Page:Catholic Encyclopedia, volume 15.djvu/171

 UNION

141

UNION

subdivisions, have followed suit ; so that at present we must no longer talk of the Orthodox Church, but of the Orthodox Churches, seventeen in number, in no sense governmentally connected, torn with inter- necine quarrels, and offering no guarantee, especially in view of the infiltration of Protestant tendencies now going on, that their doctrinal agreement will continue.

Summary. — In these three Eastern schisms, which broke up so disastrously the ancient imion of Chris- tendom, two things are specially observable from the point of view of this article. One is that, apart from the separation from the centre of unit}- which con- stituted the schism, they have retained almost in its entirety the ancient system of Church organization and method. They have retained the threefold hier- archy endowed with valid orders, the sacrificial wor- ship of the Ma.ss, a spirituality based on the use of the seven sacraments, the Catholic doctrine of grace, the exaltation of the Virgin IMother, and the invocation of the saints. Above all they have retained the appeal to tradition as the sure test of sound doctrine and the principle of submission to a teaching authority. The other thing observable in these three schisms accords with what has already been noticed in the early schisms. Doctrinal considerations based on the exercise of private judgment may have influenced their found- ers to an extent greater or less, but reasons of quite a different order determined the allegiance of their followers. Nationalism exploited by their leaders, or more often exploited by civil rulers for political pur- poses, is the true formula which explains their origin and long endurance. The nationalism of Syria and Egypt in its antipathy to Byzantine rule, further exploited by Persian and Mohammedan sovereigns, is what explains the facts of Nestorian and Monophysite history; the nationahsm of Byzantine hellenism in its antipathy to the Latins, as exploited by the Eastern emperors and their prelates, is what ex-plains the separation of the Orthodox Churches from the Holy See; the nationalism of Greeks, Slavs of different races, and Byzantines, which is the .source of their mutual antipathies, is what explains their separation from Constantinople and their erection into so many autonomous Churches.

E. Prntesiantism. — The fourth great breach in the union of Christendom was that caused by the Protes- tant Reformation of the sixteenth century. Of this movement it can by no means be said that it left the organization and methods of the Catholic Church largely untouched among the populations which it carried with it. On the contrary, it effected the most revolutionary changes of system where it prevailed, substituting church organizations constituted on a radically different principle and having codes of religious opinions unknown to previous ages. Luther, in the first instance, had no thought of breaking with the church authority; at all events he did not inscribe that object on his original programme. Out of his own disordered spiritual experiences he elaborated a theory of sin and salvation founded on his peculiar doctrine of justification by faith. Only when the Holy See rejected this travesty of St. Paul's teaching, together with the conclusions which Luther had deduced from it — only when it thus became necessary, if he would persist in his errors, that he should seek elsewhere for a principle on which to base them — did he fall back on the principle of the Bible privately interpreted as the sole and sufficient rule of Christian belief. He had, it mu.st be acknowledged, fore- rtmners in this course; for the Church herself has always preached the infallibility of Holy Scripture, and previous heresiarchs had been wont to justify their revolts against her doctrinal decisions by claim- ing that, as regards the particular doctrines in which they were interested, Holy Scripture stood for them and not for her.

What was special and novel in Luther and his col- leagues was that they erected the principle of an appeal to the Bible not only into an exclusive standard of sound doctrines, but even into one which the indi- vidual could always apply for himself without dependence on the authoritative interpretations of any Church whatever. Luther himself and his fellow-reformers did not even understand their new rule of faith in the Ratiouahstic sense that the indi- vidual inquirer can, by applying the recognized jirin- ciples of e.xegesis, be sure of extracting from the Scripture text the intended meaning of its Divine author. Their idea was that the earnest Protestant who goes direct to the Bible for his beliefs is brought into immediate contact with the Holy Spirit, and can take the ideas that his reading conveys to him jierson- ally as the direct teaching of the Spirit to him.self. But, however much the Reformers might thus formu- late their principle, they could not in practice avoid resorting to the principles of exegesis, applied well or ill, according to each man's capacity, for the dis- covery of the sense ascribed to the Holy Spirit. Thus their new doctrinal standard lapsed even in their own days, though they perceived it not, and still more in later daj-s, into the more intelhgible but less pietistic method of Rationalism.

Now, if the Bible were drawn up, as it is not, in the form of a clear, simple, systematic, and comprehensive statement of doctrine and rule of conduct, it might not, perhaps, seem antecedently impossible that God should have wished this to be the way by which his people should attain to the knowledge of the true religion. Still, even then the validity of the method would need to be tested by the character of the results, and only if these exhibited a profound and far-reaching agreement among those who followed it would it be safe to conclude that it was the method God had really sanctioned. This, however, was far from the experience of the Reformers. Luther had strangely assumed that those who followed him into revolt would use their right of private judgment only to affirm their entire agreement with his own opinions, for which he claimed the .sanction of an inspiration receivetl from God that equalled him with the Proph- ets of old. But he was soon to learn that his fol- lowers attached as high a value to their own interpre- tations of the Bible as he did to his, and were qviite prepared to act upon their own conclusions instead of upon his. The result was that as early as the begin- ning of 152.5 — only eight years after he first pro- pounded his heresies — we find him acknowledging, in his "Letter to the Christians of Antwerp" (dc Wette, III, 61), that "there are as many sects and creeds in Germany as heads. One will have no baptism; another denies the sacrament, another asserts that there is another world between this and the last day, some teach that Christ is not God, some say this, some say that. No lout is so boorish but, if a fancy enters his head, he must think that the Holy Ghost has entered into him, and that he is to be a prophet". Moreover, besides the.se multiplying manifestations of pure individualism, two main lines of partv distinc- tion, each with a fatal tendency to further subdivision, had begun almost from the first to divide the reform leaders among themselves. The Swiss Reformer, Zwingli, had commenced his revolt almost simultane- ously with Luther, and, though in their fundamental doctrines of the Bible privately interpreted and of justification by faith, they were on the same lines, in regard to the important doctrines of predestination and the nature of the Holy Eucharist they took oppo- site views, and attached to them such importance that they became irreconcilable foes and leaders of antagonistic parties.

On such a foundation, if consistently held to, it w.as impossible to build up a Church which should stand out in the world like the old Church they were