In what way did the Incarnate Son of God, before departing from this earth, provide for the continuance and advancement of his kingdom?
One thing is certain: He did not write a book nor did he order one to be written. Instead of doing that he founded a Church, against which he declared the gates of hell should not prevail and with which he promised to be present while the world should last. This being so, it is evident that every faithful follower of Jesus should become a member of that Church.
But which of all the churches that profess to be Christian is the one Christ established? Unquestionably the Catholic Church, for this alone goes back to the Savior’s lifetime. This was the Church that naturally succeeded Judaism; this was the Church whose early history is chronicled in the Acts of the Apostles; and this is still the only Church that, since the days of Christ, has maintained an uninterrupted life of nearly two millennia. Her documents, history, and traditions all go back to the age of the apostles. From her all other forms of Christianity have been derived.
The authors of the Gospels, Acts, and Epistles were members of that original Catholic Church, and the Church it was that finally selected, from the manuscripts which had been written by its sons, the books of the New Testament, and was for centuries their sole custodian. But since this Church existed sixty years at least before the writing of those scriptures was completed, and more than three hundred years before the canon of the New Testament was definitely fixed, there must have been, during all that time, some other guide and guardian of the Church besides the Bible. What was this?
It was tradition, that mighty link between the past and present consisting of the oral instructions, interpretations, and ecclesiastical observances handed down in the Church from generation to generation from the days of the apostles. Thus Paul wrote to the Church of Corinth, “Keep the traditions, as I delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2). To Timothy also he wrote, “The things that thou hast heard of me among many witnesses, the same commit thou to faithful men, who shall be able to teach others also.” Those “faithful men” undoubtedly did teach others, and these taught others still. Origen, the great representative of the Church at Alexandria, said, “Let the ecclesiastical teaching, handed down by order of succession from the apostles, be observed. That only is to be believed to be the truth, which in no way differs from ecclesiastical and apostolic tradition.”
Protestants often deride the authority of Church tradition, and claim to be directed by the Bible only; yet they, too, have been guided by customs of the ancient Church, which find no warrant in the Bible, but rest on Church tradition only. A striking instance of this is the following: The first positive command in the Decalogue is to “Remember the Sabbath day to keep it holy,” and the Jews enforced this precept for thousands of years. But the Sabbath day, the observance of which God commanded, was our Saturday. Yet who among either Catholics or Protestants, except a sect or two, like the Seventh-day Adventists, ever keep that commandment now? None.
Why is this? The Bible, which Protestants claim to obey exclusively, gives no authorization for the substitution of the first day of the week for the seventh. On what authority therefore have they done so? Plainly on the authority of that very Catholic Church that they abandoned and whose traditions they condemn.
Again, Anglicans and Episcopalians repeat those old confessions of the Catholic Church, known as the Nicene and the Apostles’ Creeds. They do this not because those creeds are found in the Bible but because those formulas of belief were composed and commanded by the Catholic Church. How was the canon of Scripture itself settled? Certainly not by anything decisive on that subject in the books themselves.
The Catholic Church (under the guidance of the Holy Spirit) decided the question of which books were to be admitted to the canon in accordance with the testimonies and traditions of the Fathers. Even when finally the various books of the New Testament had been composed, tradition must still have been for centuries the paramount influence in the Church, since the number of biblical manuscripts was exceedingly limited, and millions of Christians could not have read them even had they been accessible.
Those were the years when the Church was struggling upward from the catacombs to the conquest of the world, when she was preaching the gospel to the heathen, converting Europe, sacrificing her martyrs, producing her saints, and forming that magnificent liturgy whose words are still pronounced at every Catholic altar in the world. During those centuries not only countless individuals, but also entire nations, learned and accepted Christianity—not by a book, but solely by the teaching of the Catholic Church. In fact, when in the sixteenth century the Bible (interpreted by private judgment) was proclaimed to be man’s only sufficient guide, instantly Scripture became the source of strife and schism.
Accordingly, having resolved to join some Christian church, I had no difficulty in deciding which one. In this respect I shared the sentiments of the Unitarian preacher Dr. James Martineau, who, in his Seats of Authority in Religion, says of the Catholic Church:
“Her plea is that she has been there all through; that there has been no suspension of her life, no break in her history, no term of silence in her teaching; and that, having been always in possession, she is the vehicle of every claim and must be presumed, until conclusive evidence of forfeiture is produced, to be the rightful holder of what has rested in her custody.
“If you would trace a divine legacy from the age of the Caesars, would you set out to meet it on the Protestant tracks, which soon lose themselves in the forests of Germany and on the Alps of Switzerland, or on the great Roman road of history, which runs through all the centuries and sets you down in Greece or Asia Minor at the very doors of the churches to which the apostles wrote?”
Of all the Protestant sects from which a selection could be made, I saw none that I wished to enter. A space of fifteen hundred years lay between even the oldest of them and the origin of Christianity, and experience had taught me to expect in them no ecclesiastical unity, no real authority, and no doctrinal agreement. Moreover, even since my youth their number had decidedly increased.
To define the distinctive features of all these various sects, even if it were desirable, would be impossible within the limits of this article; but from that it must not be supposed that such societies are mere shadows without substance. The history and peculiarities of each could be narrated and described, if necessary.
Thus the Protestant body known as the Muggletonians is not, as might be supposed, a Pickwickian invention, but a religious sect founded as long ago as the middle of the seventeenth century by a London tailor named Muggleton. He declared that he and another tailor named John Reeve were the two witnesses mentioned in the eleventh chapter of the book of Revelation. He also taught that God left Elijah as vice-regent in heaven when he descended to Earth to die for mankind. He wrote a book, called The Divine Looking Glass, and members of his sect republished this as late as 1846.
