lives on from age to age, as the
human Body of Christ lives on from His birth in
Bethlehem throughout eternity. The Church
grows in one sense as any organism grows, by in
corporating into itself men and women through
Baptism, by vitalizing them and assimilating them
to herself through the Body and Blood of Christ,
and thus the Church perpetuates its own contin
uous existence by continuous gro"wth. It is con
stantly renewing its corporate life, and yet from

70 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
first to last and everywhere throughout the world
its corporate identity is preserved, it is one and the
same living Body. St. Paul's analogy absolutely
forbids the idea that the Church can divide herself
up into a number of independent sects and live,
and the idea that she can get out of her Body, and
into a new body which was not originally hers !
Hence we claim that St. Paul's teaching con
cerning the organic life of the Church as "the
Body of Christ," is a most distinct and emphatic
confirmation of the great truth that the Church is
the pledge of Christ's perpetual presence in the
world, a manifestation and provision of His love
for man. And it is for this reason that Catholics
can no more think of substituting a new sect for
the Catholic Church, than they could think of sub
stituting a new christ for the Incarnate Son of
God, or a new gospel for the living Word of their
Eedeemer. Having now suggested the Scriptural evidence
which proves that our Lord and His Apostles did
actually found and organize one, visible, self-
perpetuating Church, which was to last until the
Second Advent, there are two difficulties which
suggest themselves at this point which must be
carefully considered.
We will be told, no doubt, that the idea that
the Church is in any sense the extension of the
Incarnation, involves incomprehensible mystery.

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 71
a blending of the natural and the supernatural,
the earthly and the heavenly, the spiritual and
the material, which certainly seems very strange
if not quite incredible. Of course we reply at
once that if the Son of God Himself creates the
Church, and associates it in the closest imaginable
way with His own mysterious Person, so that it
can be truly called "His Body," the nature of the
Church must necessarily involve mystery. The
mysterious union between the spiritual and the ma
terial, the natural and the supernatural, does not
begin with the creation of the Church, but with
the Incarnation of the Son of God, for the In
carnation is the greatest possible mystery of which
the mind of man can conceive, and is entirely be
yond the fathom of human thought.
The mere fact that there may be a union be
tween the spiritual and the material in the life of a
living organism, is certainly not an incredible
thing, simply because every man is conscious of
this union in his 0"wn nature and experience.
How the spirit dwells in and acts through a human
body, no man can tell. Neither does the fact that
the nature of the Church is "mysterious" render
belief in the divine character of the Church in
the least impossible. We are surrounded on all
sides by mysteries which are absolutely insoluble.
How does the mind act on the muscles through the
nervous system ? What is the secret of the human

72 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
"will ? What is force ? What is life ? Huxley, in
his essay on Materialism and Idealism, says that
even the properties of matter "are an insoluble
mystery." How infinitely greater then must be
the mystery when matter is united to life in a
living organism. Mystery underlies the most com
monplace facts of everyday life; and to accept
nothing as true which involves mystery, lands the
doubter at once in absolute and incurable skep
ticism. Of course there is no mystery involved in the
organization of a Protestant sect, because in be
coming a Wesleyan, a Lutheran, a Calvinist, or a
Campbellite, you do not enter into any personal
supernatural relation "with Wesley, or Luther, or
Calvin, or Campbell. You simply accept the doc
trine some one of these men taught as representing
your views, and it is nothing to you whether he is
living or dead. Truth is not necessarily bound
up with his personality. It is the man's teaching,
and not the man himself with which you are con
cerned. But when you become a Catholic Churchman
through Baptism, you are brought into sacramental
touch with our Lord's adorable Person ; and in be
coming a member of Him, you become a member
of the Church which He Himself created, and
"with which He identifies Himself in the most inti
mate possible way. Hence the nature of the

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 73
Church must involve mystery of the most profound
type, otherwise it could not be the "Body of
Christ"; it could not be what our Lord Himself
and His inspired Apostles say it is.
Again, it may be said to us : "If the Catholic
theory of the Church is true, and the Lord sustains
such intimate relations to the Church and its
members as you say He does, and gives them such
amazing privileges, then Catholic Christians ought
to be preeminent in personal holiness, and purity
of life far beyond other Christians, who, according
to your theory, do not have access to the same
means of grace ; and yet, as a matter of fact, one
does not discover any such contrast between Pro
testants and Catholics in favor of the sanctity of
the Church as one might be led to anticipate. You
know the law, 'by their fruits ye shall know
them.' "
Yes; we admit at once with shame, and sor
row, and the most profound humiliation that the
Church does contain a vast multitude of men
and women whose lives witness against her sanc
tity, who are shallow, and worldly, and un-Christ
like. And again we freely and thankfully admit
that vast numbers of people who do not have access
to sacramental means of grace do exhibit most
unmistakable evidence of personal holiness and
a loving, Christlike spirit. This fact simply
makes the inconsistencies of Churchmen all the

74 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
more conspicuous, and glaring, and deplorable.
We must humbly admit the fact, however much
we may regret it ; and the fact itself would be most
discouraging to us if it were not that the Lord who
founded the Church and said such very wonderful
things about it, also said in the plainest possible
terms, that there would be both good and bad men
in the Church, "wolves in sheep's clothing," those
who were in the Church, but not of it in any real
spiritual sense. The tares and the wheat would
grow side by side in the same field until the Judg
ment Day. Well, how can this be true ?
We reply that the Lord wills to draw men by
love, not to coerce them into holiness through force,
and interfere with the freedom of their wills.
With all the resources of grace at His command,
the Lord cannot make a saint of any man with
out the consent and cooperation of the man's will.
Grace never acts automatically, or mechanically,
or irresistibly in any man's heart ; but only as the
man responds to it, and uses it in the struggle for
self-mastery. Hence human nature being what it
is, there always will be many in the Church for
whom the Lord can do little or nothing. St. Paul
found it necessary to reprimand inconsistent mem
bers of the Church in very stern and awful words,
for the commission of very great sins; and yet
this fact does not seem to have weakened his faith
in the Sanctity of the Church in the slightest de-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 75
gree. He knew well enough that the trouble was
not with the Church, but with the weakness of the
human will, and the hardness of the human heart.
Moreover the low spiritual tone characteristic of
certain types of Churchmen is largely to be ac
counted for on the ground that these people do
not faithfully use all the means of grace the
Church offers them, or submit to her Catholic dis
cipline, or believe heartily in the Catholic ideals
which she sets before them ; hence they do not rep
resent her in any practical and real sense of the
word, they do not show what she can do with the
means at her command; and so it is quite unfair
to judge her by them. The American Church has
so long been dominated by the sectarian spirit of
unbelief in the power of sacramental grace, and
by the low ideals of popular religion, that not
until comparatively recently have her own children
begun to realize what she really is, or to appreciate
what a wealth of grace and truth she places "within
their reach for use in the growth in personal
holiness. She is just beginning to exhibit what
she can do when her sons and daughters really be
lieve in her true Catholicity, and so we believe
that, as time goes on, she will manifest to the
world far more evidence of her spiritual power
than she has in the past.
Moreover (speaking now of the whole Cath
olic Church throughout all ages and throughout

76 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
the world) after the very worst has been said that
can be said about the inconsistencies of Church
men, the great fact still remains that the Church
has trained, and is training to-day, a vast multi
tude of holy souls in the virtues of sainthood
throughout the world wherever she has gone, saints,
martyrs, confessors, and obscure laymen, who have
represented a type of devoted sanctity which very
seldom if ever is found out of the communion of
the Catholic Church. She has most abundantly
demonstrated what she can do when men give
themselves wholly into her care, and follow her
teaching. There are to-day, as there have been in every
age, vast multitudes of devout Catholic Christians
who are willing to testify that in their own per
sonal experience they have tested the power of the
grace of the Catholic Church, and have found it
a most certain and blessed reality. Making all
possible allowance for the vagaries of an over
wrought imagination, they know beyond all doubt
that they have found the Lord Jesus Christ in His
Church as they never have found Him elsewhere.
He has spoken to them, and touched them, and
healed and absolved them, and blessed them with
His love as He said He would; and so, with the
friendly pressure of the Lord's Hand in theirs,
they do not grow doubtful of Him just because
there are those in the Church who, walking in the

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 77
presence of their Lord, are sadly deaf to His lov
ing words, and blind to the unspeakable beauty of
His Face, and insensible to the mute appeal of the
wounded hands outstretched to bless them.

CHAPTEE V.

THE CATHOLIC FAITH.

CHEEE is at present in the intellectual world,
a very widespread hostility to Dogma; not
merely to any one or more individual dogmas
which are supposed to be erroneous, but to any
dogmatic statement whatever of Christian truth,
as if there were necessarily some antagonism be
tween truth and the scientific formulae in which
truth is embodied and defined. Much of this dis
like of Dogma springs from the fact that in the
popular mind Dogma is confused with dogmatism;
and dogmatism is the habit of imposing one's own
individual opinion about an open and unsettled
question on others, as if there were no appeal from
such opinion.
Catholic Dogma, on the other hand, is simply
that body of doctrine which voices the common
consent of the whole Catholic Church from the
first, and which finds its formal and authoritative
expression in the Catholic Creeds. Outside of this
dogmatic body of revealed truth, the Church leaves

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 79
the widest room for differences of individual opin
ion about many questions concerning which she has
never made any formal pronouncement whatever.
Catholics themselves are largely responsible for
this popular mistake, because in different ages of
the Church's history over-zealous Churchmen have
exalted floating opinions to the level of dogmas,
which are either false, or at best merely tolerated
by the Church, as if the acceptance of these opin
ions was necessary for salvation. Hence, when the
critical sense of the historical student eventually
repudiated these additions to the Catholic Faith,
naturally, though illogically, in the reaction of
feeling many men acquired a dislike of all dog
matic forms.
Moreover, without question, it is possible to
teach a doctrine which is in itself quite true, in
such a way that the life of the truth beneath the
formal expression is smothered and killed. Again
it may be possible to dwell so exclusively on the
scientific technical expression of theological Dog
mas, that the theologian loses sight of the adorable
and loving Personality of the Son of God whose
Deity the Dogma is supposed to define and defend.
As the popular religion of the day has it, "Christ is
buried beneath a lot of ecclesiastical dogmas ; and
we must shake ourselves free from these shibbo
leths, and get back to the Christ of the Gospels."
Then again, no doubt much of the modern hos-

80 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
tility to Dogma is due to the spread of material
ism and self-indulgence, which rebel against any
exact statements of truth imposing moral obliga
tions on the man who accepts the truth. In this
respect the popular dislike of Dogma is the meas
ure not only of the popular loss of faith in those
great Christian truths which the dogmas define,
but also of a growing laxity of moral principle,
and a hatred of moral restraint.
But, after all, the popular dislike of Dogma
is utterly irrational, because intelligent men must
believe something; and men quickly learn that
truth is valuable and effective only when it is
definite and authoritative. No one ever complains
because natural science is always dogmatic in its
teaching. A number of years ago, when Charles
Darwin gave to the world a theory of evolution,
defined in a series of dogmatic propositions, his
theory was very widely accepted notwithstanding
its dogmatic nature, and the Christian man who
ventured to question it was ridiculed as far behind
the times. And yet, after all, the doctrine of evolu
tion was really nothing more or better than a clever
working hypothesis, and Tyndale, in his famous
Belfast address, said that "the strength of the doc
trine of evolution consists not in experimental
demonstration (for the subject is hardly accessible
to this mode of proof) but in its general harmony
with scientific thought." And since Tyndale wrote

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 81
these words, some points of the doctrine of evolu
tion have been so modified that no living scientist
holds the doctrine precisely as Darwin formulated
it, and no one knows just what form it will take in
the future ; and yet no one objects to it because it
is defined in dogmatic form.
All science is necessarily based on dogmatic
definitions of certain great facts and laws which
are fixed and definite, and which cannot be called
in question without making the science itself im
possible. If, then, dogmatic formulae are essen
tially necessary in natural science, why should
they not be both necessary and justifiable in
theological science, provided, of course, you once
admit that our Lord gave a revelation of posi
tive truth which is to be defined, protected, and
transmitted in its integrity. Indefiniteness in
theological teaching has done an infinite deal of
harm, and is largely responsible for the popular
notion that Christian belief is after all merely
a speculative theory about unknowable things, hav
ing very little practical bearing on the affairs of
every-day life.
But someone may say to us, "If the love of the
Son of God for man is really as you say it is, the
'heart of Catholicity,' why not preach Christ as
the perfect example and exponent of Divine love,
the one ideal man, and drop all your complicated
dogmas like the metaphysical puzzle of the Trin-

82 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
ity ? Why must we cudgel our brains and dispute
about these things, when the Personality of Christ
is really the heart and essence of the Christian
religion? God is love; that is the main thing;
and love and Dogma are about as unlike as a blush-
rose and an iceberg. You might as well try to
express the glory of a sunset by an algebraic form
ula, or measure the sense of adoration with a
yard-stick, as to try to express the soul's relation
to God in a dry theological dogma. So the love
of the Son of God for man can have nothing what
ever to do with creeds and dogmatic definitions."
To this the Catholic Churchman replies, if
God's love for us, and our love for God is merely
a gushing, sentimental emotion and nothing more,
as senseless and fickle as human passion, of course
it may exist without regard to truth, or reason, or
common-sense, or any other standard by which
sane people usually regulate their emotions and
their conduct. But love, in the divine sense of the
word, is not merely an emotional sentiment, but
the obedient response of the man's whole nature
to Christ's appeal; and so real love concerns the
mind, and the will, quite as much as it does the
affections. How can we love anyone intelligently
unless we know something certain and definite
about him? And what can we know about the
Lord Jesus Christ apart from His revelation of
Himself in the Catholic Faith and the Holy Scrip-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 83
tures ? The Lord makes the test of true love to be
not sentiment, but obedience; and if we are to
obey intelligently we must first ask why we should
obey Him, and of course there is but one answer to
this : we must obey Him because He is the Son of
God, our Creator and Eedeemer, and it is precisely
this truth which the Creeds were formulated to
define and defend.
You say that you simply trust in your Lord
as your loving Saviour. No doubt you do, but
why in the world should you, unless you first be
lieve that He is what the Creeds say He is, the
Son of God ? No son of man alone could possibly
save you.
Again, the simple elemental proposition that
"God is love," which seems so exceedingly un-
dogmatic and purely sentimental, is really based
on the most mysterious of Catholic Dogmas, the
doctrine of the Holy Trinity. We affirm that it is
not possible to defend the proposition that God is
love, unless such defence assumes as its basal fact
that in the unity of the Godhead there is more
than one Personality.
Let us now see what is involved in this appar
ently simple statement that God is love. If God is
love, if love is an essential attribute of His Divine
Nature, then surely God must have been loving
something throughout all eternity before He cre
ated man ; the highest faculty God possesses could

84 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
not have been wholly inactive and fruitless
throughout untold ages, or He would have ceased
to be God. He must have had some object on
which He could expend His love, and He could
not have loved perfectly anything less perfect in
holiness and beauty than Himself, or anything
lower than Himself. Hence He must have had
through all eternity a Son worthy of His love;
and in His love for His Son,^ and His Son's love
for Him, the highest capacity of His divine Na
ture found its adequate expression and satisfac
tion. So you see that if you are going to defend
the proposition that God is love, you are driven
to affirm something like the doctrine of the Holy
Trinity in order to make your proposition reason
able. Plato saw this, and many of the greatest
philosophers of the world have found themselves
forced to the same conclusion. Thus we find that
there is after all the closest possible relation be
tween the fact that God is love, and the Dogma
of the Holy Trinity, and that in defending the
Dogma as it is defined in the Creeds, we are mak
ing belief in God's love philosophically possible;
we are furnishing a natural solution of that which
is otherwise an impenetrable mystery.
Again, someone may say to us, "We all admit
that Christ is the ideal type of manhood, the most
perfectly lovable of all men who ever lived. Why
not love Him, and trust Him, and believe in Him,

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 85
and follow His example, simply because of the
moral and spiritual beauty of His life, without
obscuring His lovely Personality by a metaphys
ical definition of His Deity? Such a definition,
for example, as one finds in the Athanasian Creed,
which has a lifeless, dry rattle to a layman's ears,
and means very little to his intellect. Christ is
the one ideal Man for all men to love. Why is
not that quite enough for us to know ?"
Now here again we must insist that this obvi
ous and simple proposition that Christ is the one
perfect ideal for all men to love, really depends
for its truth on the Catholic Dogma of the Incar
nation. We affirm again that it is not possible to
defend this simple proposition that Christ is the
ideal man, unless He is also at the same time the
Son of God ; that is, unless the Dogma of the In
carnation is true.
Let us start, then, with the assertion that our
Lord's manhood is the one ideal type of perfect
manhood, ideal not merely because of His sim
plicity of bearing. His marvellous self-sacrifice.
His love of the poor. His fearless courage, His
masculine strength perfectly blended with fem
inine tenderness, but also because all the excel
lencies of our Lord's character were so perfectly
balanced without any exaggeration or deficiency of
endo"wment. His manhood is eminently sane, and

86 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
well fitted to become a universal type. We all
agree most heartily in this wonderful fact.
But this brings us to a great difficulty : This
"ideal man" made certain most extraordinary
claims for Himself which must be somehow ad
justed to the ideal character of His manhood, if
we are going to retain our ideal, and love it, and
reverence it, and imitate it. He said that He was
the King, Judge, and Master of men ; that He had
existed eternally with the Father ; that He was one
"with the Father ; that men who had seen Him had
seen the Father ; and that no man could come unto
the Father save by Him. He created the world
out of nothing ; and He promised to save it through
belief in Himself. The Kingdom, and the throne,
and the angels of God, are His Kingdom, and His
throne, and His angels. He is to raise and judge
the dead, and assign eternal rewards and punish
ments. Now we ask, how are you going to reconcile
your ideal of perfect manhood as exemplified by
our Lord, with these amazing, stupendous claims
which He makes for Himself? If He is nothing
more than an ideal man. His unbounded personal
pretentions, and the self-assertion which He con
tinually advances in the Name of God, must be
either sheer imposture and blasphemy, or else they
are the preposterous hallucinations of an unbal
anced mind. If any good man in these days said

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 87
of himself, what the Lord did about Himself, his
friends would say at once that his reason was com
pletely dethroned, that he was untrustworthy, and
must at once be put under restraint, because he
was no longer a normal type of man. If your
ideal man is, as he certainly must be, sane, sober,
truthful, and humbly conscious of his own per
sonal limitations, and his weakness and depend
ence in God's sight, what becomes of your ideal
in our Lord's case, in view of His awful self-asser
tion of absolute sinlessness, and absolute equality
with God ?
Most certainly you cannot love and trust or
follow the example of an insane fanatic, or a
blasphemous impostor. Hence, if you are to retain
your ideal of the perfection of our Lord's type
of manhood, you must vindicate His awful claims
to be equal with God. If Christ is Ood, then of
course His divine claims and the loveliness of His
perfect manhood are in absolute harmony with
each other, and you can love Him consistently.
So the definitions of our Lord's nature as given
in the Catholic Creeds, are simply defences of
His Deity necessary to preserve the consistency
of His ideal type of manhood. Thus we find that
even so simple a thing as love for our Lord's
perfect manhood, really rests on the full Dogma
of the Incarnation for its justification.
Moreover, how could it be an act of love on

88 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
God's part to show us a perfectly lovable example
for us to follow, unless in His mercy He gives us
the power to become Christ-like ? And how can
He do this unless He is the Son of God ?
Love is also the explanation of the Catholic
Dogma of the Atonement, the Sacrifice of Cal
vary; and it is a very terrible perversion of that
doctrine to say that Christ's death is a compensa
tion paid to an angry Father. "It is treason
against the love of God to speak as if the wrath
of the Father could rest for one moment upon the
well-beloved Son; or as if that mysterious death
were needed to win back for sinners the Father's
love." Against all such immoral suggestions, it is
enough to remind ourselves that the love of Ood
was the moving cause, and not the result or the
effect of the death of Christ. By the Sacrifice
of the Cross, is revealed the infinite love of God
in vindicating the eternal law, and yet saving men
from death. So the Cross has appealed every
where to the heart of sinners. There has been no
more popular doctrine than this: "If any man
sin, we have an Advocate with the Father, Jesus
Christ the Eighteous, and He is the propitiation
for our sins."
"0 love of God! O sin of man!
In this dread act your strength is tried;
And victory remains -with love;
For He our Love, is crucified."
Last of all, let us take the Christian ideal of

