CHAPTER III.

THE AWKWARD DILEMMA.

In the whole catalogue of sin, there is hardly one so detestable in itself, or so withering in its effects, as the sin of heresy.  Consequently, though we feel a great love as well as a great interest in the Church in England during the thousand years in which she formed a part of the Church of God, we can have little love for the present Church of England, as by law established, cut off, as she is, from the only true Church, which Christ, the Incarnate God, was pleased in His infinite wisdom to build upon St. Peter, and upon those who should succeed him in his sublime office, and who have received the Divine Commission to rule over the entire flock, to hold the keys of the kingdom of heaven, and to confirm their brethren to the end of time.

Besides, a careful study of the origin and genesis of the present Anglican Establishment is scarcely calculated to predispose any one particularly in its favour.  It is not Catholics only who might be thought biased upon such a point, but others also who feel this.  In fact, it is precisely impartial men, unaffected by any interest either way, who most fully realise from what a very shady beginning the new state of things arose.  As Sir Osborne Morgan puts it, “Every student of English history knows that, if a very bad king had not fallen in love with a very pretty woman, and desired to get divorced from his plain and elderly wife, and if he had not compelled a servile Parliament to carry out his wishes, there would, in all human probability, never have been an Established Church at all.”

This gentleman is a Protestant, and the son of a Protestant clergyman, so we may be quite sure that he harbours no special leanings towards us, yet he speaks impartially as one who has not only read history, but read it without coloured spectacles.  Perhaps Lord Macaulay puts the case as bluntly as any one, and we may as well quote him because he, too, was no Catholic, and held no brief for the Church of Rome.  This brilliant writer, who was, perhaps, an historian before all things, tells us that the work of the Reformation was the work, not of three saints, nor even of three ordinary decent men, but of three notorious murderers!  These are not our words, but Macaulay’s, and it is not our fault if this is his reading of history.  We merely summon him as a Protestant witness.  He calmly and deliberately states that the Reformation was “begun by Henry VIII., the murderer of his wives; was continued by Somerset, the murderer of his brother; and was completed by Elizabeth, the murderer of her guest”.  Not a very auspicious beginning, it must be confessed, and scarcely suggestive of the Divine afflatus.  Those who planted the Catholic Church used no violence, and did not inflict death.  No! on the contrary, they endured death, and their blood became the seed of the Church.  And that is quite another story.  In former days every