or, one would think, to quiet any troubled conscience: for
whether or no this be the meaning of the 6th Article, the whole Greek and
Latin Church would reject with horror such propositions as the first two
put together, as being subversive of the very existence of a Church, and of
all dogmatic authority. It is a valid argument enough to an individual to
say, You have signed such and such documents, and are bound by them: but if
he is in doubt whether the documents themselves be tenable, they cannot be
taken to prove themselves. The decision of a province of the Church in the
sixteenth century cannot be quoted to prove that that decision is right,
for it is the very thing called in question. It is the Reformation itself
which is put on trial; it cannot appeal to itself as a witness; it must be
content to bring its cause before a judge, whose authority all will
admit,--and that judge, need we say, must be antiquity, and the consent of
the undivided Church. And the Church of England, it must be admitted, has
not shrunk from this appeal. Her often-quoted canon enjoins her ministers,
in that part of their duty wherein most is left to their private judgment,
"to teach nothing which they wish to be held and believed religiously by
the people, save what is agreeable to the doctrine of the Old or New
Testament, and what the Catholic Fathers and ancient Bishops, have
collected out of that very doctrine." Thus she spoke in the year 1571. The
Church had then passed through fifteen centuries of a chequered, but
superhuman, and most marvellous existence. Her continuous life implies a
continuity of principles, ruling her from the beginning; and any
controversy which affects her well-being, as does that concerning the
integrity or loss of a great member, must be judged according to those
principles. The present position of the Church of England may be merely a
provisional one, I firmly believe that such is the fact; but if she is to
claim the allegiance of her children as a part of the Catholic Church, it
must be proved that such her position is tenable upon the principles which
directed that Church when undivided. In short, I propose honestly, though
briefly, to meet this imputation of schism by an appeal to the authority of
the first six centuries: an authority, which no Roman Catholic can slight
or refuse.

Let us go back to the first period at which the universal Church, emerging
from the fires of persecution, is found acting as one