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 89
personal purity which is exemplified in the earthly
life of our Lord. Could anything possibly seem
more undogmatic, more untheological than this?
We say that Christian purity is but the respect and
love of all that is high, and holy, and good, and
pure, and unselfish, absolutely without reference
to doctrine of any sort or description; and yet,
curiously enough, as a matter of fact, the Christ
ian's idea of moral purity, or rather the Christ
ian's motive for being pure, actually rests on sev
eral of the most mysterious of Christian Dogmas
for its inspiration. For what is the Christian's
ideal of purity as distinguished from the motive
of the man who is not a Christian ?
The Christian man is not taught to be pure
merely because the moral law forbids immorality,
not even merely because the Son of God has set us
an example of personal holiness which He bids us
follow; but the Catholic Christian is told that he
must be pure because the Son of ' Ood so really
dwells in his body and soul that sin against his
body is sacrilege against the Person of the Son, of
Ood Himself. In other words, the Christian man
finds the only adequate inspiration for pure and
holy living in the awful fact of the union of his
body -with the glorified Manhood of Jesus Christ.
This, and this alone, is the distinctively Christian
motive for moral obedience. Notice it is not so
much seK-respect, or even respect for others, as it

90 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
is self-reverence which is born of consciousness of
union with Christ. The Christian's body has lit
erally become the Temple of Christ, and the Holy
Spirit, and so the Christian dares not defile the
sanctuary of God. "Know ye not that your bodies
are the members of Christ ? Shall I then take the
members of Christ, and make them the members of
an harlot? God forbid!"
But what does this union with Christ involve ?
It involves first of all a belief in the two great
Dogmas of the Catholic Faith, the Dogma of the
Holy Trinity, and the Dogma of the Incarnation,
according to which the Son of God becomes Man
and sanctifies our manhood by dwelling in it.
Then secondly, it involves belief in the Dogma of
Baptismal Eegeneration, and the Dogma of the
Lord's Eeal Presence in the Holy Eucharist, ac
cording to which the Christian is baptized into
union with the new nature of the second Adam,
and is fed with the Lord's Body and Blood, so
that the Lord dwells in him, and he dwells in the
Lord. The true basis of Christian morality is thus
found to be both theological and sacramental, and
its true inspiration is personal union with Christ,
a union which is the most awful and touching ex
pression of the love of the Son of God for man.
Precisely because it is so awful, and yet so touch
ing, so overwhelmingly suggestive of the love of

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 91
Christ, does this consciousness of union with the
Lord serve as the only sufficient safeguard when
the will is weak, and passions are strong, and the
popular philosophy of the day offers innumerable
excuses for violations of the moral law. An un
dogmatic Christianity is most certainly not a
moral Christianity in anything but name ; and one
of the saddest phases of the modern Protestant
warfare against the old Dogmas of the Faith, is
the fact that such multitudes of Protestants who
have lost their hold on the Faith, are also losing
their grip on moral principles and moral distinc
tions which faith in Christ alone creates and main
tains. Now, "if the voice of an universal longing, the
plaintive pleading of humanity driven almost to
despair by the strife of tongues, and struggling
to avoid the impending fate of blank unbelief, is
to be regarded as possessing any significance, it
certainly demonstrates that the one thing needful
is a voice to instruct, and a hand to guide us in
our efforts to find the truth." We would impeach
the goodness and love of God if we assume that
He would or could refuse to answer the great uni
versal prayer of His children who grope in dark
ness for light. If, then, God does give some reve
lation of His Mind through His Son, must we not
assume that His Message will have certain charac
teristics ?

92 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
First of all, that Message must be infallibly
true, true beyond all question or peradventure.
Dealing, as it must, with facts and truths which
we could not possibly discover for ourselves or
know in any other way, by any natural process of
reason or research. His Message must come sealed
with the supreme authority of God as His divine
Word. And coming thus from God, it must com
mand our obedient acceptance as a whole ; not be
cause this or that portion of it happens to coincide
with our individual views, but because all of it is
an expression of the Mind of God.
Secondly, that Message must be intelligible,
definite, direct, and plain in its statements, so that
the man of the street and the day-laborer will have
the same opportunity of knowing what this Mes
sage is, as the philosopher or the theologian. If
the Message is unintelligible or obscure for all
practical purposes it will be useless.
Thirdly, God's Message to us must be change
less, simply because God does not change; and a
revelation of Himself must be steadfast and final.
A Message which was true in one age, and false
in the next, which was so fractional and imper
fect that men might outgrow it, and remodel it,
and eventually discard it, could not possibly come
from God, or in any way represent Him. If the
Creed of the Church represents nothing more than
the high-water mark of human research, and spec-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 93
ulation concerning things spiritual, then of course
the creed of one age cannot be the creed of another,
because human opinion constantly changes, and
every man must have his o"wn creed, adapted to his
o"wn individual power of comprehension. But if
the Creed is the Eevelation of God, it cannot
change, for "That which changes is not truth."
Assuming, then, that any Message which comes
from God must be infallibly true, intelligible, and
changeless, how are we to find out what that Mes
sage is ?
The first reply to this question comes from
Protestants and it will take this form : After His
Ascension, our Lord sent the Holy Spirit to in
spire His Apostles to write a Book which embodied
His Eevelation and was His Word, and men were
to be guided by the Holy Spirit in their study of
this Book so that they could make up their creed
from it. Hence the Bible and the Bible alone is
the Protestant Creed, because it alone contains
truth which is infallible, intelligible, and change
less. Of course all Catholics agree with the state
ment that the Bible is the inspired Word of God,
and that in so far as the Bible deals with matters
of faith and morals it is most certainly infallible.
Then apparently, according to the Protestant the
ory, we have a very satisfactory answer to our
question, and of course as all Protestants appeal to

94 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
the same Bible, they must have the same creed
about which they all agree.
Now let us try to find out what this creed is.
Let us begin "with God. What do Protestants be
lieve about God? Well, some say that He is a
Person, and others that He is impersonal Force,
Mind, Truth, and Life. Some that He is one
Person, others that He is three Persons in One
Godhead; some that He is knowable, others that
He is unknowable. How about the Lord Jesus
Christ ? Some say that He is God, others that He
is a prophet sent by God, others that He is merely
an ideal man, the flower of the human race. Some
believe that He was born of a pure Virgin, others
that St. Joseph was His father. Some assert that
His death atoned for the sins of all men, others
that it atoned only for the sins of a few, and others
that His death was but the martyrdom of a good
man, and no atonement was necessary because sin
is not a positive evil but merely a phase of human
weakness. Some believe in the reality of His
Eesurrection, others say that it was merely a sub
jective vision of a lot of enthusiasts. Some believe
in a literal Ascension, others deny it. Some Prot
estants believe in a literal Second Advent of the
Lord, others say that the Second Advent is merely
the moral progress of the race.
Well, how about the teaching concerning the
Holy Ghost ? Some believe that He is God, others

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 95
that He is merely the spiritual influence of the
Father. How about the future after death?
Some Protestants believe in an intermediate state,
most of them do not. Some believe that the soul
sleeps until the resurrection, others that it is very
much awake. Some believe in a bodily resurrec
tion, others in a spiritual resurrection, others in
no resurrection at all. Some believe that the pun
ishment of the wicked is eternal, some that it is
temporary, and others that there is no Hell of any
sort. Well, how about the question of salvation?
Some Protestants believe that we are saved by
faith alone, others by faith and grace, others by an
internal emotional crisis, and others merely by
"leading a good life." Some believe that few are
saved, others that many are saved, others that
everyone is saved. How about the Bible ? Some
believe in a verbal inspiration, others in a partial
inspiration, others in no inspiration at all different
from the inspiration of Shakespeare or Marcus
Aurelius. How about the Church ? Some believe
that it is "Episcopal," others that it is Presby
terian, others that it is Congregational. Some
claim that the Church is visible, some that it is
invisible ; others assert that it is a coterie of sanc
tified souls, and others, a collection of Protestant
denominations. How about the Ministry ? Well,
some say that there are three kinds of ministers,
others two, and others that no ministry whatever is

96 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
necessary. How about the Sacraments? Some
Protestants say they are means of grace, others
that they are merely symbols of grace, and others
that Christ abolished all ordinances and sacra
ments forever when He "nailed them to the Cross."
How about human nature? Well, some believe
in the co-existence of body, mind, and spirit. Oth
ers apparently believe in soul and body only, while
others seem to think, or at least thought, that mind
is an electrical rearrangement of the molecules
or phosphoric atoms of the brain. How about the
unity of the Church ? Some believe in corporate
unity as being "desirable." Others believe in
"heart-unity," and others that disunion is a good
thing, because all tastes are suited, and disunion
promotes missionary competition.
Now we ask in all seriousness, in face of all
this hopeless confusion of teaching, What is the
Teuth ? What does the Bible teach ? And, not
withstanding its boasted loyalty to the Bible, Prot
estantism is forced to answer, "We are not agreed
as to what the Bible does teach." And so Catholic
Churchmen claim that when the Bible is taken
away from the witness of the Church which orig
inally produced it, and is subjected to experiments
by the individual interpreter, who imagines he is
guided by the Holy Ghost, it is absolutely impos
sible to form any Creed of any sort or description
in which all Bible students will unite, although

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 97
they all admit that in some sense the Bible is the
inspired Word of God.
So when we are told that the Holy Ghost
guides the prayerful man in his individual inter
pretation of the Bible, we reply that "the obvious
results of this process are directly against the the
ory; for every error recorded in history, every
fanatical extravagance, every schism, has been due
to reliance on inward illumination "without the
guidance of divinely provided external testimony."
We cannot possibly believe that the Son of God
who loves men, and is supremely anxious that
they should find and enter into the truth which He
reveals to them, would withdraw His Presence
from them, and leave them nothing but a Book
about which they were to dispute, and concerning
the meaning of which they could not possibly
agree. Protestantism as a whole gives us no Mes
sage which is infallible, intelligible, or changeless.
Well, we get another answer to our question
from a "widely different source. We are told this :
"Of course God never meant that individual inter
pretation of the Bible was to be the source of in
fallible truth, because God has appointed the
Eoman Pontiff, the successor of Blessed Peter, as
the Vicar of the Holy Ghost ; and when He speaks
officially, ex-Cathedra, and defines doctrines which
concern faith and morals for the whole Church,
his utterances are infallible and irreformable of

98 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
themselves, without the consent of the Church."
Here again you see we have a theory of individual
inspiration, only in this case the indi"vidual dis
cards the Bible and the Church, and speaks in the
place of God Almighty.
Anglo-Catholic Churchmen can hardly be ex
pected to accept as a doctrine divinely revealed, a
theory of individual infallibility, no trace of
which can be found in the Bible, or anywhere in
the teaching or practice of the ancient Catholic
Church, a theory which was not set forth formally
by the Eoman Church itself until 1870.
The Catholic Faith was originally defined, and
all the great controversies were settled by the as
semblage of the great General Councils of the
Church which brought to a focus the teaching of
the whole Church, and voiced it through the wit
ness of the assembled Episcopate; and infallible
papal definitions had nothing whatever to do with
the matter, any more than they had with the com
position of the Declaration of Independence.
Hence, if we are to find out what God's Mes
sage to us is only through the individual pro
nouncements of one man in the Church who ex
pressly repudiates the historic witness of the
Church, thus making "an appeal to history trea
son," we fail utterly to see how we can be sure that
such definitions are infallible, intelligible, or
changeless.

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 99
Of course the mistake in both cases, Prot
estant and Eoman, is the assumption that indi
vidual inspiration ever can be the source of truth
since the Canon of the New Testament was closed
by the Church. The guidance of the Holy Ghost
was not promised to the individual man, be he
layman or Pope; but to the Church as a whole.
The Church, not the Pope, was to be the pillar
and ground of truth. Men were told to hear the
Church, and not this man or that man in the
Church. After the Holy Ghost had descended
into the Church on Whitsunday, He so influenced
the minds of the Apostles that they were impelled
to teach everywhere the same thing; and were
saved from any radical error in their teaching con
cerning matters of faith and morals. Then, sec
ondly, the Holy Ghost so opened the minds of
those who heard this teaching that they recognized
its truth, and accepted its authority. Here, then,
we have a double test of inspiration: universality
of apostolic teaching, and universality of accept
ance of that teaching. Men everywhere taught
and believed the same thing throughout the
Church, and so the Holy Ghost spoke through the
Church as a whole. Naturally the body of truth
thus taught and believed, at first taught orally,
soon began to emerge in creed forms which again
were elaborated as occasion required, under the
same double test of inspiration. Sometime later

100 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
this Faith of the Church already clearly defined
and understood, was informally embodied in the
books of the New Testament written in the Church
by its officers ; and from this time, the Faith which
came first, and the New Testament which came
later (both products of the Holy Spirit's inspira
tion), were handed do-wn in the Church side by
side, mutually witnessing to each other, and to
the truth which both embodied.
The function of a General Council was not to
originate any new truth, or to invent any new in
terpretation of Scripture; but simply to bring to
gether in one place witnesses from the whole
Church throughout the world in order that they
might testify what had always been, and what
then was, the belief of the whole Church about
the matter which was under discussion; in this
way the definitions of the General Councils were
always regarded as infallible because they voiced
the general consent of the whole Spirit-guided
Church from the first. We find this same univer
sal teaching of the Church embodied in the an
cient liturgies, the writings of the Apostolic Fath
ers, and the ancient customs and traditions of the
Church, and in this way we get a court of appeal
to which the Scriptures may be brought in order
to interpret them rightly; and so we are saved
from the confusion of Protestant individualism,
on the one hand, and from Eoman individualism

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 101
on the other. If as Catholic Churchmen we accept
the Catholic Faith as it had been taught by the
whole Church from the first, and if we interpret
the Holy Bible in harmony with this Faith and
with the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, we get
a Message from God which we believe to be infal
lible, which we know is intelligible, and which is
fixed beyond all possibility of change. The Prayer
Book incorporates the substance of this ancient
Message from God through Christ, and furnishes
every American Catholic Churchman with a crit
erion of doctrine which alone can produce certi
tude in matters of faith. There may be schools
of thought in the Church, and wide differences of
opinion may be tolerated by the Church ; but the
official teaching of the Church is set forth by the
Church in the Prayer Book, and by this the
Church must be judged.
The Lord did not begin teaching men by giving
them the New Testament, but by first of all organ
izing His Church, aiid committing to it the Faith
once for all delivered to the Saints; and then in
this Church He inspires the composition of the
New Testament, and commits it to the care of the
Church, in order that the Church may witness
to its original interpretation in every age and
every place throughout the world. Hence, al
though all Catholic Churchmen have the greatest
reverence for the Inspired Word of God as given

102 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
in the New Testament, they insist that the Bible
needs the historic witness of the living voice of the
Church as its true interpreter, and to save it from
the abuse of individual experiments in interpre
tation.

CHAPTER VI.
THE CATHOLIC PEIESTHOOD.
OFTEN a popular prejudice against some truth
or principle is embodied in some one word
which is attached to the doctrine in question as a
label is attached to a package, or as a bit of scarlet
pasteboard is nailed to an infected house by the
Board of Health to warn people off the premises ;
and while such a popular label is certainly not an
argument, it often takes the place of an argument,
and is meant to record the adverse judgment of
those who use it against the thing to which it is
attached. Such a label may be the result of genuine and
far-sighted justice, or it may be merely the product
of ignorant and narrow prejudice, or an effort on
the part of busy men to shirk the responsibility
and trouble of getting at the bottom of a very com
plicated subject. Many persons are very strongly
influenced by these labels or popular catch-words,
and so occasionally it is necessary to find out, if
possible, just what tbe word is supposed to mean.

104 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and what objection to any given truth it is sup
posed to represent.
As any attempt to set forth a definite Creed is
often stigmatized as "dogmatism," so whenever in
modern times the Catholic Church has taught the
doctrine of a real priesthood, a "ministry of recon
ciliation," its teaching has been answered at once
by the charge of "sacerdotalism" ; and in meeting
the objection which this word represents, it is the
first duty of those who call themselves Catholics
to discover, if possible, whether there is not a cer
tain element of justice in the implied criticism,
no matter how much the doctrine itself is misun
derstood, or perverted. Here at once we must ad
mit that Catholics themselves are largely respon
sible for the popular suspicion and dislike of what
Protestants call "sacerdotalism," because priests
of the Church have far too often exhibited a pro
fessional temper of mind, a type of self-assertion
and personal vanity, which is the result of weak
ness, and is of the nature of sin. When any priest
imagines for one moment that because he holds a
commission to teach and administer Sacraments in
the Name of the Lord, therefore he himself is per
sonally superior to his brethren, or belongs to a
social or professional caste of a higher grade, or
that he has been endowed with any authority of
any sort or description over them in secular mat
ters, or any authority to act in any capacity save

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 105
only as the responsible steward and humble servant
of his Lord, then of course his conduct will be
rightly offensive to all right-minded people and a
source of scandal to the Church. Priests of the
Church have by no means been guiltless of this
sin ; and in this sense of the word, "sacerdotalism"
is worthy of the hearty condemnation of every
devout Catholic because it is a terrible perversion
of the true spirit of the priestly office. The awful
responsibility of sharing in any way, or in the
most remote degree the Priesthood of the Son of
God, ought to fill the heart of a priest with such
a humbling sense of his own personal unworthi
ness, that to him "sacerdotalism" of this sort would
be utterly abhorrent and impossible.
But the word stigmatizes not merely a vicious
habit of mind, but also a doctrine of the Church
which is right and true. For example, we can
imagine someone saying to us — "The thing I ob
ject to, is not merely the over-bearing pretentious
ness of conceited priests, but the doctrine itself
which is distinctly taught throughout your Prayer
Book that a man can come in between my soul and
Christ and deal with me as Christ's representative,
and dictate to me the terms of my salvation, and
offer me grace and truth which he asserts I must
have if I would be saved. Eeligion is wholly a
personal matter between my Saviour and me ; and
to interpose a priestly order of men between Him

106 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and me, is in just so far to separate me from Him,
and to substitute for the power of a living faith,
something which is a purely human invention.
Your doctrine of the priesthood is an unwarranted
interference with my personal relation to Christ,
a violation of my liberty of direct communion with
Him, which I heartily resent, and which under no
circumstances whatever will I accept."
This, no doubt, is the real force of the objec
tion which underlies the use of the word "sacer
dotalism," and it is made by very earnest and sin
cere people, whose loyal devotion to our Lord can
not be questioned for a moment.
No doubt direct personal communion with God
in prayer, and praise, and adoration, and medita
tion, and in a restful, loving sense of His Pres
ence, is the unquestioned right of every Christian
man, woman, and child; and in such communion
no man, be he priest or layman, has the slightest
right to intrude. But the thing to be constantly
borne in mind is this : Direct and full communion
with God was interrupted by the sin of disobedi
ence, and can be restored in its fulness only
through the mediatorial work and office of the
Lord Jesus Christ.
Hence, if He lays dowH terms on which, and
established means through which alone perfect
communion with God can be restored, then we
must place ourselves in obedient acceptance of

