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A Crisis in the Church of England

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 November 2011

Frederic Palmer
Frederic Palmer
Affiliation:
Harvard University
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Extract

The construction and working of ecclesiastical machinery has always been allowed to be the special function of High Churchmen of every description. For there are High Churchmen not only in the Church of England and the Episcopal Church in America, but in every church. The division of churchmen into High, Low, and Broad is founded on the different attitudes of the human mind—legal, emotional, intellectual. All Christians reverence the Church, the Bible, and the conscience. But in presence of a problem one man will ask what is the teaching of the Church? Another will turn to consider what the Bible has to say about it. A third will endeavor to trace it to its basis in the necessities of thought and life. Religion is, for the High Churchman, devotion to an institution; for the Low Churchman, to a person; for the Broad Churchman, to abstract truth. Such sturdy guardians of the different important ways by which the soul approaches God are fortunately found in every church. And so the man who stands pre-eminently for the special tenets of the fathers, whether Calvin, Wesley, Swedenborg, or Channing, is as truly a High Churchman as he whose fathers are Ante- or Post-Nicene. And if the faith is regarded as having been delivered to the saints once and for all, the construction of machinery for its preservation will be not only the duty but the delight of the loyal ecclesiast.

Type
Research Article
Information
Harvard Theological Review , Volume 7 , Issue 2 , April 1914 , pp. 231 - 244
Copyright
Copyright © President and Fellows of Harvard College 1914

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References

1 The Future of the Evangelical Party in the Church of England. B. Herklots. Elliot Stock. 1913. Pp. viii, 198. 3s. 6d.

Broad Church. Symes, J. E.. Methuen & Co. 1913. Pp. xii, 116.Google Scholar

2 Page 31.

3 Page 38.

4 Page 43.

5 Page 94.

6 Page 102.

7 “Statuimus quod nullus ad sacramentum corporis et sanguinis Domini admittatur extra articulum mortis, nisi fuerit confirmatus, vel nisi receptione confirmationis rationabiliter fuerit impeditus.” A Collection of the Laws and Canons of the Church of England, by John Johnson, vol. ii, p. 277. (Lib. of Anglo-Cath. Theology.)

8 Since this article was written the archbishop of Canterbury has called a Council to meet in July to give advice in the Kikuyu case.