“What,” asks a well-known writer in unfeigned astonishment, “what opinion is not held within the Established Church?  Were not Dr. Wilberforce and Dr. Colenso, Dr. Hamilton and Dr. Baring equally Bishops of the Church of England?  Were not Dr. Pusey and Mr. Jowett at the same time her professors; Father Ignatius and Mr. Bellew her ministers; Archdeacon Denison and Dr. M’Neile her distinguished ornaments and preachers?  Yet their religions differed almost as widely as Buddhism from Calvinism, or the philosophy of Aristotle from that of Martin Tupper.”  If a Catholic priest were to teach a single heretical doctrine, he would be at once cashiered, and turned out of the Church.  But “if an Anglican minister must resign because his opinions are at variance with some other Anglican minister, every soul of them would have to retire, from the Archbishop of Canterbury down to the last licentiate of Durham or St. Bees”.

As surely as infallibility is the essential prerogative of a divinely constituted Teaching Church, so surely can it exist only in that institution which alone has always claimed it, both as her gift by promise and the sole explanation of her triumphs and her perpetuity.  It would be the idlest of dreams to search for it in a fractional part of a modern community, like the Church of England, which had always disowned and scoffed at it, and which could account for its own existence ONLY on the plea that the Promises of God had signally failed, and that it alone was able to correct the failure.

Men ask for some sign, by which they may recognise the true Church of God and discriminate it readily from all spurious imitations.  God, in His mercy, offers them a sign—­namely UNITY.  Yet they hesitate and hold back, and refuse to guide their tempest-tossed barques by its unerring light into the one Haven of Salvation.

FOOTNOTES: 

[Footnote 5:  See Charge, etc., dated November, 1893.]

[Footnote 6:  Ang.  Ministry, by Hutton, p. 504.]

CHAPTER V.

THE POPE’S INFALLIBLE AUTHORITY.

1.  The Church of God can be but one; because God is truth:  and, truth can be but one.  The world may, and (as a matter of fact) does abound in false Churches, just as it abounds in false deities; but, this is rendered possible only because they are false.  Two or more true Churches involve a contradiction in terms.  Such a condition of things is as intrinsically absurd, and as unthinkable, as two or more true Gods—­as well talk of two or more multiplication tables!  No!  There can be but “One Lord, one Faith, one Baptism”.  If several Churches all teach the true doctrine of Christ, unmixed with error, they must all agree, and, consequently, be virtually one and the self same.  There is no help for it; and sound reason will not tolerate any other conclusion.  The “Branch