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 107
His terms before we have any right to claim free
and full communion with Him as Christians.
However direct and personal all prayer must nec
essarily be in the soul's intercourse with God, we
must approach God in prayer, in such ways, and
under such conditions as He Himself provides,
otherwise we cannot possibly be sure of His ac
ceptance and approval. The question as to whether
a priesthood of men shall have anything directly
to do with the salvation of other men, is simply a
question as to whether the Lord has provided and
appointed a priesthood for just this purpose ; and
if we find that He has, then most certainly He
must have had His own reasons for so doing,
which were good and sufficient.
To begin with, there is no reason why we
should resent the idea that God should minister
to us in various ways through other men, simply
because God is constantly doing this very thing all
the time, and every day. In order to correct a
spirit of selfishness, God has made us mutually
dependent on each other in many ways; and not
only on each other as individuals, but on special
orders of men trained and set apart for some
special purpose. As has been frequently said,
there is a priesthood of medicine, and a priesthood
of law, and we could not possibly get along for one
single day without these "orders," or secular
"priesthoods." We all admit, for example, that it

108 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
is God who heals all disease ; but when He chooses
to do this by employing the skill and personal
ministrations of a clever physician, we do not
think that it is any the less His work, nor would
we ever think of speaking as if the physician
"came in between our souls and God," or inter
fered with our spirit of thankfulness to God for
God's merciful answer to our prayers in healing
us. Moreover, every Protestant sect which main
tains a ministry of any sort virtually claims some
sort of "priestly function" for such ministry, be
cause it is freely admitted that their ministers con
vert men from sin to holiness, teach them much
truth, and put them in the way of salvation, al
though it is God alone who converts, and God
alone who makes Christians of men. Most Prot
estant Christians feel it their duty to partake of
"the Lord's Supper" occasionally, through which
their faith is strengthened; and yet if instead of
an "ordained minister," some carpenter, or lawyer,
or merchant, were to attempt to administer this
ordinance to them, they would resent the assump
tion at once. The Lord Jesus Christ blessed and
multiplied the loaves and fishes, and with them
fed five thousand men ; but it was the Apostles and
not Christ Himself who actually distributed the
food to the hungry men and women ; and the whole
history of God's dealing with men since the primal
disobedience, is a history of saving men through

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 109
the ministrations of their fellow men. From first
to last, God constantly sends men to "dictate terms
of salvation" to other men on certain definite con
ditions; and when St. Paul said "we are Ambas
sadors for Christ as though God did beseech you
by us, we pray you in Christ's stead, be ye recon
ciled to God," he simply emphasized a principle
which characterizes all God's covenant relation to
men. Now in order to understand what the Catholic
doctrine of the Priesthood really is, we must re
member first of all that there were three things
which man needed for His redemption and salva
tion: First, a gift of revealed truth to enlighten
his mind, clouded by sin ; secondly, a Sacrifice for
his sin that he might be absolved from its guilt and
delivered from its power through gifts of cleansing
and healing grace, and thirdly, discipline of the
will in obedience to God's law for the development
of the grace of God within him. These things,
and these alone, could restore man to perfect com
munion with God.
Hence, when our Lord, the Son of God, became
Incarnate in order to save men, in His mediator
ial work He must meet these three needs of man;
He must fill three offices, or serve three distinct
functions ; He must be a Prophet, a Priest, and a
King. As a Prophet, He comes to teach men the
truth ; as a Priest He offers Himself on the Cross

110 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
for the redemption of the world, and pleads that
Sacrifice before His Father, and absolves penitent
sinners; and as a King, He rules the wills of
men, and brings them into habitual obedience to
His law of life. So we must remember that
Christ's revelation of Himself as a Prophet, a
Priest, and a King, is a very wonderful revelation
of Divine love, because in this three-fold charac
ter He becomes our Saviour, He meets each one of
the three great needs of the race.
If, then, the Church is the Body of Christ in
which He dwells, and through which He still car
ries on His mediatorial work of saving men, there
certainly must be some way in the Church by
which He can give visible and audible expression
to this threefold ministry ; some way in which He
can manifest Himself openly to men as their
Prophet, their Priest, and their King. If in this
respect He remains invisible. His Mediatorial
work would not be adapted to the conditions in
time and space in which His visible Church exists.
Now so far as we know the only way in which our
Lord could accomplish this in a visible Church
composed of men, is to appoint an order of men to
represent Him in His three-fold character. He
certainly was sent by His Father to be a Prophet,
a Priest, and a King ; and He said to His Apostles,
"as My Father sent Me, even so send I you." "He
that receiveth you, receiveth Me." Now of course

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. Ill
His ministry could only represent His three-fold
office in a subordinate sense. They could not pos
sibly originate and teach any new truth; they
could merely teach that which the Lord delivers to
them. They could not offer any new Sacrifice, or
in any way add to the merits of the Cross; they
could merely plead the Sacrifice their Lord offered
before the Father. They could not rule in the
Church save only as administering the law which
Christ Himself establishes; it is the Lord's will,
not their own, to which men must be brought into
obedience ; hence the ministers of the Church can
be prophets, priests, and kings, only in a subor
dinate and delegated sense. And yet their three
fold office is very real. Our Lord sends His min
isters as Prophets, that is, as teachers. "Go ye
unto all the world and preach the Gospel to every
creature, teaching them to observe all things what
soever I have commanded you." "He that heareth
you heareth Me." Then our Lord sends His min
isters as Priests ; "Offer this (the Lord's Body and
Blood in the Holy Eucharist) as a sacrificial Me
morial of Me." "Show forth the Lord's death till
He come." "Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are
remitted unto them." Then our Lord sends His
ministers as Kings in the sense that they are to
administer discipline in the Church in His Name.
"Whatsoever ye shall bind on earth, shall be bound
in heaven."

112 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
If the whole Church consisted of only one
parish, then the Lord would have commissioned
only one priest to represent Him; but as the
Church throughout the world is broken up into
many parishes, there must be many priests to rep
resent the Lord's threefold office in the Church in
every age, and every place. Hence our Lord com
missions an Apostolic order which was to go unto
all the world in space, and last unto the end
of the world in time, and with which He prom
ised to abide every day. This ministry He
commissions by an outward act (breathing on
them) through which they receive the Holy Ghost,
saying to them, "As My Father sent Me, even so
send I you. Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are
remitted unto them; and whosesoever sins ye re
tain, they are retained."
If the Lord thus commissions a ministry to
represent Him in His threefold character of
Prophet, Priest, and King, to teach men His re
vealed truth, the Catholic Faith, to plead His
Holy Sacrifice in the Holy Eucharist, and to ad
minister discipline in His Church, and if this min
istry thus commissioned, comes to us in His Name
and by His 0"wn authority, then we certainly must
be very sure indeed as to who are ministers or
priests of Christ, and who are not. If we would
obey Him, we must support and obey those He
sends and no others. How then are we to know

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 113
beyond all doubt about this? Is there any test
of ministerial character which we can apply to any
man who comes to us claiming authority to exer
cise the threefold office of the great High Priest ?
Is the test of ministerial character the "in
ward call" of God, the sense of "vocation" of
which a man thinks that he is conscious in his
heart? Most certainly not, because no man can
know the inner workings of another man's heart,
and the "inward call" has no evidential value to
anyone but to the man himself who imagines he
has experienced it. Moreover, supposing the "in
ward call" did give a man authority to minister in
the Lord's Name, the man himself may be utterly
mistaken about it, because a vast number of men
have thought themselves called of God to preach,
who later have discovered and openly admitted
that they were mistaken about the whole thing,
and have forsaken their ministry, and have gone
into business. How about the laymen who have
submitted to the ministrations of such a man as
this ? Could it possibly be part of the loving pro
vision of the Son of God that Christian men and
women should be left exposed to the wiles of every
and any adventurer who might present himself on
the strength of an "inward call," and claim to rep
resent the Lord to them ? It is under the best of
circumstances an awful and fateful thing for any
man to assume to speak to others in the Name of

114 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
the Son of God, and gather disciples about him
self ; and if such an assumption is based on noth
ing better than an "inward call," laymen have ab
solutely no security whatever of receiving valid
sacraments or of hearing the truth, or of obeying
Christ, in obeying those whom He sends. The
Lord would have no moral right whatever to make
so much depend on the ministrations of a valid
ministry, unless He makes it perfectly clear who
are His ministers, and who are not. Moreover,
in a visible Church, a ministry of visible men or
dained to administer visible sacraments, must be
set apart by some visible sign which all men can
see and test for themselves. Now this visible sign
of ordination cannot possibly be the recognition
by a congregation of laymen of a man's inward
call, through some form administered by repre
sentatives of this congregation, because no one
layman and no body of laymen can give to another
that which they never possessed themselves, name
ly, authority to minister in Holy Things in the
Name of Christ. When men organize a new
"church" or a new ministry, that church and that
ministry simply represent the men who make
them, and no one else.
Of course all Catholics believe that there is
one way and only one in which a man may become
a priest of the Church, one way and only one in
which he can obtain authority to represent the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 115
threefold office of the Son of God, and that is, he
must receive ordination at the hands of an Apos
tolic Bishop, who himself belongs to the great
Apostolic Order originally ordained and commis
sioned by the Son of God. In this way and in this
way alone can he vindicate his priestly character,
and ministerial authority, and furnish credentials
of his right and title to teach and administer
Sacraments and discipline in our Lord's Name.
Of course we "will be told that this theory in
volves the doctrine of the Apostolic Succession.
Certainly it does; but the Apostolic Succession
is not a long chain of single links which is de
stroyed by the breaking of a single link; it is
simply an organic part of a great living organism,
like the arterial system in the human body through
which blood fiows from the heart throughout the
system to the tip of each single finger, and from
the sole of the foot to the cro"wn of the head. To
talk about a single "break in the Apostolic Suc
cession" destroying the authority of the ministry
is about as sensible as it would be to assert that if
a man cut his finger the cut must necessarily prove
fatal. The succession is a "tactual succession,"
simply because the Church as a living, visible or
ganism is a "tactual" Church, in living touch with
Christ, and with all its organic parts, and in touch
with all its members. The ministry cannot be
separated from the Church as a living Body, and

116 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
used for a new Protestant sect, any more than a
man's arterial system can be transplanted into
another man, and yet keep its connection with
the first man's heart. And this suggests the true
test of a man's ministerial authority for a layman.
If a priest is in recognized communion with
the Church, working in obedient authority to some
Catholic Bishop, that is, or ought to be, satis
factory evidence to a layman that the priest has
true ministerial character, because the Church de
termines the man's standing in accordance with its
ancient laws which have always been of force in
the Church from the first, insuring the proper
transmission of Holy Orders. The layman has
no more concern in "tracing back the succession
and proving it at every point," than he would in
determining the vitality of a man's hand, by dis
secting out the veins and arteries of the arm until
he reached the heart. The hand is a part of the
living system, and the priest is an organic part of
the living Church.
Now we claim that the Catholic theory of the
priesthood is simply the expression of our Lord's
threefold character, as our Prophet, Priest, and
King. The ministry of the Church is the visible
means through which our Lord's threefold medi
atorial work in the Church is applied to individ
ual men, and becomes effective for their salvation.
Hence our Lord's commission of a continuous min-

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 117
istry is really a most marked expression of His
love for man as the Son of God. This truth would
appear clearly enough, if we could only free our
minds from a lot of prepossessions and prejudices
which make it very difficult to weigh the truth at
its par value. The trouble is that we approach the
Catholic doctrine of the priesthood, handicapped
by the popular fear of sacerdotalism, and confused
by the claims of a number of sectarian ministries
which set forth "God's evident blessing on their
work" as a justification for their repudiation of
the ancient Apostolic ministry which has come
down through the ages from the ordaining Hands
of the Blessed Lord Himself. But surely God can
not be said to bless any violation of His own law,
any rejection of those He sends to represent Him.
That which He blesses is not the assumption of
official ministerial authority on the part of any
self-appointed ministry, but the personal faith,
zeal, and sincerity of Protestants as individual
men and women, quite irrespective of the sect to
which they happen to belong, or of any ministerial
claim they may choose to make.
God is not confined in the disposal of His
blessing on personal virtues, to the limits of His
own Kingdom; and God may bless any man, in
any system, if the man himself is honest and de
vout, while He leaves the system as a whole to
eventually work out its own destruction if it

118 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
exists contrary to His will. For example, there
have been many excellent and successful men in
those continental Protestant bodies which were
originally comparatively orthodox, but have now
relapsed into utter rationalism, denying the in
spiration of the Holy Scriptures, and the Deity
of the Lord Jesus Christ, and have forfeited the
right to be called Christian in any conceivable
sense of the word.
Of course one great reason why the Catholic
doctrine of the Priesthood occasionally seems
harsh and repulsive to Protestants, and yet so help
ful and full of the love of the Son of God to Cath
olic Churchmen, is the fact that Catholics and
Protestants look at the doctrine from two widely
different standpoints. The Protestant (having no
conception of a divinely commissioned ministry),
sees nothing but the exclusive pretensions of a
religious caste; while the Catholic sees in the
Priesthood the continuous pledge and token of our
Lord's personal work among men in the Church.
In the Catholic priest, the Protestant sees only the
man, his personal faults and foibles, his weakness
and inconsistencies, his shallowness and lack of
spirituality, if he is guilty of such things. The
Catholic, too, sees these things, and often they dis
tress him and humiliate him ; but he also sees the
official or representative character of the man.
So to him the priest, with all his faults, is still the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 119
Ambassador of Christ, unworthy though he be of
such inconceivable dignity. He is the commis
sioned officer whose ministrations the Lord has
sworn to bless, and so, in this deeper vision of the
priest, the superficial view of the man is merged
and lost. The man himself may be unloving, and
unbeloved; but the priest is none the less the
pledge of the Lord's loving ministrations to men.
"What room is there for self-exaltation in a
system in which self is merged and lost in another,
and in which the man fades, and the Lord is more
and more?" When the priest stands at the font,
the man is nothing; it is the Lord Himself who
baptizes with His own blessed Hands, and cleanses
the soul from the taint of sin. Again, when the
priest stands at the altar, his individuality ob
scured as much as possible by his official vestments,
the man is nothing; it is the Lord Himself who
ministers at the altar, and offers Himself to, and
for, men in the Holy Eucharist. Again, when
the priest stands in the pulpit, and speaks "in the
Name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the
Holy Ghost," the man is nothing; but (in so far
as he preaches the Catholic Faith) it is Christ
who speaks to us. Or once again, when the priest
pronounces Absolution, the man sinks out of sight,
and it is the gracious words of the Lord Himself
which release us from the burden of our sins.
No doubt when the office of the priest is found

120 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
in combination with a devout, earnest, magnetic
personality of the man who is the priest, the per
sonal equation is of almost inestimable importance
and helpfulness ; and assuredly a bad priest can do
untold harm. But whether the man himself is
good or bad, his presence in the sanctuary is
merely the sign and assurance of the infinitely
higher Presence; and so the thought of the man
fades away from the vision of the soul fixed on
the Face of the Son of God.
The very fact that the priests of the Church
may so often be weak and unspiritual, only em
phasizes the more the wondrous patience and ten
der love of the great High Priest, in that He
should be willing to associate such men so inti
mately with His mediatorial work, and use them
as instruments in His Hands for the salvation of
their fellow-men.

CHAPTER VII.

CATHOLIC SACEAMENTS.

fM^ the Catholic doctrine of the Priesthood has
i/ 1 been characterized by the popular Protestant
theology as "Sacerdotalism," so too the Catholic
doctrine of the Sacramental system has been hon
ored with a label, and the label is "sacramentarian-
ism." This rather imposing word seems to imply
that according to the belief of a Catholic, Sacra
ments are a species of magical rites having some
mysterious charm about them; and that they are
the product of some sort of sacerdotal jugglery or
priestly incantation by which the supernatural
charm becomes potent, and insures the salvation
of the man who receives the Sacrament. Hence
Protestants draw telling contrasts between re
liance on forms and ordinances, and salvation
through spiritual faith and holiness of life ; which
comparison is supposed to vindicate the Protest
ant idea that Sacraments are seemly forms at best,
and have little or nothing to do with salvation.
It is by no means impossible that Catholics

122 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
themselves have been at times responsible for this
popular mistake when they have been very scru
pulous and regular in their devotion to the Sacra
ments of the Church, and yet very worldly and
unspiritual in their lives. For example, if a man
attends the celebration of the Holy Eucharist fre
quently, and receives the Lord's Body and Blood
with much ostentatious devotion, and yet is dis
honest in his business, uncharitable to his neigh
bors, impure in his habits, and selfish in his home
life, he naturally conveys the impression that he
believes that he is at liberty to live as he pleases,
provided he makes it all right by frequent com
munions and sacramental Absolution. But as a
simple matter of fact, no intelligent Churchman
ever really believes anything of the sort, however
inconsistent his life may be ; and it is utterly mis
leading to contrast the reception of sacraments or
belief in sacramental grace, with personal holiness,
as if the two things were antagonistic to each
other, instead of being mutually complementary;
or as if anyone thought for a moment one could be
a substitute for the other.
Occasionally a sick man may take his medicine
regularly and yet continue to violate the laws of
nature, and do the very things which originally
undermined his health, and produced his sickness ;
but no one would argue from this that any sane
body of men believed that medicine was a very

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 123
good substitute for wholesome sanitary moral hab
its of living. No Catholic believes for one mo
ment that the Sacraments can be of the least help
to anyone unless he is penitent, and believing, and
endeavoring to obey God's law in the state of life
to which God has called him. On the contrary, the
Church has always taught that the reception of the
Sacraments on the part of an impenitent man, re
sults only in the man's condemnation, and puts
his soul in imminent peril of perdition. There is
no mechanical potency about a sacramental form
by which sins are forgiven, and salvation is in
sured, irrespective of personal character; and
Catholics would be the first to assert that the re
ception of sacramental grace is not an end in it
self, but only the means to an end ; and the end is
holiness of life, through union with Christ.
But the opposition of Protestants to the Cath
olic doctrine of sacramental grace really goes
much deeper than any superficial misunderstand
ing, and may perhaps be voiced somewhat in this
way: "You assert that divine grace is conveyed to
us through outward and visible forms which are
signs and pledges of the gift of that grace ; but to
me there seems to be a necessary incompatibility
between material and spiritual things. The grace
of God is so great, so free, so mighty, so far-reach
ing, so divine, and so personal, that to associate it

124 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
in any way with a material form or ordinance
seems to restrain it, localize it, degrade it, and,
so to speak, dole it out in bits and portions as if
it were a material commodity controlled by a
priestly trust. I believe that all grace is the free
gift of the Holy Spirit in answer to prayer
through the power of faith alone; and hence to
prescribe the reception of Sacraments as channels
of spiritual grace, seems to me like putting a lot
of empty forms and ordinances between God and
my soul, and dishonoring the Holy Spirit."
The feeling which is thus expressed, is cer
tainly very commonly held by a vast number of
Protestants who believe most sincerely in the
power of divine grace, and are naturally jealous
of anything which would seem to restrict it: and
doubtless it does sound very "spiritual" to exalt
faith at the expense of Sacraments, and to assert
that grace must be absolutely free, and to object
to Sacramental doctrine as being "materialistic" ;
but really, after all, the question as to whether
Sacraments can be means of grace can be deter
mined in one way and only one, that is by a refer
ence to the plain teaching of Him who Himself
established and instituted the Sacraments. To at
tempt to be more "spiritual" than the Son of God,
is dangerous business; and to assert that divine
grace is "absolutely free," when the Lord Himself
lays down conditions on which, and provides

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 125
means through which, certain forms of grace are
to be received, is not Christian faith, but some
thing quite different.
Of course, the first thing to be determined is
whether the Sacramental system has any relation
to the Divine Person of the Son of God, to His
glorified Manhood which alone is the source of
all grace; and so we must turn first of all to our
Lord's earthly life and see if there is anything in
His conduct which, by way of analogy, will give us
a clue to the right interpretation of His Sacra
mental doctrine.
Everyone who has studied our Lord's miracles
intelligently must have been impressed by two
very significant facts: that in so many cases our
Lord heals through the physical touch of His
hand, and that often He uses some material thing
as the instrument through which He works in
healing disease. When He raised the daughter of
Jairus, He took her by the hand. He touched the
eyes of two blind men when He restored their
sight. When in healing a leper. He laid His hand
upon him, the act is all the more significant be
cause the law forbade anyone to touch a man
afflicted with leprosy. Again, He laid His hands
on the woman afflicted with a spirit of infirmity.
He touched the man with dropsy as He cured him.
He touched both the tongue and ears of the deaf
and dumb man. Twice He put His hands on the

