Page:The Irish Church and its Formularies.djvu/11

 and falsification with that assumption of personal infallibility, concentrated in its chief pastor, which has shocked and bewildered the public conscience of Christendom. Nor can I at all sympathise with the antagonistic systems either of stark and merciless Calvinism, or of gelatinous and creed-less Latitudinarianism. Against all and any of these perversions of the Faith and polity of the Christian Church, I believe that the United Church of England of Ireland maintains a vigilant watch. Most naturally the Church of Ireland, thrown into local and immediate contact with a branch of the Roman Church, which, to the undisguised and truculent exhibition of the Papal system in its most repellent form, adds all the bitterness of an opposition blown up to white-heat by long antagonism of race, is peculiarly alive to dangers from the Papal side. But the Irish Church, while specially vigilant when vigilance is most apparently needed, will not, I am sure, be negligent on the side where the danger from being less conspicuous may really be more pressing. Nothing short of a cataclysm could Romanise a Church such as that of Ireland, placed like a beleaguered garrison within a large and violent Roman Catholic population. The risk might rather be a party alliance with those who, like itself, resist Rome, but who do not, like our Church, wage their war of resistance with the weapons of Gospel truth and Christian antiquity.

But I am digressing. Speaking for both branches of the United Church, I believe that its watchwords are moderation and toleration; and that, in proportion as each community is moderate and tolerant, she speaks the mind of her Divine Head. Among the guarantees of that moderation and that toleration, I hold, as I have already indicated, that the existing formularies—taken altogether and as a traditionary body of documents—hold a principal place; in consideration not only of their contents in themselves, but of the fact that these documents have long outlived the strife of