Page:Tracts for the Times Vol 3.djvu/81

Rh viz. the theory of infallibility. The actual promise made, as they contend, to St. Peter's chair as the centre of unity, would undoubtedly account for truth being wholly in the Roman Communion, not in the English, and solve the antecedent perplexity in question. But the English Church, taking no such high ground as this, certainly is open to the force, such as it is, of the objection, or (as it was just now expressed) on the primâ facie view of the case is unlikely to have embraced the whole counsel of God, because she does not assume infallibility; and consequently no surprise or distress should be felt by her dutiful sons, should that turn out to be the fact, which her own principles, rightly understood, would lead them to anticipate. At the same time it must carefully be remembered, that this admission involves no doubt or scepticism as regards the more sacred subjects of theology, of which the Creed is the summary; these having been witnessed from the first by the whole Church,—being witnessed too at this moment, in spite of later corruptions, both by the Latin and Greek Communions.

A consideration has been suggested in the last paragraph on which much might be said on a fitting occasion; it is (what may be called) a great Canon of the Gospel, that Purity of faith depends on the Sacramentum Unitatis. Unity is the whole body of the Church, as it is the divinely blessed symbol and pledge of the true faith, so also it is the obvious means (even humanly speaking) of securing it. The Sacramentum was first infringed during the quarrels of the Greeks and Latins; it was shattered in that great schism of the sixteenth century which issued in some parts of Europe in the Reformation, in others in the Tridentine Decrees, our own Church keeping the nearest of any to the complete truth. Since that era at least. Truth has not dwelt simply and securely in any visible Tabernacle. This view of the subject will illustrate for us the last words of Bishop Ken as contained in his will:—"As for my religion, I die in the Holy Catholic and Apostolic faith, professed by the whole Church before the disunion of East and West; more particularly I die in the communion of the Church of England, as it stands distinguished from all Papal and Puritan innovations, and as it adheres to the doctrine of the Cross."