126 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
blind man at Bethsaida, and He took the lunatic
child by the hand when He restored its reason.
He touched the wounded ear of Malchus when He
made it whole; and when He blessed little child
ren. He laid His hands on them. Again, when
He multiplied the loaves and fishes. He first laid
His hands on them. In fact, so many miracles
of healing were wrought through contact with His
Body that, as we read, "The whole multitude
sought to touch Him ; for there went virtue out of
Him, and He healed them all." "They pressed
upon Him to touch Him, as many as had plagues."
"They besought Him to lay His hands on them."
Then our Lord often used material things as
media through which He healed, as when the
woman with an issue of blood touched the hem of
His garment and healing virtue went out from
Him to her ; and when He anointed the eyes of the
man bom blind with clay, and sent him to wash in
the pool of Siloam.
All this is very remarkable when we remember
that neither the touch of His hand, nor the use of
any material medium whatever was in the least
degree necessary to Him, in order that He might
effect a cure, nor could either clay or water have
the slightest medicinal effect in themselves; the
cure was wrought in every case simply by an in
stantaneous act of His divine will. Moreover, by
employing physical touch and material things as

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 127
agencies in His miracles of healing. He would be
in great danger of catering to the popular belief
in charms and superstitious practices used by
fakirs, unless there were some very important
reason in His Mind justifying Him in what He
did. Why is it that in so many cases the healing
virtue goes out of Him through His human hand ?
Is it not that He wills to teach us in this way that
all healing grace comes to us through contact with
His human nature. His perfected Manhood ? He
heals by touch because He is the Son of Man, as
well as the Son of God ; and His Manhood is the
link which binds us to His Godhead, the channel
through which all grace flows down to us from
God. Then He employs material things like the hem
of His garment, clay, and water, as healing media,
to teach us that if He deems it best. He can asso
ciate any gift of grace with an outward and visible
sign, as the pledge and token of that gift; and so,
as His miracles of physical healing were but types
of His miracles of spiritual healing, so His use
of clay and water foreshadows the whole sacra
mental system of the Church which He establishes,
in which certain gifts of grace were to be asso
ciated "with certain material forms. These forms
do not localize, or limit, or materialize, or "dole
out" God's grace; they simply indicate how we

128 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
may be put in touch with Christ, and know that
virtue has gone out of Him to us.
Of course, if some man were to originate a
system of memorial ordinances, such ordinances
could not give grace, there would be no mystery
whatever about them, and they could have little or
nothing to do with salvation.
But if we once realize that it is the Son of Ood
who Himself institutes the Sacrament, associates
it most intimately with His divine Personality,
pledges His word as to its efficacy, and prescribes
the use of it, then all doubtful halting and
stumbling at sacramental mystery is out of place
on the part of a Christian. We really have no
more right to question God's power and ask how
He can give spiritual grace through a material
form, than to ask how He, being God, could be
come man, so that His Manhood is the outward
and visible sign of the Presence and power of His
Deity. And if the Church is the extension of the
Incarnation, Christ's Body in which He dwells
and through which He brings Himself into touch
with men, then it is perfectly natural that the Lord
should reach out and touch men, and heal them,
and absolve them, and bless them, and gather them
into living union with Himself, by visible and
audible signs.
When our Lord said, "He that believeth and is
baptized shall be saved," "Except a man be bom

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 129
of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the King
dom," "This is My Body, this is My Blood," etc.,
the Catholic Churchman dares not explain away
the simple, obvious, literal meaning of these words
which the Church has always accepted from the
first, nor does he dare detract in any way or any de
gree from their mysterious meaning, lest in so do
ing he be guilty of disbelief in the Lord Himself.
Moreover, the Catholic Churchman cannot under
stand why the Lord should import into the Christ
ian Church a number of lifeless, empty, Jewish
ordinances, if the Church itself is to be full of the
life and grace and power of the Son of God, and is
to impart that life and grace to its members. Be
lief in grace-giving Sacraments is distinctly
Christian ; and belief in empty forms and symbolic
ordinances is most distinctly Jewish.
Moreover, belief in Sacramental power is cer
tainly not opposed to spirituality of mind and life,
because the great saints and doctors of the Church,
like Augustine, Bernard, Anselm, Thomas &,
Kempis, Quesnel, Keble, Pusey, Carter, and oth
ers, have every one of them been sacramentalists,
in the sense of holding the highest views of sacra
mental grace.
We come now to a reassertion of our original
theme, that if the heart of Catholic belief is the
love of the Son of God for man, then the Sacra
mental system is most distinctly an expression

130 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and a provision of the Lord's love ; and this fact
will appear more strongly if we take a number of
practical illustrations from the everyday experi
ence of a Catholic Churchman.
Here, for example, are a Christian father and
mother who love their children, and feel that
God's great Catholic Family would be a very un
lovely and unnatural thing if there were no place
in it for children. They do not want to be mem
bers of "the Kingdom of God" while their children
are left out of it. Moreover, they know full well
by their own sad personal experience that every
child inherits a tainted nature, and weakened
powers of resistance against the evil of sin, and
they are acutely anxious that everything which
can be done should be done to overcome this con
genital defect, and save their children from the
awful danger of making shipwreck of themselves
in the future. They feel a great sense of their
o"wn responsibility for their children, and a dis
trust of their wisdom and power. What shall
they do ?
In this emergency the Church stands ready
to respond lovingly to their need. They bring
each child to Holy Baptism, in which it is born
again into touch with the Lord's glorified Man
hood through "water and the Spirit," just as the
Lord promised it should be. They are not left
in the slightest doubt about it. They do not have to

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 131
wait until the child grows up and chooses for him
self, possibly choosing wrongly; but as the little
child can place no bar of wilful sin, or "wilful unbe
lief against the entrance of grace to its heart, so
the loving Christ takes the Child in His arms and
claims it for His o"wn, by His Sacramental touch.
Henceforth the child is "a member of Christ, the
child of God, and an inheritor of the Kingdom of
Heaven." And so, as the child grows older, and
is taught to respond to this baptismal grace, the
life of the Son of God interpenetrates each part
of his nature, and harmonizes it, and sanctifies it.
He is taught that because he was made a Christian
in Holy Baptism, his body and soul have become
temples of God, and. he must keep God's temple
holy and undefiled.
Then, as the boy grows older, and begins to ma
ture, his father and mother know full well that he
is entering upon a new period of his existence
which brings its own peculiar and great tempta
tions, its possibilities of a fine, holy, strong man
hood, and of almost infinite self -degradation ; and
so they grow very anxious. Here again the
Church stands ready to meet the new emergency
with new grace. She offers the sevenfold gift of
the Holy Spirit to confirm or strengthen the boy,
to enlighten his mind, to brace his will, and to
kindle his affection for all that is holy, and pure,
and itrue. The outward sign of the laying on of

132 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
hands is the sure pledge of the gift, for we are
told that Confirmation is one of the "foundation
principles of the doctrine of Christ," and is the
means through which the Holy Ghost is given.
So when Christian parents see their boy kneeling
before the altar to receive the Bishop's blessing,
they know that the Lord in His loving mercy will
lay His hands on their son, and sanctify his
budding manhood, and make self-control, and self-
development, and self-reverence possible to him,
no matter how sorely he may be tempted.
Then, as the consummation of all His sacra
mental gifts, the Lord comes in the Blessed Sacra
ment of the altar to give Himself, His Body and
Blood under the forms of bread and wine, for the
nourishment and refreshment of the soul, and
those who love Him may unite with Him in
His sacrificial offering of Himself before the
Father. So the Holy Eucharist meets the two
greatest needs of the human heart: the need of
constant renewal of the sacramental touch with
Christ, and the need of pardon which ever flows
from the Lord's mediatorial sacriflcial pleading.
So when the father and mother kneel with their
children before the adorable presence of their
Lord, they know that they are bound together
through union with Him, by a bond which is far
deeper and closer than any human relationship.
They know that in the Blessed Sacrament, in

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 133
union with our Lord's offering of Himself, they
can offer themselves and those who are nearest
and dearest to them, to their Heavenly Father,
knowing that He will accept them, and bless them
for the sake of His dear Son. And so when the
young man, who has been baptized, and confirmed,
and has received the Holy Communion, leaves the
altar, and goes to his study or his business, he
knows that he has the life of Christ within him
to make him strong against temptation, and to in
spire a new sense of reverence for his body and his
soul which have become the dwelling-place of God.
So the Holy Eucharist is perhaps the supreme and
most heavenly manifestation in the Church of the
fact that the very heart and life and power of
Catholicity is the love of the Son of God for man,
a love transcending all reaches of human thought,
annihilating all limits of time and space, a love
which is abiding and eternal.
Then, suppose that the young man, notwith
standing all these wonderful gifts of grace, falls
again into some old sins under the stress of sudden
temptations, and he grows confused, and troubled
and almost despairing over the moral complica
tions of the struggle to be pure, and faithful and
true. Then again, the Church stands ready to
meet his need. She invites his confidence, so that
he may entrust the whole story of his inner life
to the keeping of one who is trained to understand

134 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and help him through a purely human sympathy,
which is very tender, and yet one whose lips are
sealed by the oath of his office, one who as an
"Ambassador of Christ" has authority to absolve
him from all his sins. Surely if our Lord, during
His earthly life could pronounce absolution, say
ing, "thy sins be forgiven thee," if He claimed,
as He certainly did, that "the Son of Man hath
power on earth to forgive sins," then there must
still be some way by which He can speak words of
absolving power to penitent sinners in the Church ;
some way by which His priests can use and apply
the authority He committed to them when He said,
"Whosesoever sins ye remit, they are remitted
unto them." And surely any audible and author
itative assurance of God's pardoning mercy in the
Church must be a very comforting and wise pro
vision of His love to those who are burdened and
weary with their sins.
Again, when the young man in the strength
and grace of his maturity gives his heart to some
sweet girl, and is anxious to make her his wife,
when he realizes the sanctity of the bond which
is to unite them so long as they both shall live,
and the great responsibility which marriage neces
sarily involves, then naturally he craves the es
pecial benediction of the Church on his espousals,
and of course the Church responds to his demand.
She pronounces her holy benediction on the young

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 135
man and woman as they vow fidelity to each other
before the altar of God in that sacramental rela
tionship which makes them one until death parts
them. Then again, if the youth is overtaken by some
serious illness, the priest of the Church is bidden
to go to him and pray for his recovery, anointing
him with oil in the Name of the Lord, that such
anointing may be to him the comforting assurance
of the healing gifts of the Holy Ghost in answer
to the prayers of the faithful.
But, suppose that some day the time comes
when it is God's blessed will to take the young
man away from those who love him most. What
will the father and mother do in their terrible
sorrow? Must the father put all thought of him
away, as if he had perished like a flower crushed
in the dust of the highway? Must the broken
hearted mother take his name out of her prayers
when, every day, all these years since he lay as a
baby in her arms, she has asked God to bless and
keep him under His loving care ? Surely at such
a time, if ever, they need the help of the Church,
and again the Church does not fail them. She
says to tbem : "Your son has not gone beyond the
reach of God's mercy or the need of God's loving
care. He lives, and loves you still, and needs your
prayers that God may give him light, refreshment,
rest, and peace, a joyful resurrection, a merciful

136 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
judgment, and a blessed reunion with you again
at the last. As our Lord's death on the Cross was
for all men throughout all time, the Eucharistic
pleading avails for the whole Church, whether on
earth or in Paradise. In the Holy Eucharist you
can unite with our Lord's sacrificial pleading for
your son, and ask God to give him some greater
happiness as yet unknown to him, for the sake of
your prayer. Moreover, in the Holy Eucharist,
when our Lord comes. He brings you into the
closest possible communion with your son, because
he and you are one in Christ. And through the
Holy Eucharist the Lord pledges to you the resur
rection from the dead of that face and form which
were very dear to you, and which you shall behold
again, purified and made perfect by the cleansing
grace of God, and the illumination of the love of
God." Thus it is that at every critical stage and turn
ing-point of a man's life, from youth to old age,
when new responsibilities, new temptations, and
new duties create the demand for new gifts of
grace, the Church in her love is always ready to
meet the demand. The Lord in His loving mercy
has forgotten nothing which could be a help and
a comfort to His children, those whom He has
gathered into loving communion with Himself in
the Church. It is His 0"wn gentle Hand which is
reached out to them in sacramental touch, always

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 137
to heal, and support, and comfort, and bless them.
The personality of the priest who administers the
sacrament, is nothing. Even the consciousness of
the outward form of the sacrament fades away and
vanishes, after it has led the heart into the blessed
presence of Him who manifests Himself through
the Sacrament. To a devout Catholic, it is quite
impossible that the form should seem to come in
between the soul and Christ, because the form is
but the sensible pressure of the Lord's Hand in
his, the sound of loving words from the Lord's own
Lips, and the pledge of His loving benediction;
and so the heart of the Sacramental system is the
love of the Son of God for man.

CHAPTEE VIII.

CATHOLIC WOESHIP.

mOST men who have not been trained to think
accurately or profoundly, are generally
more impressed by what they see, than by what
they hear, especially if what they hear necessitates
any careful thought for its appreciation. Conse
quently, the popular Protestant protest against the
Catholic type of worship directs itself not so much
against doctrine, as against the externals of wor
ship, while it ignores the heart and essence of the
worship itself underneath the form. So this pro
test against ritual forms is embodied in the word
"Eitualism." One can celebrate the Holy Eucharist as the
chief act of Catholic worship and adore and re
ceive the Lord present in the Sacrament, and offer
"the Holy Sacrifice," without lights, vestments,
incense, or any one of the "six points" of ritual;
and if Catholic Churchmen were contented to do
this, doubtless they would escape the charge of
ritualism to a very great extent. But the moment

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 139
the great central truth of Catholic worship clothes
itself in its historic ritual symbolism, then imme
diately it is labeled with the term "ritualism" as
a warning to those who are in danger of being at
tracted and misled by it. This of course is an
exceedingly superficial proceeding, because, if
Catholic worship is really false, superstitious, or
dangerous, the danger lies in the truth or principle
underneath the form, and not in the form itself.
Eitual is nothing but a visible medium for teach
ing truth ; and to attack or defend the use of forms
for their o"wn sake, would certainly be a very child
ish piece of business on the part of priests com
missioned to speak to dying men in the Name of
the Son of God.
Moreover, to assume that the essential differ
ence between Protestant and Catholic worship is
merely the difference between a non-ritualistic and
a ritualistic type of service, is to put the whole
discussion on a false and impossible basis, be
cause all public congregational worship, be it
Protestant or Catholic, is inherently and neces
sarily ritualistic. You cannot express faith, pen
itence, prayer, and praise in a united public ser
vice except through forms of some sort, forms of
speech, formal acts, or formal symbols, which ap
peal to one or more of the five physical senses, and
through them, to the mind and heart.
True, there may be a question as between good

140 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
ritual and bad ritual, simple ritual and elaborate
ritual, lawful ritual and unlawful ritual. Masonic
ritual, Methodist ritual, and Catholic ritual, but
there never can be any question as between ritual
and no ritual as long as human souls dwell in and
express themselves through human bodies. Eit
ual expression of some sort is an inherent neces
sity of human nature; and the nature of it, and
the elaboration of it, is merely a question of de
gree, a matter to be regulated by law, custom, and
good sense. The Methodist minister who wears
a white clerical necktie, and stands up while he
sings a written form of prayer to God out of a
book ("Jesus, Lover of my soul," "Nearer, my
God, to Thee") is just as truly a "ritualist" as
the priest who wears a chasuble, and sings the
Liturgy. The symbolic "plain-dress" of the
Friend minister in the Friend Meeting-house was
just as essentially ritualistic, as is the embroidered
cope of a Catholic priest. Hence the employment
of ritual is not peculiar to Catholic worship, and
"ritualism," if it be a sin, certainly infects the
whole Christian world. We must get a very long
"way beneath the symbolic form if we would find
the real difference between Protestant and Cath
olic worship.
But before we try to do this, let us take the
term "ritualism," as commonly used, and ask our
selves as Churchmen whether the word may not

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 141
refer to something which partially justifies the
popular Protestant prejudice against the services
of the Church ; something which Catholic Church
men must themselves greatly regret and condemn.
Yes, one is forced to admit that it does. When
too much time and money are spent in the main
tenance of an elaborate ritual, when the ritual is
so complicated as to become fussy and confusing,
when it is pretentious, tawdry, cheap, and the sym
bols used are shams, imitations of things made
from more expensive materials, when the priest
conducting the ritual slavishly adopts the "vulgar
and artificial mannerisms of some other system,
when an elaborate ritual is forced on an untaught
and rebellious congregation, when the service is
made the vehicle of personal display and individ
ual fads, when ritual is used merely for aesthetic
effect, without any real belief in the sacramental
truth it represents, then most assuredly such abuse
of ritual is to be greatly deplored by all devout
Churchmen, because it not only injures the men
who abuse it, but it brings very serious discredit
on the Catholic type of worship, and keeps sensible
men out of the Church.
Better, a thousand times better, have a ritual
which is simple, honest, reverent, and intelligible,
and, above all things, expressive of a real faith and
a sincere devotion, than a more elaborate service
in which these things are lacking. Making all

142 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
due allowance for popular ignorance and prej
udice, we must admit that if the services of the
Church fail to commend themselves to intelligent,
fair-minded, and devout people, there is apt to be
something wrong about the conduct of the service
itself, and we must be largely to blame for the
fact. But, granting all this, does it necessarily fol
low that ritual should be discarded, or that there
is any serious element of danger in its employ
ment, or that a "simple," barren service is in any
degree more "helpful" or "spiritual" or devo
tional, or any more acceptable to Almighty God?
Assuredly not! For the very simple reason that
God Himself has revealed His own Mind in the
matter in three ways. First, He inspired Moses
to adopt a most elaborate ritualistic system for the
worship of the Jews in the Tabernacle and the
Temple ; and He revealed to St. John a vision of
the worship of the redeemed in heaven, which
was of a markedly ritualistic type. And again,
as soon as the Christian Church was sufficiently
free from repressive persecution to permit her
Faith to find its natural and necessary expression
in symbolic forms, the whole Church throughout
the world, as if moved by some innate and irre
sistible instinct, evolved a ritualistic system of
its own, which incorporated all the essential el
ements of both the Mosaic and the Heavenly wor-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 143
ship; and for fifteen hundred years such a thing
as the Protestant type of worship was absolutely
unknown to the Christian world. Surely, if the
Holy Spirit were to guide the mind of the Church
in important matters, He would not have allowed
the whole Catholic Church to adopt an unspiritual,
false, and dangerous type of worship.
Now, of course, it will be asked, "Granting
that some sort of ritual is both necessary and le
gitimate, what has all this got to do with the love
of the Son of God for man, or our love for Him ?
How can mere ritualism concern the gentle Teach
er of simple truths, who was born in a manger,
lived in poverty, and died on the Cross ? How can
any mere ceremonial forms of ritual interest Him
in the slightest degree?"
We reply that they certainly interested Him
greatly during His earthly life, for He was a loyal
attendant at the ritualistic services of the Temple,
and He supported the authority of the ritual law
by His word and example; and while He con
demned many errors of the Pharisees, He never
said one word implying that the ritualistic worship
to which they were accustomed was wrong in prin
ciple, or dangerous in practice, for He ordained
it Himself. Again we reply, that the Lord is interested in
and accepts whatever we give to beautify His
sanctuary, or dignify His worship as an expres-

144 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
sion of our love and devotion to Him. When
Mary, the sister of Lazarus, brought the alabaster
box of very precious spikenard, and, breaking the
box, anointed our Lord's head with the fragrant
nard, as an offering of loving gratitude to Him,
Judas complained that such a procedure was a
waste of money which should have been given to
the poor. But our Lord instantly rebuked him,
asserting that Mary had "wrought a good work."
Her offering was not waste because it was adora
tion, and the Lord accepted it as such. It was not
waste any more than the offering of the gold,
frankincense, and myrrh, which the Magi present
ed to Christ, was waste. And "just as this woman
was led by divine instinct to lavish upon His Per
son that which was costly and fragrant^ so the
Church has, by the same divine instinct, been led
to pour at His Feet her richest treasures." She
offers to Him, as an expression of her love, the
very best she can afford in architecture, painting,
music, and the stately order of a dignified cere
monial ; and all her gifts centre about His Person,
the highest possible earthly manifestation of His
Presence in the Blessed Sacrament of the Altar.
True enough! The Lord was born in a man
ger, lived in poverty, and prayed to His Father
in the groves and fields ; but He is not in a manger
now. He is on the throne of God Almighty,
adored by unnumbered hosts of angels and saints.

