Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/773

Rh CHURCH 759 Calvin (followed herein by a very large number, probably the majority, of purely Protestant communities) maintain that it is invisible; while the Lutherans, the Roman Catholics, the Oriental Christians, and the great bulk of the more famous Anglican divines (in accordance with the Anglican formularies) maintain it to be visible. This latter view is, it need hardly be said, the one all but universally adopted by the fathers and the schoolmen. In one passage, however, of his later writings, St Augustine employs an expression at variance with his usual tone, and favourable to the Calvinistic view, by calling the church &quot; the society of the predestined.&quot; 3. The relations considered to exist between the visible church and Holy Scripture must necessarily be those of co ordination, or of sub-ordination on one side or the other An impartial estimate of the Anglican formularies would probably be found to support that view of co-ordinate authority of Scripture and the church which is taken by a large body of her divines, such as Bishops Pearson, Bull, Kay, Dean Jackson, and others ; though many of her adherents would undoubtedly incline, more or less com pletely, to that more Protestant view, which subordinates the church to Scripture, a view held most strongly by those bodies whose confessions of faith (as, e.g., the Westminster Confession) seem to imply that the books of Scripture attest themselves as divine. In the Church of Rome there can be no question but that the church is placed above Holy Scripture ; for though Scripture proofs of doctrine are always, if possible, sought by her controversialists, and referred to in her symbolical standards (as, for instance, the Tridentine decrees), yet the traditions preserved in the church are spoken of as to be venerated not merely as com ments on the meaning of Scripture, but as deserving equal honour and reverence with Scripture (Decret. Cone. Trident., sessio iv.) On the other hand, the Anglican formularies teach that Holy Scripture contains all things necessary to salvation (Art. vi.), though the church is described as the witness and keeper of Holy Writ and as having authority in controversies of faith (Art. xx.). The school of Anglicanism represented by Field, Hammond, Pearson, Bull, and Bramhall regards a judgment of thechurch universal, such as that of the Council of Nice against Arius, as &quot; irrevocable, irreformable, never to be altered.&quot; (See Sir W. Palmer s Church of Christ, part iv. ch. iv.) The Eastern Church seems to place the relation of Holy Scripture to itself in almost the same position as this school of Anglicans, though it would perhaps lay somewhat stronger stress on the insufficiency of Scripture without the voice of the teaching and interpreting church. It may be remarked that in this, as in other matters, belief has from time to time been greatly influenced by the course of events. In the first age of Christianity, before the canon of the New Testament was formed, the church is almost everything (as Reuss and others have observed), and the Bible, which chiefly consisted of the Old Testament, was subordinate. .By about 200 A.D., when the gospels were becoming better known, the relation between Scripture and the church appears in patristic writings much more like one of co-ordination. During the Middle Ages, as the church s political power increased, Holy Scripture became more and more subordinate, until we find Dante complaining of the way in which not merely creeds and fathers but canon law and the decretals are studied instead of the Gospel (Paradiso, ix. 133). The Reformation necessarily caused a reaction, built, as it was so largely, on new translations and on the circulation of the Bible; and in the following century we find the successors of the Reformers laying more stress upon what is commonly called the verbal inspiration of the Scripture and its infallible authority than had been done for the most part by the fathers (except perhaps St. Augustine) or by the first Reformers, Luther and Calvin, and their contemporaries, who never seem to have sanctioned the famous dictum of Chillingworth, &quot; The Bible, and the Bible only, is the religion of Protestants.&quot; Of late years the difficulties arising from science, philology, history, and criticism have tended to modify this view of the supremacy of Scripture. Not only in the unreformed communions a ad among Angli cans and Lutherans, but even in Calvinistic bodies, is this effect perceived. Thus we find an eminent Presbyterian divine, a minister of the Scottish Establishment, writing as early as 1848, &quot; The living church is more than the dead Bible, for it is the Bible and something more&quot; (Life of Dr Norman Macleod). The comment made by Kant on the inconsistency of those Lutherans who virtually say &quot;Go to the Bible, but do not find anything there except what we find&quot; is well known (Streit der Facultaten}. 4. Turning to the constitution and government of the church, it is singular that in none of the symbolical utterances of the leading Christian communities is there found such a definition of the church as would really include all that is balieved by those respective bodies. Nor is it easy to supply the want by appeal to divines, though many have striven to set forth the &quot; notes&quot; of the true church (see, e.g., Klee, Dogmatik, and many others). Neither the Roman Catholic Tridentine decrees nor the Westminster Confession supply any definition, and the one given in the nineteenth of the Articles of j the English Church leaves the questions at issue between Rome and the Reformers, between Episcopacy and Presbyterianism, entirely open. For all would claim to represent that &quot; visible church of Christ &quot; which is there described as &quot; a congregation of faithful men, in the which the pure word of God is preached, and the sacraments be duly ministered according to Christ s ordinance in all those things that of necessity are requisite to the same.&quot; Concerning the question of government there are four leading views. The first is, that no form of government was instituted by the divine Founder of the church or His apostles, that there was originally no distinction between clergy and laity, but that officers were in due time appointed as might happen in any human society, for the sake of order and convenience. This view, which is probably that of the majority of Protestants at the present time, has found a thoughtful, devout, and highly gifted exponent in the historian Neander; while the difficulties of reconciling it with the New Testament are all set forth by two inde pendent translators of his work, the Rev. J. H. Rose and Mr Morrison. A second view is, that a government was in such wise instituted as rightly to claim a jus divinum, that this government resides in presbyters, and is handed down by succession through the presbyterate. This view was main tained by many foreign adherents of the Reformation, and in England by Richard Cartwright, the Puritan opponent of Hooker, and an entire school of his day. They appeal to history, especially that of the Alexandrian Church, and to the fathers, more especially to St Jerome. The third view resembles this in principle, but assigns the governance to a superior order, that of the bishops, and makes the succession pass through them. The Anglican communion acts upon this view, re-ordaining all ministers not episcopally ordained, but accepting Greek or Roman Catholic ordina tion; and it has been defended by many of the writers of the High Church school, above named, to whom may be added Bishop Bilson, and the able Scottish controversialist Bishop Sage in his work against Gilbert Rule. (See also Bishop Cotterill s Genesis of the Church, and article BISHOP), This school lays great stress on the decisions of the 03cum2nical councils, of which it recognizes six or (according to Bishop Andrewes) seven before the division of East and West