Page:Catholic Thoughts on the Church of Christ.djvu/12

vi matters of party discussion, and to mark out clearly some de- sirable aims and some firm positions while the ground is yet unobscured by the heat and cloud of the conflict.

At present it appears to him, That the primary Idea of the Church of CHRIST is that of a Brotherhood of men worshipping CHRIST as their Revelation of the Highest ; and that equality of spiritual privilege is so characteristic of its constitution that the existence of any Priestly Caste in it is destructive of it : And also, That the Faith which it should make obligatory on its members is emphatically Faith in CHRIST Himself in His Incar- nation and Acts and Teaching and Promises and Death and Resur- rection as recorded and expounded by His own Evangelists and Apostles and very subordinately only Faith in any definite Theoretic Creed.

It is at once admitted that these opinions are not those which will be pronounced the truest wherever Number enters into the Test of Truth ; but it is also believed that not much that is certain can be learned by any estimate we can make of the consentient voices of the Past. The History of the Christian Church for the greater portion of its existence has been so little in consistent practical accordance with any Idea or Principle that is obviously Divine, that the merely being opposed to such a majority as it presents need not be to any spiritual mind a very distressing or a very dangerous position. To the present writer, it is confessed, a greater difficulty is presented by the existing state of opinion in his own Church than by that in Christendom for many ages. Views of the Aim and Constitution of the Church of CHRIST apparently the very contrary of those which he is enabled to take and which appear to him to be of the greatest importance, are now being advocated by men who seem to be as thoughtful, as able, and as earnest as any can be, and whose purity of life and fervour of feeling may well command the unmeasured respect of their Bre- thren. With every conceivable appliance for interpreting aright the Sacred Writings, with all History secular and ecclesiastical lying legibly before them, with intellectual faculties beyond most of their brethren, and educated from earliest youth till now in the midst of a church the most reasonable and spiritual