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 145
whose praises ascend with the smoke of incense
while they veil their faces in lowly adoration be
fore the awful glory of His Presence, and chant
the thrice holy anthem of praise. It is "with this
Heavenly worship that we join, in our Eucharists;
and so to the earthly worship belongs at least some
dim reflection of the glory and beauty of the wor
ship of Heaven.
But the worship of the Church is not merely
an expression of our love to the Lord, it is also a
pledge, provision and expression of His love to us.
God Himself appoints the essential elements of
ritual worship as part of His self-revelation to
men. He gives us the aesthetic and moral sense
to enable us to appreciate certain essential el
ements of His o"wn Nature, and one of these
elements is beauty. Beauty is closely allied to
love and challenges love ; and love finds its natural
expression through beautiful things, beautiful
faces, beautiful characters, beautiful thoughts,
words, and deeds ; and love embodies its ideals in
beautiful music, painting, and sculpture, which,
in some very remote degree at least, shadow forth
the ideal, perfect spiritual beauty of God's own
Nature. Hence, if the Son of God is present in our
sacramental worship, that worship as an expres
sion of His Presence must clothe itself in forms
of beauty, just as even the very garments the Lord
wore when He was transfigured became radiant

146 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
with heavenly light. It must be remembered that
the glorified condition of our Lord's human nature
was its natural condition ; and that it was only by
a merciful act of the divine Will that His Deity
was prevented from shining through His human
body perpetually, making it infinitely glorious and
beautiful. God in His mercy hides that beauty
now under the shadow of the sacramental veil lest
the full vision of it should be more than we could
bear, and would blind us as it did St. Paul; but
to the eye of faith the beauty of the Lord's Pres
ence illuminates and glorifies His earthly Sanc
tuary now; and so it is most fitting that the altar
and the service of the altar should be as beautiful
as we can make it.
Of course, individuals differ much in their
capacity for appreciating moral and aesthetic
beauty; and in their ability to realize in any de
gree the presence of the Son of God in the Blessed
Sacrament, which presence all ritual symbolizes;
but most devout Churchmen are helped by the
stately dignity of a beautiful sanctuary and by the
reverent order and beautiful symbolism of the
ritual celebration of the Holy Eucharist, because
these things appeal to the imagination through
the senses, and stir the heart, and open the whole
nature of the man to the silent appeal of the in
visible but gracious presence of the Son of God.
Moreover, the appeal is made to the whole man

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 147
through every avenue of approach to the mind and
heart, where the Church's full ritual is used. The
five physical senses are made to minister to the
three spiritual senses, the sense of the good, the
true, and the beautiful. The symbols of the altar,
the vestments, the lights, the ceremonial order of
the celebration, appeal to the sense of sight. The
words and the music of the Liturgy appeal to the
sense of hearing. The fragrant smoke of the burn
ing incense appeals to the sense of smell. The
eucharistic elements, the bread and wine, appeal
to the sense of taste and touch.
Because the body is an essential part of the
man, shares in the spirit's sin, was redeemed by
Christ, and is sanctified by the Holy Spirit, and
is eventually to be raised from the dead, it too, has
its own peculiar share in worship. The attitude
of standing, the bending of the knee, the bowing
of the head, the use of the sign of the Cross, all
these outward expressions correspond with and
represent characteristic attitudes of tbe mind, in
prayer and praise, and adoration, and penitence.
So far as it can be accomplished, the wor
shipper's whole ritual environment is made to be
suggestive of the supernatural presence of the Son
of God as He comes to receive our worship; and
all this, mark you, is no clever device of human
wits, no scheme or system evolved from the inner
consciousness of man, it is rather the provision of

148 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
God Himself, through the inspiration of the Holy
Spirit. Now, having given the rationale of the visible
ritual system of the Church, we come at last to
the very heart of the whole matter, the one, essen
tial, mighty fact which gives meaning to Catholic
worship. All Catholics believe that in the Blessed
Sacrament of the Altar, our Lord is really, and
objectively present to feed us with His Body and
His Blood, to receive our worship, and to offer
the Sacrifice of the Cross to His Father. We
know this to be true, because our Lord said to His
disciples, "The bread that I will give, is My
Flesh," "He that eateth My Flesh and drinketh
My Blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him"; and
when men interpreted what He said literally, and
were offended at His words, and wandered away
from Him, He let them go, because He could not
take back or explain away what He had said.
Moreover, when He instituted the Blessed Sacra
ment, He took the bread in His hands and said,
"This is My Body"; and of the wine He said,
"This is My Blood"; and He did not give the
slightest possible hint that He was speaking fig
uratively, although at that very moment when He
uttered these words He knew that what He then
said, would be interpreted literally by unnum
bered millions of His disciples throughout all ages
in His Church.

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 149
When the Lord said, "This is My Body";
"This is My Blood"; we must remember that
"these are the words of One who is perfect God,
and perfect Man. They are the words of the
tender, loving. Son of Man, but must they not
partake of the eternity and the infinity of the God
head of the Speaker ? They are the words of God
Incarnate ; must they not have to do with the deep
and unfathomable mystery of His Holy Incarna
tion ? They are the words of One who could offer
His Body a Sacrifice for all men; must they not
embody and set forth the mystery of the sacrificial
Body ? They are the words of One who rose from
the dead in a spiritual Body, having faculties and
properties far above those of the natural body;
must they not have to do with the profound mys
tery of the existence of a spiritual Body in which
dwells all the fulness of the Godhead ? They are
the words of One who was able to make Himself
the second Adam of the human race, so as to enable
all men to partake of His pure and holy human
nature, to counteract the effects of having partaken
of the impure, and unholy nature of the first
Adam. Must not such words of necessity be linked
with such a mystery ?"
So Catholic Churchmen in every age have
humbly and reverently accepted the truth of our
Lord's words, and, believing that He could not mis
lead them in what He said, they have believed that

150 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
"by reason of the consecration of the species (the
bread and wine) the Sacrament of the Holy
Eucharist possesses an inward part — the Body and
Blood of Christ, which are present truly and ob
jectively, although supernaturally, in, with, and
under the consecrated bread and wine." We be
lieve that the manner of that Presence, has not
been revealed to us, and that it is a mystery, be
cause beyond the appreciation of the senses. We
believe that the Lord's Body and Blood thus pres
ent in the Holy Eucharist, are of course in union
with His divine Person, and are the sacramental
medium of living touch with Him.
But the Holy Eucharist is not only a Com
munion, it is also a Sacrifice, because of its mys
terious relation to the one great Sacrifice of Cal
vary. In the Communion as a spiritual feast,
God gives Christ to us that we may spiritually
feed upon Him. But in the Eucharist as a sacri
fice, we offer Christ to God in union with His
sacrificial offering of Himself on the Cross for us.
On the Cross, our Incarnate Lord offered Him
self to the eternal Father, once for all; and this
offering can neither be repeated, nor supple
mented. In Heaven, our Lord as "a Priest for
ever," "ever li"ving to make intercession for us,"
continually offers Himself, "the Lamb as it had
been slain," pleading before the Face of God, the
all-atoning Sacrifice of the Cross. On earth, as

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 151
our great High Priest, He is sacramentally pres
ent on our altars that we may join with His offer
ing of Himself, and offer Him to the Father. The
Heavenly Offering and its earthly counterpart are
one with the Sacrifice of the Cross. In offering
Him to God, we offer to the Father, "ourselves,
our souls, and bodies, to be a reasonable, holy, and
living sacrifice," because we are sacramentally
united to Him ; and the Father beholding His Son,
beholds us in Him ; and in accepting Him accepts
us in Him.
Thus it is that the great central act of Catholic
Worship is a most marvellous expression of the
love of the Son of God for man. If the love of
Christ found its supreme expression in the awful
Sacrificial death of the Cross of Calvary, then
every Holy Eucharist is, so to speak, a living reas
sertion of that same love, because in every Eucha
rist that same Sacrifice is again set forth, again
presented to the Father by the Lord Himself at
our altars. In every Holy Eucharist the loving
Son of God comes to us, as it were, to take us in
His wounded hands and arms, and offer us to His
Father as if we were a very vital and necessary
part of Himself; so absolutely necessary to the
satisfaction of His great love, that He is unwilling
to offer Himself to the Father alone without us.
The Sacrificial aspect of Catholic worship sets
forth the marvellous truth of our Lord's o"wn

152 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
words, "Greater love hath no man than this : that a
man lay down his life for his friends."
The love of the Son of God is also set forth
with most touching power and beauty through the
fact that in the Holy Mystery our Lord is present
to receive our worship, and to feed us with Heav
enly Food. He who was always the welcome
Guest in the home of His beloved friends, Mary,
Martha, and Lazarus at Bethany, He who revealed
Himself to His two friends in the "Breaking of
Bread" at their little table in Emmaus, He on
whose breast His best-beloved human friend laid
his head as they sat at the Paschal Supper, even
He it is who comes to us in the Blessed Sacrament
at a special place and time, in much the same
humble, personal, friendly way which our hearts
crave, and which in one sense they can understand,
however mysterious that Adorable Presence may
be. The attempt to grasp and realize the infinite
spiritual Presence of Almighty God staggers the
mind, and baffles the imagination; but if in the
Blessed Sacrament our Lord manifests His Deity
to us through the presence of His glorified Human
Nature (He that eateth My Flesh, and drinketh
My Blood, dwelleth in Me, and I in him), then,
as the beloved Son of Man, He appeals directly
to our hearts, and binds us to Himself by a love
which we know and understand. He comes to us
still as the Incarnate Son of God, as He came to

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 153
those of old who saw His Face, and felt the warm
grasp of His Hand, and heard the gracious words
of His Lips.
God's love to man, man's love to God, these
are the two supreme and complementary thoughts
which find their adequate expression in Catholic
worship; and for this reason Catholic worship
alone can thoroughly satisfy the spiritual hunger
of the soul by which the Lord Christ gently draws
men unto Himself.

CHAPTEE IX.

THE SPIEIT OF LOVE AND

PEEHAPS the strongest objection to the Cath-
lic theory of the origin, authority, and func
tion of the Catholic Church, in the mind of a Prot
estant, is the feeling that such a theory fosters a
spirit of exolusiveness which is contrary to a spirit
of Christian love. This tendency towards eccle
siastical exolusiveness, we are told, has been for
mulated in certain restrictive laws of the Church
which prevent Christian intercourse and inter
communion between the Episcopal Church and
"other Protestant churches," and which seem to
imply that "Episcopalians" regard themselves as
more holy than their Protestant brethren, and
that they are in the habit of depreciating the sin
cerity, earnestness, and spirituality of the Prot
estant type of faith and worship.
We are told, first, that the Catholic idea of the
Church is essentially exclusive. Second, that we
exclude Protestant ministers from our pulpits.
Third, that we exclude unbaptized persons from

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 155
the hope of final salvation. Fourth, that we ex
clude Protestant Christians from communion at
our altars. Fifth, that we refuse to take part in
Protestant worship with Protestants; and we are
told that as long as this unsympathetic attitude
towards Protestants is maintained, it is useless to
talk about the Catholic Church as an expression of
the love of the Son of God for men.
Now let us take each one of these five specifica
tions, and see if it involves any unsympathetic
depreciation of the true Christian character or
spirit of our Protestant friends.
I. We are told that the moment we assert that
the Lord creates one visible Church which is to
last always, and claim the allegiance of all men,
we are committed to a theory which is inherently
and necessarily exclusive and narrow.
But who, pray, does the Church exclude from
her communion? She welcomes all men to com
munion with her on precisely the same terms. Her
conditions of admission and membership are for
all men alike, and are very simple, and easily com
plied with. She makes no discrimination what
ever among penitent believers, but urges them one
and all to be baptized, to be confirmed, and to
receive the Holy Communion at her altars as her
loyal children. She requires from Protestants, as
conditions of communion, nothing whatever which
she does not require from every young man and

156 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
woman brought up under her care from infancy.
Moreover, the Church distinctly teaches that lay-
baptism is valid, and that baptized Protestants
are in the Church; how, then, are they excluded
from it ? If, being baptized Catholics, they prefer
to devote themselves to some Protestant sect apart
from the Church, they most assuredly exclude
themselves. We do not exclude them ; and if they
do thus prefer to exclude themselves, why should
they care what the Church does or thinks about
them, one way or the other? Hence, judged by
itself merely as a principle, the historic position of
the Church does not necessarily involve any "ex-
clusiveness." "But (it will be replied) even though you ad
mit that individual Protestants are members of
the Church through Baptism, you do not recognize
Protestant denominations as churches, and this is
exclusiveness." We reply at once that we freely
and fully recognize these "churches" as being just
exactly what they claim to be, and certainly are,
that is, voluntary associations of men founded
since the Reformation for the purpose of protest
ing against certain errors, and teaching certain
Gospel truths which they thought had been neglect
ed or obscured by the older Church from which
their founders originally seceded. Does any one
of these denominations claim that as an organized
corporate Body it had any existence before the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 157
Reformation? Do the Methodists claim to go
back of Wesley, or the Presbyterians back of Cal
vin, or the Lutherans back of Luther ? Certainly
not. Well then, why should we be expected to
affirm that they are a corporate part of the old
Catholic Church which has had a continuous ex
istence from Apostolic days ? They do not affirm
any such thing, and why should we ?
The Church cannot possibly establish inter
communion with these Protestant denominations
on the theory that they are themselves, as organiza
tions, "branches" of the old, historic Catholic
Church, for, by their o"wn admission, as by the
plain testimony of historic facts, that is precisely
what they are not. The Church may have the most
cordial sympathy possible with individual Prot
estants as baptized Christians, and acquit them
from all intentional share in the sins of heresy and
schism, but she cannot be expected to surrender
her old historic birth-right, or deny her corporate
identity, or admit for one moment that there is no
difference between the historic position of the old
Church and a modern sect which was organized
by seceders from the Church, and exists to-day in
open and professed competition with her in her
0"wn field, and which, by reason of its very exist
ence as a separated body, sanctions the evils of a
divided Christianity.
II. Again, we are told, "You claim that the

158 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Catholic Church is an expression of the love of
the Son of God, and yet you refuse to receive into
your pulpits as Christian ministers, men who ex
hibit quite as much holiness of life and often far
more zeal and scholarship than your own minis
ters ; and this certainly is a violation of the law of
love." Yes, no doubt it would be a violation of
the law of Christian charity if such men were ex
cluded from our pulpits because we for one mo
ment questioned their personal holiness, or their
zeal, or their scholarship, or their Christian char
acter. But, most unfortunately, neither zeal, nor
holiness, nor scholarship, nor Christian character,
nor all of these qualities combined, confer upon a
man authority to preach in the Name of Jesus
Christ, in the pulpits of Christ's Church. They
doubtless qualify the man to be very useful and
perhaps successful as a preacher ; but authority to
preach is an official matter, and not a personal
matter ; and until a minister can give us some rea
sonable credentials of his authority inherited
through the Church from our Lord's original min
isterial commission, we think that he would be in
a false position in one of our pulpits. However
much we might profit by his eloquence, and his
scholarship, and his forceful personality, yet he
would lack the one thing which makes a man a
priest, and creates the moral obligation to listen
to his teaching, and that is, authority from the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 159
Church to speak in the Name of Christ. When a
man stands and speaks in one of our pulpits, we
believe that the Church must he behind the man,
because the man speaks in the name of the Church
which gives him his commission, and not in his
own name, and most assuredly not in the name
of some sect quite apart from the Church.
Moreover, there is another reason why Prot
estant ministers are not admitted to our pulpits,
and that is the fact that the priests of the Church
are commissioned to preach and teach one, and
only one thing: "the Faith once for all delivered
to the saints," "as this Church hath received the
same" ; and although many devout Protestant min
isters teach much Gospel truth, yet they are, by
reason of their official position, necessarily hostile
to much truth which the Church holds to be vital.
Again, if these Protestant ministers remember
that they represent Protestant denominations orig
inally organized to protest against the Church and
much of its teaching, then, surely, when they enter
our pulpits they are guilty of distinct disloyalty
to their own denomination ; and if they reply that
their denomination no longer maintains its old
attitude of protest against the Church, then we
ask, what in the name of common sense does it
represent, and on what ground do they claim any
official standing, and how do they justify their
separation from the old Church ?

160 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
When a man has not been trained under the
instruction of the Church, and is not in any way
subject to its discipline, and does not subscribe to
the Catholic Creed, we have no means of knowing
what he will preach when he enters one of our
pulpits. He may preach a thoroughly orthodox,
evangelical, and stimulating sermon; or alas! he
may ventilate some ancient heresy in modern
dress ; and so as a matter of self -protection we feel
that it is necessary to guard our congregations
from the views exploited by those of whose per
sonal belief we know little or nothing.
Here, again, we believe that the Church must
be behind the man, if his teaching is to amount to
anything, because the Church as a whole is the
great teaching Body, and the individual preacher
is but the voice through which the Church speaks.
The Church's first duty is loyalty to Christ in
guarding the Faith which He has committed to
her care; and her second duty is loyalty to her
own children in delivering to them the whole
Faith, pure, and undefiled. If, in order to accom
plish these results, she finds it necessary to take
certain precautions, and enact certain laws which
seem harsh and uncharitable to Protestants from
their o"wn point of view, no one can regret the fact
more than a Catholic Churchman who knows very
well that a Protestant preacher may be a man of
broad scholarship, stimulating personality, deep

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 161
spiritual intuition, blameless life, and saintly
character, while a commissioned priest of the
Church may be shallow, conceited, and very un
spiritual, sadly lacking in the graces of personal
and spiritual magnetism. This fact a Catholic
Churchman may keenly and sorrowfully regret,
but the fact itself has no direct bearing on the
question which we have been discussing.
III. Sometimes we are told that if we teach
that sacraments convey grace to men which is or
dinarily necessary for salvation, we thereby ex
clude all unbaptized men from the Church, and
imply that every unbaptized man is lost ; and that
that is a very terrible doctrine for any man to hold
who professes that the Catholic Church represents
the love of the Son of God for men.
We reply that God is not confined to sacra
mental media in His gifts of grace ; and that if a
man, through no fault of his own, through igno
rance, or defective education, or want of oppor
tunity, fails to receive the sacraments of the
Church, and yet is loyal to such truth as he does
know, and to the dictates of his conscience, we be
lieve that in some way God will give that man all
grace necessary for his salvation, either in this
world, or in the intermediate state, between death
and the resurrection. The Church does not teach
that any man ever has been, or ever can be, lost

162 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
through any defect for which he himself is not
responsible. IV. Protestants occasionally say to us — "You
admit that all baptized Protestants are Christians,
and yet you exclude all Protestants from your
communion. How can this fact be reconciled
with your assertion that the Church exhibits a
spirit of love for all men ?" We reply that we do
not admit any one to the Blessed Sacrament mere
ly because we love him, but because in our judg
ment he has complied with those conditions which
prepare him for a life of habitual communion at
our altars. And (to speak very plainly) we fail
to see on what ground those who devote themselves
entirely to some Protestant sect apart from the
Church, and who recognize no duty to the Church
of any sort or description, should demand the
highest possible privilege of Church membership
in the name of love. They certainly show no love
to the Church. If the Church gives the Blessed
Sacrament to her own loyal and devoted children
only on certain conditions with which they must
comply, and with which all Churchmen expect to
comply as a matter of course, why should the
Church be expected to suspend these conditions in
favor of those who have no active connection with
her whatever ?
Again, believing that Confirmation is a sacra
mental rite of Divine institution, which confers

