What is significant here is the abandonment of the authority of the Catholic Church as the ground or warrant for their acceptance.1

The Anglican Reformation gave a new definition of the "Catholic Church" as that phrase finds expression in the creeds. Hitherto it had been understood in different ways, the Greek Church and the Roman Church each claiming to be exclusively the Catholic Church, each denouncing the other as heretical and schismatic. According to this new, enlarged and Biblical conception given in the XIXth Article,

"The visible Church of Christ is 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."

The Catholic Church is further defined in the "Prayer for all sorts and conditions of men":

"More especially we pray for the good estate of the Catholic Church; that it may be

1 The American Episcopal Church omitted the Athanasian Creed, but retains the VIIIth Article in other respects unchanged.

so guided and governed by thy Good Spirit, that all who profess and call themselves Christians may be led into the way of truth, and hold the faith in unity of spirit, in the bond of peace, and in righteousness of life." 1

In the "Bidding Prayer," given in the Canons of 1604, set forth by authority of Convocation, the definition of the Catholic Church is more explicit still:

"In all sermons, lectures, and homilies, the preachers and ministers shall move the people to join with them in prayer in this form or to this effect as briefly as conveniently they may: Ye shall pray for Christ's holy Catholic Church, that is, for the whole congregation of Christian people dispersed throughout the whole world." (Canon 55.)

Of this Church, composed of all Christian people, it is further alleged that no organized branch is infallible:

1In the American Episcopal Church, the word "universal" is substituted for "Catholic." The same usage had been adopted in the creeds by the Lutheran Church.

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As the Church of Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Antioch have erred, so also the Roman Church hath erred, not only in their living and manner of ceremonies, but also in matters of Faith." (Article XX.)

The infallibility which the Anglican Church refuses to the ancient historic churches, she does not claim for herself. Infallibility is no longer to be held as a mark of the Church. Everything must be tested by the appeal to Scripture. There are things, however, which are not contained in Scripture, such as rites and ceremonies. In respect of these, the Church of England claimed authority, -"the power to decree rites and ceremonies, and also authority in controversies of faith." But here again, the higher authority is invoked: "It is not lawful for the Church to ordain anything that is contrary to God's Word written." (Article XX.) And of the discipline and worship, as well as of the doctrine, the Anglican Church has ordered that they be ministered "as Christ hath commanded," and "according to the commandment of God," which means that the commandments of men have been set aside.

It must be borne in mind that in the Reformation, the old scholasticism of the ancient church and the Middle Ages still bore heavily upon the minds and consciences of those who had received the "new learning," and who, by the study of Greek, had seen a new meaning in Scripture. The tendency of the Reformation was away from dogmatic subtleties and refinements to the intellectual freedom and the larger life of the modern world. The purpose of the Reformation was primarily religious and ethical; and wherever in the Prayer Book the reformers introduced comment or exhortation, the stress was laid upon the moral duties of life and the character of the Christian man. No contrast in the history of theology is more striking than this oasis of the epoch of the Reformation, between the cumbrous scholasticism of the medieval world, as developed, for example, by Thomas Aquinas, where unwarranted intellectual inferences were raised to the equality with divine revelation; this, on the one hand, and the scholasticism of the seventeenth century, whether in the Anglican Church, the Lutheran, or the Reformed. The hyper-orthodoxy of the seventeenth century, with its excessive intellectualism, represented among the Puritans by the Westminster Confession, or by such writers as

Pearson in the Church of England, or by the more luxuriant forms which the same tendency took in Germany, prepared the way for the descent of the eighteenth century into every phase of scepticism or unbelief. Deism was the natural sequence of the ultra orthodox, dogmatic spirit which has made the seventeenth century unattractive, obnoxious, and almost unintelligible.

The Church of England cannot be understood or appreciated unless this circumstance be borne in mind. The influence of Erasmus was felt in England more powerfully than in his own country, and the Erasmian tendency was toward the ethical and undogmatic side of the Christian faith as brought out in his Enchiridion. His Paraphrase of the New Testament was placed in the churches, to be read for the light it threw on Scripture. During the first half of the sixteenth century the warfare was kept up against the old scholastic dogmatism, till it became discredited and fell into the obloquy from which it has never emerged. This dogmatic bondage was one of the evils which the men of the "new learning" were seeking to overcome; among them Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, to whom we owe the Book of Common Prayer, and whose influence pervades the Thirty