The Glassites also have played rather an important part in the religious life of England. The founder of this sect was a Scotchman by the name of John Glas, who, about two hundred years ago, formed a society, subsequently known as Glassites or Sandemanians (from Robert Sandeman, the son-in-law of Glas), as a kind of protest against the established Church of England.
The present membership of the sect numbers about two thousand, and among their peculiarities are a love-feast eaten every Sunday, the “kiss of brotherhood,” the washing of feet, abstention from “blood” and “things strangled,” and a simple kind of communism. To pray with anyone who is not a Glassite is regarded by this sect as unlawful. It must not be supposed, however, that this peculiar society is composed of uneducated people, for one of its members was the distinguished scientist, Michael Faraday.
The sect of the Jezreelites still exists in London. It was founded by a certain James White, who, in the last century, published a book called The Flying Roll, under the name of James Jezreel. It is a message to the ten lost tribes of Israel.
The sect of the Irvingites was founded by the celebrated Edward Irving, the friend of Carlyle. They have a very handsome church in Gordon Square, London, and numerous chapels scattered through the city. This sect, which once had twelve apostles, appointed by Irving, calls itself the “Catholic Apostolic Church” and has an elaborate ritual. Each member is supposed to give one-tenth of his income to the Church.
But enough: The state of Protestantism, revealed by such a list of heterogeneous and continually multiplying sects, is indeed appalling.
Granting that in many instances the differences between them relate for the most part to their various forms of ecclesiastical government, some of them nevertheless are mutually hostile and irreconcilable. But, whether their points of disagreement are important or not in the eyes of the disputants, they prove beyond a doubt the lack of unity in Protestantism.
Every sect naturally owes its existence to the fact that it considers itself the correct type of the Christian church and therefore must regard the others as less perfect. We are sometimes told that this does not matter, since they all agree in the “essentials” of Christianity; but who is to decide what is essential? Each sect believes that at least one thing is essential—namely, that which it alone has and which the others have not. Otherwise it would not have left the other sects and begun a separate existence.
If it be true that the divisions in Protestantism are not essential, then the scandal of this state of things is all the greater; for if God has given us a revelation, he must have meant it to be received in its entirety. It is inconceivable that his message is of such small value that we poor, finite creatures may select from it what pleases us and reject the rest. One thing is certain: The idea of one divinely founded Church, possessing supernatural guidance, unity of doctrine, and authority of discipline, is wholly lost among Protestant denominations, and the term unity, as applied to Protestantism, has no significance.
There is at work in Protestantism a process of disintegration that apparently nothing can check; for all these humanly created sects originate from the notion that dissatisfied members of a church have a perfect right to leave it and found another, which they call reformed. By consulting the list of sects, it will indeed be seen that there are “Reformed” Presbyterians, Methodists, Lutherans, Episcopalians, and the like, all of which churches are, of course, reformations of other reformations of the original Luther’s Reformation.
Nor is there any reason why this process should not, like an endless chain, go on indefinitely, for that would be the natural result of the Reformation. It is the logical consequence of Luther’s theory of the individual’s right to interpret Scripture as he likes and to “protest” against every interpretation which he does not like. No logical Protestant, therefore, can refuse to others the right to “protest,” since this it is which forms the very raison d’etre of his own church.
Now, in the midst of this chaotic state of things, we recognize the incontrovertible fact that Christ himself founded one Church, and only one, and laid upon it certain commands and sacraments. This being so, how have his followers dared to leave that Church and on their own responsibility set up another, or many others, deciding which of the original sacraments they will retain and which they will discard and which of Christ’s commands they will obey?
That they have done so is only too evident; but, having thus begun to pick and choose among sacraments and customs, old as the Church itself, and having invoked the right of private judgment in matters of doctrine, where is the process to end? All of those sects agree in saying that the Bible is the one and only infallible source of truth, and all of them find in it some self-interpreted texts on which to found their special idiosyncrasy.
But surely a Church that was established by the Son of God and that is still controlled and guided by the Holy Spirit ought to deliver the same message, with authority, everywhere. Does any Protestant sect do that? Certainly not. Year after year the Protestant schismatic spirit continues its erosive work. It is like a river that, having broken loose from its appointed course, cuts for itself a multitude of new and devious channels.
Deeply significant are the words of Cardinal Manning on the religious condition of England after more than three hundred years of Protestantism: “Never before were the masses of our people so without God in the world, never was spiritual famine so widespread and blank. Millions in our towns and cities have no consciousness of the supernatural. The life of this world is their all. Never before were the schisms and heresies, which have been generated by the first great heresy and schism, so manifold and dominant. The church of the Anglican Reformation has given up well-nigh one half of the people to endless separations, which have exhausted its vitality.”
None of the many sects of Protestantism is large enough, old enough, or strong enough to be likened seriously to the universal, ancient apostolic Church of Rome, and even a collection of such sects forms only an incoherent group of mutually repellent particles. On the one hand, therefore, stands discordant Protestantism—wanting in discipline, lacking doctrinal unity, repudiating most of the original sacraments of the Church, and tending fatally to dissolve either into continually augmenting subdivisions or into ever-increasing rationalism.
On the other hand stands united Catholicism—immovable amid the ebb and flow of human innovations, impregnable to the attacks of heresies, indifferent to the rise and fall of empires, surviving spoliation, superior to schism, steadfast in persecution, and calmly watching the disintegration of its enemies. Thus does the changeless Church of Rome endure, and thus she will endure, till Christ who founded her shall come again.
How true are Cardinal Newman’s eloquent words: “O long sought after, tardily found desire of the heart—the truth after many shadows, the fullness after many foretastes, the home after many storms. Come to her, poor wanderers, for she it is, and she alone, who can unfold the secret of your being and the meaning of your destiny!”