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 163
certain gifts of grace ordinarily necessary to the
perfect development of the Life of Christ in the
soul, and which is itself a spiritual preparation
for the privilege of communion, we cannot pos
sibly accept Protestant Christians as communi
cants who refused to be confirmed. We must de
fend and administer all the means of grace which
the Lord has provided in His Church for all men,
to all men; and unnecessarily to omit any one
means of grace in any individual case because a
man does not appreciate or understand it, is cer
tainly not showing our love for the man, but is
committing a serious wrong against him; and we
thereby make ourselves responsible for his great
loss. Confirmation is not a means of "joining the
church by profession of faith." It appears in the
New Testament solely as a sacramental means
through which the Holy Ghost is given to men;
and so to omit it, would be a sin against the Holy
Ghost Himself. Hence "a public profession of
faith" in some Protestant church is no substitute
for Confirmation, and bears not the slightest sort
of analogy to it.
Besides all this, the Protestant doctrine con
cerning "the ordinance of the Lord's Supper," and
the Catholic doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, are
very radically different; and Churchmen have no
right whatever to admit communicants to the
Blessed Sacrament, unless they have had some

164 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
adequate intellectual instruction, and spiritual
preparation, and have learned to appreciate the
difference between observing a symbolic ordinance,
and feeding upon the Body and Blood of the Son
of God in the Holy Eucharist. The law of the
Church which requires Confirmation before com
munion, is not a violation of the law of love ; but
it is rather a provision insuring the use of all the
Lord's means of grace for all Christian men and
women; means of grace which are essentially ex
pressions and provisions of the Lord's love. So to
omit or discard unnecessarily a single sacrament,
would in just so far weaken the force of the thesis
for which we are contending : that the whole sacra
mental system is a provision of God's love for
man. V. Churchmen are often accused of being
bigoted or exclusive, because they are not in the
habit of uniting with Protestants in their religious
services, or in "union meetings" ; and the refusal
to do this is said to indicate a narrow, unsympa
thetic spirit, and not a spirit of love.
There are several things which may be said in
reply to this accusation. First, Churchmen as a
rule much prefer the order and dignity of litur
gical worship, to the uncertainties and vagaries
of an ex-tempore service; consequently, they are
seldom tempted to leave the regular services of the
Church, and go elsewhere. To the Churchman

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 165
trained in a liturgical system, much of the Prot
estant type of worship, however sincere, earnest,
and acceptable to God it may be, seems crude,
unsatisfactory, and individualistic, rather than
congregational; and while the personal devotions
of Protestant ministers offered in public services
may be very satisfactory to them, they seldom are
satisfactory to one who has been accustomed to the
infinitely wider range of devotional thought and
expression of the Prayer Book service, a service
in which the worshipper himself has a large and
active share and part. The extempore prayer of
a Protestant minister may "come from his heart,"
but it certainly does not come from the heart of
the Churchman who listens to it in silence; and
moreover, if the minister's heart happens to be un
spiritual, narrow, shallow, or lacking in refine
ment, then the fact that it comes from his heart,
rather than from a Prayer Book, is much to its
disadvantage. Hence a strong preference for the
liturgical services of the Church does not neces
sarily indicate a lack of sympathy on the part of
Churchmen for Protestants.
Then, secondly, a Churchman feels that it is
his duty to support the services of his 0"wn parish
Church by his habitual and regular attendance at
these services ; and so he makes it a matter of prin
ciple not to set a bad example by wandering about,
and leaving the worship where be belongs.

166 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Then, lastly, the Churchman cannot forget
that public congregational worship in a Protestant
church, conducted by a Protestant minster, is a
corporate act, and represents, not merely the spir
itual devotions of a number of individual Christ
ians, but the corporate worship of a Protestant
denomination. Hence, if a Churchman takes a
part in that worship, he thereby implies that he is
in sympathy with, and approves of, the indepen
dent ecclesiastical position which this Protestant
denomination assumes. For the moment at least,
he puts himself in open communion with a Body
which has repudiated the ministry, and the sacra
mental system of the Church, and has set up a
rival system, a rival ministry, and a rival wor
ship of its own. No intelligent and loyal
Churchman can do this, if he believes honestly
that all corporate Catholic worship must be cen
tered about an altar, must be sacramental, and
sacrificial, and for this reason must be conducted
or administered by a priest of the Church who
can show the credentials of his right to admin
ister the Lord's sacrament, in the Lord's Name.
Here again we must insist that, in taking this
position. Churchmen do not question in the least
the sincerity or the earnestness of the Prot
estant type of worship. It is one thing to sym
pathize with the sincerity of such worship, and
it is quite another thing to join in it, when it is

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 167
the worship of a denomination or sect which, by
its surrender of the principle of a real ministerial
priesthood, its loss of historic orders, and its re
jection of sacramental worship, has deprived wor
ship itself of its distinctively Christian character.
A Hebrew or a Mohammedan might have a service
in which he read the Holy Scriptures, offered
prayer, and sang hymns ; but no one but a Christ
ian could possibly have a Holy Eucharist which
the Lord Himself ordained, and in which He is
sacramentally present to feed men with His Body
and Blood, and to offer Himself to the Father on
their behalf. Protestantism repudiates the Cath
olic doctrine of the Holy Eucharist, and yet it is
this doctrine which to a Catholic is the very heart
and centre of Christian worship. In a Catholic
Church, the altar is always central in position, be
cause the Holy Eucharist is always the central act
of Christian worship. In a Protestant church the
pulpit, and not the altar, is the most conspicuous
piece of furniture. This difference of arrange
ment is itself symbolical, and indicates a difference
in belief and practice which goes to the very root
of the question as to what constitutes Catholic
worship, and what type of worship a Catholic
Churchman must attend. Hence, Protestant wor
ship around a pulpit as a substitute for an altar
seems very inadequate and very unsatisfactory to
a Churchman; unsatisfactory, not because the

168 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Churchman questions the sincerity of the wor
shippers, but because he misses the Eucharistic
Offering at the altar, which to him is vitally es
sential. The restrictive law of the Catholic Church is
not an expression of unsympathetic hostility to
Protestant Christians, but it is rather the safe
guard which the Church finds it necessary to
throw around the gifts of grace and truth com
mitted to her care, in order that they may be pre
served perfect and entire, and in order that she
may thus prove faithful in her stewardship of the
mysteries of God, and loyal to Him whose Bride
she is.
Of course, under the present conditions of mod
ern thought, with a divided Protestantism on one
side, and a spurious liberalism on the other, it is
inevitable that any sort or kind of restrictive law
should be regarded as narrowness, and exclusive
ness ; and so of course a Catholic Churchman does
not hope to vindicate the Church altogether from
these charges. He must simply wait patiently for
that vindication which is as surely coming as the
day follows the night, because sooner or later all
thoughtful men must recognize the fact that
Christianity is entering into a life and death
struggle with a hostile materialism, and that that
Church alone will be able to survive its assaults
which is securely anchored to the great Catholic

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 169
verities of the Faith, that Church which has the
courage and patience to defend these things faith
fully, even though in so doing she forfeits the
sympathy of many men whose friendship she
would be very glad to have. Surely Protestants,
as a class, cannot be either ignorant of, or indiffer
ent to, the sad havoc which rationalism has already
made among Protestant ranks, and if they once
realize how the citadel of the Christian's faith is
threatened on all hands, they will be at least wil
ling to try to understand the true position of any
Church which appeals to them for sympathy and
support in the great battle of the future.

CHAPTER X.
CATHOLICITY AND "iNTOl
CHIS is an age in which tolerance is exalted
as the chief of all virtues; and so when the
Church presents a definite dogmatic Faith for the
acceptance of men, we are promptly informed that
the claims of the Church are necessarily opposed to
a true spirit of toleration; and that, while they
might have passed muster in a credulous and un
critical age, they are quite too narrow and insular
for the broader vision of the twentieth century;
and so, if there is any such thing as "the heart of
Catholicity," it is a spirit of intolerance, rather
than a spirit of love.
Without question. Catholic Churchmen in va
rious ages and various places have occasionally
manifested a most deplorable spirit of intolerance
towards those who differed from them. "The
spirit of the Inquisition" has not been confined to
any one part of the Church, or to any one party in,
or out of, the Church. If it could be shown that
there is, or ever was, anything in the characteristic

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 171
teaching of the Church which would naturally
or necessarily lead men to persecute each other,
or burn each other at the stake, surely the Church
would be the Kingdom of Satan, rather than the
Kingdom of God; and all honest men would be
forced to renounce their allegiance to her at once.
But sad and dreadful as all religious persecu
tions have been, the Church is not the only organ
ization which must plead guilty, for Protestants
themselves have more than once resorted to the
cry of "fire," as the immediately available antidote
for heresy; and so this type of intolerance was
characteristic of the spirit of a certain age, rather
than of any one or more religious systems. At
one time public feeling, which prevailed every
where and among all classes of Christians, sanc
tioned persecution as the rightful means of sup
pressing dangerous error, and all parties are
guilty. It was only a question as to who could
get the upper hand ; and the man who did, was the
Lord's avenger ; and the man who did not, was the
Lord's martyr. But, fortunately, the day is past
in which heresy can be suppressed by force, and
Christians can tear each other limb from limb in
the Name of God. Intolerance, if it exists to-day
among enlightened people, must be intellectual
intolerance. And indeed, it is quite possible to teach the
truth in these days in a most intolerant spirit, to

172 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
assume that, because a man holds an imperfect
creed, or a creed from which we differ, the man
himself must necessarily be insincere, or perverse,
or out of the pale of Christian sympathy, or lack
ing in spirituality; and there are plenty of ways
without resorting to rack or thumb-screw in which
we can make those who differ from us feel the
sting of an intolerant spirit, and make the truth
we advocate hateful to them. A man who is abso
lutely right in his belief, may be absolutely wrong
in the way he holds and teaches what he believes,
not in the least because a right belief ever ought to
inspire intolerance, but because the man himself
is weak, and narrow, and stupid, and lacks the
blessed gift of sympathetic imagination which
would perhaps have helped him to see things from
the other man's standpoint, or at least to appre
ciate the other man's sincerity and moral worth.
We are not disposed to deny that the Church con
tains a great many narrow-minded people who
mistake intolerance for zealous devotion to the
truth ; but we do most emphatically deny that the
true spirit of the Church, its historic claims, or
its dogmatic Creed, necessarily breed intolerance
or an unsympathetic habit of mind. Here, again,
it is manifestly unfair to judge the whole Church
by the failings of a few of her members.
Now, no doubt we will be told by some clever
representative of the twentieth century Zeit-Geist,

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 173
"You Churchmen are welcome to believe anything
you like, pro"vided you do not insist that anyone
else shall believe it too, and as long as you freely
admit that tlie other man is quite as liable to be
right as you are. You seem to forget that the
Dogmas of the Schoolmen are anachronisms in the
present age. The world has quite outgrown the
swaddling clothes of mediaeval dogma. Your
Creed is utterly out of harmony with the times,
and needs to be recast, rehabilitated, readjusted
to the demands of the modern 'new thought.' All
human conceptions of truth are necessarily narrow
and fragmentary; and modern science has so
widened the range of intellectual vision that all
the old hard and fast distinctions between truth
and error are fading away. Education shows the
many-sidedness of truth which cannot possibly be
compressed in any one or more human formulae,
and it is really a proof and test of higher mental
culture in these days to hold one's opinions in
suspense, and not to be too certain about anything.
The spiritual essence of truth is smothered and
killed by creeds, and the best thought of the day
refuses to cramp and throttle spiritual ideals by
forcing them into theological dogmas, and met
aphysical definitions. Hence, your position as a
Catholic Churchman involves intellectual intol
erance, because you are hopelessly committed to
the propagation of a dogmatic creed, and a church

174 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
which makes exclusive claims to be of divine or
igin and authority."
Thus it is that from the standpoint of a "higher
intellectual plane," and the "broader vision of the
new thought," we are informed that to hold a
definite creed, and to believe in the Catholic
Church, necessarily breeds intolerance.
Well, in the first place, if these assumptions
are true, then there is no reason why they should
be applied exclusively to religious truth, and we
are left to the logical inference that the more one
studies, the less one knows, and that there can be
no such thing as arriving at any final conclusion
about anything in any department of human
thought and investigation. All truth is in a state
of solution, and we are hopelessly at sea, adrift in
an intellectual fog.
To repeat something which has been said before
in the chapter on the Catholic Faith : in one sense
of the word, all truth must necessarily be intoler
ant of that which would contradict and so destroy
it. All scientific formulae, for example, are dog
matic in the extreme, absolutely intolerant of con
tradiction. And if they were not, science itself,
or any form of systematized knowledge, would be
impossible. Drop out the dogmatic element in
modern scientific teaching, and the results of all
research work would be about as valuable and con
clusive as "The Hunting of the Snark." Thought

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 175
has absolutely no value unless it starts from
demonstrable facts, and proceeds according to the
laws of logic in its interpretation of these facts.
No truth is of any practical value until it assumes
such fixed and definite form that it can be grasped
intelligently by the mind. Truth in nature is
fixed, dogmatic, and final, because it represents
the Mind of God, which does not change. Our own
comprehension of the truth may be shallow, mis
taken, and fragmentary, and may frequently need
adjustment and enlargement; and, of course, if
what we hold is merely a plausible theory, evolved
from the throes of our subliminal consciousness,
we must be very tolerant of the other man's theory,
which is quite as liable to be right as our own. But
the truth itself (as distinguished from our incom
plete comprehension of it) is necessarily dogmatic,
and intolerant of error.
This brings us at once to the real pith of the
question. What is the Creed of the Catholic
Church which we teach ? Does it represent merely
the highest achievement of philosophical specula
tion, or physical research? Is it something, into
the knowledge of which men have grown through
the use of their natural powers of reason, by a long
series of experiments, by evolving a working hy
pothesis one day which has had to be modified or
discarded the next day, until some theory is found
which covers most of the facts ? Is the Creed the

176 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
best and most up-to-date interpretation of the phe
nomena of natural law, the most advanced thought
of the cleverest men of this generation, the best
temporary adjustment possible between the Evolu
tionists, the Higher Critics, the lower Critics, and
the Critics in between, who are searching for the
truth ?
Well, if it is, then certainly the Creed of the
Church, as it cannot rise higher than its source in
human minds, must be held only tentatively, and
must constantly adjust itself to the best thought
of the day, and possibly it will be explained away
altogether as time goes on.
But Catholic Churchmen deny that the Cath
olic Creed is in any sense whatever the product of
human reason, because it is the direct revelation of
the Son of God to men, expressing the Mind of
God concerning certain great questions which lie
almost wholly above the plane of human reason
and experimental research. The Creed is the
formula in which this revelation from God has
been defined under the guidance of the Holy
Spirit's inspiration, and it is not in the least the
product of human wit or clever speculation. This
being true, it is necessarily both dogmatic and in
tolerant of its contradiction, because it comes from
God. In this respect, moreover, it is in perfect
harmony with the intolerance of scientific truth
which has the seal of absolute demonstration.

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 177
The Mind of God is fixed and final in whatever
way it reveals itself, whether through the Catholic
Faith in things supernatural, or through the phe
nomena of nature, in things purely natural; and
the Mind of God is intolerant of error because God
IS THE Truth, and if He compromised with error
He would destroy Himself.
In the Catholic Creed, the great changeless
verities of the Christian religion, the Dogma of
the Holy Trinity, the Dogma of the Incarnation,
the Dogma of the Atonement, the Fact of the Res
urrection, and the existence of the Holy Catholic
Church, stand out strong, clear, positive, eternal,
and unchanging; and we claim that there is no
other ground of certitude in matters of faith. For,
once surrender the belief that the Catholic Faith,
and the whole of it, is a divine revelation, and you
have nothing left to fall back upon but the specula
tions and plausible guesses of men which will be
one thing in one age, and another thing in another
age, and always and forever shifting and incon
clusive. If we are told that we have no right whatever
to exempt the Creed of the Church from the tests
of modern scientific criticism by which all forms of
thought in these days are measured, and to which
they must adjust themselves if they survive at all,
we reply that, instead of being in any sense "ex
empt from criticism," the Catholic Faith has been

178 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
the storm centre of hostile criticism for a good
many centuries, and the Church has never shrunk
from submitting the credentials of the Faith to any
fair and reasonable tests, even when many of her
critics were utterly unscientific in their methods,
and were guilty of abysmal and crass ignorance
concerning the elemental principles of the Faith
they wished to attack. It is indeed well for the
Church that she has not shrunk from free crit
icism, because, while scientific criticism has no
doubt stripped the Bible of certain acquired tradi
tions and traditional interpretations which never
really had anything to do with the Faith, yet such
criticism has not weakened in the slightest degree
the historic foundation on which the Catholic
Faith rests ; on the contrary, it has only served to
reveal quite unsuspected strength in the historic
anchorage of the Faith, and so to vindicate the
divine claims of the Faith in the eyes of intelli
gent men. We are quite familiar "with the jaunty
patronizing air with which a certain type of critic
informs us occasionally, through the columns of a
cheap magazine, that the Christian religion has
now been explained away; and possibly a certain
type of mind is impressed by this sort of thing.
But, after all, the defence of the Faith involves the
solution of the most profound problems which have
ever perplexed the minds of men, and the warfare
must be a battle of giants, while the petty, blatant

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 179
camp-followers are made to stand back and keep
the peace.
You cannot measure the ocean in a pint cup;
and if God reveals Himself at all to men, that
revelation must necessarily transcend all bounds
of human thought in certain particulars; and its
spiritual dogmas can no more be "tested" by the
methods of material science, than the love of God
can be measured in a test-tube, or analyzed under
the flame of a blow-pipe.
The idea that the Church knows nothing of
"scientific methods," and "scientific tests," is pure
assumption of the shallowest kind, inasmuch as she
numbers among her own devout children many of
the cleverest and best-read scientific minds of the
day; and she knows full well that if she is to in
fluence the trend of modern thought, she must flrst
thoroughly understand it, and keep in touch with
its problems and its methods. What the Church
objects to, is not "scientific criticism," but hasty
generalizations from insufficient data, a species of
"dogmatism" which has characterized the methods
of many men who assumed to speak in the name
of science, whose judgment was immature, and
whose theories bore no logical relation whatever
to the real well-ascertained facts of the case. It
is because of the men of this stamp that the Church
is forced to be on her guard, and, no doubt, to seem
at times as if she shrank from the application of

180 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
scientific tests to the truth of her claims. With
men of any true scientific culture of mind she has
no quarrel ; and if at times she is forced to differ
with such men, she believes that patience and mu
tual sympathetic appreciation will bring the solu
tion of the difficulty.
The mere fact that this Creed of the Church
may be out of harmony with the "spirit of the
age," is quite as liable to indicate that the spirit
of the age needs radical readjustment, as that the
Catholic Faith needs to be "recast."
Now, perhaps, we are in position to form some
intelligent definition of what tolerance and in
tolerance really are, and this we must do if we are
to face the real issue.
Tolerance, like charity, concerns a judgment
of motives; and, properly speaking, has nothing
whatever to do with facts, or the logical inference
from facts. Tolerance is simply generous and
kindly judgment of those from whom we differ.
Intolerance is not the act of condemning the error
a man holds, but condemning the inner motives
and honesty of the man because he holds the error :
it is the doubt of his sincerity, the prejudiced re
fusal to hear his side of the case, and to give him
the fullest possible credit for the truth he does
hold. Intolerance forgets that we have no right
whatever to force any man into agreement with
us through any power save the intrinsic per-

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 181
suasiveness of truth, and the moral authority of
God behind the truth. Intolerance lies neither in
teaching the truth nor in condemning error, but in
doing these things in a spirit of rivalry and an
tagonism, rather than in a spirit of love. Intol
erance is born of the stupid failure to distinguish
between the error and the character of the man
who holds the error ; the failure to realize that men
are far more often wrong in their belief by reason
of defective education, and the idols of their en
vironment, than they are because they are insin
cere, or self-willed.
The type of so-called "tolerance" to which we
have alluded, is really a wretched travesty of the
real thing. It assumes that truth is merely a rel
ative term, represented by a lot of more or less
inconsistent theories, any one of which may be
disproved at any time by further investigation, and
therefore no one has any right to claim any su
periority over the rest. To assert that what we be
lieve is in any sense infallible, brings us imme
diately into conflict with someone else ; and this is
intolerance. In other words, tolerance involves
the practical surrender of all definite, positive
conviction, or at least of the suppression of that
conviction, if one still has any convictions left,
after a course in "the new thought."
Again, in the face of all this, we assert not
merely that truth is necessarily intolerant of error.

182 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
but that certain departments of it are necessarily
aggressively intolerant. I may hold certain truths,
like the Nebular Hypothesis, or the Atomic theory
of Matter, which have no practical bearing what
ever on my practical life, or on the moral and
spiritual welfare of my neighbor. I do not care
in the least whether he accepts these truths or not ;
it is nothing to me. He would be no better for
accepting them, and no worse for rejecting them.
But if there are certain other truths which I be
lieve to be part of a divine revelation from Al
mighty God, truths which so intimately concern
the moral and spiritual welfare of my neighbor
that they have to do with the salvation or loss of
his immortal soul, then, just in proportion as I
am interested in that man and love him, will I
feel bound to warn him of his danger, and teach
him the truth which I accept. Call this intoler
ance if you like, it certainly is the necessary logic
of my belief, absolutely the only course open to
me unless I am an arrant hypocrite, or hopelessly
selfish. Moreover, it is neither unkind, nor un
charitable, nor a misjudgment of the man's mo
tives. It is inhuman to see any man walking
blindfold into some great danger without even
warning him; and for me to excuse myself from
such a duty on the plea that I am not the man's
keeper, or on the score that the man ought to know

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 183
enough to take care of himself, would be criminal
selfishness, and not tolerance.
Moreover, every man, possessed of any real
scientific culture of mind, loves, reverences, and
defends truth for its own sake; and there are
thousands of scientists who labor patiently and
spend their lives in different lines of difficult re
search work without any hope of adequate re
muneration (as Agassiz did when he said, "I
haven't time to make money"), simply and solely
because they feel the inspiration of adding to the
world's stock of definite and usable knowledge.
Any truth is worth defending and vindicating
simply because it is true, and because truth is, as
we have said, the medium through which the minds
of men come into sympathetic touch with the Mind
of God. A loss of a sense of the value of exact
truth is not a prerequisite of "tolerance," but a
symptom of mental incapacity.
Again, Catholic Churchmen are accused of in
tolerance and uncharitableness because they assert
that the Lord Jesus Christ Himself organized and
commissioned one visible Church which was to ex
tend throughout the world in time and space, and
to carry on His mediatorial work among men,
applying to men as individuals the benefits of His
Incarnate life. But the question involved in the
belief in the Catholic Church is not one of toler
ance, or intolerance, but simply one of fact, or fie-

184 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
tion. Did the Lord found and organize a Church
which was to be as universal in its claim of man's
allegiance as was His claim as their Redeemer?
If He did, then, most assuredly, it cannot be intol
erant to perpetuate that claim, any more than it is
intolerant to point men to the Cross as the sole
and only source of their redemption. In fact, the
assertion of the historic Catholic claims of the
Church cannot possibly have anything to do direct
ly with tolerance or intolerance, because the claims
of the Church are based on certain well defined
and authentic historic facts which can be subjected
to the test of historic criticism, precisely like any
other series of facts, and either established, or dis
proved. If the Church is the visible product of
our Lord's own acts and words, the great con
summation of His mediatorial work, then surely
it cannot be intolerant to say so ; on the other hand
if it is not, if it is merely a great sect created by
men, then the assertion of the Catholic claims of
the Church is not intolerance, but just plain fraud,
and should be denounced as such. In determining
the origin and historic identity of any organization
of men we deal with historic records, and docu
ments, and monuments, and manuscripts, and tra
ditions, and other historic data, "without passing
judgment on the motives or sincerity of any one.
The whole thing is a matter of historic research,
conducted by experts accustomed to weighing the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 185
value of historic testimony, and any mere per
sonal sentiments or prejudices are utterly out of
court. Well, suppose that the corporate identity of the
Catholic Church has been preserved through the
ages, so that its corporate life can be traced back
to the original creative act of the Son of God, and
it is found to be the same Church which He com
missioned to represent Him. What shall we say of
this Church ? Must we not say of it just what the
Lord who made it, said of it, just what the Holy
Scriptures say of it ? Could we possibly say any
thing more? Dare tve say anything less? It must
be His Church ("My Church"), His Bride, His
Kingdom, His Body, His Temple, the very fulness
of Him who filleth all in all. He builds it, and is
with it every day unto the end of the world. The
Holy Ghost guides it unto all truth, and so it be
comes the pillar and ground of truth. To hear it,
is to hear Him. To obey it is to obey Him. To
be baptized into it, is to be united to Him. To
divide it, is to wound Him. The Church is sent
unto all the world in space, and unto the end of the
world in time, and the gates of Hell shall not pre
vail against it. In this Church men are to be
born again, to receive the Holy Ghost, to feed on
the Lord's Body and Blood, and to be taught the
Truth necessary for their salvation.
How, then, can there be any intolerance in

186 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
saying of the Church just what He said of it, and
just what the Holy Ghost said of it? When our
Lord said "no man cometh unto the Father but by
Me," He made the most absolute and exclusive
claim of mediatorship between man and God, a
claim which was absolutely intolerant of any rival
claims. Why should it be thought tolerant to pro
claim His claim of Mediatorship to all men, while
it is intolerant to proclaim His Church as the
means through which He now exercises that Medi
atorship ?
Moreover, if the Catholic Church is what we
claim it is, a most gracious and loving provision of
the Son of God, through membership with which
He brings men into living union with His glorified
Manhood, and absolves and cleanses them, and
teaches them saving truth, then we must not only
defend and protect that Church, but we must try
as best we can to bring all men into living union
with it, that they may share with us the blessings
we receive through it, and in it ; and our zeal will
be exactly proportioned to our love for all men.
The devout Churchman, who has found the blessed
presence of Christ in His Church, can no more
refrain from the effort to "proselyte," and make
converts for the Church, than he can look on the
Face of Christ and refrain from loving it, or
refrain from the impulse to make other men know
and love it. Call this intolerance if you like ; it is

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 187
the intolerance of faith, the intolerance of love, the
intolerance of spiritual enthusiasm, the intolerance
which refuses to tolerate in itself any selfish mon
opoly of heavenly things, the intolerance which
refuses to tolerate pride, and prejudice, and igno
rance, or anything which would shut men out from
the Catholic Kingdom, the provision of the Lord's
love. Love for the Church of Christ is a form of
intolerance which is brave enough to be misunder
stood, humble enough to be scorned, patient enough
to wait its vindication in another world, and yet
persistent enough to brave any discouragement and
any failure for His sake.
If the Lord commits to the care of His Church
certain gifts of truth and grace which are of in
estimable importance, then the priests of the
Church become stewards of the mysteries of God,
and are responsible for the faithful and obedient
care of these things. Hence, it necessarily follows
that the Church must enact such restrictive laws as
are necessary to prevent these gifts which she holds
as a Trustee from being alienated from their orig
inal purpose and use. If, for example, she must
defend the Faith, she must prevent her priests
from teaching that which contradicts or weakens
the Faith. If she must defend her sacramental
system, she must provide that her sacraments shall
be properly administered to those who are quali
fied to receive them, and to no others. Hence, the

188 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Church has enacted certain laws in the adminis
tration of her system of discipline which may seem
intolerant to those who do not understand their
purpose or their great necessity.
If one of her priests teaches heresy she may
inhibit him from preaching, or, if he persists, she
may possibly depose him from his office as a com
missioned teacher, and she does this simply as a
matter of self -protection ; moreover, unless she
does this, sooner or later she forfeits her office as
custodian and teacher of the Catholic Faith, and
she commits intellectual suicide. Now when she
undertakes to discipline one of her priests for false
teaching, immediately the secular press and many
sectarian ministers start the cry of "heresy-hunt
ing," in the effort to make a martyr of the man
who is under discipline, as if he had done a brave,
clever, and rather fine thing in thus "rising supe
rior to the Creed of his Church." We are fre
quently told that to discipline any one for heresy
or a denial of the Faith in these days is rank
intolerance, and belongs to the narrow, persecuting
spirit of the middle-ages, rather than to the en
lightened sentiment of the twentieth century. Of
course. Churchmen can readily understand that a
man who does not accept the Christian Revela
tion, and believes nothing definite, and has nothing
in particular to defend, will regard any defence of
anything as "intolerance."

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 189
But there is another aspect of this matter
which needs frequent emphasis. When a man is
ordained a priest of the Church, he swears in his
ordination vows, not merely that he believes the
Faith "as this Church hath received the same,"
but, that he will teach it in its integrity; and the
Church gives him his commission to teach on this
express stipulation. The Faith is not given into
his care to be revised, readjusted, dissected, or ex
purgated ; it is committed to him for just one pur
pose and no other, that he may teach it, whole, and
entire, and protect and defend it from change and
mutilation. If, as time goes on, he finds that he
has lost his faith in the whole or part of it, there
is only one course open to him as an honest man :
he must surrender his commission to teach. The
moral principle involved in his position would be
recognized readily enough, if the thing occurred
in the commercial world. For example, if a
trustee of the endowment fund of some great Hos
pital were to divert part of the income of that fund
to his own private use, and spend it in gambling
on the races, the man would be immediately de
nounced as a criminal, and public sentiment would
at once demand his expulsion from his office as
trustee. What, pray, is the difference between the
criminality of violating the trusteeship of an en-
do"wment fund, and violating the trusteeship of the
Revelation of the Son of God with which He has

190 THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY.
endowed His Church? Why should the one be
condemned as a criminal proceeding, and the other
be publicly applauded as "liberality," "breadth of
view," "martyrdom," "independence," and the
like ? There is no answer to this question, unless
it is that the popularity of a heretical priest is the
result of the popular hatred of the Dogmatic Faith
which the priest once swore to defend.
If the father of a family refuses to exercise
any discipline in the care of his children, and
neglects to protect the unity, purity, and integrity
of his home, we do not say that he is very tolerant ;
we say that he plays false to his responsibility as a
father, and is criminally careless.
Now we know quite well that to set forth the
claims of the Church as the way of salvation, is
regarded as in itself an act of intolerance. "That
anything should be seriously viewed as necessary
to salvation is a doctrine abhorrent to present-day
principles. Monitory clauses are being removed
from the social code, from the Bible, and from
the Creed. It is thought a piece of savage brutal
ity even to allude to Hell, and an illiberal imper
tinence to warn, while to say that a man is held
responsible to God for what 'views' he adopts
... or that any doctrine peculiar to any one
denomination should be regarded as essential, is
looked upon as the very embodiment of sectarian
bigotry. . . . One of the most serious symptoms

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 191
of the age is the absence of holy fear." The spirit
of the age, which says, "Do as you like," "Think
as you like," "Believe as you like," "Criticize as
you like," may well chafe at such words as "neces
sary to salvation."
But to charge the Church with intolerance,
while one accepts the Bible as the Word of God,
and the words of Jesus Christ as the expression of
the Mind of God, is hopelessly illogical, because
the Bible from end to end is full of the most sol
emn warnings; and the most awful things which
could possibly be said concerning the ultimate fate
of a rebellious human soul, were said by the In
carnation of Love itself, the Son of God. God
is not merely Love ; God is Truth, Purity, Justice,
and Holiness ; and to such a Nature as God's, sin
must necessarily be disease, bondage, transgression
of eternal law, and separation from God. And,
unless sin be remedied in some way, it involves the
final ruin of body and soul. True, the Son of God
is very merciful and full of loving tenderness for
the penitent sinner, but He is absolutely intolerant
of wilful sin ; and He did not hesitate to denounce
the man who sins wilfully, and leads others into
sin, in terms which are beyond measure fearful.
He speaks as a man who. Himself facing death,
must warn men who are themselves engaged in a
life and death struggle to save their souls ; and at
the same time He speaks "with the absolute author-

192 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
ity of Almighty God. He always speaks with a
passionate intolerance of evil, which is inspired by
His own perfect holiness. And so, if the Church
speaks in His Name, if her message finds its first
expression on His lips, then she, too, must speak
with authority in her intolerance of evil, no mat
ter how her message is received by a self-indulgent
world. The Church must set forth the terms and
the means of salvation with no uncertain sound;
and if men choose to call her illiberal, intolerant,
narrow, and impertinent, then the charge reflects
not so much against her, as against the Lord Him
self, whose message she delivers.
The most terrible things the Lord ever said
against sin, or concerning the bitter fate and the
awful doom of an impenitent sinner, were said
simply because, in the infiniteness of His love. He
could not bear to have one single human soul wan
der away from Him and destroy itself. He made
all souls, and He loves them all, and He needs
them all to satisfy His love, and He could no more
tolerate that which would hurt them, and separate
them from Him, and destroy them, than a human
father could tolerate the wiles of a fiend in human
form who would seduce his daughter.
Love implies intolerance of that which would
injure the beloved, or separate him from the one
who loves him ; and, if it did not, then it would be
a miserable, mockish sentimentalism, utterly un-

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 193
worthy the name of true love. Hence, Churchmen
claim that the assertion of Dogmatic truth, the
plain setting forth of the terms of salvation offered
men in the Church, and the system of discipline
necessary to protect and preserve the Church from
heresy and schism, are all of them necessary pro
visions of the love of the Son of God for man, be
cause through them His love is made effectual for
the salvation of men.

CHAPTER XI.
THE SPIEIT OF LOVE, AND EOMAN CATHOLICISM.
CHE purpose of this book has been to set forth
and illustrate one and only one great truth:
that the heart of Catholicity is the love of the Son
of God for man. By Catholicity we do not mean
any one provincial type, be it Oriental, Latin, or
Anglican; but Catholicity in the original and
primitive sense of the word, as it was known and
taught by Ignatius, Clement, Cyprian, Cyril, Ath
anasius, Basil, Ambrose, Chrysostom, and Augus
tine ; and as it is shared and illustrated in a more
or less imperfect way, by all parts of the Catholic
Church to-day.
Hence, there seems to be no special reason why
in this place we should enter into the details of the
old, well-worn controversy between Anglican and
Roman Catholics. There is nothing new which
can be said on the subject. For example, Roman
objections to the validity of Anglican Orders have
been met and answered point by point, with the
utmost scholarly thoroughness by Anglican writ-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 195
ers; and again and again, Romans have been
driven to shift the entire ground of their attack,
in order to maintain any argument at all. More
over, the characteristic claims of Imperial Su
premacy, and Papal Infallibility, have been met
by an appeal to the testimony of history, which is
overwhelming in its force as vindicating the Cath
olicity of the Anglican Church. The whole argu
ment on these matters, with all the available evi
dence now in hand, has been embodied in a num
ber of good manuals on the Roman Question,
which are easily obtainable by any one who is in
terested in the matter, and a list of some of these
books is given at the end of this chapter, to which
the reader is referred.
While we are not concerned at this point with
the defence of the Anglican position, there is one
question which suggests itself with considerable
force, quite in harmony with the purpose of this
book, and that question is this : — Does the Roman
type of Catholicity with which we are familiar,
impress us strongly with the fact that it represents
the love of the Son of God for man ? We know, of
course, that the Roman Church often puts into
the hands of Protestants certain clever manuals
which are carefully worded to make the best of the
Roman position, and are written in a very beau
tiful spirit, in which the Roman Church is repre
sented as a Holy Mother yearning over Protestants

196 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
and Anglicans with a depth of love and tender
solicitude for their spiritual welfare, which is cer
tainly as generous as it is touching. We do not
question the fact that the Roman Church produces
now and then, in individual cases, a very high type
of sainthood, which is unquestionably inspired by
a supreme and loving devotion to our Lord Jesus
Christ, and which proves very winning to Prot
estants. We admit quite freely that certain phases
of the Roman system may be so tremendously
idealized by clever management, that in certain
respects the Roman Church may make an almost
overwhelming appeal to impressionable and senti
mental souls, who imagine that they will find in it
everything which is beautiful, consistent, lovely,
and true. To such people, doubtless, the prevalent
Anglican type of devotion seems cold, and unat
tractive, as compared with the hot-house exuber
ance, and fervor of devotion, one frequently finds
in the devotional manuals used by Roman Cath
olics. But, notwithstanding all this, the question re
curs, would an Anglican Catholic learn more of
the true spirit of love by becoming a Roman Cath
olic? Would the Roman type of Catholicity, as
such, impress him as being more directly inspired
by the love of the Son of God for man, than the
Anglican type, or the Greek type? Would his
environment in the Roman Communion broaden

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 197
his sympathies, soften his heart, and fill him with
a loving, generous, tolerant spirit towards all men,
and a loyal love of the truth for its own sake?
This, certainly, is a most practical question, and
one which really goes to the very root of the whole
issue between us and Rome, and so is one which
merits the most careful consideration. Contro
versies which concern the organization of the
Church, touch the Body of Catholicity. Discus
sions which deal with doctrines, touch the Mind
of Catholicity. But that which concerns the spirit
of love, touches the very Heart and essence of
Catholicity, and is therefore of supreme import
ance in connection with our present discussion.
When one remembers how terribly the Church
of England suffered for centuries under the secu
lar power of the Court of Rome with the Pope at
its head, how the Church was robbed, defrauded,
and oppressed, when one recalls how Rome did her
best to cut Anglo-Catholics off from communion
with the continental Churches by papal bulls and
anathemas, and how to-day she demands the un
conditional surrender of all Anglicans to her au
thority, as heretics, and schismatics, the question
of the characteristic temper and spirit of such a
Church becomes a very important one. And
again, when we remember that she makes it a con
dition of communion with her that we should re
pudiate the Mother who bore us, pronouncing her

198 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Orders invalid, her Sacraments void of grace, her
Eucharists empty forms, and that we must sub
scribe to Dogmas which have not an atom of Scrip
tural or historic truth behind them, and pronounce
belief in these things to be necessary to salvation,
then surely it can hardly be a violation of the
spirit of love to ask in all seriousness whether sub
mission to Rome would enable an Anglo-Catholic
to know more of the love of Christ — its breadth,
its depth, its height — that love which passeth
knowledge. On the contrary, it is a question
which Rome itself forces us to consider with the
utmost care, in view of the actual facts of the case,
however unpleasant a review of these facts may be.
The question is not one of aggressive attack,
but one of self-defence, pure and simple.
Surely, it must be admitted by all honest men
that a true spirit of love involves, first of all, a
strict loyalty to the Truth. He who professes to
represent the love of the Son of God to men, and
desires to win men to an obedient acknowledgment
of that love as the Catholic Church reveals it, must
himself love the truth for its o"wn sake, and for
the sake of those he assumes to teach ; and he must
represent facts of history in their true light, with
out distortion, misrepresentation, or prevarication
of any sort.
Now, most unfortunately, very much of Roman
controversial literature has become so saturated

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 199
with a spirit of unfaithfulness to historic facts,
that Anglicans have almost ceased to hope to find
in a modern Roman writer a candid and fair
review of the whole facts of the case where Roman
claims are concerned. This is a very serious state
ment to make, and we must follow it at once with
proofs. For example, to the Clementine Romance, sup
posed to be written by St. Clement of Rome near
the end of the second century, is attached a spuri
ous letter, a heretical forgery, in which St. Peter
is made to say much about "his chair" ; and the
letter asserts that he consecrated St. Clement as his
successor in this "Chair." All this is pure ro
mance; but after the third century it was widely
accepted and quoted as true by writers advocating
the papal claims. Again, in 419, at a Council of
the African Church held at Carthage, the legates
from Rome offered as proof of the Pope's right to
hear appeals from foreign Churches, certain can
ons of the local synod of Sardica, claiming that
they were canons of the General Council of Nice
in 325. Tbe African Church detected the at
tempted fraud, and protested courteously, but
firmly, against it at Rome.
Again, the Roman legates at the Council of
Chalcedon, in 451, produced a copy of the Nicene
canons containing the words, "The Roman See has
always had the Primacy," which words were never

200 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
in the canon, but were the interpolations of a
forger. Again, in 754, Pippin, King of France, be
stowed on Pope Stephen IIL, a territory contain
ing more than twenty cities, in response to a letter
forged by the Pope in the name of St. Peter.
Moreover, Rome has been much given to in
serting interpolations in the writings of the
Fathers. For example, Irenaeus is made to say, "It is
necessary that all should depend on the Church of
Rome, as on a well-spring or fount."
St. Cyprian is said to have written, "Upon
him (Peter) He builds His Church .... the
Primacy is given to Peter, that it might be shown
that the Church is one, and the Chair one."
St. Augustine is quoted as saying, "Rome has
spoken, the cause is ended."
Now, as a matter of fact, not one of these men
said any one of these things attributed to him.
They are forgeries, pure and simple.
About the middle of the ninth century, Isidore
Mercator wrote about a hundred letters, which
claimed to be decretal letters, decisions of coun
cils, and other documents, representing the period
between the years 90 and 314. In these papal let
ters the language current at a much later period
was ascribed to very early ages, and these forgeries
were widely circulated, and constantly quoted, and

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 201
enormously influential in promoting the expansion
of papal claims; and yet they are now admitted
by all candid Roman theologians to have been
forgeries of the most outrageous character.
The condemnation of Pope Honorius for
heresy was recorded in the Roman Breviaries until
the sixteenth century. But when the theory of
papal infallibility was first suggested, the name
of a pope condemned for heresy was quietly
dropped from the Breviaries; and when Pere
Gratry, a French Roman priest discovered this,
he said, "Has God, then, need of your falsehoods,
that you speak deceitfully for Him? Has God
need of these frauds ?"
Keenan's "Controversial Catechism," certified
by the Vicars-Apostolic of Scotland, Ed. 1846,
stated that the doctrine that the Pope was infal
lible was "a Protestant invention," and "no article
of the Catholic Faith." But when this "Prot
estant invention" became a "doctrine divinely re
vealed," this statement quietly disappeared from
the book in question.
The so-called "Nag's Head" story about the
sham ordination of Parker was constantly used as
material for disproving the validity of Anglican
Orders for many years, and is now occasionally
imposed on the credulity of the ignorant ; and yet
Roman theologians themselves admit that the story

202 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
was pure fiction, and had not the least foundation
in fact. These are only a few samples out of many that
might be given of Rome's habit of falsifying his
tory when it suited her convenience so to do. Now
it may be said that most of these forgeries and in
terpolations, and misquotations, were accepted in
a credulous and uncritical age, when the means for
disproving them were not immediately in hand;
and that intelligent Roman theologians for the
most part repudiate them, and so the Church of
this age should not be held responsible for them.
But the fact still remains that the papal claim of
Imperial authority was largely huilt up on these
very frauds, and yet to-day is supported and set
forth as a divine origin, the recognition of which is
absolutely necessary for salvation; hence Roman
Catholics in supporting papal imperialism are re
sponsible for these frauds, and they can escape
such responsibility only in one way: namely, by
repudiating these claims, which have no historic
basis. One of the most startling deviations from
Scriptural and primitive custom in the Roman
Church, is the denial of the chalice in the Holy
Eucharist to the laity. Everywhere throughout
the Catholic Church until the twelfth century, lay
men received the Lord's Blood in the Holy Com
munion, and not until the Roman Council of Con-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 203
stance, in 1415, did the Roman Church absolutely
forbid it. But since then, if any layman persists
in claiming that this prohibition is unlawful, he is
to be condemned as a heretic, and punished by the
Inquisition : and if a priest ventures to administer
the Lord's Blood in the Holy Communion to a lay
man, he is to be excommunicated, and severely
punished. Is it an exhibition of the spirit of love
on the part of the Church of Rome to mutilate the
Blessed Sacrament ordained by our Lord Himself, .
and cut off her laymen from participation in half
of it, even when Rome itself is forced to admit
that, for over a thousand years from the first, lay
men everywhere communicated in both kinds of
the Holy Species ?
Again, many intelligent theologians in the
Roman Church discredit altogether the authen
ticity and the miraculous power of a very large
proportion of relics, pictures, shrines, and images,
which are exhibited for the reverence and venera
tion of the faithful; and yet they look upon all
this system of fraud as an allowable means of ex
citing devotion in the hearts of ignorant and im
pressionable people. But how can any form of
devotion be pleasing to Almighty God which is
based on fraud, and involves double-dealing on the
part of priests who knowingly countenance such
fraud ? To take only one famous instance out of
many, the body of the Apostle St. Bartholomew

204 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
as a whole, is said to be both at Rome, and Bene-
vento. Here, then, we have two entire bodies of
the saint. Both Monte Cassino and Rheims claim
to possess a large part of the body. "Besides these,
there are three heads, one at Naples, one formerly
at Reichenau, and a third at Toulouse ; two crowns
of the head at Frankfort and Prague ; part of the
skull at Maestricht; a jaw at Steinfeld, part of a
jaw in Prague, two jaws in Cologne, and a lower
jaw at Murbach; an arm and hand at Gersiac, a
second arm, with the flesh, at Bethune ; a third arm
at Amalfi; a large part of a fourth arm at Fop-
pens ; a fifth arm, and part of a sixth at Cologne,
a seventh arm at Andechs ; an eighth arm at Ebers ;
three large leg or arm-bones at Prague ; and a part
of an arm at Brussels."
When the Roman Church countenances as she
does the exhibition of all these fraudulent relics
for the veneration of the faithful, can this im
posture be reconciled with a spirit of tender and
loving sympathy with which the Church of God
should care for her children, and guide them into
the truth, and protect them from falsehood ?
Can it be said to be a spirit of love which
prompts the Eoman Church to teach her children
to give to a creature, however holy and lovable, the
worship which belongs to Almighty God alone?
Is it a true statement of the authorized teaching of
the Eoman Church concerning the Blessed Virgin

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 205
Mary, to say that Romans merely ask her prayers
for themselves as they would ask a friend to pray
for them ? Let us test this statement.
Pope Pius IX., in his famous encyclical, said :
"Ye know very well, venerable brethren, that the
whole of our confidence is placed in the most Holy
Virgin, since God has placed in Mary the fulness
of all good, that accordingly we may know that if
there is any hope in us, if any grace, if any salva
tion, it redounds to us from her, because such is
His will who hath willed that we should have
everything through Mary."
An accredited Doctor of the Roman Church
writes : "At the command of the Virgin all things
obey, even God." "The salvation of all depends
on their being favored and protected by Mary."
Roman theologians do not hesitate to call the
Blessed Virgin our "Redemptress," "Mediatress,"
"the author and cause of our salvation." Perhaps
this is why crucifixes are sold to Romans having
our Lord's Body on one side, and the figure of the
Blessed Virgin on the other. In the "Raccolta"
(a collection of prayers especially indulgenced by
the Popes), is this petition : "I acknowledge thee,
and I venerate thee, most Holy Virgin, Queen of
Heaven, Lady and Mistress of the universe, as
daughter of the Eternal Father, Mother of His
well-beloved Son, and most loving Spouse of the
Holy Spirit. Kneeling at the feet of thy great

206 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
Majesty, with all humility I pray thee, through
that divine charity wherewith thou wast so boun
teously enriched on thine Assumption into Heav
en, to vouchsafe me favor and pity, placing me un
der thy most safe and faithful protection, and re
ceiving me into the number of those happy and
highly-favored servants of thine whose names thou
dost carry graven upon thy virgin breast."
In a Prayer Book for priests (Nova Edition,
Campidonae, 1865), is this parody on the "Anima
Christi": "Soul of the "Virgin, illuminate me;
Body of the "Virgin, guard me;
Milk of the Virgin, feed me;
Passage of the Virgin, strengthen me;
0 Mary, mother of grace, intercede for me;
For thy servant take me."
This prayer was published and used at Rome
with the license of Superiors in 1825 : "I adore
you. Eternal Father; I adore you. Eternal Son;
I adore you, most Holy Spirit ; I adore you, most
holy Virgin, Queen of the heavens, lady and mis
tress of the universe."
Again, Cornelius a Lapide (Eccl. xxiv., 29)
says : "As often as we eat the flesh of Christ in
the Holy Eucharist, so often do we in it really eat
the flesh of the Blessed Virgin."
And again, Oswald (Dogmat. Mariol, p. 177)
says : "We maintain a co-presence of Mary in the
Eucharist. This is a necessary inference from our

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 207
Marian theory, and we shrink back from no con
sequence. . . . We are much inclined to believe in
an essential co-presence of Mary in her whole
person." Faber (pp. 29, 30, pre. Bid.) says that Christ
showed to St. Ignatius the very part of the host
which had once belonged to the substance of Mary.
Is it any wonder that when Doctor Pusey called
Doctor Newman's attention to these statements in
accredited Roman writers, he exclaimed, "they are
like a bad dream; they amaze, they terrify me."
Does the Roman Church vindicate and set
forth the love of Christ by taking one of His
unique attributes as the Son of God, that He alone
was without inherited taint of original sin, and
conferring it on the Blessed Virgin, so that our
salvation begins with her, rather than with Him ?
The Dogma of the Immaculate Conception, added
to the Roman Creed by Pius IX. in 1854, not only
has no Scriptural evidence to warrant it, but it
was unknown to the ancient Fathers, and when
it flnally appeared was contradicted by fourteen
Popes, by St. Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Thomas
Aquinas, and many other eminent theologians.
Now the very dreadful thing about all this
modern eultus of St. Mary the Virgin, is that it
most distinctly obscures the one vital fact of
Christianity, that real Catholicity is an expression
of the love of the Son of God for man. This cul-

208 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
tus represents our Lord as stern, and severe, and
unsympathetic, and unloving, and places St. Mary
as a very tender and loving Mediatress between
us and Him. We are most distinctly told that our
prayers will be answered much sooner if we appeal
to her, rather than to Him; and so the Blessed
Virgin, rather than Christ, represents to men the
love of God for man. Could anything possibly be
worse than this ? If the heart of Catholicity is the
fact that it is a provision and an expression of the
love of the Son of Ood for man, what shall we say
of that type of Catholicity which represents the
human love of a creature, as being more real, and
more effectual for our salvation, than the divine
love of the Creator? Surely, this is little short of
absolute blasphemy.
Again, what trace of the spirit of love is there
in that doctrine of Purgatory which teaches that
every soul, no matter how faithful it has been,
must undergo prolonged and excessive torment,
like that of hell, as if pursued by the wrath and
vengeance of God, before it can enter Heaven ?
"In pain beyond all earthly pains,
Favourites of Jesus! there they lie,
Letting the fire purge out their stains,
And worshipping God's purity." — Faber.
And yet again, is it a spirit of loving sympathy
which forbids the Roman clergy to marry, even
when they are stationed in enervating tropical cii-

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 209
mates, where the environment is most demoraliz
ing, and temptations are very acute ? Has Rome
learned nothing by the frequent clerical scandals
resulting from enforced celibacy under such con
ditions ?
Now, one very marked characteristic of the
Roman Church is that she never admits that she
is, or can be, in the wrong; or that she has made
blunders, and falsified history. And when men
have groaned under her oppression, and have
struggled for the freedom of an honest appeal to
historic facts in dealing with vital questions, Rome
has adopted a policy of repression, either by silenc
ing discussion through the authority of an en
cyclical, or by an exhibition of physical force.
Again and again, before the Reformation, as in the
cases of the Gratian and Valantinian Rescripts,
ecclesiastical Rome has appealed successfully to
the secular power of Imperial Rome to back her
up in the extension of her authority, and in the
effort to coerce all men into obedience to her
claims. If it were possible for Rome to make
an alliance with some world-wide secular power
to-day, we have much reason to believe that she
would use the same means for accomplishing the
same ends.
Before the Reformation, three great Councils
had been held to bring about a reformation in
clerical discipline, and to each of these councils

210 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
England had sent representatives to plead ener
getically for some consideration. The defeat of
this attempted reformation by councils, which was
effected through the intrigues of Rome, and, above
all, by the skill of the last of the great Popes,
Martin V., is, as the historian Dixon says, "the
most mournful event in modern history." To
crush the spirit of reform in Spain required the
full force of the Inquisition with all its satanic
methods. The Dragonnades, and the horrors of
St. Bartholomew's day in France, witness to the
same blind spirit of absolutism.
In these days, to put a book on the Index Ex-
purgatorious, is not quite the same thing as a fair
answer to the truth which the book may contain;
and the "submission of the intellect" to authority,
in the face of the protest of certified facts of his
tory, does not commend itself to the best thought
of this century. After the Vatican Council, which
declared the Pope infallible, a prominent Roman
theologian exclaimed, "Thank God ! we have done
with history." And, in view of Rome's unhistoric
position, we can readily imagine what the man
meant. How about the spirit of love in any Church
which follows up her decrees even about minor
matters with anathemas, and threats of eternal
damnation against those who venture to differ from
her? Anglo-Catholics cannot contend with the

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 211
same weapons ; they must still believe that the re
ligion of Christ under modern conditions must be a
very tolerant religion in the best sense of the word
"tolerant"; and that "there are natural laws of
fairness and reasonableness which cannot be dis
regarded in religious controversies, or in making
converts, any more than in any other human trans
actions, without injury to the soul, and scandal to
religion," and a miserable violation of the law of
love which should govern the relation of all Christ
ian men to each other.
Last of all, let us take the question of the in
spiration of the Holy Scriptures. The Church has
always taught the fact of inspiration, but has not
formulated any one theory of inspiration. Some
time ago, when a school of free and conservative
criticism began to form in the Roman Church, as
suming that the question as to the limits of inspira
tion was still an open one, and moved by a desire to
bring about a reconciliation between Christian the
ology and conservative scientific criticism, the
Pope met the movement by issuing an Encyclical
(1893) on the study of Holy Scriptures, in which
he proclaimed as the doctrine of the Church, some
thing which the Church had never believed before :
the exact verbal mechanical theory of inspiration
which is the product of mediaeval scholastic rigor
ism, and has been hopelessly discredited by all
conservative critics of the Anglo-Catholic school.

212 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
What must be said of a Church which has noth
ing better than this to offer concerning one of the
most difficult and vital problems of modern re
ligious thought ? Nothing could possibly be more
out of date, more crude, and more unsympathetic,
than the tone and temper of this encyclical, which
attempts thus to suppress, by an official promulga
tion of a discredited theory, all advance in the crit
ical study of the Bible; and which condemns all
theories of inspiration which admit there is a
strong human element in the composition of the
Bible, and different grades of inspiration, or af
firms that the highest sort of infallibility is lim
ited to matters which concern faith and morals.
Again, when in recent years a school of liberal
Roman theologians began a candid examination of
the historic evidence bearing on the question of the
validity of Anglican Orders, and one after another
declared in favor of their validity, the Pope, under
the influence of the Jesuits, suppressed at once all
free and impartial inquiry and discussion of the
matter, by issuing the Bull "Apostolicae Curae,"
in which he declares Anglican Orders "absolutely
null, and utterly void," notwithstanding the fact
that every single point by which his decision was
reached and vindicated has been met and an
swered, time and again, by Anglo-Catholic theo
logians. Here again is an example of Rome's fear
of open and free discussion of the actual facts of

THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY. 213
history, and here again is an illustration of Rome's
unsympathetic attitude towards many of the most
scholarly theologians in her own communion.
In conclusion, let us quote several passages
from three well-known Anglo-Catholic theologians.
Bishop Gore, Father Puller, and Canon Carter,
as well expressing the difference in spirit and tem
per of mind between the Anglican and the Roman
Church :
Bishop Gore says: "In this defence of the
English Church, I have frankly admitted all the
faults of undiscipline, doctrinal compromise, and
reaction which we think can be fairly laid to our
Church's charge. I believe that these are to be
set over against the arrogant claims, the exaggera
tion of truth, the falsifications of history, the ac
cretions of error, which must be laid to the charge
of Rome. Which set of faults is the greater —
which Church is more guilty in the eyes of God —
it is not for us to determine. The evils of a
Church into which by God's providence we are
new-born, granted she he a Church, are not an ex
cuse for leaving her, but a spur to action. And I"
am sure that we Anglicans feel a hearty thankful
ness to Almighty God, that He has caused our
lot to be cast in a Church, which, however deeply
she has sinned, can acknowledge her sins; which,
however great her defects, even in her authorita
tive formulas, is not prevented by any arrogation

214 THE HEART OF CATHOLICITY.
to herself of what belongs to a greater whole, from
confessing them, and openly seeking to reform
them. Better anything than to be unable to bear
the light ; better anything than to be unable to face
the facts of history and firmly accept them ; better
any evils than to have to speak deceitfully for
God." Father Puller has written: "We ought to
thank God every day that in His great mercy He
has delivered the Church of England from that
bondage. We must indeed mingle with our
thanksgivings the deepest penitence and humilia
tion, when we think how unfaithful we have been
in our use of our freedom ; when we think of our
lack of discipline, of our miserable Erastianism,
of our worldliness, of our Laodicean self-satisfac
tion, of our very imperfect grasp of certain as
pects of primitive truth. We may, however, in all
humility hope that in some degree we are improv
ing. Thank God ! it is no part of our Creed that
the Church which we love is without spot or
wrinkle. We are free to see our faults and to
confess them, and to do what we can to amend
them. The more we strive to amend what we see
to be "wrong, the more will our vision be purged,
so that we shall become conscious of evil which we
had not before suspected."
Lastly, Canon Carter has written : "We must
preserve a temper of mind favorable to re-union.

THE HEART OP CATHOLICITY. 215
doing all we can to further it, a spirit of loving
fellowship and consideration, a fairness of judg
ment and generosity towards those who are sep
arated from us, with a readiness to acknowledge
error, while firmly maintaining the truth which
God has committed to our charge. ... Is it not
evident that patience, and forbearance, and consid-
erateness were at all times greatly needed in the
rulers of the Church ? A recovery all round, as it
were, with the completeness of the Catholic Faith,
following after a period of decay, history assures
us, is possible only within the Catholic Church
itself. It is surely this to which God has been
guiding us. Hard blows have been dealt us. De
sertions of dear friends have saddened us. But
life has been ceaselessly growing within and
around us everywhere, like the very spring-tide of
the coming summer. While freely and unhesitat
ingly acknowledging our defects, and difficulties,
but confidently asserting our Catholic inheritance,
we cannot doubt that such recuperative power is at
work amongst us, as a witness to the promise, 'Lo,
I am with you alway, even to the end of the
world.' "

GOOD BOOKS DEALING WITH THE ROMAN
QUESTION.
Infallibility of the Church  Salmon.
History op the Church of England . . Wakeman.
Roman Catholic Claims  Oore.
The Roman Question  Carter.
Primitive Saints, and the See of Rome . . Puller.
Romanism, Protestantism, and Catholicity Ewer.
The Bull "Apostolicae Curae" and the
Edwardine Ordinal  Puller.
Some Features of Modern Romanism . . S. P. G. K.
What is Modern Romanism?  Seymour.
Papal Claims  Seymour.
Reply of the Archbishops of Canterbury
AND York to the Bull "Apostolicae
Cubae" 
Catholic versus Roman  Langtry.
Plain Reasons Against Joining the Church
of Rome (Revised Edition) . . . Littledale.

BY THE SAME AUTHOR
CATHOLIC PEINCIPLE 8. A companion volume to
"The Heart of Catholicity." 12mo, cloth, $1.25;
by mail $1.35 ; paper, 40 cts. ; by mail 47 cts.
Published by The Young Churchman Company,
Milwaukee, Wis.

3 9002 00736 8823

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